Thought Bricks

Hetzner introduced Ampere Altra Arm64 processors as an option for their cloud servers in April this year. I hadn’t tried them until recently but they seem to perform on par with the Intel offerings at similar price points at least in my anecdotal testing on some small instances. The pricing is quite good (as low as €3.79 per month in the US market). You save €0.50 if you use IPV6 only which might be OK for some use cases.

Two months ago, I wrote about the LXD fork called Incus that was in the works. The first release of Incus is out and looks interesting. I haven’t installed it yet, but did give it a try online. It is very similar to LXD but has some nice changes. First, the simplification around instances rather than having separate containers and virtual machines is nice. It breaks backwards compatibility but makes things simpler going forward.

The UK’s OFCOM has referred AWS and Microsoft to the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) for anticompetitive behavior. The report (pdf) is on point. The major concerns listed are: egress fees technical incompatibility committed spend discounts It’s an interesting read. The cloud (e.g., someone else’s server) is critical for many companies and is becoming increasingly important. It’s a very profitable business for the hyperscalers and deserves some attention by antitrust authorities.

I did a little bit more testing with OpenTofu today. This time with LXD. There was a new alpha version of OpenTofu released to fix a bug so I installed that one to keep current. I didn’t encounter the bug although I did use the sensitive variable tag. An init, plan, apply and destroy loop worked flawlessly with the following simple LXD configuration: terraform { required_providers { lxd = { source = "terraform-lxd/lxd" } } } resource "lxd_instance" "tofu1" { name = "tofu1" image = "ubuntu:22.

I created a very simple project to test out the alpha release of OpenTofu using the Hetzner Cloud Provider. I figure many people are looking at the common providers like AWS and Azure, so I thought it would be interesting to check out something different. The first alpha release installed from a .deb file on Ubuntu 22.04 without issue. This release references the new registry amongst other things. I ran tofu init without any issues:

As I said I would do a few days back, I gave OpenTofu a try on one of my old Terraform projects. The TLDR; is that it worked without any changes to the existing scripts. The first step was downloading and building it on my ancient MacBook. The instructions to build the source code were easy to follow and it didn’t take too long to get it running. After that, it was a matter of getting an updated API key for Hetzner Cloud and creating a terraform.

I’m still rowing with Rivanna Rowing Club. This is my third session of classes and I’ve learned the basics pretty well and have the callused hands to prove it. We have been sculling exclusively. I like it a little bit better than sweep rowing but, at least for me, it was harder to pick up. The technique is more subtle and you have to pay a lot more attention to your hands and the balance of the boat.

The open-source fork of the now not open source Terraform called OpenTofu is getting close to operational readiness. It is being run by The Linux Foundation and has the backing of a number of companies and people. From what I can tell, the only thing missing right now is the registry for Terraform providers. I’m sure a new registry will be available soon and then it’s off to the races. I’m planning on revisiting a couple of the things I’ve done with Terraform over the past few years to see what, if any changes, are required to make them go.

In yet another example of why Ticketmaster should be broken up 404 describes how scalpers game the system. Essentially, scalpers are pros at buying up high-demand tickets and they are much smarter and more motivated than Ticketmaster who throws up some weak-sauce barriers to them. It’s an interesting discussion of the techniques used and how they short-circuit efforts to prevent multiple ticket sales. I can’t say that I’ve got a brilliant idea off the top of my head to prevent this abuse but with the money that Ticketmaster rakes in, you would think they could come up with something.

This article in WaPo by Brian Merchant makes some very good points about how tech has changed over the years and mostly not for the better. In the 1990s, the internet was so interesting and fresh and fun. There were a lot of crazy things that happened and most of it was driven by real people. Fast forward to the 2020s and the internet as it was is gone and replaced by the semi-walled gardens of content and information hosted by big tech companies.