DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling

Latest Episodes:

Observability Cost-Savings and eBPF Goodness with Groundcover Jul 26, 2024

Show notes

Bret is joined by Shahar Azulay, Groundcover CEO and Co-Founder, to discuss their new approach to fully observe K8s and its workloads with a "hybrid observability architecture."

😇 My new GitHub Security workshop has launched! A free 2-hour workshop with hands-on labs to harden your repos and your workflows from common supply chain attacks. I'll cover how attackers are getting in, and then we'll lock down a sample repo so you know what needs to be done to protect your code. You'll leave with a deep understanding of risks and mitigations as well as a list of helpful tools to keep your repos safe, including my new "gasa" tool for scanning your repos and orgs.

Groundcover is a new, cloud-native, eBPF-based platform that designed a new model for how observability solutions are architected and priced. It is a product that can drastically reduce your monitoring, logging, and tracing costs and complexity, it stores all its data in your clusters and only needs one agent per host for full observability and APM.

We dig into the deployment, architecture, and how it all works under the hood.

Watch the video version on YouTube. Includes demos.

★Topics★
Groundcover Discord Channel
Groundcover Repository in GitHub
Groundcover YouTube Channel
Join the Groundcover Slack

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Shahar Azulay - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(03:16) - Shahar's Background and GroundCover's Origin
(06:34) - Where Did the Hybrid Idea Come From?
(12:11) - GroundCover's Deployment Model
(18:21) - Monitoring More than Kubernetes
(20:32) - eBPF from the Ground Up
(23:58) - How Does Groundcover read eBPF Logs?
(32:06) - GroundCover's Stack and Compatibility
(36:18) - The Importance of PromQL
(37:41) - Groundcover Also OnPrem and Managed
(49:35) - Getting Started with Groundcover
(52:15) - Groundcover Caretta
(54:55) - What's Next for Groundcover?

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my GitHub, Agents, Docker, and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

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Flow State with VS Code AI Jul 12, 2024

Show notes

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Continue.dev co-founder, Nate Sesti, to walk through an open source replacement for GitHub Copilot.

Continue lets you use a set of open source and closed source LLMs in JetBrains and VSCode IDEs for adding AI to your coding workflow without leaving the editor.

You've probably heard about GitHub Copilot and other AI code assistants. The Continue team has created a completely open source solution as an alternative, or maybe a superset of these existing tools, because along with it being open source, it's also very configurable and allows you to choose multiple models to help you with code completion and chatbots in VSCode, JetBrains, and more are coming soon.

So this show builds on our recent Ollama show. Continue uses Ollama in the background to run a local LLM for you, if that's what you want to Continue to do for you, rather than internet LLM models.

Check out the video version on YouTube. Includes demos.

★Topics★
Continue.dev Website

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Nirmal Mehta - Host
Nate Sesti - Guest

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:52) - Meet Nate Sesti, CTO of Continue
(02:40) - Birth and Evolution of Continue
(03:56) - Continue's Features and Benefits
(22:24) - Running Multiple Models in Parallel
(26:38) - Best Hardware for Continue
(32:45) - Other Advantages of Continue
(36:08) - Getting Started with Continue

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

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AWS Graviton: The Great Arm Migration Jun 28, 2024

Show notes

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Michael Fischer of AWS to discuss why we should use Graviton, their arm64 compute with AWS-designed CPUs.

Graviton is AWS' term for their custom ARM-based EC2 instances. We now have all major clouds offering an ARM-based option for their server instances, but AWS was first, way back in 2018. Fast forward 6 years and AWS is releasing their 4th generation Graviton instances, and they deliver all the CPU, networking, memory and storage performance that you'd expect from their x86 instances and beyond.

I'm a big fan of ARM-based servers and the price points that AWS gives us. They have been my default EC2 instance type for years now, and I recommend it for all projects I'm working on with companies.

We get into the history of Graviton, how easy it is to build and deploy containers and Kubernetes clusters that have Graviton and even two different platform types in the same cluster. We also cover how to build multi-platform images using Docker BuildKit.

Watch the video version on YouTube. Includes demos.

★Topics★
Graviton + GitLab + EKS
Porting Advisor for Graviton
Graviton Getting Started

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Nirmal Mehta - Host
Michael Fischer - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(06:19) - AWS and ARM64: Evolution to Graviton 4
(07:55) - AWS EC2 Nitro: Why and How?
(11:53) - Nitro and Graviton's Evolution
(18:35) - What Can't Run on Graviton?
(23:15) - Moving Your Workloads to Graviton
(27:19) - K8s Tooling and Multi-Platform Images
(37:07) - Tips for Getting Started with Graviton

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

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Local GenAI LLMs with Ollama and Docker Jun 14, 2024

Show notes

Bret and Nirmal are joined by friend of the show, Matt Williams, to learn how to run your own local ChatGPT clone and GitHub Copilot clone with Ollama and Docker's "GenAI Stack," to build apps on top of open source LLMs.

We've designed this conversation for tech people like myself, who are no strangers to using LLMs in web products like chat GPT, but are curious about running open source generative AI models locally and how they might set up their Docker environment to develop things on top of these open source LLMs.

Matt Williams is walking us through all the parts of this solution, and with detailed explanations, shows us how Ollama can make it easier on Mac, Windows, and Linux to set up LLM stacks.

Be sure to check out the video version of this episode for any demos.

This episode is from our YouTube Live show on April 18, 2024 (Stream 262).

★Topics★

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Matt Williams - Host
Nirmal Mehta - Host

(00:00) - Intro
(01:32) - Understanding LLMs and Ollama
(03:16) - Ollama's Elevator Pitch
(08:40) - Installing and Extending Ollama
(17:17) - HuggingFace and Other Libraries
(19:24) - Which Model Should You Use?
(26:28) - Ollama and Its Applications
(28:57) - Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
(36:44) - Deploying Models and API Endpoints
(40:38) - DockerCon Keynote and LLM Demo
(47:44) - Getting Started with Ollama

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

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Kubernetes Observability with Site24x7 May 31, 2024

Show notes

Bret is joined by Jasper Paul and Vinoth Kanagaraj, observability experts and Site24x7 Product Managers, to discuss achieving end-to-end visibility for applications on Kubernetes infrastructure. We answer questions on all things monitoring, OpenTelemetry, and KPIs for DevOps and SREs.

We talk about the industry's evolution from monitoring to full observability platforms, as well as adjacent topics for helping you with your own Kubernetes and application monitoring, including going through some of the most useful metrics in Kubernetes and AI's role in metric analysis and alerting humans.

Be sure to check out the live recording of the complete show from April 25, 2024 on YouTube (Ep. 263). Includes demos.

★Topics★
Site24x7 Full stack observability
Site24x7 Kubernetes monitoring
Voting App

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
J.P. Jasper - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(02:01) - Observability vs Monitoring
(08:32) - The New App Health Layer
(14:39) - Attributes Collected
(17:47) - Unified Observability
(19:00) - AI-Powered Insights: The Role of AIOps
(21:51) - OpenTelemetry and Multi-Cluster Monitoring
(25:45) - Windows Support
(26:06) - Correlating Requests Between Microservices
(28:14) - Synthetic vs Real-Time Monitoring
(30:25) - Dashboards, Tracing and Metrics
(37:17) - Getting Started

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

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K2D by Portainer May 17, 2024

Show notes

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Neil Cresswell and Steven Kang from Portainer to look at K2D, a new project that enables us to leverage Kubernetes tooling to manage Docker containers on tiny devices at the far edge.

K2D stands for Kubernetes to Docker, which is a bit of a crazy idea -- it's a partial Kubernetes API running on top of Docker Engine without needing a full Kubernetes control plane. If you work with very small devices, including older Raspberry PIs, 32-bit machines, maybe industry sensors and the infrastructure we now call 'edge', the container hardware is often hard for you to make simple, reliable, and automated all at the same time.

So this project uses less resources than a single node K3S and still allows you to use Kubernetes tools to deploy and manage your containers, which are in fact just running on a Docker Engine with no full-fledged Kubernetes distribution going on there.

We get into far more detail on the architecture, the Portainer team's motivations for this new open source project and what its limitations are, because it's not real Kubernetes, so it can't do everything.

Watch the video version on YouTube for any demos.

This episode is from our YouTube Live show on March 28, 2024 (Stream 260).

★Topics★
K2D website
K2D Docs

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Neil Cresswell - Guest
Nirmal Mehta - Host
Steven Kang - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(02:40) - Introducing the guests
(03:56) - Why K2D? Architecture and Motivations
(05:55) - How Efficient is K2D?
(10:25) - K2D Architecture Explained: Components and Operations
(20:42) - What Happens When Resources are Exhausted?
(23:18) - K2D for Edge Deployment with Portainer or Argo CD
(28:22) - K2D Future Roadmap
(30:36) - Getting Started with K2D

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

★ Support this podcast ★

Chainguard: Building Secure Container Images May 03, 2024

Show notes

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Dan Lorenc from Chainguard to walk them through Chainguard's approach to building secure, minimal container images for popular open source software.

They discuss why it is important to have secure and minimal container images. Dan explains how Chainguard helps remove the pain of CVEs, laggy software updates and patches and much more. Chainguard is now available also on Docker Hub.

They spend the first part of the show talking about the week's big news: the XZ supply chain attack, and Dan was the best man to explain it. They also touch on CVEs, things you can do to reduce the attack surface, SLSA, and more during this jam-packed show.

There's a video version you can watch on YouTube

★Topics★
Chainguard Website
Vulnerability Management Certification course
True Cost of Vulnerability Management
Chainguard Images
Chainguard on Docker Hub Announcement

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Nirmal Mehta - Host
Dan Lorenc - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(05:14) - Dan's Take on the XZ Hack
(14:59) - Chainguard Distro Creation
(21:21) - Chainguard in Docker Hub Announcement
(24:26) - Free Images vs Private Images
(26:27) - Zero CVE Approach
(28:33) - Ways to Reduce Attack Surfaces
(39:56) - Chainguard Academy
(41:08) - Real Time Antivirus Malware Scanner
(43:52) - Google Distro Lists Worth Using
(45:56) - Chainguard for Buildpacks
(46:20) - SLSA
(56:08) - What's Next for Chainguard?
(56:52) - Getting Started with Chainguard

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

★ Support this podcast ★

AWS Finch: The Minimal Local Container Solution Apr 19, 2024

Show notes

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Phil Estes of AWS to show us the Finch project, which bundles the best open source tools for building and running containers locally. Now it runs on macOS and Windows WSL2.

We've been talking with Phil about this show for months, and now that Finch has come to Windows, we thought it was the best time to clue you in as to why AWS created the Finch project and what it does.

You've probably heard of containerd, the most popular container runtime on the planet and BuildKit, the best way, in my opinion, to build container images. Those two work hand in hand in Docker and many other container tools. But you might not have heard of nerdctl or Lima, which are also open source tools that work with containerd and BuildKit to help you run containers locally in a virtual machine. Well, AWS had the idea of making an easy installer for these four tools. That's how Finch was born.

Finch is not meant to be a replacement of your existing way to run containers. The tools it installs are a bit of a minimum feature set, if you will, and more focused on providing people the exact tools AWS uses in its container platforms, mainly containerd and BuildKit, which are everywhere in AWS. Rather than building something that's feature equivalent to other local container solutions like Docker Desktop and Rancher Desktop, Finch keeps it simple and does the bare minimum.

If you just want an easily installable and minimal way to build and run local containers at the command line with no goofy, high-end fancy features, pure open source and just on Mac and Windows, at least at this point, you should give Finch a try.

Be sure to check out the live recording of the complete show from February 22, 2024 on YouTube (Ep. 255).

★Topics★
Finch Website
Bret's local container runtime spreadsheet

Creators & Guests

Phil Estes - Guest
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Nirmal Mehta - Host

(00:00) - Intro
(00:35) - What is Finch?
(03:53) - Phil's History with Docker and Finch
(07:59) - Deep Dive into AWS Finch Project
(11:41) - How do the Components Tie Together
(25:31) - Finch's Position in the Container Ecosystem
(26:47) - Finch's Capabilities and Comparisons
(27:45) - VM Management and Lima Integration
(37:51) - Finch's Roadmap and Community Engagement
(41:49) - How Does Finch Connect to Lima?
(42:45) - Potential Lima Conflicts with Finch
(46:38) - Getting Started wtih Finch

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

★ Support this podcast ★

Portainer for Kubernetes, Docker, Swarm, Edge, and IoT Apr 05, 2024

Show notes

Bret is joined by Neil Cresswell, CEO and co-founder of Portainer, to show us new features in Portainer and how it can manage, deploy, and orchestrate all your container workloads from a single Docker Engine, all the way to multi-cluster and IoT Kubernetes deployments.

Portainer is much more comprehensive than you might think. Docker on the Edge, Podman, Kubernetes, in the cloud, in hybrid, you name it; it seems that Portainer supports it. In the show, we also get some updates on new things that have happened in the last couple of years, including adding GitOps support to Portainer, the ability to deploy Kubernetes nodes, and infrastructure.

Be sure to check out the live recording of the complete show with demos from February 29, 2024 on YouTube (Ep. 256).

★Topics★
Portainer Website
Portainer on YouTube
Portainer on X
Portainer on LinkedIn
Portainer Demo: Kubernetes the "easy" way

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Neil Cresswell - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(02:50) - How Portainer Started
(05:38) - Portainer's Strongest Use Cases
(08:56) - Portainer's Cluster Provisioning
(12:42) - Docker Desktop and Portainer
(15:22) - GitOps with Portainer
(18:43) - K2D Teaser
(21:34) - Portainer Across Different Environment Types
(25:21) - Portainer's Focus on IoT and Edge
(29:01) - Portainer's Evolution and Future Developments
(35:03) - Passwords and Secrets Capabilities in Portainer
(40:15) - AI Capabilities in Portainer
(42:06) - Portainer Editions, Licenses and Pricing
(43:09) - Using Traefik for Ingress
(44:53) - What's Next for Portainer?

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

★ Support this podcast ★

Open Source Codespaces with Daytona Mar 22, 2024

Show notes

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Ivan Burazin and Chad Metcalf to debut Daytona, an open source "codespaces equivalent."

Daytona is a development environment manager designed to automate all the tedious steps a developer needs to perform to set up their development environment. "Essentially, it transforms any machine into a codespaces equivalent."

Where Daytona is actually starting in the enterprise is focusing on large dev environment solutions and management of those, and then trickling down to individual developers. So there are two very similar solutions to a problem of many developers and their varying ways that they set up their environments for development, but they're coming at it from two ends of the spectrum.

Watch the video version on YouTube.

★Topics★
Daytona website
Daytona on GitHub
Why Daytona OSS'd
DIY Guide

Creators & Guests