‘Never stop learning!’ is a cat poster slogan most of us have heard at least once in our lives, I’d reckon. Nonetheless, it’s not a bad credo to live by in the persistently changing world of cloud nativity.

With Kubernetes - arguably the CNCF landscape’s crowd puller - aiming at maintaining a 15-week (minor) release cycle, it’s just natural that other projects get started, released, updated, and iterated on at a fast pace, too. Keeping up with that pace can pose a challenge; luckily, several blogs, podcasts, and communities out there are helping with that.

However, something I would’ve liked very much when getting started with Kubernetes and its vast ecosystem about a year ago was a broad overview across different projects for different use cases. Way too often, I would listen to talks, read blog posts, or watch YouTube videos where every other sentence mentioned a CNCF project I had never heard of.

Therefore, I’m setting out on a journey of creating 26 blog posts on different projects from the CNCF landscape - one for each letter of the alphabet - throughout 2023.

The Concept⌗

The blog posts will differ in quality, length, and depth - for some parts of the journey, I got a clear vision already (looking at you, Prometheus). For others, I probably don’t even know what I signed up for yet (is there a project for ‘W’?).

I plan on sharing some general insights about the projects with you, which I gathered when tinkering with them myself, garnished with HowTos, examples, and references for continuing your studies.

There will be fully-fledged tutorials, explaining concepts in detail and ‘getting something done’, and sometimes the posts will remain more shallow - as mentioned before, my goal is to provide a broad overview, not to replace the respective project’s official docs. ;)

The Curriculum⌗

Of course, I haven’t planned everything out by now, but for some weeks, I already got a clear favorite to focus on - I will probably add to that list over the year. If you’d like, you can suggest a project for me to check out on Twitter as well.

  • A => ArgoCD - Declarative GitOps CD for Kubernetes
  • B => Backstage - An open platform for building developer portals
  • C => Crossplane - The cloud native control plane framework
  • D => tba
  • E => Envoy - An open source edge and service proxy
  • F => Flux - Open and extensible continuous delivery solution for Kubernetes
  • G => tba
  • H => tba
  • I => Istio - Connect, secure, control, and observe services
  • J => Jaeger - A Distributed Tracing Platform
  • K => tba
  • L => tba
  • M => tba
  • N => tba
  • O => tba
  • P => Prometheus - The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database
  • Q => tba
  • R => Rook - Storage Orchestration for Kubernetes
  • S => tba
  • T => Thanos - Highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities
  • U => tba
  • V => Vitess - MySQL-compatible, horizontally scalable, cloud-native database
  • W => tba
  • X => tba
  • Y => tba
  • Z => tba