Welcome to Up The Stack
Firstly Welcome to Up The Stack, there are two aims for this new site and new name for some. This project begins with a look into the graduated and incubating projects that we see within the CNCF Landscape. A challenge I have faced and I know so many others will have as well is the overwhelming vastness of the CNCF landscape. Much like we did in the 90DaysOfDevOps project which you can find linked on the front page here, is we want to provide a structured way of looking at the CNCF landscape by breaking things down and then taking a look into the projects and what they can do in the Cloud-Native space to better our applications. The second goal for me here is to land some of the relevant cloud, cloud-native and devops content that for the past few years has been published on vZilla.co.uk which by all accounts was how I got into the community and started sharing through blogs my trials, triumphs and tribulations around virtualisation and storage.
Up The Stack - CNCF Landscape
The cloud native landscape can be complicated and confusing. Its myriad of open source projects are supported by the constant contributions of a vibrant and expansive community.
Before we get into the landscape we should take a quick look at who the CNCF is/are:
CNCF is the open source, vendor-neutral hub of cloud native computing, hosting projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus to make cloud native universal and sustainable.
The landscape gives us a kind of logical way to visualise and catagorise all of the many projects that have been donated or that are sponsored into the landscape.
You can check out the landscape yourself here at the time of writing this (04th July 2023) “You are viewing 1,195 cards with a total of 3,749,544 stars, market cap of $21.6T and funding of $53.3B.” For the project I did not want to dive into over 1000 different projects at various parts of their journey.
Our goal is to take a look at the incubating and graduated projects which brings us down to 55 projects across the various catagories.
There are two goals for this project, firstly it is to hopefully help the community have a structure in terms of understanding the landscape without the daunting approach of maybe thinking we have to learn about 1000+ projects. The second is I would like to know what I don’t know. Much like 90DaysOfDevOps I had some knowledge but I was also missing a lot. The other thing to note here is that we are not setting a time limit on this, the last two years of #90DaysOfDevOps has been great but it is a lot of work. I will discuss more of the plan later but expect to see video and blog content here on this.
Up The Stack - Content Hub
I decided I needed a new place to land some blog posts and with a few other project ideas it made sense to create a new site as a landing page to some of these projects and ideas. I am still not sure the value of blogs as we reach the half way point of 2023, I thought the pandemic had a big impact on the blogging scene but then I created some blogs and the 2022 edition of 90DaysOfDevOps and now with over 22k github stars maybe there is still a point to blogging, a recent twitter post came up with some very interesting points on this topic.
Basically this just means that you are more likely to see Cloud, Cloud-Native and DevOps focused blog content here vs vZilla which began life as a virtualisation and storage blogging location. Slowly it is my belief that the most useful content will be here with an archive pointing there. But we will see.
Other Projects
You may have noticed on the front page a grid of little logos, I joke about coming up with names and logos before actually starting and finishing any of them…. Well here we are, I have a couple of ongoing projects that are sometimes in the back of my head but sometimes they are top of mind.
- Data on AWS - You can expect some content here focused on AWS and then all the storage and data related areas that we see within the vast AWS ecosystem. You might then see some focus around data management and some overview of some of the Veeam tools available for AWS but to begin with this is about me learning and sharing the AWS ecosystem of storage and data services available.
- Project Pace - This project has been something I have used pretty much weekly since my endeavours into the cloud-native ecosystem, I needed a quick and easy way to be able to show and learn some aspects of Kubernetes and this project is a list of demo environments that help me show, learn and teach some of these areas specifically and mostly around data services on Kubernetes using minikube.
The Plan
Ok, finally, what is the plan?
We have a few things set up so that I can start working across the board. I have also been ramping up the YouTube channel because this is another area where I want to share more content. Especially now I am in the new office. I wanted to share the plan because this helps with my accountability and getting stuff done.
I have a passion about sharing and learning in public and making this accessible to all.
If you made this far and you have any questions, twitter or GitHub is going to be the quickest way to start a conversation. We also have the Discord available for the 90DaysOfDevOps project, well over a 1000 people in there and would love to expand on the talk track in there.
With that, let’s start creating some new and hopefully useful content for everyone.