Book Review: The Eye of the Needle by Ken Follet

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A german spy Die Nadel (or The Needle) has been in London during World War II. He is assigned the task to gauge the military at Port Calais in France. Allied forces have been planning a camouflage setup at Calais to dupe the Germans into thinking the attack is going to happen from Calais instead of from Normandy. To that effect, many artists and movie studio setup workers were put to building a massive fake military setup in Calais. Die Nadel or Henreich Faber happens to find out that its a fake and not a real military setup and from that point on the book is about whether he is able to deliver the proof of his findings to Abwehr in time or not. The story is fast paced and keeps the reader engaged. A good novel to start reading the works of Ken Follet.

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Book Review: The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first book of Leo Tolstoy i read. Its a small novel with 10 chapters and took me about 3hrs to complete in all. The story is about the life of a man named Ivan Ilych. It starts with folks from his work and his friends attending his funeral. The story then revolves around who he was and how he got injured on falling while he was infatuated with decorating his new house, his relationship with each member of his family, his reminiscences during his last days of his life when he reflects on his childhood and the happy memories of those days, what he feels about the doctors who don't seem to empathize with him and fail to answer his questions concerning his health in a direct manner. Tolstoy excels in describing the emotions of the characters and there are several occasions when the reader feels drawn by the realism of author's description of what the characters feel. Its a masterpiece of a work and i highly recommend it for the literary value of this book if not so much for the story in it.

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Passed Docker Certified Associate Exam

Passed Docker Certified Associate exam today May 5th 2020.
I have been procrastinating on this for a while but due to COVID-19 shelter-in-home and no classes to take kids to, got enough time to get this taken care of.

Now regarding the exam, while i was lingering on when to take this exam (had enrolled last year December) Docker got bought by Mirantis and the DCA exam which used to multiple choice only became a bit harder with majority of questions (42 of total 55) being DOMC (Discrete option multiple choice). Also the syllabus got revised (v1.1 of study guide) to include many Kubernetes topics in the exam. Lots of Kubernetes related questions were there from topics including persistent volumes, configMaps etc. Fortunately i am also preparing for CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) and going to write it soon on 16th May, 2020 so i was able to answer those.

My study notes are available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MY87SMK 

My experience taking the test was - it took me about an hour to complete the exam so i think the 90mins duration is sufficient. 

Setup a k8s cluster with OLCNE

To install a development setup for kubernetes an easy option is to use https://github.com/oracle/vagrant-boxes/tree/master/OLCNE.

All we need is virtualbox and vagrant installation, clone the above git repo and run vagrant up.

By default it creates a k8s cluster with 1 master and 2 worker nodes.

As of today it installs OEL 7.8 with k8s 1.17.4.

[vagrant@master1 ~]$ kubectl get no
NAME                 STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION
master1.vagrant.vm   Ready    master   3h35m   v1.17.4+1.0.1.el7
worker1.vagrant.vm   Ready       3h34m   v1.17.4+1.0.1.el7
worker2.vagrant.vm   Ready       3h34m   v1.17.4+1.0.1.el7
[vagrant@master1 ~]$ cat /etc/oracle-release
Oracle Linux Server release 7.8