Find Your K8s Happy Path with RawKode Academy

On this episode, I'm joined by my friend David Flanagan. You know him as RawKode on YouTube and around the internet. And we've known each other for years in the Kubernetes and KubeCon scene. Uh, seeing each other at the conference about twice a year, at least once a year for many years now.

So. We've got together a few times and talked in streams and just, uh, in videos about what's going on in Kubernetes, and he's back to talk about a big launch of his that I'm very excited for us to cover and get into the weeds because it's something that every team deals with and everyone who's learning Kubernetes. Has to deal with and we are gonna get into it. So what this is about is that the landscape, the CNCF landscape, that's the thing that we all point everyone to when they are curious about all the projects in the Kubernetes community.

And we go send them off to landscape that c ncf.org, and then they look at this giant list of over a thousand open source project. Well, they're not all, all open source, but mostly open source projects that relate. To Kubernetes or they provide an additional functionality to Kubernetes And other cloud native technologies.

I guess it's not just about Kubernetes, but the challenge there is where's the happy pass? Where are the recommended stacks? Where's the mean stack? The PHP plus MySQL stack, like there's all these, in history, typical stacks of usable technologies.

I was one of those early guys that was using node js with Mongo because they seemed like they both sort of rose to fame in the early 2010s at the same time. I was developing a lot of backend JavaScript apps that ran on Mongo and learning how to use NoSQL in times where it was cool. Although now looking back, I probably could have just stayed with Postgres. But the point here is that we all struggle with this, and especially as you're learning, you don't know what to learn first.

And RawKode has created an entire website that we will talk about through this. Episode on his preferred stack, and it's not just a list. This app is quite in depth. I'm gonna call it an app because it's more than just a display of listing projects.

It's got commentary, it's got spicy takes, and he breaks down his tech matrix solution of. Cloud native ecosystem. The way he sees it, the things you need to evaluate, the things you need to skip and the things that he advocates you check into his advocate list are the must have technologies, and that's. What we go through in detail is each of his must haves and why.

Maybe a little bit of his why on how that came to the list of must-have. Kubernetes technologies. We also cover other topics like Flux versus Argo CD, the HashiCorp slash IBM controversy and the CD k deprecation of Terraform. content creation challenges that we've both had because we're both making courses and YouTube videos and podcasts and all that stuff.

And he's launched all this on his website at RawKode Academy. So check it out and go check out his resources because he's making fun stuff and I, I really appreciate the level of effort he's giving to the community in his open source work. Here we go. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks for being here. no, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to sit down and talk tech with you.

Yeah. we've also talked this year a little bit about course making and the struggle of being a full time content creator. we both suffer together and not alone. In this content game.

I mean, yeah, I'm still not sure. It's a good idea it's like the whole DevRail paradox, right? Everyone thinks it's glamorous. You go on planes, fly business class, stay in hotels have meals cocktails and just travel the world.

But really underneath, it's a very difficult job where you have to be face all of the time. Putting yourself into, the public eye and social situations that don't come easy to a lot of developers. it's not easy for me. even doing this online being vulnerable on YouTube your website LinkedIn and making content, it's so difficult.

Yeah, I, don't think I'd change it for anything. It's, a whole lot of fun when you get to make up the content that you love and enjoy and hopefully find that others love and enjoy it too. the creation process, I think is the most rewarding thing. you just shipped a video this morning.

little discussion of HashiCorp and some stuff they're doing over there, I haven't seen that video yet, but it's always nice to click publish, because now you know it's out there and you could take it back, but you probably won't. So it's only forever on the internet. what could go wrong? I very specifically and purposely content creation life, which is now six or seven years, have never really had strong opinions on my channel.

I focus on showing people the tools and how to be successful with these tools, and I very rarely say here is my opinion on something the video I published today. where the title is, fuck you. HashiCorp dash dash dash an IBM company. That gives you all the context that you need right off the bat.

Right. We're but I, I mean, I have been burned with this announcement, of the deprecation and CDK. So I felt it was time to make it personal for once which again, I don't rarely do. So I'm very Yeah.

I hope it is well received. Well, it'll certainly mean more when it comes from someone who's not posting that kind of video daily or ever. Either that or it's the end of my career, and I'll have a full time job by January 26. Who knows?

I give a lot of opinions, but I don't tend for them to be negative because I also know a lot of these people, a lot of times I'm talking about something where I know someone that works there and they're all doing hard work. It's just the company's overall decisions impact things, and it's not individual's fault. So I tend to hate throwing shade at companies in my videos. But yeah, sometimes it's warranted, I think.

I give my opinion on the sunset of that project and what the next steps are for people I am angry with the whole thing, but not at the individual developers who are working on Terraform CDK, or even Terraform or anything else. The same with the license change, right? I'm not angry the people doing the real work. It's the C suites and the executives on their yachts with their billions who just get to sit and make decisions that affect an entire community without a face in that community.

So why should I worry about offending them? It's kind of my perspective now. It's like, I'm sorry you don't have the community's best interest at heart and I don't have yours. you're, talking in more detail.

I tend to pay attention to those topics, but there's so many companies in our field that it's hard for me to really keep track of who's in the C suite, you know, what company's situation is like. I totally forgot they were being bought by IBM you're right. Sometimes you do forget that, IBM has swallowed up Red Hat as well. red Hat is an IBM company now, Yeah.

and around we go. I think we're, especially in the AI space, watching a lot of acquisitions and it's hard to keep track of who now is part of who, but today. I reached out to David because we have seen attempts before at trying to take the giant CNCF landscape, hundreds and hundreds of projects. are we over a thousand yet?

Like of all the things in that landscape website? I'm trying to remember, is. Yeah. yeah.

it's daunting for those of us that live at full time and if you aren't wanting to buy a vendor's prescribed stack They tend to have certain tools that they either bundle or, work with. So you kind of get a chosen stack there. A lot of us that have been teaching and educating others have been frustrated since the beginning of all of this, the number of projects continues to climb. I don't, there's no sign of stopping.

And, we, occasionally see projects deprecated or archived. And even if you thought you were current a year ago or six months ago, you're no longer current. And what's possible with all of these tools? And we do, I think, tend sometimes as engineers to just have this like candy land approach a little bit, where we want to, tuning oh man, this exists, so I must check it out and go, support I might need to put this in my cluster.

Right. And I think reach I'm going to guess you're one of those my that at years it's been more of a less is more approach. year. very you put out your opinionated Kubernetes stack.

tell me about that, like the original inset, like why did you want to do this in such a, detailed way? it was more than just a single post that says, here's a list of tools I recommend. I think you and I have something in common and, that we talk a lot, we talk to a lot of people, when we go to conferences where we're in discards, whether we're on social media, a lot of people value our opinions on stuff. as a result of that, you know, I have a public office I always think we're people big time and they just want to talk about what they should be learning.

What's their next step in their career? What tools should they be paying attention to? When I go to conferences, it's the same again there It's okay, I be using Loki? Should I be using Meemer?

Should I be using Cortex? Like what does my observability stack looks like? What does my security stack look like? These are questions people have, because the CNCF and the cloud native landscape make a lot of money.

They attract a lot of companies who build products that solve problems. there's a lot of competition. I used to send people to the CNCF landscape document before it got to what it is now. But it doesn't really make sense if you send someone to it.

There is just boxes and boxes and boxes of decision fatigue. not like you go there and you go, oh, well how, about application delivery components should I use? Because you get presented 30 options. How do you make that decision of which one is right for me and my team?

I decided there had to be a better way. I realized. for the best part of, I think nearly 20 years, 15 years, been putting out their tech radar. And I used to use this all the time back in 2013 to 2015 when I was, director of development for a software company.

I wanted to know they were doing the hard work, researching, kicking the tires, doing all the, syncing with salt. Right. So I trusted them for that opinion, but I realized that they're not really in a position to cover something that's as broad or as specific that I want. And I know I use broad and specific at the same time, but Kubernetes, Cloud native is broad, but it's also a niche, Yep.

tech radar, like ThoughtWorks? And then I tried to copy it. Not the code, but the idea. And I was like, okay, here's my quadrants.

And I was like, this has to be simpler. So I sat down with my good friend Claude, and my good friend ChatGPT and my other friend, Gemini I had a conversation for days. This, discussion was massive, it was like, what do I care about in this space? What decisions am I making?

If I were going to build a stack tomorrow, what would that look like? What are the trade offs that I make? And eventually I got to the point where these discussions really hit home. are the properties of a project that are important to me.

Here's why they're important to me. I made, a database of the things that are important with the technologies and then grouped them together. I didn't want to deviate too much from the CNCF landscape because there is a lot of information there. The only thing that's really missing is that opinionated piece.

Why should someone adopt FluxDV? over Argo CD that is not on the landscape? It will never be on the landscape because the CNCF is Switzerland, right? They are there to home these projects.

They're not there to tell people how to do anything. And that was kind of the start of it. I called it the tech matrix because it is a matrix and that we have, different criteria and groupings and everything that we need to balance two projects against each other, or two segments against each other. that was really the start of it.

I was also in a very fortunate position where the Rockwood Academy, you know, I've done over 400. 300 videos now, covering a lot of these technologies. I already had some of the database just sat there in YAML file in a Git repository. I just had to enrich it with some more information and then add my flavor to each of them as well.

And then sitting down with my good friends, Claude, gemini and I and ChatGPT, I was like, here's my idea. Let's build it into the website Voila, we, got the tech matrix, and we can go through it in more detail. I can talk about how some of the decisions were made and my opinionated stack, but the whole point of it is I can update this matrix whenever I want, my opinion changes, as new technologies come out just give people a little bit of guidance. the opinions that are here should you be paying attention to our technology.

And I break it down into should you be just keeping an eye on this technology? Should you be exploring it and kicking the tires? Should you be actively learning this because it will be a net positive on your career. Then into the more of the team dynamic, is this safe for me to adopt with my team?

And lastly, the advocate, do I specifically say this is the one technology that everyone should be using, and if you're not, you're doing it wrong. That is kind of where I went with the matrix, right down to that. You need to use these tools if you are serious about platform and Kubernetes in 2026. So would you say this is a good resource, for someone getting started?

is this meant for people that are sort of, do you come at it from like a problem fixed perspective of like, I'm thinking about service mesh. Let me see what David has to say about service mesh. is it more like that So it's multifaceted, right? If you are new to cloud, native to DevOps, to platform engineering, to observability, any of these things, Any of these niches within the niche, you can go to the tech matrix and I will give you an opinionated handful of technologies that you should be watching, exploring and learning.

And if you stick to that, I hope you will get enough value to make the next 12 months of your career come by in six months, We're trying to cut down that mean time to progress. very difficult for someone coming into Cloud Native to take a look at that landscape and know what technologies to play with. Should they invest six weeks learning flux and then go spend another six weeks learning Argo and building their own opinions, I want to speed that up for them. Yeah.

If you learn that, you learn everything that you need to learn, and I don't want to say anything bad about Argo, but it's just not a tool I'm ever going to use. So I'm not going to tell other people to use it either. it's safe to adopt, but I would never encourage it. If you are a team or you've already been doing Kubernetes for 7 years, you still need to keep up to date with, the changes.

my tech matrix is still valuable because as technologies are announced, as they are released, as they are evolving, you can just subscribe to a technology and get updates. on has it moved from my kick the tires explorer into my learn phase? Have I now decided to start adopting it and advocating it? you can just get the alerts for the things that are important to you.

You can just get alerts on get ups if you want, or you can just scroll very niche into Flux cd. the way that you consume it is going to be different from person to person, but it depends on what you want to get out of it. I hope that I've structured it and composed it in the right way where you can just get what you want from it without the noise. that is the problem of the landscape.

It comes one way, the noisy way, and it's very difficult to get the signal out sometimes. Alright, have definitely, And that's you're right. I'm now thinking about my own use of, the landscape it. website and not something I send people to anymore.

week. it hasn't been that way for years To me, it feels like it's only there for people who are in the CNCF and are who are aware of a lot of the projects and are looking for what's new, browsing through some of the categories and identifying what we don't know about yet. But that's a far cry from implementation or a decision on product. And, especially when we start talking about platform engineering stacks, there's a lot of expectation in what's.

What features exist in that stack versus someone's just saying, I, need to deploy Kubernetes. And that there's a lot, I feel like there's a lot more minimum decision amount for a platform engineering stack, I feel like is, a much higher bar than I've got a working Kubernetes cluster that's in production. so why don't we go through some of it. I'd love to, get some of your thoughts.

we can read them on the website, but I'd love to discuss some of them for our podcast audience and get some of your if you don't mind. let's do it. we'll do an experiment, right? Let's go to the, landscape, and assume we want to decide which service mesh we should adopt.

All right? So we come here and we're like, okay, we're looking at projects and products, side by side. We need to find where service mesh is, or networking, depending on how it's structured. we see we've got a service mesh section here, so we can group in.

Now we do see Istio and Linkerd because they're graduated projects and everything else is a paid for product. There are no opinions here to tell you whether you should use Istio over Linkerd. right now. STL for a start says simplify observability traffic managed security policy with the STL service mesh.

STL simplifies nothing, that is just. Wrong, can see how many GitHub stars it's got. What does that tell me? Well, not really much.

then we've got Linkerd, which is drastically less GitHub stars, which I think is, an absolute train, but it is an ultra light, ultra simple, ultra powerful service. mesh. I would agree with that. I'm a fan of Linkerd.

I'm always going to side with Linkerd. then we've got all these paid for products. when should I build or buy? When should I own my own service mesh and when should I pay someone else to maintain it for me that isn't really covered.

Yeah. It's valuable for a content creator, right, where you want to come and see what random technology will I cover this week? You know, close your eyes and move them out and see what you get. But from for joining us today.

Please make sure to sign in and have your registration information. We've got a lot to be doing So I'm going to go We have all of the technologies that I've ever covered or ever had any opinion on within the cloud native landscape. I tried to make it very obvious what these categories are so you can expand how to read the matrix. I explain what watch, explore, and learn are, those are the most important ones.

right very easy just to come here and get what is my stack. It's everything in this column. There's no other decisions to be made. The adopt is a bit broader, and that's because I made the decision that CNCF graduated project, it is probably safe for any organization, no matter how big or small in the world to adopt.

I am confident that CNCF will keep that project, active and maintained for as long as they can. I have never seen them sunset or graveyard, any project that has ever been graduated, I could be wrong, but I don't think that has ever happened. They put a lot more effort into trying to save it if it got into trouble. I imagine.

Well, yeah. Plus the conditions to graduate, right? You can't be a single vendor project. There has to be multiple people that are actively invested in making that a successful project.

So, you know, the likelihood of one company going bankrupt. 50 50 probably worse. multiple, within a single thing, I think it should be safe. So where do Do you wanna start in my graveyard?

Do you wanna start on my watch list? Do you wanna start with what I'm advocating my opinionated guide to platform engineering Kubernetes. What would you like to learn? Yeah.

So, for the audio audience, I'm going to mention the numbers at the top, the live totals where it says skip, watch, explore at the very top are those your totals Yeah, so I mean, I For the audio audience, I wanted to mention you've actually gone through and deselected essentially 169. projects, Yeah, that's 169 CNCF projects Correct. so in total we had 320 projects that I have stored data on in the Rockwood Academy, 169 of them. I have put straight into Skip Technologies that I am not, really interested in, doesn't mean they're not useful, doesn't mean you can't be interested in them.

These are personally things that I do not give two hoots about because they do not fit in to my stack or my production or anything else. doesn't mean they're not good, I have already made my opinions on observability. Thanos is a great project. But I'm just not interested in that.

So it's in Skip, we've got Holmes, GPT, just not interested in bringing AI into my cluster. I use AI everywhere else. I do not want it in my cluster. bank Vaults, Aqua Project, ClusterNet, Dex.

I mean, I know some of these and some of them are just not, if someone were to click on it and say Go check, oh, OpenTofu is going to move, that's, a no brainer. Yeah, because I was always Team Terraform. motivations change right, right, right, right. So I get to update this and people can follow along with my Stack It doesn't mean anything in Skip is bad.

It just means I haven't got around to it. It's not for me right now, or I don't have a use case. Yeah. I wish I could be in a position where I could add opinions on everything, but again, that is a risky game.

This is a volatile ecosystem. I've always felt, for me it's always felt like a little bit of like, stay in your lane. there's different areas where I'm like, you can have opinions, but they would not be based on full production experience and knowledge of running clusters long term with these products. I'd hate to have opinions when I have a cursory knowledge or I've done a sample install in my closet.

that's not enough for me to feel like I have an opinion. You also have graveyard on the other end. Yeah. So the graveyard, is projects that are either abandoned, so people should just get a warning not to use this.

I'm going to have to add Terraform, CDK to it today. or projects that have burned me. and I feel bad by that, but you know, sometimes a project is just, shouldn't adopt it. And I'm just graveyarding it so people know, SaltStack, is not a dead project, but it was bought by VMware then Deprioritized and now that it's Broadcom.

I think you would be absolutely, crazy to adopt SaltStack in 2026, but you I was a fan a decade ago. It was, my go to over puppet, Ansible, everything. I feel, very disappointed that it's not my go to anymore. And I felt bad about putting cadence here because it literally just got moved to the CNCF.

that worked on cadence went to Temporal and Cadence was deprioritized by Uber this was their last chance to try and save the project by donating it. I just don't see anyone actively contributing or using it. maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think anyone picking that today over anything else, is making a very naive mistake. the graveyard is just there as a, you know, make sure your projects aren't in it.

And the nice thing is, you can come here, and if we go to advanced mode, for the, audience, it gives you search and the ability to group and slice and dice. you can just search, cadence won't show up because it's graveyard. is the NGINX Kubernetes project? Controller I don't think in there.

The only one I've got is Emissary on Skip. the ngres controller did not make the cut, but I guess I should add it to graveyard. I was. I do have to try and keep on top of this now as well.

It's going to keep you sharp. It's going to keep you sharp. Is this a open source repo where people can help you make corrections or is it, I guess this isn't really corrections, it's more like your opinion. So how could other people help you with that?

That's a great point. So, we're on the GitHub repository for the Rockwood Academy. There is this wonderful content folder. And you can go to technologies and every technology is in here, If we just grab, let's use salt, we'll just pick on salt today, you can open the MDX file.

as you just marked it with, a YAML front matter. It's very easy for anyone to come and change this. If you need to update the, logo for whatever reason, you can do that. we have a matrix graveyard here, and this is where I can store my opinions under matrix.

But one of the things I would love to do sooner rather than later, like before the end of the year, is to just allow other people to come and put their opinions here so that you can actually click on a face and it's like, what's david stack? What's brett stack? You know, what's X y stack And just make it this community driven Stack Yeah. tool because my opinion, is my opinion and it's my path.

And I hope other people find that useful. we should have everyone's opinion. Anyone who wants to contribute their opinion should be able to do that. the reason I didn't launch with that is how do we allow this to visualize if it grew beyond four or five people's opinions?

Does it start to devalue the, matrix? I need to work that out. So there's a lot of things I would love to do, but, getting more opinions into it, and it is all open source. People can come and contribute.

so lots of things on my mind about how to push that forward. Yeah, it feels like one of those things where you could spend 40 hours a week, on this, Cause I'm sitting here thinking, yeah, you could probably make that it shows opinions on the project I'm like, I'm already trying to work out your exact, your actual ui ux about that. Let's get everybody's opinion. Let's bring them on in.

But, but let's not elevate everyone's opinion. let's elevate certain voices. Maybe if they've opinionated on five projects, they somehow get to a different tier there's a lot you could do with that, we know about all these product review websites on the internet that suck. They all these, G2, there's all these things that I find on the internet that are like, well, we have user opinions and we think this is better than that.

I might be comparing like, you know, Excel to Google Sheets or something, I don't know. But those websites always felt suspect to me and lacked genuine, like, who is saying all this? it does feel like a cool idea to see opinions of different projects. It would be interesting to even some of those opinions could link, is it possible to add other people's opinions that they have put out publicly if someone's wrote a blog post about it in the past where they've had an opinion on, like for me it's the classic Argo versus flux discussion around which tool or both.

in that case it's I'm sure there's a lot of opinions on both sides. There's probably a very few amount of people that have actually used both. so that would be cool to see their opinions or to have links to their blog posts. But yeah, this is the kind of thing where there is no end, there's no end for you.

No, there definitely is not. But, find ways to bring in more opinions. It could even be that if you're just on the Academy website, it pops up and you pick between two technologies. We can still collect information that is valuable to people, We can still build up community scores for stuff.

lots of ideas and I'll push that forward. Yeah. there's 169 skips, there's 14 in the graveyard. So, I've been working very explicitly 14 of these technologies.

And then the rest of them are on that gradient of be keeping an eye on this one until you should start actively learning this technology. Yeah. for the audio audience, can we run real quick through the advocate? The 14 and just list them for the audience so they know of these are, the heavy hitters.

everybody should be at least a little curious about it. Is that how you're approaching it for teams? It, doesn't mean they have to implement it. It's not like a foundational technology that they would always, you're not saying this is required, you're just saying I'm a huge fan of this.

I'm a huge fan. I would never build a production platform without, these tools. This is what Oh, okay. for joining us today.

we hope you have a great rest of your day. We'll see you next time. Take care. you need a common format.

And cloud events is just so simple. It's just a spec. They have implementations for serialization across all different languages. if you have any sort of semantic data that travels over a network just wrap it in a cloud events envelope.

It doesn't matter who you are. everyone should have it in their NPM, go dependencies, REST, Cargos, It's one of those understated, underutilized technologies that saves a lot of downtime, bugs, regressions, So yeah, amazing project. I'm a huge fan of CUE. I literally just published a video on it two days ago for, making GitHub Actions easier.

I use CUE across my entire monorepository. I even released a tool called QNV, QENV, whatever you want to call it. last week to replace my, disparate tools of Justfiles, Bazels, CI CD pipelines, Dart env, configs. All of it is now solved by one tool.

powered by CUE. very, very cool. Hello, and welcome back to the DockerCon Monthly Dev Session. My name is Matt Granitz and I'm the Chief Editor of DockerCon, I'm joined by Matt from Github, and Matt has been really helping us out on this project.

How are you? I am doing well. I'm The Zanzibar paper came out of Google, nearly a decade ago. SpiceDB is an implementation of that.

It will simplify your life if you have permissions across the board. don't reinvent the wheel here. Use the tools that are out there. I never have SSH on any machines, so teleport is always right there.

I use Teleport for clustered. I have done since 2019 when we did the first episode. again, you run a small binary on every machine and cluster on databases and it commoditizes access. Yeah, I'm a fan of Teleport.

need to get a logo there. Yeah, I need to get the logo in for that. Maybe someone on the teleport team will contribute that to the repository for me. They, also gave away Yeti cups.

So, you know, they got the swagger in their swag a little bit. by the way, for those listening, we've done cloud events, Q Flux cd, spice db, teleport, and you're breaking these out into areas you mentioned that the, first three are in app definition and development rest SPICE db, teleport, we've got a few more to get through. are any of these, it sounds like these are all technologies that aren't necessarily competitive. So when you recommend or advocate for something, are you picking what you consider your favorite or your winner in a category?

Or would you see there's two good service meshes or whatever? I'm, trying, again. I'm trying not to be swissolent. like there are more than two good service meshes, but there's only one I would adopt and that's the Okay.

I'll have under advocate. I wouldn't have two there. and funnily enough, we're now into where Linkerd pops up, right? Like that is my service mesh.

I use it everywhere. it's simple enough that I don't need to overcomplicate the setup. It does what I want it to do, again, without too much configuration. It works by default.

It's lightweight, it's got a proxy written in rust, like it ticks all the boxes on the Dave Book of technology. Like when I say, would I use this? It's got all the ticks. doesn't mean STO is not great.

Everyone uses STO successfully in the enterprise. Lots of banks use STO. they have requirements that lean them more towards it over something like Linkerd, but to me, Linkerd is just where we should be service mesh wise. And it's that balance of power, defaults and, doing the right thing, like it's really important.

Obviously Kubernetes is here. I've been advocating for Kubernetes since, day one. Will that be replaced at some point. Yeah, probably.

But that day is not today. These categories, by the way, are from the landscape. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. okay.

my own categorization of software, which we can take a look at, but the landscape is, I'm, trying to make the landscape simpler, but again, I haven't deviated too far from, that, we then have cilium and EBPF, is my CNI. I discourage people using any other CNI because I feel like you're just throwing out too much power. EBPF is phenomenal. XDP is phenomenal.

Hubble, who does not want Hubble in their cluster, you're just missing out on so much and making your life easy EBPF, while not a product or a project that one can just adopt as something that solves the problem. You have to learn it. It's like a programming language. I do advocate for EBPF.

It's a superpower to anyone that's willing to invest the time to learn it. then we get down to observability. My stack is FluentBit. I love FluentBit.

It's lightweight. It's written. C it's fantastic. Just use it if it works.

There are times where you can't use FluentBit. use FluentD. but FluentBit now I think has enough parity that you're probably safer using FluentBit anyway. I've used it for a long time.

right on you FluentBit, I've, yeah. I felt like when it started getting traction, I thought, well, I'm, going to switch from FluentD, so, yeah. Because who wants something written in Ruby when they can have something written in C Yes. Grafana needs no introduction.

Everyone probably has Grafana on their stack. OpenTelemetry is like CloudEvents, it is now the universal language for metrics, logs, traces, and anything that comes in the future. So just adopt it and simplify your life. The last two are Spin and WebAssembly and WASI.

I've been a big advocate of WebAssembly for a while. I do think it is the future. we're not quite there yet, but I will advocate the hell out of them any opportunity I get because the developer experience of building applications that way is second to none It is absolutely wonderful. rust, I struggled with not putting this in advocate.

I put it in learn because I do feel, it's not that I should be telling people to put rust in their production, but everyone should learn rust. It will teach you to be a better developer. This is just broken down into a Trello board, Kanban. you come along and pick the ones you want.

if you want advanced mode, you can say, show me one of these. I can just say, I only want to see. What should I be learning? you get this learn column, and these are all the technologies that I think will make you a better engineer, developer, and operator if you spend some time and invest in learning them dagger for one as we click on it.

Yeah, that's a good list for me. because my students one of the most common questions. We get in our Discord server, we get people in there every day joining through the, discord discovery when, they let us be in discovery. because we get kicked out often because of activity issues.

the IoT we go into discovery, we get a bunch of people and they're like, onboarding is, low or whatever. We're going to kick you out of discovery. and then they're like, you meet the requirements for discovery. Project.

But anyway, the people show up and I would say an I need a bot. So when you say I'm learning DevOps, I have bots that send you a whole bunch of links in a dm. I, never set it up, but I need to do that because there's a lot of people, especially in India, coming into tech and wanting to go directly to DevOps activities or platform engineering activities, either at the beginning of their career or very early in their career, you and I have been doing this a long time. these those terminology, those concepts of the job role specifically for that existed 15 years ago, but it's not the same as it is now.

And the, what we call, what we think of when we think you have a DevOps role or a platform engineering role today are different than they were. And certainly the technology list is completely different than 15 years ago. there's very few places that are, I think, good opinionated paths. of course we've got roadmaps sh or roadmap sh and they do a lot of good work there, but even their simple version of the learning path can be quite intimidating, for new people.

these are the core foundations for your overall IT learning. When we get into platform engineering or caring about clustering technologies. There's nothing I can point people to until today that says, okay, I know there's a lot going on. yes, you need to go learn Kubernetes.

But people often ask me about what CNI, they should learn. They often ask, about which logging or monitoring tool they might learn. I think those are maybe some of the most common ones. The Flux versus Argo conversation comes up a lot.

I'm an Argo fan, but it's mostly because that's what I've used. I've used Flux very few times and it was definitely before the last major version. It was years ago. So I don't even feel like I can have a strong opinion on one versus the other.

I just know what I like. So for the, is that kind of what your audience this learning part? I need a short link to send people to the learning path because that's something that we could put into our Discord server for people to find quickly for what they need to check up on. I guess if they're brand new to all this, they start with the advocate stuff, right?

I guess that's the challenge here where do you meet your people? you've given me an idea for. How to frame the start of the matrix. I mean, there should be a, button, Why am I here?

I want to know Hmm. I want to know what technologies are on the horizon. I want to know what I put into production, and I want to know what your stack is. Those, are the different questions that I'm trying to answer.

Just because these are my opinions and this, is my stack. Yeah. you will actually get my blurb of why I use this over the other tool. I do try to explain why FluxCD is the tool that I use for GitOps.

to make it a bit more fun, I've added a spicy take to everything that I advocate. I don't know if this applies to you as an Argo user, but since you did say you use Argo, you're getting the spicy take, and for the audio audience, I'll read it out, Yeah, Flux CD is the grown up option, and most teams don't realize it because they're busy clicking around their dashboard. sorry if I've offended you there at the same time, but I, do Argo CD won the GitOps wars because it had that UI made the delivery of your image updates very visual and people loved that.

I'm, see I am one of those people. of flux. I mean, yeah, you're not offending me. And it's a great conversation to have because, We hope that's stuck with me for years is that I talk to teams that use both, time.

that they use Flux to manage the systems and they use Argo to show the dashboard to the devs. I've never implemented both, at the same time. But with Argo, I make the dashboard read only so a lot of the functionality is, just, you can't use it because it creates bad behavior. It's click ops.

And yet I still love the, I love giving developers a way to see into my clusters Giving them a regular dashboard that would show a list of pods that they maybe aren't, they're maybe more concerned of, Hey, did the thing that the job, that run, finish and is my app actually being served on the website? that was a common thing with a couple of projects and they needed something to tell them that. And I was like, well, we got this dashboard with Argo, I'll give it to you. So I started giving it read only, and then I got a lot of success with people.

So really my own path to liking Argo was through trying it first. Even though I was hoping at the beginning I was like, well, flux seems cooler. I'd like, I think I like this approach. But you're right, I think the web project, the web ui originally it was shelved or it was a third party thing, but it wasn't well kept or something.

I can't remember the origin of the UI part. Yeah, I just remembered it wasn't, one, yeah. the Weaveworks, enterprise one, was available for people that did that. it was really difficult to get that web UI for Flux back in the day, but now you're spoilt for choice because our purpose built Web UIs I know the Gimlet team, shipped one.

But not only that, headlamp has first class support for Flux CD as well. if you really want it, it's there. But I'm of the opinion that, you have to trust your GitOps pipeline and you don't really need to watch it. I tend not to have one.

when, you have two great projects, or at least two popular projects, I, sympathize with people because they feel like they have to go super deep in order to make an educated choice. And who's got the time to do that a dozen times. So that's exactly what you just stated earlier about why you created this people shouldn't have to spend six months to a year making decisions about the basic technologies that go in their stack. like you said earlier, these are plumbing to us.

They are, essential components of a modern IT stack. And you need a lot of the things you mentioned, We didn't really go deep into logging or monitoring. I think you did say Grafana, but you didn't talk about Loki versus others. And, I don't know if I saw Prometheus on the list, I wouldn't say that I specifically always run one or the other.

when it comes to observability, I tend to use a SAS product rather than run on my own. because I'm happy to, I'm happy to pay the price there want more sleep and I'm a team of one, so I don't, really need to make that trade off. If I were back in a company tomorrow and responsible for a production cluster, I'd probably be running Lokey. I think it's such an amazing piece of software and I'd probably running meur because I know Grafana are gonna back that Yeah.

Because InfluxDB have done three major rewrites in. Six years. that's a scary prospect for people putting it into a critical part of their infrastructure. I'm willing to take that risk because I'm a big fan of InfluxDB.

I used to work there, which is also why I'm a fan of it. but I'd struggle to put it in Advocate when's Influx 4 going to be written in Zig? is that going to come out in two years time? I don't think they would ever do that.

I, think they have found the vision that Paul Dex, the founder had. I think he's now there and it's a safe bet now, but would I bet my career on it? I don't know. So, to wrap this up because we could talk for hours.

what are some key takeaways? Do you have any key takeaways for people this is for both new people and experienced engineers. If they're wanting to learn, if they're looking for what they should learn next, this will help them, I guess with that. With that, if you go to advanced mode and filter for what's important to you, If you're looking for application delivery and want to know what to watch, learn, explore and adopt, it's all right there, plain black and white with my feedback on as much things as I can.

And do you know my goal? Is to add 10 pieces of feedback to each project, or at least every day, add 10 more pieces. this is the V1 of the tech matrix. yeah.

on major developments. I, will do that as, things change a usability point right now. feedback is great. Please hit out on socials if something isn't right or I can make your life easier or give you more opinions on stuff.

those questions that go to your discord, send them my way. I'll update the matrix to include that. but yeah, know it's not going to help for people that are, listening, but use the advanced mode. That's my one piece of advice to anyone, no matter what journey you're at, go to pipeline stage and just clear it and select the one that makes sense.

if you just want to know what is cool and upcoming, the watch pile, there's 35 pieces of technology there. Daytona is gaining a lot of ground in ai, and development environments. Start kicking the tires on that. we've got Dalec with a much for joining us today, Bye.

confirm that it's worth watching, but I am still keeping an eye on it. if we progress from watch to explore, things that are safer bets might be right for you and it may not be. It just depends what you're trying to do. One that I think is really cool is Perseus.

This is like the Grafana replacement. It's an amazing project, but it's so early. and it's not really got that multi vendor contributions yet, They show me that it's going to have that longevity. So I think it's amazing.

I hope they do amazing things and keep going, but it's very much in that explorer phase right now. I can't encourage people to go and learn it. another amazing project is Kairos from the Spectral Cloud team. this allows you to take any Linux operating system and make it an immutable.

Cloud native Kubernetes running machine, It's such a cool project and then of course if you ditch the explore and learn, these are technologies that I think will pay dividends on your career, So that question of, I'm new to DevOps and I want to learn. I hope I could guarantee that if you pick anything on this list, it'll be a net positive on your career. Flatcar is an amazing piece of technology that I think if you learn it and learn how to use it, great things. Same with Knative.

If you want serverless on Kubernetes, there's probably no better choice than, the Knative Project And Dagger, an up and coming CICD pipeline, that is all as code and TypeScript and all of that really good stuff. This isn't just new shiny tech. Has anyone ever lost their job from learning Postgres? No chance, everybody should learn Postgres.

it's going to make you a better DBA. It's going to make you design better schemas. It's going to make you think about indices and optimizations and performance at the database layer. You can even go down a rabbit hole of learning P-L-S-Q-L, and that will still pay you dividends later on in your career.

The way. of software. I love that you're like, I, still have the, 'cause I love that. you also have the Kubernetes project listed there, which I think is, an assumed, an assumed.

Yes. I? I want to do a little plug for my friend Aaron Francis. He just launched a Postgres course called Mastering Postgres.

he has built a bunch of database courses at databaseschool. com. That's an unpaid ad for my friend Aaron. He's a wonderful guy and, he's making really good content and he's making me jealous.

because he rented an apartment, built a whole studio in it, put an actual blackboard in there, like a, teacher's classroom and is killing it in the content game right now. think, courses with a lot of technical little deep insight. I, feel like the same way. actually it's like.

the To me, you need networking, getting a Cisco cert early in my career, in the nineties, was pivotal foundational. I still use that knowledge every day. of that I don't necessarily have to break down my, subnets into binary a whole lot anymore, but understanding that stuff has always helped me in every level above that in the technology stack. And that's to me, like TCP IP is one of those things that it's almost feels like people learn last now because the cloud just sort of glosses over it.

But databases are the same thing. you and I could probably walk into a typical cloud native shop of a small team that's maybe in a little startup I'm presuming that you've never been a full time DBA. I would never have called myself that, but I've managed lots of databases over the years and I bet you I could still. see after I first ranted about indexes, I could probably still walk into a team today and they're having performance problems.

And I'm like, yeah, you're not doing indexes. let's do some indexing. to me that's like a foundational understanding of that anyone should have a database. It's Like even if you're just a, DevOps engineer a full time ops engineer running Kubernetes clusters, like, you should probably understand the basics of how SQL works and how SQL databases have logs and how they flush some of these sort of basic technologies that we can't avoid even if you outsource it.

So it's cool that you had that stuff in there because that's key stuff too. I mean, it's like you're, you're getting right on the edge of almost being. it's you're the cloud native stack. So I go to DevOps sh for my, which programming language should I learn for DevOps, which, you know, it's got the typical Ansible, Terraform, blah, blah, blah, Docker, Kubernetes, learn all these things.

learn a cloud, get a cert in DevOps somewhere. And then now it's like, okay, now you need to be actually productive and make decisions on how you're going to run your web servers and your databases. And that's maybe where the cloud native, like we jump over to David's website and that's where it starts off with. And I feel like there's a continuity there.

We could sell that. I hope there is value to everyone who is trying to learn. the learning doesn't stop. This isn't people, you know, when I say people trying to learn, it's not people that have got 10 days experience.

You know, even people that have been doing this for 20 years, like us. is there ever a day or a week that goes by where you're not learning? and the Postgres thing, right? what you were just talking about indexes and all of that, You've got to get the basics right.

You've got to master the basics 10, 000 times. like the old, I can't remember his name. The martial artist that died Bruce Bruce Lee. he said he didn't fear someone who practiced 10, 000 kicks one time.

He feared a person who practiced one kick 10, 000 times it's true in development and engineering, you've got to get those basics down and then that gives you the, ability to do it. the freedom to go and explore all these other technologies. The T shaped developer is a very important paradigm. that changes when we bring AI into it.

is my matrix already useless? Because people can just sit down with Gemini and say, what should I learn this week? It's like, I don't know. But I still think there's a lot of value and, you know, the human touch and our opinions and sharing that with people.

And this is my way to try and ease that burden for people. Nice. Well, thanks for creating this yet. Another thing for the community, I feel like your list is ever growing of, of things you've, you're giving away in terms of content and advice and edutainment, which I also have used that word before.

So that's good that you think that, 'cause I think that is key is a lot of this stuff can, can be dry and dull and we've already got that in a thousand conference talks every, well, every three months now. I guess it was definitely more than a few thousand a year of conference talks on YouTube. So we don't need more technical content necessarily. We need something that's a little better, higher produced.

And you are one of those gentlemen that I. I like to watch your videos. I watched your cue video, from a couple of days ago. last night actually, I think I, So, up in my feed.

be you're somehow YouTube knows that if it talks about cloud native, it needs to show up later. next to late night comedy and stand up comedy. Like those are my three things on YouTube. They're all nice and mixed together.

Oh, and, EVs, anything ev and it throws you and Victor Farsik and some other, Sid and some other good YouTubers. it throws them all in there in the mix. great content. Yeah.

So thanks for doing this and I'm looking forward to getting this podcast out. And you can find more of this at, rawcode. Academy and all the links are gonna be in the show notes. David, where can people find you?

I know you've also got a Discord server. do you want to tell the people where they can find you at? Yeah. you can go to Discord, GG slash rawcode.

I'll go to Discord server, I am rawcode on every reputable social site. and, you know, even know what's there. the. way the world is right now.

I find myself on LinkedIn a whole lot more, which I never thought would happen, but I am active on LinkedIn sharing my opinions there too. So I try to be everywhere. and I'm always happy to sit down with people. I have a very public office hours link.

I'll make sure Bret has that for the show notes too. if you ever just want 20 minutes to sit down and talk tech, it's there for the community. I have nothing but time. Yeah, that's great.

That's perfect. this is the exact DM I sent to a group of, cloud native friends recently. Random thought. I get more value from scrolling LinkedIn than any other platform.

I actually enjoy it. I think 90% percent of what I see is good quality. What a strange world we live in. Oh, never thought I would see the day either.

And here I am. I'm not only consuming LinkedIn, I'm now posting to LinkedIn, which is a very new thing for me. But I do think it's given people a voice and I want more voices in the community. I want to get more opinions, more feedback, all of that.

And it is one of the better places right now. Definitely. yeah, Low, drama, high quality. that's at least my feed.

I'm very lucky in there, at least right now. I, didn't do a lot of work to get it there, so I assume that that's, a experience that others might have in tech. I know Blue sky is a thing. I'm a big fan of Blue Sky, but, the community at least the cloud native community, And the, the container and cloud community feels more active on LinkedIn than on, BlueSky, at least currently.

thanks for being here and I'm sure we'll do this again and see each other at KubeCon, bye. You can sign up for my newsletter at bret. News to get this and more cloud native content.