I'm joined by Nirmal Mehta of AWS and Viktor Farcic from Upbound, to go through our 2025 year in review. We look into the AI tools that consumed us this year, from CLI agents to terminal emulators, IDEs, AI browsers - what worked, what flopped, what's worth your time and money, and what we think isn't!

Check out the video podcast version here:
https://youtu.be/mnagfUsh5bc

🙌 My next course is coming soon! I've opened the waitlist for those wanting to go deep in GitHub Actions for DevOps and AI automation. I'm thrilled to announce this course. The waitlist allows you to quickly sign up for some content updates, discounts, and more as I finish building the course. https://learn.bretfisher.com/waitlist🍾

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Nirmal Mehta - Host
• Viktor Farcic - Guest

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (04:15) - Game of AI Tools
• (04:41) - Reflecting on the Fast-Paced Year
• (07:12) - CLI Tools and AI Integration
• (08:50) - Ghostty
• (11:49) - Terminal Preferences and AI Tools
• (13:53) - Claude Code
• (16:14) - Skills
• (27:21) - Warp
• (34:42) - AWS Kiro and Spec-Driven Development
• (41:01) - Visual Editors (IDEs)
• (46:22) - Zed
• (48:32) - AI Browsers
• (01:02:13) - Notion AI
• (01:04:31) - Code Rabbit MCP
• (01:07:10) - AI Optimization
• (01:10:02) - Ad Blocking and AI SEO

I talk with David Flanagan, aka Rawkode, about his new opinionated Tech Matrix that helps you navigate the overwhelming CNCF landscape. https://rawkode.academy/technology/matrix

🙌 My next course is coming soon! I've opened the waitlist for those wanting to go deep in GitHub Actions for DevOps and AI automation. I'm thrilled to announce this course. The waitlist allows you to quickly sign up for some content updates, discounts, and more as I finish building the course. https://learn.bretfisher.com/waitlist🍾

★Show Links★

• RawKode Academy website
• David's Discord
• David's LinkedIn
• David on social media: @rawkode everywhere

Check out the video podcast version here: https://youtu.be/1LigTOlFiYk

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• David Flanagan - Guest

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

• (00:00) - Intro
• (04:46) - Opinions on HashiCorp
• (08:54) - The CNCF Landscape
• (10:23) - Opinionated Tech Matrix
• (17:48) - Tech Matrix in Detail
• (28:11) - The Advocate List
• (28:55) - Cloud Events and CUE
• (30:12) - SpiceDB and Teleport
• (31:38) - Service Meshes: Linkerd vs. Istio
• (32:23) - Kubernetes and CNI
• (33:18) - Observability Tools
• (33:59) - WebAssembly and Rust
• (34:45) - Learning Paths and DevOps
• (42:32) - Key Takeaways
• (45:30) - Database Fundamentals

Bret is joined by Philip Andrews and Dan Muret of Cast AI to discuss pod live migration between nodes in a Kubernetes cluster.

🙌 My next course is coming soon! I've opened the waitlist for those wanting to go deep in GitHub Actions for DevOps and AI automation. I'm thrilled to announce this course. The waitlist allows you to quickly sign up for some content updates, discounts, and more as I finish building the course. https://learn.bretfisher.com/waitlist🍾

In this episode, we nerd out over how Cast AI works under the hood, use cases for it, including hardware and OS maintenance on a node. I've got a feeling Cast AI has a winning feature on their hands.

★Show Links★
Cast AI website
Cast AI YouTube Channel

Check out the video podcast version here: https://youtu.be/yINNWxRywv4

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Dan Muret - Guest
• Philip Andrews - Guest

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:21) - Cast AI Elevator Pitch
• (06:57) - Stateful Workloads
• (10:03) - Bin Packing in Live Migration
• (13:35) - Stateful vs Stateless
• (15:43) - Networking and Storage Considerations
• (23:03) - Future Developments and Use Cases
• (25:43) - ML Workloads
• (28:25) - Live Migration of Spot Instances
• (31:01) - Live Migration Process Explained
• (39:02) - Challenges and Engineering Behind Live Migration
• (43:56) - Getting Started with Cast AI

Bret discusses exciting news about Swarm being maintained until 2030.

🙌 My next course is coming soon! I've opened the waitlist for those wanting to go deep in GitHub Actions for DevOps and AI automation. I'm thrilled to announce this course. The waitlist allows you to quickly sign up for some content updates, discounts, and more as I finish building the course. https://learn.bretfisher.com/waitlist🍾

★Show Links★
Swarm news: Mirantis maintaining until 2030
Awesome Swarm

Check out the video podcast version here: https://youtu.be/tmQbrCrM-yM

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:34) - History of Mirantis and Swarm
• (01:02) - Swarm's Current Status
• (03:44) - Swarm's Long-Term Support
• (08:07) - Swarm's Value Proposition
• (12:25) - Technical Challenges and Solutions
• (17:47) - Looking Ahead: Roadmap and Commitments
• (20:26) - Final Thoughts

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Michael Irwin to discuss Docker's comprehensive AI toolkit, covering everything from local model deployment to cloud-based container orchestration across multiple interconnected tools and services.

🙌 My next course is coming soon! I've opened the waitlist for those wanting to go deep in GitHub Actions for DevOps and AI automation. I'm thrilled to announce this course. The waitlist allows you to quickly sign up for some content updates, discounts, and more as I finish building the course. https://learn.bretfisher.com/waitlist🍾

★Show Links★
Docker Model Runner
Gordon AI Blog Post
Docker Offload
Docker Gen AI Catalog
Docker MCP Catalog and Toolkit
Docker MCP Gateway Repository

Check out the video podcast version here: https://youtu.be/dUmSsnc33O0

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Nirmal Mehta - Host
• Michael Irwin 🇺🇦 🕊 - Guest

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

• (00:00) - Intro
• (04:32) - Gordon AI
• (11:18) - Docker Model Runner
• (21:11) - State of Free Models
• (23:48) - MCP Toolkit
• (26:16) - MCP Gateway
• (35:22) - MCP Server Limits
• (40:08) - MCP Gateway vs API Gateway
• (47:48) - Model Support in Docker Compose
• (52:37) - Docker Offload

Bret is joined by Andrew Tunall, the President and Chief Product Officer at Embrace, to discuss his prediction that we’ll all start shipping non-QA'd code (buggier code in production) and QA will need to be replaced with better observability.

🙌 My next course is coming soon! I've opened the waitlist for those wanting to go deep in GitHub Actions for DevOps and AI automation. I'm thrilled to announce this course. The waitlist allows you to quickly sign up for some content updates, discounts, and more as I finish building the course. https://learn.bretfisher.com/waitlist🍾

Embrace is a mobile observability platform company that I first met at KubeCon London this year. Their pitch was that mobile apps were ready for the full observability stack and that we now have SDKs to let mobile dev teams integrate with the same tools that we platform engineers and DevOps people and operators have been building and enjoying for years now. I wanted to hear from observability experts on how they think this is all going to shake out.

★Show Links★
Embrace website
Embrace GitHub repository
Embrace docs

Check out the video podcast version here: https://youtu.be/HHpn3OqMrbU

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Andrew Tunall - Guest

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

• (00:00) - Intro
• (03:00) - AI in QA and Software Development
• (07:25) - Challenges and Cultural Shifts in AI-Driven Development
• (19:27) - Real-World Examples and Observations
• (26:01) - Future of AI in Software Engineering
• (26:49) - Building Reliable Software
• (27:39) - Tools and Strategies for Measuring Reliability
• (28:39) - Importance of Observability
• (35:52) - Enhancing Mobile App Observability
• (42:41) - Changing Behaviors in Observability

The Daytona founders - Ivan Burazin and Vedran Jukic - discuss their pivot to an AI agent cloud.
We dig into the new infrastructure requirements of developing agents that need their own sandboxes to operate in.

A year ago, we had them on to talk about Daytona giving us remote development environments for humans, and they have now pivoted the company to focusing on providing cloud hosting environments for AI agents to operate.

I suspect this is something we're all gonna eventually need to tackle as we work to automate more of our software engineering. So we spend time breaking down the concepts and the real world needs of humans developing agents, and then the needs of AI that require places to run their own tools in code.

Check out the video podcast version here https://youtu.be/l8LBqDUwtV8

🙌 My next course is coming soon! I've opened the waitlist for those wanting to go deep in GitHub Actions for DevOps and AI automation. I'm thrilled to announce this course. The waitlist allows you to quickly sign up for some content updates, discounts, and more as I finish building the course. https://learn.bretfisher.com/waitlist🍾

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Ivan Burazin - Guest
• Vedran Jukic - Guest

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

• (00:00) - Intro
• (07:45) - Daytona's Sandbox Technology
• (14:34) - Practical Applications and Use Cases
• (16:06) - Security and Isolation in AI Agents
• (19:36) - Start Up Times for Sandboxing and Kubernetes
• (24:28) - Daytona vs Lambda
• (32:43) - Rogue Models and Isolation
• (36:31) - Humanless Operations and the Future of DevOps
• (48:54) - SDK vs MCP
• (51:52) - Human in the Loop
• (52:50) - Daytona: Open Source vs Product Offering

Julián Duque from Heroku joins me to explain and demo their new AI platform.

Check out the video podcast version here https://youtu.be/BGqlLZHdRDs

🙌 My next course is coming soon! I've opened the waitlist for those wanting to go deep in GitHub Actions for DevOps and AI automation. I'm thrilled to announce this course. The waitlist allows you to quickly sign up for some content updates, discounts, and more as I finish building the course. https://learn.bretfisher.com/waitlist🍾

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Julián Duque - Guest

You can also support my free material by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (06:49) - Deep Dive into Heroku's AI Capabilities
• (16:00) - Heroku MCP server
• (30:04) - Describing MCP Tool Interactions
• (32:25) - DevOps Automation with Heroku MCP server
• (38:39) - Heroku AI and Future Prospects