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Lukas Gentele Contributor Share on Twitter Lukas Gentele is the CEO of Loft Labs , which builds open source developer tooling for Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a wonderful but complex software that can present significant “Day Two” challenges when put into production. Developers who are new to Kubernetes — and most are — face a large knowledge gap when they look to sustain and optimize Kubernetes clusters. In this piece, I will share several ways to address problems as they arise. Optimize your Kubernetes cluster for cost As adoption of Kubernetes rises, the need for applications and engineers to access clusters is also growing. However, it is neither feasible nor cost-efficient to always use entire physical clusters to achieve this goal. Virtual clusters are a great way to reduce costs. In a scenario of 100 developers, we calculated up to 78% savings by using open source virtual clusters. Leveraging virtual clusters with open source software such as VirtualCluster o...

In 2014, Prayank Swaroop made a pitch to the storied venture firm Accel, where he worked as an associate, about future marketplaces in India. At the time, Flipkart and Snapdeal were the only two e-commerce startups in India that had shown a semblance of scale. Swaroop made a case that as more Indians come online, opportunities will emerge in food delivery, automotive aftermarket, warehousing, road freight, and social commerce among many other marketplace areas. Swaroop, now a partner at the firm, turned out to be right. Urban Company, which operates in the domestic help sector, is valued at over $2 billion; Zomato and Swiggy are delivering food to millions of customers each month; Spinny and Cars24 are selling hundreds of thousands of cars each quarter; social commerce startup DealShare is valued at over $2 billion and Meesho just short of $5 billion. Hundreds of millions of Indians have come online in the past decade and over 100 million are making online transactions and purchases...

Taking a deep breath as I write these words: Next week, TechCrunch will return to our first in-person CES in three years. Phew. It felt good to finally get that off my chest. The last time our team flew to Las Vegas for the event was January 2020 . An auspicious date. It wouldn’t be long before the entire world went pear-shaped. It was a big show, with 117,000 in attendance, per the CTA’s (Consumer Technology Association) figures. The event, which its governing body would rather you not call the Consumer Electronics Show , has become a sprawling affair in recent decades. Attempting to see the entire show is a fool’s errand. Back in my younger, more hopeful days, I made a point of seeing as much of it as I could, making a pretty good run at walking every official hall. That’s become increasingly impossible over the years, as the show has spilled out well beyond the confines of the Las Vegas Convention Center. There’s the Venetian Convention and Expo Center (RIP the Sands), countless...

Tim Harned Contributor Share on Twitter Tim Harned is a managing director at Progress Partners . He has had an M&A and capital advisory career spanning more than 30 years making strategic transactions for Fortune 500 and early-stage enterprises. Ever since Elon Musk’s “be careful what you wish for” acquisition of Twitter, speculation about America’s first homegrown “super app” has soared. In October, Musk tweeted : “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” According to Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Musk is “thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.” Keep in mind that Musk founded X.Com and merged it with Confinity to create PayPal. For context, China’s WeChat launched as a messaging service in 2011 and has since become a combination of Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak and Healthcare.gov — as well as more than 3.5 million partner “mini programs” that operate inside the app. PayPal and Walmart have ...

Spotify has launched a New Year’s Hub to help its users ring in 2023, the streaming service announced on Thursday. The company says the one-stop destination gives users access to classic party playlists and special takeovers from artists like Charli XCX, Rita Ora, N-Dubz and Céline Dion. “We’ve got plenty of music to kickstart your celebration, and it’s all in our freshly launched New Year’s Hub,” Spotify wrote in a blog post . “Whether you want a low-key night or a heart-pounding dancefest, we have you set with featured playlists to match the vibe you’re channeling.” The New Year’s Hub includes many up-beat playlists, including “Party Hits,” “Afro Party Anthems,” “Get Turnt” and more. On the other hand, there are also playlists for people who want to have a low-key New Year’s Eve, with playlists like “Chill Hits,” “Comfort Zone” and “Chillout Lounge.” The New Year’s Hub also includes many DJ mixes from artists like Tiësto, Hannah Laing and Benny Benassi. The co...

India said on Thursday that under its ongoing G20 presidency, it will prioritize the development of a framework for global regulation of unbacked crypto assets, stablecoins and decentralized finance and will explore the “possibility of [their] prohibition” in a potentially large setback for the nascent industry. India began its year-long presidency of the Group 20 early this month. The group, which comprises 19 nations across continents and the EU, represents 85% of the world’s GDP. It also invites non-member countries including Singapore and Spain and international organizations such as World Bank and the IMF. The Reserve Bank of India, the Indian central bank, said in a report today that crypto assets are highly volatile and exhibit high correlations with equities in ways that dispute the industry’s narrative and claims around the virtual digital assets being an alternative source of value due to their supposed inflation-hedging benefits. The Indian central bank warned that polic...

When Alibaba’s former CEO Jack Ma passed the torch to Daniel Zhang, he established a system that regularly rotates executives to ensure the company always stays agile in the fast-changing internet space. It’s time for this year’s reshuffle — the e-commerce and cloud computing titan made a few major reshuffle announcements on Thursday. The decision that stands out is happening at Alibaba Cloud, the third-largest public cloud infrastructure provider in the world only after AWS and Microsoft. Jeff Zhang, former president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, is stepping down while Daniel Zhang (unrelated), Alibaba’s CEO, takes over as acting president. The timing of the restructuring is sparking speculation. Just under two weeks ago, Alibaba Cloud’s Hong Kong servers suffered a serious outage that shut down many services in the region, including major crypto exchange OKX . The system failure, which lasted up to one day for some customers, made the incident one of the biggest among Chinese c...