In my last blog post (New Year with a new focus) I mentioned that I’m on a new journey – one that requires me to roll up my sleeves and get comfortable being uncomfortable in this new world of Cloud Native Apps. For those of you playing along at home, I thought I would outline some of the training materials I’m using. These are in no certain order, but are things I’ve done, or in the process of doing. Please note, future blog posts will include more training materials etc.
The first thing I’ll point out is I’m not alone on my journey and a great pair of EMC’ers
created a podcast just for this type of endeavor. Brian Carpenter (@InTheDC) and Brent Piatti (@BrentPiatti) have a Podcast called “TheHotAisle” which is “Uniquely focused on delivering content for the next generation of Systems Engineers while giving customers and partners equal access to the journey”. This has been a FANTASTIC Podcast. They have covered Steve Francia of Docker, all the way to Andrew Clay Shafer with Pivotal and Mitchell Hashimoto of Vagrant. They have also taken a deep dive into the flash technology world with Rob Peglar (@peglarr), VP of Advanced Engineering with Micron, one of the 4 global manufacturers of NAND technology. Their podcast is definitely a MUST LISTEN as they cover an incredible amount of great content along with very knowledgeable guests.
Another MUST listen to Podcast is from our friends Aaron Delp (@aarondelp) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely). The Cloudcast Podcast is the 
gold standard for everything Cloud Computing, DevOPS, AppDev you name it. These guys are incredible and their podcast is amazing. Most of the time they run about 30ish minutes so you can listen to them on your drive into work. If you are even remotely interested in Cloud Native Apps/DevOps etc, go and subscribe to their podcast.
When I think about online learning, I always think about PluralSight.com and their incredible catalog of content. One of the things that grabbed my attention right out of the box was a course created and delivered by Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) called “Docker & Containers: The Big Picture. It takes you through an introduction of Docker, and then dives deeper into where containers might fit, how they are different than a Virtual Machine and various other things about the Docker ecosystem. It’s a solid 2 hour overview of the solution. Even if you feel like you understand containers, or Docker, it’s well worth the 2 hours of hearing insight from Nigel.
In this new Cloud Native Apps focus, I wanted to start getting comfortable with some of the Operational (the Ops in DevOps) solutions in the market today. Docker seems to be all the rage, so I figured this would be a great place to start. I reached out to a good friend of mine Harish Jayakumar (@harish_jkumar) who happens to be a Solutions architect at Docker. He suggested getting my feet wet with their free Docker-Toolbox and pointed me to: https://www.docker.com/docker-toolbox – it’s STUPID simple and is a great way to get an early win on installing and setting up Docker. Docker-Toolbox can be installed on your Macbook Pro (or Air if you want) and it includes Docker Client, Docker Machine, Docker Copose, Docker Kitematic (gui) and it sets up and installs VirtualBox (Sorry VMware friends 
). It even has you run your very first container called Hello-World to show you that everything installed and is running well!
In addition to Nigel’s Course, Docker has an incredible Self-Paced Training site that I’ve been using as well. It’s located here: https://training.docker.com/self-paced-training. I’ve since moved on from using Docker on my Laptop (it’s still installed) and converted one of my ESX Hosts from back in my VDI days to bare metal Ubuntu and followed the install process outlined in the Self-Paced guide to get Docker installed and running. It’s also reminded me how badly my Linux skills have degraded !
Guess what, at some point you are going to run into some sort of issue, it’s inevitable and
the quickest way to this moving from being fun, to “forget this crap, I’m quitting” is having a support system you can lean on to help you through these. For me, I have some kick ass friends that live and breathe this stuff. In addition to my boss Matt Cowger (@mcowger), I’m also really good friends with former vSpecialist Jonas Rosland (@jonasrosland) who frankly has probably forgotten more about containers and new application development than I will ever learn. The great news is both of these guys, and a ton of others like to hang out in the EMC Code Slack Channel located here: Community.emccode.com . Do yourself a favor and go sign up and join. They have all sorts of channels dedicated to various different topics and lots of super friendly people to help answer your questions!
So, this should get you started for a little while. I have a ton of other things I’m using and I’ll blog about those in the future.
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