neurons firing from a keyboard

I was thinking about the projects in the CNCF the other day.

I’ve shown some variant of this image countless times in customer calls, demos, and presentations, but never really stopped to think about how hilariously vast this landscape is.

As anyone who’s used Kubernetes for more than two weeks will tell you, you don’t keep up — you just pick the same five tools that everyone else did and make a career out of it.

There’s thousands of tools, though.

So I got to thinking. “I have this blog. I’ve been struggling to find inspiring things to talk about in it. What if I just tried every single tool in the CNCF community, talked about it a bit and gave a quick getting started guide?”

And that’s how CNCF Weekly was born.

Try all the tools!

My goal for CNCF weekly will be to provide a high-level overview of every tool in the CNCF landscape. You’ll get:

• A one-sentence “in a nutshell” explainer of what the the tool is,
• A high-level summary of what it is and why you’d want to use it,
• A quick guide on getting started with it, and
• Some next steps to consider.

AI Policy

I don’t use AI when I write (though some of the hot mess I’ve written in the past would be perfect for it 😂). CNCF Weekly is no exception.

Posts in CNCF Weekly will be written, edited and tested manually by yours truly unless explicitly stated otherwise.

That said, AI-adjacent projects are entering the CNCF portfolio at a rapid clip, and I’m looking forward to covering them here!

A note about the quick start guides

Most of my getting started guides will use Kind to create local clusters. It’s a great tool to get Kubernetes clusters locally on your machine.

On the Mac, you can use Homebrew and the brew install kind command to install it. You can use winget and the winget install Kind.kind command to do the same on Windows. Finally, you can use dnf/yum install or apt install to install Kind on Linux or download the binary directly from GitHub.

Some of the tools in the landscape require clusters managed by cloud providers; I’ll provide instructions on how to set those up in those weeklies.

Check out my videos on LinkedIn Learning if you’d like more visual guides on setting all of this up!