Buchatech.com – A blog about Cloud, Containers, Kubernetes, GitOps, DevOps and more

New Platform Engineering Course and Blog

September 11, 2023 by sbuchanan

Many organizations have embraced DevOps and adopted technologies like Kubernetes, cloud computing, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Pulumi. Despite these efforts, they often face challenges in delivering on the promises of DevOps and cloud-native. Platform engineering has emerged as the next step in the evolution, breaking down barriers and empowering developers to bring software to the market faster and more efficiently.

Recently I have been working on content to help educate and share my knowledge in this space. I am happy to announce two new pieces of content on Platform Engineering including a new course and a new blog.

Course: Platform Engineering: The Big Picture

Last week my 22nd course was published on Pluralsight! I am really excited about this course because it covers something that has been really hot in tech lately. It is about Platform Engineering. Platform Engineering has emerged as the next step in the evolution, breaking down barriers and empowering teams. Being someone that works with Kubernetes and cloud native this course was right up my alley because I work directly in this space.

The course is titled “Platform Engineering: The Big Picture“. This course will help you explore platform engineering and discover how it can elevate cloud-native development, making developers’ lives easier while achieving new heights in software delivery. Platform Engineering unifies and centralizes toolchains & workflows for self-service making developers’ lives easier while achieving new heights in software delivery.

In this course, you will gain an understanding about Platform Engineering, its benefits, architecture, tooling, workflow and how to adopt it.

Some of the major topics covered in the course include:

A Platform Engineering overview and why it’s needed, how Platforms enhance DevOps and streamline cloud native.
A comparison of DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering.
You will learn about Platform Engineering Architecture, its tooling landscape, and Internal Developer Platforms.

Check out the “Platform Engineering: The Big Picture“ course here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/platform-engineering-big-picture

I hope you find value in this new Platform Engineering course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses!

Here is the link to my Pluralsight profile to follow me:

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/steve-buchanan

Blog: 8 tools every platform engineer should know about

I am also excited to announce my second Platform Engineering-related blog post on Pluralsight. This one is titled: “8 tools every platform engineer should know about”. In Platform Engineering there are a lot of tools that can make up a platform. It can be confusing and hard to know what tools to focus on in the Platform Engineering space. In this blog post, I list 8 tools that are a must-know when you are in the Platform Engineering space.

👉 Read the blog post here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/it-ops/top-platform-engineering-tools

New Platform Engineering Blog Post on Pluralsight

August 18, 2023 by sbuchanan

I am excited to announce my second ever blog on Pluralsight.com. This blog is about Platform Engineering. In this post I break down what platform engineering is, the business problems it solves, and how to know if your organization is ready to roll it out yet.

In the blog post, we explore why there is so much hype around platform engineering, if Platform Engineering is a replacement for DevOps, how Internal Developer Platforms help resolve the infrastructure gaps, and more. Be sure to check it out!

👉 Read the blog post here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/it-ops/what-is-platform-engineering

Learn How to Build a Web App with JavaScript

July 27, 2023 by sbuchanan

This week my 21st course published. In this course I take you on a journey to build a web app in JavaScript. JavaScript is the top web programming language today with 12+ million active developers and 97% of all websites using it. It is a great language used to build dynamic and interactive web apps given its flexibility, frameworks, and modules.

The course is titled “Building a Web Application with JavaScript“. It is a part of the new “JavaScript 2022 Path” on Pluralsight. This is my 2nd course in this path. My 1st course was “Building a REST API in JavaScript with Express“. Be sure to check out my REST API course as well!

JavaScript is a must-have skill in your toolbelt when building web apps. In this course, Building a Web Application with JavaScript, you’ll learn to build a dynamic and interactive web app.

First, you’ll plan and set up your web app project. Next, you’ll discover how to build the layout, style, and CRUD for your app with HTML and CSS. Finally, you’ll learn how to code your app’s dynamic functionality in JavaScript and publish the app when done.

When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge for planning, building, styling, and publishing a web app in JavaScript needed to go from an idea to a fully functioning web app in JavaScript.

Check out the “Building a Web Application with JavaScript“ course here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/javascript-building-web-application

I hope you find value in this new JavaScript course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses!

Here is the link to my Pluralsight profile to follow me:

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/steve-buchanan

New GitOps Blog Post on Pluralsight

July 27, 2023 by sbuchanan

I am excited to announce that I was able to contribute a blog on Pluralsight.com. This blog is about GitOps. It will take you through what GitOps is, and why you should learn it.

In the blog post, look at the the benefits of GitOps for developers, work through GitOps tools and frameworks, what you need to get started with GitOps, and more. Be sure to check it out!

👉 Read the blog post here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/it-ops/what-is-gitops

New AKS Community

July 27, 2023 by sbuchanan

There is some exciting news for AKS. Brian Redmond a PM with the AKS team has worked to get the External AKS Community up and running again. This community will have monthly meetings and recorded content.

The AKS Community Meetings will be live-streamed on YouTube and will cover interesting technical content on AKS related topics “Ask me anything” sessions and more. Here is a recording of the inaugural meeting for the AKS Community. https://www.youtube.com/live/1_ukekQEzBw?feature=share&t=32

If you miss the old ‘AKS Office Hours’, you definitely need to check out this new AKS community. Looking forward to seeing this community grow!

To make sure you’re always in the loop and never miss a beat, follow the official PG on various social media sites. Stay informed about upcoming meetings, exclusive content drops, and other exciting AKS-related news:

Twitter – https://twitter.com/theakscommunity
YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/@theakscommunity
Threads – https://www.threads.net/@theakscommunity
Github – https://github.com/theakscommunity/aks-community-meetings

Azure Friday: Exploring Automated Deployments for AKS with Steve Buchanan and Scott Hanselman

June 5, 2023June 4, 2023 by sbuchanan

Hey everyone, today I’m super excited to tell you about a recent episode of Azure Friday that I was lucky enough to be a guest on.

Azure Friday is a weekly video series hosted by the legendary Scott Hanselman, where he interviews experts and developers on various Azure-related topics. In this episode, we talked about Automated Deployments for AKS, a new feature that makes it super easy to deploy your apps to Azure Kubernetes Service.

If you’re not familiar with AKS, it’s a managed Kubernetes service that lets you run containerized applications on Azure without having to worry about the complexity of managing the cluster. It’s a great way to scale your apps and take advantage of the benefits of Kubernetes, such as high availability, load balancing, and service discovery.

But what if you’re not familiar with containers or Kubernetes? What if you just have some code in a GitHub repo and you want to run it on AKS? That’s where Automated Deployments for AKS come in. It’s a feature that simplifies the Kubernetes development process by taking care of the tedious work of containerization for you. It uses a tool called Draft, which automatically detects the language and framework of your app, creates a Dockerfile and a Helm chart for you, builds and pushes the image to Azure Container Registry, and deploys the app to AKS. All with just a few clicks in the Azure Portal.

Sounds amazing, right? Well, that’s what I wanted to show Scott in this episode. I had an app hosted in a GitHub repo that I wanted to run on AKS. The app was a simple web app that displayed some data from a database. I had already created a few resources in Azure, such as a resource group, an Azure Container Registry, and an AKS cluster. All I needed to do was use Automated Deployments for AKS to get this app from code to running on a cluster.

So how did it go? Well, you’ll have to watch the episode to find out. But spoiler alert: it was super easy and fast. In just a few commands, I went from code to an app running on AKS. Scott was impressed and so was I. We had a great time chatting about how Automated Deployments for AKS works under the hood, some of the benefits and limitations of using it, and how it can help developers get started with containers and Kubernetes.

Check out the episode here:

https://aka.ms/azfr/749

With Automated Deployments, Microsoft is opening up new avenues for developers to embrace the power of containers and AKS, enabling them to effortlessly build scalable and robust applications.

If you’re interested in learning more about Automated Deployments for AKS, you can check out the documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/automated-deployments. It’s available today in public preview, so you can try it out for yourself and see how easy it is to run your apps on AKS.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoy this episode of Azure Friday as much as I did. It was an honor and a pleasure to be a guest on Scott’s show and talk about one of my favorite topics: Azure Kubernetes Service. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me on Twitter at @Buchatech. Thanks for reading and happy coding!

Pluralsight Spotlight: Steve Buchanan on Upskilling, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud, & Impostor Syndrome

May 5, 2023May 4, 2023 by sbuchanan

I recently had the honor to film an episode of Spotlight at the Pluralsight headquarters.

It was an awesome experience and fun talking with Adam Gunn.

In the episode, we talked about:

Tech skills you need to master for the future, including hybrid and multi-cloud, Kubernetes, AI, and more. We also touched on how I landed in tech and how to overcome impostor syndrome to become a successful professional.

You can check out the episode here:

Honored To Be Listed In The 2023 Onalytica Who’s Who in Cloud? Top 50 Report

April 27, 2023 by sbuchanan

Onalytica just released their 2023 Who’s Who in Cloud? Top 50 Report. I am humbled and honored to be included in this list of 50 incredible people and thought leaders in the cloud space!

The report features the Top 50 thought leaders and influencers who have driven the most engagement around the cloud on LinkedIn and Twitter over the past six months. The thought leaders in the report are leading the charge when it comes to cloud computing, through our speaking, books, articles, as well as video and or audio content.

Onalytica has been creating influencer lists for the last 10+ years. These influencer lists span industries such as tech, finance, healthcare, education, and many more.

These Who’s Who reports are created using the Onalytica platform which has a curated database of over 1 million influencers. Out of 1 million influencers, it is not easy to land in the top 50. I landed at #41 on the list!

I want to give a special shout-out to my fellow Microsoft colleagues on the report including:

Thomas Maurer, Rory Preddy, Adora Nwodo, Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza, Yuri Diogenes, & Houssem Dellai.

I also want to give a special shout-out to my fellow authors and Pluralsight employees on the report including:

Drew Firment, Nigel Poulton & Lars Klint.

You can check out the report here:

https://onalytica.com/blog/posts/whos-who-in-cloud-top-50-influencers-to-follow

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About Onalytica

Onalytica Provides consultancy-led Influencer Marketing software for industry & B2B marketing and communications professionals looking to identify and engage with social media influencers.

Onalytica’s software enables brands to implement and run structured Influencer Relationship Management programs with large Influencer Communities to improve brand awareness, perception and demand generation.

Founded in 2009, and backed by Bebo founders Michael and Paul Birch, Onalytica have created over 5,000 B2B and B2C Influencer programs for global clients which include Microsoft, Google, IBM, Coca-Cola, Amazon, Centrica and British Airways.

Onalytica are striving for this report to be a One-Stop Shop for the Movers & Shakers of the industry so any feedback to further improve the lists is always gratefully received.

Combining Kubernetes Community and Careers

April 26, 2023 by sbuchanan

I was a guest on a very popular cloud podcast. This is one of the longest-running cloud podcasts around starting in 2011. It is the Cloudcast Podcast.

I was on episode #714 titled “Combining Kubernetes Community and Careers”. In this episode, I had a great time chatting with Aaron Delp about my journey in the Kubernetes community, building a personal brand through education and sharing, content creation, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Here are the show notes breaking down the topics:

Topic 1 – Today we are going to be talking about careers and Kubernetes. Steve, welcome to the show! You have a super fascinating career journey, can you give everyone a quick introduction?

Topic 2 – I heard you over on the Kubernetes Unpacked podcast. First off, it’s hard to keep up with everything you are doing in the community these days. What is your current focus and passion? Have you reached 20 courses on Pluralsight yet?!

Topic 3 – How do you balance the day job (Program Manager for AKS) and the nights and weekends (PluralSight courses, blogging, podcasts, etc.)? Besides learning and sharing, what benefits are you seeing with this approach?

Topic 4 – I believe your journey parallels our journey here. We started the podcast to learn and give back to the community. Prior to the podcast, blogging was the big thing (we are completely aging ourselves I know) but I think it is safe to say blogging isn’t a primary source today. How would you recommend folks new to the industry get started sharing their journey? Where is the most “bang for your buck” these days?

Topic 5 – Let’s talk about Kubernetes and specifically AKS, what are customers finding new and interesting? What are the leading solutions and integrations you see combined with AKS? How do you create a “stack” in AKS (GitHub Actions, Azure Container Registry, etc.)

You can listen to the full episode here:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/3195/12719684-combining-kubernetes-community-and-careers