posts/santa-interview: Add Santa interview

Santa switches to Cilium, this deserves some coverage!

This is just some humoristic post, no particular context attach other
than Christmas happening recently.

_posts/2024-01-02-santa-switches-to-cilium.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title:  "Exclusive interview: Santa switches to Cilium"
+date:   2024-01-02
+author: Quentin Monnet
+employer: isovalent
+excerpt:
+categories: Cilium
+tags: [Cilium, humor]
+---
+
+* ToC
+{:toc}
+
+_We are very lucky to produce an exclusive interview with Santa, who kindly
+answered our questions just a few days after his last tour. Believe it or not,
+Santa now runs Cilium!_
+
+#### Dear Santa, welcome to this interview! We just finished 2023's tour. How did it go, this year?
+
+Ho! Hey! Hello, thanks for having me. That's right, the Elves and I finished
+our tour in the early hours in the morning of the 25th of December. Once again,
+we managed to bring toys and presents to children, young or grown-up, all
+around the world. This year, the team was particularly well organised, and we
+managed to deliver more presents than ever before, even with the increased
+delays due to the decreasing number of chimneys.
+
+#### These are great news. How do you explain the progress you've made?
+
+For some parts, this is due to cultural changes. In 2023, we realised that we
+were behind in terms of well-being and mental healthcare. We've been asking
+children to be well-behaved for centuries, but now we started to run
+initiatives to encourage our team to be nice at work, too. Another thing is
+that many of us decreased our consumption of meat and rich food, and we've felt
+more on shape.
+
+But we also implemented technical changes on our infrastructure, and observed
+huge improvements from it. The truth is: we switched to Cilium.
+
+#### What infrastructure? And what were you using before Cilium?
+
+What do you mean, "what infrastructure"? How do you think we've been tracking
+wish lists for billions of children over the years? Or ordering parts and
+components for building toys? Or handling stocks and delivery? We've been in
+business for centuries, and we're really good at it. We were pioneers in terms
+of databases. At the beginning though, we only had pens and paper. But when
+computers took off, we soon got equipped. We grew our own infrastructure, first
+with mainframes, then with racks of servers. The North Pole is ideal for
+cooling hardware, you know. Ten years ago, we started to deploy all our infra
+with OpenStack, but this ended badly. The Elves threatened to quit if we
+couldn't find an alternative. So we turned to external providers. We do have a
+few rebel Elves running clusters of Raspberry Pis internally while muttering
+things about Vim or Emacs, but in reality most of our workflows now take place
+in hosted clouds. We ported all of our databases there, even if there has been
+some overhead due to data privacy restrictions. [GDPR] didn't help, but we
+found our way to compliance.
+
+[GDPR]: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114033/how-can-santa-keep-his-lists-when-the-gdpr-is-around
+
+More recently, we started to get our hands dirty with Kubernetes and to deploy
+pods, services, and volumes at scale, in a more convenient way.
+
+#### How did this previous solutions work for you?
+
+Well, we got the presents sorted all these years, haven't we? But some
+solutions worked better than others, as we've discovered through the years.
+
+On the early days of the Internet, for example, we tried to provide online
+forms for wish lists, but the lack of encryption made it easy for people to
+intercept the requests and add useless items to play pranks on their friends.
+We also had a good time rebuilding our database after that child named
+`Robert'); DROP TABLE Children; --` filled the form. Robert, don't be surprised
+you stopped receiving presents after that day.
+
+Also, a few years back, we decided to follow the hype and we deployed a
+solution based on blockchain. We had all presents registered into a chain, so
+that we could guarantee their provenance and their delivery. As it turns out,
+no child has ever cared where the toys come from, or how they all fit nicely
+into the chain, or whether you can use cryptographic primitives to ensure that
+a toy car has not been tampered with.
+
+Thankfully, at the end of the year we've always managed to bend the tools to
+our needs, and to deliver. It's just that some years are easier than others.
+
+#### So why did you try Cilium?
+
+Since we've started managing clusters with Kubernetes, we've had a good
+experience. However, the IT Elves have always found it difficult to connect
+multiple clusters, or to observe what's going on in the cluster. We first heard
+about Cilium when fans of the project asked for some Cilium swag for Christmas
+in 2021. In 2023, we learned that Cilium entered (then completed) its
+[graduation] process, and felt that the project was mature enough to give it a
+try. We deployed it on our clusters, and it turned out this was exactly what we
+needed.
+
+[graduation]: https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2023/10/11/cloud-native-computing-foundation-announces-cilium-graduation/
+
+#### How did Cilium change the situation?
+
+Ho! Cilium has been a game-changer. A revolution. A new era. We deliver in so
+many countries! We have clusters at AWS, GKE, Azure, and several other
+providers. Cilium allows us to connect the clusters seamlessly together, so
+that all our services can communicate together. We have XDP acceleration or
+bandwidth management to handle the peak of traffic when Christmas comes near.
+We have transparent encryption to make sure that no data leaks and that nobody
+sees whether a child has been good or bad.
+
+In terms of performance, we observed an increase of 80% of requests processed
+by seconds, which translates into 564 additional toys produced each minute and
+a 7% improvement in order accuracy, with a 12% reduction of the duration of the
+tour.
+
+With Cilium, we've been using this eBPF thing to run the dataplane in the
+kernel, and it's fast, and it's resilient! I'm all excited. It's as if I got a
+Christmas present to myself, this year. The Elves are excited, too: they
+changed their traditional green liveries to light green, yellow, blue, purple,
+and red ones, matching the colours of the Cilium logo!
+
+#### Rumour has it you renamed the reindeers, can you tell more about that?
+
+Oh, yeah I did! When I noticed all the benefits we obtain with Cilium, I got so
+excited that I started to rename them all. Dasher and Dancer now go as
+Clustermesh and Servicemesh. Vixen is VXLAN. We also have XDP, Metrics, DSR,
+Hubble, and Tetragon.
+
+<!--
+Dasher
+Dancer
+Prancer
+Vixen
+Comet
+Cupid
+Donner
+Blitzen
+Rudolph
+-->
+
+To be accurate, there is one I didn't rename. Rudolph remains Rudolph. It's not
+really that I was attached to the name, you see. But the name has been
+hardcoded by everyone in so many workflows everywhere that, when we simulated a
+change, it completely crashed our CI. I had to abandon the idea.
+
+#### What do you plan for the year ahead?
+
+Usually, I take a couple months to rest after the rush before Christmas, and to
+recover from the stress of the delivery night. But this year was easier on the
+team, and we're all so excited, that we won't rest for long. We have a few
+plans for 2024. Some Elves want to integrate AI into our workflow. They claim
+that it can help reading and sorting the letters we receive, or designing the
+ideal presents.
+
+Tetragon is also on our list. Our servers are mostly secure, but Bad Folks have
+occasionally managed to divert a few toys. Remember that year when you asked me
+for this wonderful gift, but didn't get it? That was the Grinch exploiting a
+zero-day vulnerability against our infra to steal presents. But I am hopeful
+that Tetragon will help detect any attempt in the future, and all requests
+should be addressed. Too bad you're a grown-up now!
+
+We also have plans to explore Cilium itself even further. We're following the
+project very closely, looking out for new features. In fact, I brought [an
+early present][cisco] to some of the Cilium developers, and I'm curious to see
+where this will take them. In the meantime, we consider getting involved and
+contributing to Cilium ourselves. I already created [a Pull Request][pr] to add
+myself to the list of users.
+
+[cisco]: https://isovalent.com/blog/post/cisco-acquires-isovalent/
+[pr]: https://github.com/cilium/cilium/pull/30083
+
+#### Many thanks for your replies! We wish you a very Happy New Year 2024
+
+There's no doubt that 2024 will be an interesting year. And when December comes
+back, the Elves and I will be back to town, ready like never before. Enjoy the
+presents we brought, and Happy New Year to you all. Ho! Ho! Ho!