🎉 CNDO #29: Docker Mastery reaches 300,000 students

🗓️ What's new this week

A break from sharing technical content this week to celebrate a big win and give you some personal history

🐳 Docker Mastery reaches 300,000 worldwide students 🥂

On Udemy's platform, my Docker Mastery course recently passed more than 300,000 enrolled students! We all love round numbers, and this was a big one for me.

I started this instructor career path almost seven years ago, and I hoped it would be worth it. It has been, and it's also been a lot of roller coaster feeling over those years. It was scary to take the leap, exciting and humbling that it worked, lonely in the grind to keep it updated and competitive, and yet still gratifying to have reached this wonderful milestone.

After months of researching and weighing the pros and cons in 2016, my wife and I decided to fire my consulting clients and dedicate four months to making Docker Mastery. It was frightening and exhilarating at the same time. My goal was to make the best Docker course out there while also being personal, full of real-world insights, and trying to be a bit fun. Instinctively, we felt it would be successful, but I had tried making courses before and they failed to make enough money to justify the time spent, so I didn't take that for granted.

Docker Mastery was a bit of a stealth launch since I didn't have an existing audience (no YouTube channel, no newsletter, and under 1k Twitter followers), but it rose quickly to #1 in the Docker category on Udemy. It far exceeded all our expectations. We launched in the spring of 2017 and hoped to have a few thousand students by the end of the year. We made that after the first month! Since then, many instructors have entered the field, and competition is fierce. We've continued to expand that course with many additional tools and topics, and we remain true to my style of teaching:

1. Only teach what I know, based on experience
2. Be genuine, be in the videos, and teach what I believe in
3. Make it fun, engaging, and relevant in the real world
4. Create a community of learners who can support each other

Since then, we have indeed diversified. We have this newsletter, our podcast and live show, four courses on Udemy, a course on Maven, and a thriving Discord community. I still enjoy consulting occasionally, speaking at conferences yearly, and holding IRL workshops. I'm grateful for my (tiny) team that supports me and is wonderful to work with, and I can't wait to celebrate the next big milestone with you!

Thank you to all who have supported us, encouraged us, educated us, shared with us, and worked with us. Moby Dock wants you to celebrate too
docker run -it docker/doodle:cheers

🔴 Live show: Learning Docker and Kubernetes: Live Q&A (Ep 232)

This week on my livestream, you and I can focus 100% on your questions related to my Udemy and Maven course content: all things Kubernetes, Docker, GitOps, GitHub Actions, and DevOps-related.😉

🎧 Podcast

Ep 139: Istio Ambient Mesh and Solo.io

Last Friday, we released our latest podcast, where Nirmal and I welcomed Idit Levine, Founder/CEO of Solo.io. Idit focuses on Service Mesh, API Gateway, and Multi-Cloud networking and security.

Idit has been involved in the Containers/DevOps community for 10+ years, building products from Docker to Envoy to Kubernetes, and now Istio and Cilium. We talk about Istio, Ambient Mesh, Envoy, Zero-Trust Security, Cilium, eBPF, Multi-Cloud and more.

You can read the show notes here.

This is not the first time we've talked about Solo or Service Mesh. Ambient Mesh is Istio's new implementation design that simplifies the install and infrastructure costs of running Istio.

I'm hopeful that this is going to help a lot more people implement Istio because traditionally, it does have a lot of parts and a lot of costs with the sidecar approach, but this new approach reduces the number of essentially proxies and parts that you're running on each node of your Kubernetes cluster.

🗓 Next big thing️

Come hang with me at DockerCon (speaking twice and hopefully live streaming!) and KubeCon Chicago (no speaking, but maybe streaming!) Let me know in our Discord server #conferences channel, so we can meet up IRL.

🐦 Tweet of the week

Cloud complexity, we've got work to do as an industry.

I'm seeing more complaints these last few years about the complexity of cloud infrastructure, DevOps being a pain, and how much effort and knowledge it takes to go from code commit to production. This thread by Corey Quinn of all the skills needed just to launch an EKS cluster is evidence of the problem. It's funny / not funny, so check out the full thread below.

👀 In case you missed last week's newsletter

#28: Moving TLDs to a better registrar, again

I give you my top three places to park your domains and tell the story of moving my domains to better registrars, A story of 25 years of owning domains and what a recent developer survey says to use now.