My first SRE/DevOps meetup, and a fun comedy show
The Meetup
Last Saturday at 10 AM (I know, pretty early) I went to an SRE meetup I found on Meetup.com. There were about 5 talks, two of which were unscheduled. At first we all had to introduce ourselves, and a few folks said they were looking for a job, thoug not as many as you'd think, given the state of the tech industry currently. Maybe they felt shy.
About the talks
The first talk was from Shivesh Abhishek, about reducing resource consumption in their applications by moving from individual VMs fot all of their applications at Ozone, to using kubernetes (k3ds on-premises). The numbers were interesting, around a 66% percent decrease in memory allocated and similar reduction in vCPUs.
The second talk was by Ashish Ranjan at Swiggy, one of India's two big food delivery services. He gave an outline of how they moved 90% of their 600+ microservices (java, go, and python) to ARM-based nodes. A fun thing he said was they actually blocked developer merge requests unless they made their code compatible with ARM. Another thing he mentioned was that they were unable to migrate Node workloads to ARM and left them as-is. They ended up saving 30% just from this small change, however it is unclear whether AWS themselves gave them some sort of cash incentive to migrate.
The third scheduled talk was about moving to Instance Metadata Service version 2 by Ayush and Amal from CRED, because the first version is vulnerable to Server Side Request Forgery attacks. There was some actionable advice, like setting the hop limit in the internal network to 2 to acommodate the second version. A high point was some guy asking a question about why they called IMDSv1 an attack "vector", and the guys responding "that's just the terminology". For anyone interested, the term comes from Disease vectors, i.e. living beings that transmit disease, like mosquitoes.
The other two talks were by the founders of Dr. Droid, about their application which analyses
automated slack alerts to give companies insights on why they happen. Neat, I guess!
The other talk was by the folks from Incerto,
talking about OpenTelemetry, which their product is based on.
Was it good?
The talks were alright and I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me before they started, so it was a good experience overall, but next time I'll check the contents of the talks to see if I will find them interesting before RSVPing.
I met this guy while coming back home
The stand-up comedy show!
This one was on Sunday. Zo and I had a cute little date beforehand, and it did not involve waking up at 8 AM, so already ahead of the previous day's experience (just kidding, I seem to be a morning person, not the least because our cat wakes me up every day at 5 AM on the dot). We hung around at an independent bookstore for a while and got some books (I'm planning to post about it later), and then got our wrist bands for the show.
The show had two opening acts, and the main attraction was
Shreya Priyam Roy,
a runner-up on a comedy show Zo introduced me to last year.
The venue had a great atmosphere, it was in a basement and really tiny and cosy.
It also seems to host a lot of comics! We ended up sitting in the first row, prime targets for crowd work.
I do not recall the name of the first comic, but Zo liked her the most. One funny thing that happened was she made fun of a lady in the front for wearing a jacket, saying it isn't that cold, but Shreya herself was wearing one.
The second comedian, Daahab Chisti made some jokes about being fat and converting to Islam at her brother's expense. I found the way she enunciates words pretty funny.
The main act was about one and a half hour long and was pretty great. She made jokes about - Her dad expecting her to sit for the Civil Services examination (really competitive in India) ever since she was born - Her being Bihari - Being sexually harrassed in public (this one was a tough listen) - Men pissing on walls (this is a real thing that happens)
She also asked us if she could practice roasts for a show she was going to be doing in a few days (16 Jan 2024, Tuesday). They were great, and she asked Zo to pretend to be one of the roastees, so that was fun.
We're at the front! Excuse the lousy quality
Was it good?
Hell yeah, we're going to the same venue again next month.