Hey, sys #02

Port Forwarding

Here we are! Another week means another edition of more strange, and grammatically incorrect, content that is…. part newsletter, part tech-journal? WHO KNOWS.

Let’s dive in.

what i’m reading

I was originally going to discuss Skaffold, but nope. I have decided to read a bit on port-forwarding. Let’s take a step back and discuss why.

what i’m working on

The Vox Product Audience team asked us to enable connections from their development environment to services running on Kubernetes. The services in question are elastic-search , redis, and mysql.

Once I was past the initial burst of panic triggered by the task’s novelty and urgency, I decided to set up an external hostname for these services via an ingress. A short Slack thread confirmed that this was the right idea.

That said, port-forwarding was briefly mentioned during the conversation. It was immediately dismissed, sure, but it tickled me and provoked a series of existential questions.

• Do I know what port-forwarding is?
• Do I?
• Really, do I?

The answer was a blurry yes. I knew the term, I had used it before but I had never taken to time to cement its definition in my brain. At least, not in a way that empowered me to explain it to others. I wanted to change that and set to write this short post.

Without further ado, here’s this week’s eli5 aka Pam’s febrile attempt at explaining a computing concept to an imaginary adult 5 year old.

eli5

**sips whiskey**

Okay, kid. Here goes.

Have you seen Coco? That’s basically port-forwarding on a tight schedule.
Anyways, here’s a somehow similar and definitely terrible analogy:

You see dead people. Yes, you do. Not in a Sixth-Sense-and-creepy way, but more in a cute-ghosts-and-imaginary-friends way. However, no one knows that you have that power.

One day, your mom wants to send a love note to her mom, aka your grandmother. She symbolically places the envelope against nan’s urn, sheds a tear, and walks away. You run to hug your mom and whisper to her “It’s okay, mom. I’ll help you.” Before she can grasp what you said, you dash to the urn, carefully pick up the card, and step into the Land of the Dead.

Once you’re in the other dimension, you find your grandmother. She is sipping on a mojito, nonchalantly flipping the pages of the latest Mortie Claire magazine. She sees you and greets you with a warm embrace. Without wasting anymore time, you hand her the note. Fin.

Okay so…. back to port-forwarding. Let’s unpack and connect (lol):

• your mom was the sending computer
• your grandmother was the receiving computer
• the message was forwarded from the first port (your grandmother in Ashes™) to the second and working one (your grandmother in Ghost™)
• you, kid, were the channel that forwarded it….

same

in other news

• TIL: URLSearchParams in JS.
  Who knew that url building could be so clean??
• Our team is on the hunt for a new Docker Registry. We’ve been using Portus for a while but… it’s time for a replacement.
• This redditor gave a great ELI5 for port forwarding.
  Dare I say… it is… much better than mine?? Yes, I do. I dare say it is.
• There’s a new raspberry Pi in town!
  “I will finally get one and build ~ something ~ with it!”
  - Bright Eyed Pam, circa every other week.

Until next week! ✌️

top 5 fave gifs.