Cloud native noob

General
1

First of all, wow, well done. The project and community is awesome. Thank you.

I need some help with a few fundamentals. I have used Debian at home for many years and recently switched to Bluefin-dx.

I am a full stack developer (20+ years). My current work project uses windows, docker, GitLab so I have some (limited) container experience, but otherwise very little cloud (kubernetes etc) knowledge.

I am using bluefin as my main machine for personal use including development. I am used to using intellij and I have a personal license but I could use VS Code if it makes more sense for e.g. devcontainer integration.

I think I am lacking a lot of assumed knowledge that cloud-natives take for granted. I appreciate some answers are subjective, but I need to start somewhere.

I understand that my source & data should be on the host and dev tools installed in a container. I would like a declarative setup that I can back up.

  • bluefin-cli - it’s not clear to me why this exists.
  • am I supposed to use brew on the host or in a container
  • should I use fleek/nix or brew, or does it just depend on preference
  • should I use devcontainers + jetpack.io or some other toolset / workflow
2

Hi @unfurled

bluefin-cli provides a default environment where you can install and run command line applications via the distro-agnostic homebrew package manager. This is not the only way of installing command line applications, but it is the most promoted way.

That’s up to you. Some people wanted to use brew on the host and that is why it was added later.

Preference

3

I’d start with what you know. Jetbrains: ujust install-jetbrains-toolbox and then start from there.

Then you can selectively add the tech as you familiarize yourself with it. There’s devcontainer support in jetbrains, but not sure how robust it is.

EDIT: I hear you on the lack of information. We tape together a bunch of tools that have great docs (vscode + devcontainers) but there’s no cohesive doc. I’m hoping some good content creators help out). We’ve slimmed down the tool recommendations since Alpha down to devcontainers and brew, so that’s probably what we should recommend. For your use case you can probably ignore bluefin-cli.