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

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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 my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

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

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.

Be sure to check out the live recording of the complete show with demos from March 7, 2024 on YouTube (Ep. 257).

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

Creators & Guests

• Ivan Burazin - Guest
• Chad Metcalf - Guest
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Nirmal Mehta - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Cristi Cotovan - Editor

• (00:00) - Intro
• (06:33) - CodeAnywhere
• (07:50) - Introducing Daytona: Revolutionizing Dev Environments
• (13:54) - Demo
• (21:07) - Daytona's Automation Magic
• (22:49) - Comparing Daytona with DevPod
• (25:15) - Daytona's Roadmap and Beyond
• (27:01) - Dev Environments and IDEs
• (39:52) - AI with Daytona
• (44:05) - Getting Started with Daytona
• (44:35) - Getting Involved in Daytona
• (47:00) - Features About to Ship in Daytona

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

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