DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling

Latest Episodes:

Cycle.io LowOps container platform Jul 14, 2023

Show notes

Bret and Matt welcome Jake Warner back to the show to talk about LowOps. What does LowOps mean? What can Cycle offer us as an alternative to Swarm and Kubernetes?

😇 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.

Jake Warner is the CEO and founder of Cycle.io. And I had him on the show a few years ago when I first heard about Cycle and I wanted to get an update on their platform offering. On this show we generally talk about Docker and Kubernetes but I'm also interested in any container tooling that can help us deploy and manage container based applications. Cycles' platform is an alternative container orchestrator as a service. In fact, they go beyond what you would provide normally with a container orchestrator and they provide OS updates, networking, the container runtime, and the orchestrator all in a single offering as a way to reduce the complexity that we're typically faced with when we're deploying Kubernetes.

While I'm a fan of Docker swarm due to its simplicity, it still requires you to manage the OS underneath, to configure networking sometimes, and the feature releases have slowed down in recent years.

But I still have a soft spot for those solutions that are removing the grunt work of OS and update management and helping smaller teams get more work done. I think Cycle has the potential to do that for a lot of teams that aren't all in on the Kubernetes way, but still value the container abstraction as the way to deploy software to servers.

Live recording of the complete show from May 18, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #217). Includes demos.

★Topics★
Cycle.io website
@cycleplatform on YouTube

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Creators & Guests

Bret Fisher - Host
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Matt Williams - Host
Jake Warner @ Cycle.io - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(02:25) - Introducing the guests
(03:17) - What is Cycle?
(12:33) - Deploying and staying up to date with Cycle
(14:21) - Cycle's own OS and updates
(17:12) - Core OS vs Cycle
(22:10) - Use multiple providers with Cycle
(22:52) - Run Cycle anywhere with infrastructure abstraction layer
(24:33) - No latency requirement for the nodes
(28:28) - DNS for container-to-container resolution
(29:54) - Migration from one cloud provider to another?
(31:17) - Roll back and telemetry
(32:48) - Full-featured API
(37:12) - Cycle data volumes
(38:35) - Backups
(40:24) - Autoscaling
(43:00) - Getting started
(44:40) - Control plane and self-hosting
(44:58) - Question about moving to Reno
(45:59) - Built from revenue and angels; no VC funding

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AWS containers with Corey Quinn Jun 30, 2023

Show notes

Bret and Matt are joined by Corey Quinn to talk about AWS and containers.

Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group. You may have seen or heard some of his in-depth AWS content, including his Last Week in AWS newsletter and blog, Corey's podcast Screaming in the Cloud and the AWS Morning Brief, or his highly produced YouTube videos on the Last Week in AWS channel.

Corey runs the Duckbill Group, a company of people focused on helping clients understand and manage their cloud spend. If I had to describe Corey in a sentence, he's a quick thinking AWS expert who is one part cloud strategist, and one part sarcasm.

The inspiration for this show came from his blog series, focused on all the ways to run containers on AWS, which is to say there's a lot. Dozens of ways, in fact, which I took as a testament to how containers have won the cloud as the primary way to package and deploy software to servers. Now, the hard part for us is to figure out which method we're going to choose for running those containers.

We go on lots of tangents, but overall it was a fun conversation and I hope you enjoy this episode.

Live recording of the complete show from May 4, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #214).

★Topics★
The Cloud Resume Challenge
Last Week in AWS
17 ways to run containers on AWS
17 MORE ways to run containers on AWS

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

Creators & Guests

Bret Fisher - Host
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Matt Williams - Host
Corey Quinn - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(07:19) - 17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS
(09:57) - If you're using the cloud, use the cloud!
(13:32) - Data loss and it's only on the internet forever
(17:58) - Recommended ways to run containers on AWS
(22:49) - Biggest burn on people's AWS bills
(29:33) - Docker Desktop on top of AWS EC2 in Windows and do you need bare metal?
(30:13) - Bare metal required for Hyper-V
(32:39) - AWS App Runner
(40:26) - Services AWS has dropped
(41:39) - Workloads inside the container; where the container should run
(44:13) - Building experience...hands-on projects vs getting certifications
(55:31) - Migrating. Leaving Kubernetes.
(01:00:57) - Chat GPT Star Wars jokes

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Podman In Action: Desktop, Machine, and more Jun 16, 2023

Show notes

Bret and Matt are joined by Brent Baude and Dan Walsh from Red Hat to talk about the latest with Podman, Quadlet, Podman Desktop and Podman machine, and how it all works with Kubernetes.

Dan Walsh, a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, has been working with containers since the beginning. He's a contributor to Docker, Project Atomic, SELinux, and a lot more. He literally wrote the book on Podman.

Brent Baude, is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat and an architect and a primary maintainer of Podman, and contributes to many of its associated technologies like CRI-O, Buildah, and Skopeo.

We go through a lot of tooling in this episode because Red Hat has taken a different stance than Docker in how it delivers its container tooling. You might say they take the approach of the Unix philosophy of every program does one thing well. Most of us know Docker and how it bundles many things related to containers into a single command line and daemon, yet some would prefer to isolate pieces of container management functionality into discreet, smaller programs - one for building images, one for running containers, one for communicating with registries, one for adding a GUI to your container manager, and one for managing the container VM. It's just sort of how I would break down the Podman ecosystem.

And while that may seem like a lot of things, it's basically what Docker does for you in a single tool, yet the isolation of these tools is what can make them purpose-fit when you only need a fraction of the functionality of Docker. For example, one of Podman's core tenants is that it tells systemd to run your pods, which is the initialization process on most Linux distributions. In this way, your containers become more like standard system processes, rather than the Docker way of running all containers under the Docker Daemon process itself.

Now many of us have heard of the other two original Red Hat container projects, Skopeo and Buildah, but there's now an increasing number of things the Podman ecosystem can do. So I'm grateful to Dan and Brent for coming on to break down the new parts of this toolkit and how we might use them.

Live recording of the complete show from April 20, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #212).

★Topics★
Podman Website
Podman Desktop Website
Dan Walsh's book, Podman in Action
Podman Machine reference
Quadlet Blog Post
Podman and Quadlet Blog Post

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

Creators & Guests

Bret Fisher - Host
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Matt Williams - Host
Brent Baude - Guest
Dan Walsh - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(04:26) - Dan's history with containers
(10:52) - The recommended way to get Podman
(11:55) - Podman Machine
(13:27) - How is Podman Machine installed
(16:43) - How is Podman organised
(19:22) - Podman Compose explained
(25:21) - Podman Desktop
(28:52) - Podman and Docker extensions
(30:16) - Support for Kubernetes YAML
(36:54) - Podman and systemd workloads
(42:44) - How to get started with Podman
(51:38) - Overlaying networks with Podman

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Falco Logs Suspicious Events on Your K8s and Servers Jun 02, 2023

Show notes

Bret and his co-host, Matt, are joined by Jason Dellaluce and Luca Guerra from Sysdig to talk about Falco, a tool I recommend for production clusters and knowing about any bad behavior on your servers.

Falco is a security tool I've mentioned multiple times on this show, because I mostly think that a low level security focused logging product is something that every production server needs. The ability to log unexpected events and behaviors on your Linux host is powerful and necessary to be able to audit what's really happening on your infrastructure outside of your app itself.

Falco has been a CNCF incubating project for over four years, and I was immediately drawn to it in its early days, because it was container and Kubernetes aware and it could log and alert with default rules for everything, from someone starting a shell inside a container, to a bash history file being deleted, to a container trying to talk to the Kubernetes API.

This episode will be useful for those of you new to tools like Falco and for those familiar with its basics, but also wanting to learn about newer features and use cases, which I did some learning on myself in this episode.

Live recording of the complete show from April 6, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #210).

★Topics★
Falco website
Falco on CNCF

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

Creators & Guests

Bret Fisher - Host
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Matt Williams - Host
Jason Dellaluce - Guest
Luca Guerra - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(02:24) - Introducing the guests
(05:25) - What is Falco? Why do we need it?
(08:00) - What can Falco monitor?
(17:11) - How are events logged?
(30:59) - Does Falco classify alerts by severity?

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DevPod for Dev Containers May 26, 2023

Show notes

Bret is joined by Lukas Gentele and Rich Burroughs from Loft Labs to look at a new project called DevPod, that supports dev containers and VMs. It works with local Docker instances and AWS, GCP, Azure, and several other cloud providers. The project is compatible with Microsoft's DevContainer standard, which means it works with the VC Code standalone app and VS Code in the browser.

Lukas and Rich were on this show last year, showing off vcluster, which allows you to run a full Kubernetes cluster inside an existing Kubernetes namespace. In this episode, we announce the release of DevPod and also go through some demos. I'm already thinking of how I might use it in my own developer workflow.

Live recording of the complete show from May 16, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #216). Includes demos.

★Topics★
DevPod website
DevPod on Twitter

Creators & Guests

Bret Fisher - Host
Beth Fisher - Producer
Lukas Gentele - Guest
Ruch Burroughs - Guest
Cristi Cotovan - Editor

(00:00) - Intro
(02:49) - Introducing the guests
(03:39) - Loft Labs and VCluster
(05:46) - Introducing DevPod
(10:39) - Why CLI plus GUI?
(13:16) - DevPod use case
(15:30) - Options for IDEs and port forwarding
(18:20) - Using the Microsoft VS Code dev containers features
(21:14) - Create dev environments locally or remotely
(27:47) - Turning it on and off without having to go to the infrastructure
(49:13) - How to get DevPod
(50:00) - What's next? Share feedback.
(57:12) - This is not a production deployment tool
(01:01:27) - Wrap-up

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Docker 2023 New Stuff May 19, 2023

Show notes

Bret and Matt are joined by two engineers in Docker's leadership - Chief Technology Officer Justin Cormack and Senior Manager of Developer Relations Michael Irwin, to talk about recent Docker Hub changes, as well as their latest product releases.

We touch on Docker's latest updates and announcements, focusing on the early releases of Docker Scout, Docker plus WebAssembly, and the Telepresence extension for Docker Desktop. We also look at Docker's version 23 release, its first major update in three years, with key changes including BuildKit becoming the default builder, the ability to run alternate containerd shims, and a return to semantic versioning.

Other updates include new Swarm features and deprecation of older features, specifically older storage drivers.

In the show we also cover Docker's recent announcement and subsequent retraction of a plan to require free Docker Hub organizations to move to different plans.

Live recording of the complete show from March 23, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #208).

★Topics★
Docker v23 release
Docker Hub org changes
Docker Scout
Technical preview of Docker+Wasm
Telepresence for Docker announcement

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

Creators & Guests

Justin Cormack - Guest
Bret Fisher - Host
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Michael Irwin 🇺🇦 🕊 - Guest
Matt Williams - Host

(00:00) - Intro
(02:56) - Docker version 23 release
(05:37) - Docker's Hub Announcement and Retraction
(07:40) - What does telepresence mean with Docker
(10:18) - Should I switch to Kubernetes for development?
(12:35) - Telepresence elevator pitch
(20:30) - Telepresence connection scenarios
(23:30) - How to connect with Telepresence?
(31:05) - Bret's Jekyll Story
(33:12) - What is available free in Scout?
(35:15) - Scout is not a point-in-time scan
(39:45) - James Buren's Scout Video
(40:03) - Anyone can make an extension
(42:04) - Favorite extensions
(43:19) - Wasm technical preview
(45:33) - Bret's interview with Nigel Poulton
(48:27) - Question
(52:31) - Docker 23 defaults to BuildKit
(53:27) - Happy Birthday Docker
(55:06) - Wrapping up

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Contribute to Kubernetes May 05, 2023

Show notes

Bret and Matt are joined by Chad Crowell of KubeSkills to walk through how you can contribute to Kubernetes open source.

Chad started the kubeskills.com community and podcast to focus on learning Kubernetes by doing and in this episode, he's taking us through a detailed guide on how to get involved in the Kubernetes community.

Although Kubernetes and other CNCF projects may seem big and complex with tons of activity, Chad helps us understand how the maturity of the projects and the community make it a much more pleasant onboarding experience for first-time contributors. We go through a wide range of resources and steps to help your first issue or pull request go smoothly.

Live recording of this show from March 9, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #206).

★Topics★
Learning K8s by Open Source PDF slides
First Timers Only website
K8s Contributor Community Homepage
List of K8s SIGs
K8s Slack
Open Sauced website
K8s Contributors onboarding course
Kube Cuddle podcast with Joe Beda
Learning K8s Skills

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

Creators & Guests

Bret Fisher - Host
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Matt Williams - Host
Chad M. Crowell - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(02:45) - Chad's Book
(05:11) - Learning platforms
(05:37) - Another way to learn
(06:44) - SIGs
(07:47) - Community or Contributor Experience SIG
(10:06) - Volunteers
(11:27) - For those who want to start contributing
(13:50) - The different tags
(14:48) - Good first issues
(16:01) - Bret's first Docker fix
(16:50) - Who determines the first issues?
(18:37) - OpenSauced
(19:16) - Finding the next steps after learning
(19:59) - Dashboard to track contributions
(20:42) - A very friendly community
(22:30) - Who's paying for OpenSauced?
(23:06) - How to build your rep on the internet
(24:57) - Github Flow, Breaking it down
(27:24) - Eddie Hub
(28:10) - Assign yourself to the issue
(28:50) - Compile Kubernetes
(30:14) - Tracking the pull request lifecycle
(31:44) - Changing the k8s reference issue
(35:17) - Kubernetes Slack Channels
(35:59) - SIG mailing lists
(36:44) - Getting feedback before you do the work
(38:18) - How do you give up and issue?
(39:53) - Correlating issues with Slack
(40:28) - Start with an issue first
(41:24) - Random PRs don't go well
(43:00) - Onboarding course
(44:11) - Cheat sheet
(44:26) - What Chad has learned from contributing
(46:09) - Online resources
(48:48) - Certifications and exams
(50:46) - Matt's comment about a podcast
(52:48) - Wrap up

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Windows WSL and Containers in 2023 Apr 14, 2023

Show notes

Bret is joined by fellow Docker Captain Nuno do Carmo to talk about desktop container solutions and the best Docker setup for Windows 11.

Nuno's a Docker Captain, Civo Ambassador, Microsoft MVP, and a big fan of Windows and Cloud Native. I've had him on the show before, because the more you use the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Docker Desktop, the more you'll want to use WSL.

Nuno helps answer many questions such as where are the Linux files stored, managing the CPU and memory resources, backing up files in WSL, getting the host Windows Explorer into the Linux filesystem, getting back to the Windows file system from the Linux shell and more!

Live recording of this show from February 23, 2023 on YouTube (Ep. #204). Includes demos.

★Topics★
Nuno's WSL blog
Bret's Docker Desktop alternatives list
Rancher Desktop website
Podman Desktop website

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

Creators & Guests

Bret Fisher - Host
Beth Fisher - Producer
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Nuno do Carmo - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(00:52) - Episode intro
(02:27) - Main show
(02:39) - Reflecting on the Docker birthday
(03:25) - Bret's Maven Course
(03:27) - Introducing Nuno
(04:34) - All starts with WSL
(05:13) - Mac vs Windows
(05:33) - WSL1 and WSL2
(08:28) - Question Linux in VM vs WSL
(12:51) - Filesystems and performance
(14:34) - Setting yourself up for success with WSL
(15:37) - WSL not installed by default with Windows
(17:16) - Demo start
(18:20) - Line endings issue in the past
(18:56) - The tooling is WSL-aware
(20:00) - VHDx
(21:01) - Demo
(24:22) - Bret re-explains it
(27:01) - Question SSH into WSL
(29:12) - Question How do you make a fresh WSL VM?
(31:25) - Question What does mount show in Linux
(32:37) - Question
(33:28) - Taking snapshots with Raft WSL
(34:08) - Question distros and VHDx files
(35:45) - Deleting or losing your distros
(37:17) - Question
(39:45) - Ecosystem and options - the spreadsheet
(42:11) - Demos
(42:18) - Podman desktop
(45:00) - Comment on Red Hat on Windows
(46:13) - Rancher Desktop
(53:19) - Demo
(53:50) - Process isolation on Windows

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Calico Networking for Kubernetes and More Mar 31, 2023

Show notes

Bret is joined by Project Calico's Tomas Hruby from Tigera to dig into Calico CNI features for Kubernetes and beyond.

Calico can be used in a lot of places, including Linux, Windows, containers, bare metal, eBPF or iptables. Many of us learned about it as a CNI option for Kubernetes network and networking policy.

Streamed live on YouTube on February 9, 2023.

Unedited live recording of this show on YouTube (Ep. #202). Includes demos.

★Topics★
Project Calico
Tigera Website
Project Calico on Tigera's Website

Creators & Guests

Bret Fisher - Host
Beth Fisher - Producer
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Tomas Hruby - Guest

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

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New live course on CI automation and gitops deployments
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(00:00) - Intro
(00:52) - About this episode
(01:31) - Main show
(01:36) - In today's episode
(03:00) - How did Tomas get started with Calico?
(03:28) - Projects are typically open source and SaaS
(04:07) - Project Calico elevator pitch
(05:26) - What can Calico do?
(06:33) - The origins of Calico
(07:13) - Docker got Kubernetes started
(08:25) - Project Calico on Github
(08:50) - Open source version is command-line driven
(09:04) - Calico and the company behind it
(09:28) - What makes Calico unique?
(10:54) - EBPF
(12:28) - EBPF and Calico
(14:28) - Question
(18:02) - Demo intro
(18:33) - Question
(19:18) - Question
(20:25) - Question
(21:15) - Vulnerabilities and threats
(23:28) - Question
(27:05) - Calico as service mesh
(30:33) - What is Tomas excited about?
(31:53) - EBPF real-time tooling

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Faster Docker Builds with Depot Mar 17, 2023

Show notes

Bret is joined by Kyle Galbraith and Jacob Gillespie, co-founders of Depot, to discuss their new solution to slow Docker builds.

If you've never dug into some of the details of Dockers BuildKit, that's the engine behind your Docker build command, then this episode is for you. I'm fairly confident that everyone who uses Docker will eventually come upon the problems that Kyle and Jacob were trying to solve with Depot. Their focus is on speeding up your Docker builds by doing them remotely, in a transparent way.

They avoid you needing to rethink your workflows and CI automations and provide a CLI tool that's a drop-in replacement for the Docker build command. In this episode, we walked through the problems they can solve today with what I would call a unified shared build cache for your whole team, including your CI and automation tools.

The way they are going about speeding up the Docker builds is something I wished Docker had done for us all along. I think it's still early days for the Depot product, but if you're suffering with long build image times it's already mature enough to be something I would consider as a replacement for the traditional Docker engine builds that we're all used to.

Streamed live on YouTube on January 12, 2023.

Unedited live recording of this show on YouTube (Ep. #198). Includes demos.

★Topic Links★
Depot website
Depot on Twitter

Creators & Guests