Summary of My 2021

Another year has passed in the twinkling of an eye, and this New year, the global epidemic has set a new record. After Christmas, the daily increase in the United States has directly exceeded 1 million. In China, poor management in Xi’an has led to hunger.

COVID-19 has been for more than two years.

Back to the point, after leaving from W Company at the beginning of this year, I was very lucky to join the current company, Mobiuspace, and I was mixed in the process of integrating into Mobiuspace. However, I am quite satisfied with the overall results, the current work has been on the right track, but also found a lot of opportunities.

  • In January, I set up this Blog, and I met @Cheese,@Cheese helped me adjust the style of the “Friends” page, thanks him very much~
  • In February, I fired my boss, and then what to say? I suddenly felt open-minded and changed my mindset 180 degrees. It was great, but I was actually very worried about my shortcomings in all aspects. Anyway, I’m in a complicated mood. I talked a lot with @是格子啊, @Cheese and former colleagues). Thank you very much for helping me sort out my thoughts and giving me an affirmation. At the same time, I was recommended by @Cheese and started using twitter.
  • I climbed the mountain every day to see the scenery, bought a hammock to take a nap in the park, practiced the harmonica and bamboo flute, and played like this for a month.
  • In March, I started looking for a job. After meeting with several companies, I was very lucky to enter Mobiuspace and became a new SRE. The experience of a year in Mobiuspace is written in the “work” section, which is skipped here.
  • At the end of March, I watched the movie “Raya and The Last Dragon” (the only movie I watched in 2021), and the ending song was very good.
  • In April, by various coincidences, I unexpectedly found that my junior high school classmate’s residence was less than one kilometer away from me. I had a meal of hometown food and bayberry wine at his house. It tasted very good!
  • In August, my two cousin came to Shenzhen for a summer internship. I crossed Shenzhen’s east-west coastline with them. The scenery was great, but we were really hot and thirsty on the way.
  • In October
    • Joined Mobiuspace’s surfing team, surfing and have a seaside barbecue for the first time.
    • Bought roller skates, learned reverse skating and step steering, and reviewed some basic skills learned in college.
  • In December, Bought a YunMi RO Filterred Water Dispenser, and many kinds of tea. Currently I prefer to drink Black Tea, such as Dianhong - Yunnan Gold, Redsunion Keemun.
    • /images/2021-summary/yunmi-ro-filterred-water-dispenser.webp
      YunMi RO Filterred Water Dispenser
    • /images/2021-summary/my-tea.webp
      All kinds of tea
  • In January 2022, I bought Anime PVC Figures for the first time. After putting these figures, I felt that my room was more youthful and colorful.
    • /images/2021-summary/Posts-and-Garage-Kit.webp
      Anime PVC Figures and Anime Figure Painting in my room
  • After resigning at the beginning of the year, I went sightseeing, and my mind was a little more calm. I read more than half of the book “From Lost to Found the Pacific Crest Trail”.
  • In June, the community organized us to get vaccinated against COVID-19, I read the book “Youth Post Station - A Portrait of Working Girls in Shenzhen” in the waiting room, which is mainly about the lives of working girls in the 1980s and 1990s. The writing is very real and the feelings are very delicate.
  • At the end of the year, my second grandfather died. After attending the funeral, I vaguely found some profound changes in my mind. I finished reading “Moon Palace”, which tells the tragic life of the protagonist.
  • Most of the rest of my spare time, boring, do not want to learn anything, do not want to exercise, so I read a lot of web novels to pass the time.

After resigning at the beginning of the year, I practiced the bamboo flute and the blues harmonica for some time, but then it was basically silent after I got a job.

On the whole, I have made little progress this year.

When I first joined Mobiuspace in March, I was curious, but I was so cautious that I couldn’t believe I could get into such a great company. I felt like I was out of luck. After all, Mobiuspace, whether it is the level of colleagues or the working atmosphere, or the number of customers, compared with my last company is qualitatively different.

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My first station in Mobiuspace
After getting familiar with the contents and methods of the work, leader tried his best to give me the work that best matched my interests, helping me solve problems, and at the same time giving me great autonomy, which was really great.

However, a high degree of autonomy also brings higher difficulty in work. I have been in a hurry, confused, and even self-doubted when I encounter difficulties. I am worried about whether I will run away the next day.

But fortunately, I still have the ability to adjust my mindset, take responsibility and finish the work step by step.

When there were several delays in my work, leader accompanied me to work overtime. After the work was done, he took me to a big dinner to reward myself. I really thanked him for his help and support.

/images/2021-summary/workstation-2.webp
My new station, near the floor-to-ceiling window, the view is great.

Looking back at the summary and outlook for 2020, I find that the actual progress this year is very different from what I expected last year. The initial goal was only about 10% achieved, but because I was exposed to a lot of unexpected things, I was generally satisfied:

  • It is a great gain to be familiar with the culture and working style of the new company - Mobiuspace, and my working style has been greatly improved.
  • Contact and be familiar with Mobiuspace’s AWS online environment
    • Responsible for maintaining the online Kubernetes management platform, the first time I came into contact with the online cluster peak QPS was tens of thousands. It is of great significance that I have changed from being careful at the beginning to becoming a veteran now.
    • Using python to write several Kubernetes management platform services, this is also my first time to write online services, quite a sense of achievement
    • In the second half of the year, I spent a lot of energy on the analysis and control of AWS cost, and got some good results, which benefited a lot.
    • Learned the simple use of Nginx, just enough to maintain the company’s pre-existing Nginx proxy configuration.
  • Lead the completion of “create a new K8s cluster and migrate the services to the new cluster”. Although it is not a very difficult thing, but this should be my greatest achievement in 2021.
    • I also encountered all kinds of problems in the process of upgrading. When I first upgraded and migrated, I prepared for a long time and panicked. As a result, there was still something wrong with some of the services during the upgrade. I was really confused at that time.
  • Casually wrote a few demo of Go, and made little progress.
  • Learning the rust language for a week, quickly finished reading The Book, and rewrote a video2chars in rust
  • Learned the underlying principle of Linux container: cgroups/namespace technology, and implemented a demo with go/rust
  • Learned various network interfaces and iptables of Linux
  • Be familiar with PromQL/Grafana

If I give myself a score, it’s “good”. Because I am not very enterprising, so the result can not be called “excellent”.

By the way, the new office of Mobiuspace is really great. See my twitter for details:

  • Istio Service Mesh: Realize that it is a bit heavy, and its development does not necessarily match our needs
    • The cost of the Sidecar model is relatively high, and without tuning, it will bring a 1/3 to 1/4 increase in the cost of the service, as well as a increase of delay.
    • Thinking about whether to continue to invest in Istio or to switch to other options.
  • Service Mesh is still evolving rapidly, and the future trend should be eBPF + Envoy + WASM.
    • Cilium’s eBPF-based Service Mesh is a new trend (it falls back to Per-Node Proxy mode when using advanced features). It’s expected to hit other Service Mesh of Sidecar mode in terms of cost and delay.
  • As for the log of K8s cluster, we currently use a self-developed system based on gelf protocol, but there are a lot of problems.
    • From the point of view of improving the maintainability and ease of use of the log system, loki is worth exploring.
  • In terms of K8s cluster management, I think the upgrade iteration of the cluster can be done more automatically and reliably. Next year, we can explore more in the direction of multi-cluster management.
  • Pod Service Quality: For non-core services, the amount of requests resources can be appropriately reduced instead of fully reserved (Guaranteed) to improve resource utilization.
  • The official HPA capability is not enough. Our developers needs to scale the services based on QPS/Queue or other parameters. We should continue to promote the landing of KEDA.
  • In terms of cost control, I realized the benefits of ARM architecture and AWS Spot EC2.
  • There is a lot of potential room for optimization of cross-area traffic cost.
  • AI has landed in various fields, affecting our daily use of voice navigation, song synthesis, speech synthesis and many other fields, including, of course, scenarios related to SRE work: AIOps

The outlook for this year is more focused. I strive to achieve 50%, which will be a big breakthrough.

  1. Proficient in Go and use in at least two projects
    1. To forge iron, one must be strong. Coding is the foundation of IT.
  2. Learn kubebuilder, k8s source code.
  3. Network Technologies
    1. Service Mesh - Istio
    2. Network Proxy - Envoy/APISIX
    3. K8s Network Plugins: Cilium + eBPF
  4. Optimization of cost and Service Stability of AWS EKS.
    1. Save the cost of DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes.
    2. K8s new feature:Topology Aware Hints
    3. Istio: Locality Load Balancing
    4. Optimize the EC2 Instance Type:
      1. Use the more appropriate instance types
      2. Use Instance of ARM architecture, to reduce cost and increase efficiency
    5. Popularize gRPC protocol
  5. Get through the local development environment and the running environment on the cloud
    1. nocalhost
  6. Multicluster Application Deployment and Disaster Recovery
    1. karmada
  7. Explore new technologies and other possibilities(Low priority)
    1. Kubernetes-based Service platform, Future Development Direction
      1. kubevela
      2. buildpack
      3. should I promote GitOps
      4. openkruise
    2. Development of Serverless platform
      1. Knative
      2. OpenFunction
    3. Machine learning / Deep learning: I would like to try to apply AI to music, voice, SRE and other areas I am interested in…

It can be expected that there will be so many opportunities for the SRE team in 2022. I really look forward to which parts I can be responsible for and what results I can achieve.

  • Sports:
    • Practice roller skating well and learn some tricks, at least twice a month.
    • Make more than three short trips
  • Music
    • Learn music theory again…
    • Practice MIDI Keyboard.
    • Learn Synthesizer V Stduio Pro + Qingsu AI. Cover some of my favorite songs.
  • Reading: The list is as follows. Read at least one of them in a month.
    • Literature
      • No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai
      • The End of Your Life Book club, Will Schwalbe
      • One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
      • Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
      • Sophie’s World
      • Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
      • 《沈从文的后半生》
      • 《我与地坛》
      • 《将饮茶》
      • 《My Country and My People - 林语堂》
      • 《房思琪的初恋乐园》
    • social & sciences
      • Death Is But a Dream: I want to know more about “death” this year.
      • 《怎样征服美丽少女》:哈哈
      • Harper Perennial Modern Classics
      • Social Psychology
      • The Courage to Be Disliked
      • The Body: A Guide for Occupants
      • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
      • Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
      • On China
      • 《刘擎西方现代思想讲义》
      • The Order of Time
      • The Universe in Your Hand
      • 《圆圈正义-作为自由前提的信念》
      • What Do You Say After You Say Hello?
    • Technology
      • Complexity: A Guided Tour
      • Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
      • The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
      • The Mythical Man Month and Other Essays on Software Engineering
      • 《绩效使能:超越 OKR》
      • Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility
      • 《幕后产品-打造突破式思维》
      • Professional Linux Kernel Architecture
      • The Linux Programming Interface: A Linux and UNIX System Programming Handbook
      • Refactoring - Improving the Design of Existing Code
      • How Networks Work

At the beginning of 2021, my friend and I gave myself the expectation of「拆破玉笼飞彩凤, 顿开金锁走蛟龙」, which felt that it had really come true.

This year, I hope to be able to “Going up one more storey” both in life and at work.