The New Stack Context: Recent Episodes
The New Stack
Join The New Stack’s editorial team to review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies and at-scale application development. Editorial Director Libby Clark, Managing Editor Joab Jackson and TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams put more context around the stories we’re covering each week and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks. Guests include TNS writers and correspondents who join us to discuss what they’re hearing from tech industry insiders.
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In this episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Jonas Bonér, Akka creator and founder/chief technology officer of Lightbend, about the challenges of bringing state to serverless, reactive microservices frameworks, and Cloudstate itself. TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
For this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we ask Levine about the excitement around WebAssembly, its use in the Envoy proxy, and Solo.io’s new proposal for packaging WASM modules in the Open Container Initiative format. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Although WebAssembly was created for bringing advanced programming to the browser, Solo.io’s founder/CEO Idit Levine has been a vocal proponent of using the portable fast open source runtime to extend service meshes — citing Solo.io’s own work in offering tools and services to support commercial service mesh operations. In fact, WASM, as its also known, could be used to bring extensibility across a wide variety of cloud native projects, she argues.
Application and system observability was the focus of the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technology Radar end user survey, posted last week. So for this week’s TNS Context podcast episode, we invited Cheryl Hung, CNCF vice president of ecosystem, to discuss these latest findings. To get an additional industry perspective on observability, we’ve also invited Buddy Brewer, vice president of full stack observability for New Relic.
The ideal state of a cloud native shop is to run a development and deployment pipeline that can seamlessly move applications from the developer’s laptop to the data center (or the edge) without any manual intervention. And while there are many tools available to facilitate such automation — Helm, Operators, CI/CD toolchains, GitOps architectures, Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform — all too often edge cases and exceptions still require personal attention, bringing DevOps pipelines to a halt.
The missing pieces of the puzzles are a control plane and a unified application model for the control plane to run upon, asserted Phil Prasek, a principal product manager at Upbound, in this latest episode of The New Stack Context podcast. Prasek envisions a time when organizations can build their own customized set of platform services, where developers can draw from a self-serve portal the building blocks they need — be they containerized applications or third party cloud services, and have the resulting app run uniformly in multiple environments.
“Within an enterprise control plane, you can basically have your own abstractions, and then you can publish them,” Prasek said.
TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
Late last month, Rancher Labs donated its popular K3s Kubernetes distribution to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This stripped down version of Kubernetes has been a quiet hit among cloud native users — many who are deploying to edge environs.
So for this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we invited Rancher Co-Founder Darren Shepherd to discuss what Rancher is seeing in the cloud native ecosystem. Rancher is in the process of being acquired by SUSE and, because the deal is still pending, Darren could not comment but he did chat about K3s, as well as Kubernetes.
The New Stack Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
For this week’s episode, we spoke with Mike Yawn, a senior solution architect at Hazelcast, about the potential of in-memory computing to supercharge microservices and cloud native workloads.
Yawn recently contributed a post to TNS explaining how an in-memory technologies could make microservices run more smoothly. Hazelcast offers an in-memory data grid, Hazelcast IMDG, along with stream processing software Hazelcast Jet. We wanted to know more about how in-memory could be used with microservices. While in-memory offers caching just like key-value database such as Redis, it also offers additional computing capacity, which can help process that data on the fly, Yawn explained.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Pratik Wadher, vice president of product development at Intuit, to discuss the company’s experience as a Kubernetes end user, as well as its involvement in the Argo Flux project — a single toolchain for continuous deployment and automated workflows using GitOps. We also share our experiences of attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020, held this week “virtually.”
The New Stack editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Publisher Alex Williams, TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
The New Stack has just released an updated eBook on Kubernetes, “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem,” and so this week on The New Stack Context podcast, we’ve invited TNS analyst Lawrence Hecht to discuss some of the analysis he did for this volume. We covered Kubernetes adoption in the cloud, storage and networking concerns and the changing DevOps culture around cloud native computing. At the end of the podcast, we also discuss what to expect from next week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe virtual conference.
The New Stack Senior Editor Richard MacManus hosted this episode, with the help of Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor, and Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack.
A few years back, Kubernetes was in full development and many of its basic concepts were still evolving, so security was not a huge priority. But as K8s deployments have moved into production, more attention is being focused in securing Kubernetes and its workloads. Gadi Naor has been following Kubernetes security from the start. Alcide, the company Naor founded and now serves as CTO, offers an end-to-end Kubernetes security platform.
For this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Naor about a variety of Kubernetes security-related topics. Last week, Naor hosted a Kubernetes security Webinar for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which in addition to offering many helpful hints, discussed in detail the spate of recent vulnerabilities found in Kubernetes. And for The New Stack, he wrote about the problem about configuration drift in Kubernetes, and why it can’t be solved simply through continuous integration tools.
TNS Editorial and Marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
There is a new architecture for front-end web development: JAMStack rethinks the current server-browser architecture, freeing the developer from worrying about fiddling with Apache, Linux or other aspects of backend support.
For this week’s episode of the The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, which offers a JAMstack-based service that allows developers to simply push their code to git in order to update their web site or application. Key to this platform is an open source user interface framework created by Rauch, called Next.js, based on Facebook’s React, but tweaked to make it easier to build user interfaces not only for the developer but even for the designer.
TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson. On the benefit of using a managed JAMstack such as Vercel’s (over a traditional LAMP stack), Rauch noted that:
You can deploy to an essentially serverless infrastructure, right? I always tell people that content delivery networks were the OG serverless — because they never required management. They were perfectly delegated. It’s a globally distributed system with no single point of failure. You’re not going to have to worry about Linux and Apache because you can deploy to any distributed global network that can serve essentially markup, JavaScript, CSS and static files. Then obviously to power the API, server rendering and more advanced functionality, the Vercel network gives you serverless functions. So we try to complete the entire JAMstack equation.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Denise Gosnell, chief data officer at Datastax, who is a co-author of the O’Reilly book “A Practitioner’s Guide to Graph Data.” She also graciously wrote a post for us explaining why graph databases are gaining traction in the enterprise.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Graph database systems differ from the standard relational (SQL) kind in that they are engineered to more easily capture the relations across different entities. “When you’re looking at your databases, graph databases allow you to model your data more efficiently by using relationships,” Gosnell said.
You could capture that relationship information through a series of database joins of separate tables, but eventually, the complexity of this approach would make it prohibitive. “When you look at the full end-to-end complexity for using it in an application or maintaining your code, or updating edges, graph databases are going to make that a lot easier for the full lifecycle and maintenance of that application,” she said.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Chris DiBona, director of open source at Google, about Google’s launch of the Open Usage Commons, an independent company to help open source projects better manage their trademarks.
In a blog post, DiBona notes that trademarks sit at the juncture of the rule-of-law and the philosophy of open source. So for this episode, we wanted to find out more about how they interact and how Google is attempting to improve the management of trademarks in an open source way. We also wanted to address the rumors that this organization was created to manage Google’s Istio open source service mesh in lieu of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (DiBona’s answer: no).
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Craig McLuckie, who is the VMware chief of Tanzu development, as well as one of the creators of Kubernetes. We asked him about the importance of the developer for modern business, the value that Kubernetes brings to developers and how VMware’s Tanzu portfolio enables that.
TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Matt Asay, principal from the open source office at Amazon Web Services about his new series of posts on The New Stack that documents the contributors and originators behind many of the most popular open source programs we use every day.
TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
Over the past few weeks, AWS’ Asay has been traveling the open source world — virtually — to write a set of fascinating series on The New Stack that documents the contributors and originators behind many of the most popular open source programs we use every day.
In this series, we’ve met the developers behind more than a dozen projects, including Wireshark, Matplotlab, Curl and many other widely-used tools. The idea with the series is to, in Asay’s words, “shine a spotlight on an array of open source projects (and their founders and/or lead maintainers) that quietly serve behind-the-scenes. In the process, I hope that we’ll gain insight into both why and how these critically important projects have managed to thrive for so long. This, in turn, just might provide useful information on how best to sustain open source projects.”
In this interview, we ask Asay what he has learned speaking with all these creators, about project management and open source itself. We chat about how to join an open source project, and why it is difficult for maintainers to attract more help (and, in some cases, why they may not want contributions at all). Also on the agenda was the importance of open source licensing, how the younger generation of developers think about the idea of “open source,” and the long path it has taken for worldwide acceptance.
“I spent 10 years railing against the Microsoft machine for things with FUD around SUSE and Linux and whatnot. And now I’ve spent just as much time praising Microsoft for the great open source contributions that they make. But people don’t know that history.”
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Eric Sammer, Splunk distinguished engineer, about the IT system monitoring company’s ongoing effort to rename its “white list / black list” and “master/slave” terminology to remove language that perpetuates systemic racism and unconscious bias in tech. Splunk brought together a working group of people from across the organization to develop additional recommendations, guidelines, and procedures to identify and replace biased language and to prevent other instances from happening in the future. We also chatted with Sammer about what has happened since the company he co-founded, event-driven services monitoring provider Rocana, was acquired by Splunk in 2017.
This week in TNS, D2IQ co-founder Tobi Knaup wrote about the growing problem of container sprawl, a by product of more companies running containers in production, and as a result, there is a loss of efficiency on the part of the DevOps teams managing them. https://thenewstack.io/container-sprawl-is-the-new-vm-sprawl/
In this episode, we will speak with Ben Hindman, D2IQ co-founder, and CTO, about this issue of container sprawl, and how it hampers “Day 2 Operations” as D2IQ (formerly Mesosphere) calls it.
We also will discuss the company’s recent Cloud Native Virtual Summit, its recently released KUDO tool https://thenewstack.io/kudo-automates-kubernetes-operators/ , the 6th Anniversary of Kubernetes, and the latest on Mesosphere and the DCOS.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
For this week’s episode, we spoke with Priyanka Sharma, the new general manager for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, about her rich work history and her visions and strategies for moving CNCF forward. Also joining the convo is Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF chief technology officer.
This week, the CNCF announced that Sharma will now lead the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, taking over the role filled by former Executive Director Dan Kohn.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb.io, the observability platform vendor, about the company’s pricing changes brought on by COVID-19 and more broadly how observability practices and tools are changing as more companies make the move to the cloud.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Honeycomb this week changed its pricing structure to reflect the cost realities for businesses and the long term effect of COVID-19. The company also recently released the results of a survey that shows half of the developers surveyed aren’t using observability currently, but 75% plan to do so in the next two years. And in April the company released an open source collector for OpenTracing that allows teams to import telemetry data from open source projects into any observability platform, including their own but also their competitors.
Yen said of the pricing changes:
Our old pricing was, you bought a certain amount of storage and gigabytes and paid for a certain amount of data ingest, also in gigabytes, over a period of time. We felt like that was a little bit harder for people to map to their existing workflows, harder for them to predict. So we shifted to an events-per-month ingest model, one axis, one way to scale your usage.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Peter Zaitsev, CEO of the open source database software and services company Percona,. This week, Percona held its own virtual 24 hour virtual conference, Percona Live Online, where open source, databases and cloud native computing were all discussed. So we grilled Zaitsev about how traditional SQL databases operate in a cloud native world, as well as about Percona’s newly announced performance and optimization package for MongoDB.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Tina Nolte, vice president of product, for Kubernetes management service Spectro Cloud, about why we shouldn’t think of containers/Kubernetes as just another form of virtualization.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Nolte recently wrote a popular post for us on why we shouldn’t think of containers and Kubernetes as just another form of virtualization — that it opens up a whole new way to think about application development and deployment. So we wanted to find out more about this concept.
“Kubernetes is really about that middle area between infrastructure and application. So the applications themselves are enabled to be differently architected because of that operational PaaS layer if you will,” she explained. “It’s not just a lift-and-shift of old apps into new infrastructure.”
Focusing too much on the infrastructure side of Kubernetes ultimately misses its true value, an insight Nolte gleaned, in part, from working for a well-regarded OpenStack-based start-up, Nebula, that ultimately shuttered.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Deepak Singh, Amazon Web Services’ vice president for containers and open source, and Peder Ulander, AWS general manager for open source, about the company’s recently released Bottlerocket Linux distribution for the cloud.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams, TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Sebastien Goasguen, co-founder and chief product officer, TriggerMesh, about how to build applications from serverless functions that span multiple clouds, using the company’s software.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams, TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
We spoke with Goasguen about the role that TriggerMesh plays for GitLab and enterprise customers. Last month, TriggerMesh released the Cloud Native Integration Platform as well as the AWS Event Sources for OpenShift, timing the release with the virtual Red Hat Summit. With the latter offering, TriggerMesh brings Amazon EventBridge-like functionality to the OpenShift ecosystem allowing developers to trigger functions across clouds and legacy data centers. TriggerMesh users can now link events from anywhere to Red Hat OpenShift workloads.
“Serverless is not just function-as-a-service. It’s not just functions. It’s actually an integration problem. We call TriggerMesh a cloud-native integration platform: We compose cloud services together, glue them together thanks to an event-driven architecture,” Goasguen said.
Then, later in the podcast, we discuss the top podcasts and news stories from the site, including an interview with agile expert Emily Webber on remote work, how serverless can help embed security into the development process, the idea of offering databases as a serverless service, and the importance of standards in serverless adoption.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Joe Duffy, Founder and CEO of Pulumi, and Sophia Parafina, Pulumi’s technical marketing manager. In this convo, we delve into the recent Pulumi 2.0 release, which allows teams to reuse code, apply policies and do integration testing of infrastructure the same way they do for application development, a concept known as “architecture as code.”
TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with The New Stack correspondent Jennifer Riggins about all of the excellent reporting she and others on the TNS team have been doing recently on the effects that COVID-19 is having on the tech industry.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
For this episode, we wanted to look not only discuss the changing patterns in network traffic that the global COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, due to factors such people staying at home and working from home, and the sudden acceleration of e-learning. As Riggins writes in a recent post:
For a lot of tech and infrastructure teams, they not only are going through the stress of the collective trauma we’re sharing in, but they are struggling to keep up with ever-scaling, extreme strains on their systems. Simply put, no one could have predicted this uptick.
One big theme that kept popping up was “resiliency,” not only from an individual psychological perspective, as well from organizational and systems views as well.
Here are some of the other posts we discussed:
The Network Impact of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic: How has the worldwide pandemic stressed our networks? In multiple ways, according to this report from our London correspondent Mary Branscombe. Internet traffic is generally 25% to 30% higher than usual. You can also see the change in where people are connecting from; usage is up in residential areas but visibly down in downtown San Francisco, downtown San Jose and especially the Cupertino and Mountain View neighborhoods where Apple and Google have their campuses. U.S. Unemployment Surge Highlights Dire Need for COBOL Skills: One of the surprise stories coming from the global pandemic has been the dire need for COBOL developers. Who would have seen that one coming? New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is now asking for volunteers with COBOL skills. New Jersey’s 40-year-old mainframe benefits system was besieged by a 1,600% increase in usage, as over 371,000 people have filed claims in the past month. Keep Your Endpoints Secure During the COVID-19 Pandemic: We are also seeing more reports of security breaches indirectly due to the spreading virus. In this contributed post from CalSoft’s Sagar Nangare, he notes that People are scared and hungry for more information around events like COVID-19. In panic mode, they surf the internet, visit fake pages, and fall prey to phishing scams. Also, endpoints for remote access have increased due to remote working, increasing surface areas for cybercriminals to target. How Kubernetes Prepared 8×8 for a 50x Spike in Videoconferencing Usage: The New Stack spoke to 8×8, a cloud communications and video collaboration provider to learn how the company phased in remote-by-default, and how it is creating systems and team resiliency during a 50-fold increase in traffic over less than a month. One answer? Kubernetes. Chaos, Hugs and Interruptions: Dev Folks Work from Home with Kids: Working at home is nothing new to the cloud native computing community, which has always been about the distributing workloads. But adding children, who all of sudden were home full time as well when the schools closed, adds another stress to already frazzled IT pros. Here are some tips on getting by. SaltStack’s CTO on Pandemics, the End of Empires and Software’s Future: Here’s an interview with Thomas S. Hatch, founder and Chief Technology Officer of SaltStack where he discusses how software engineers’ lives have changed (or not), the folly of forcing workers to come to the office when they really do not need to and his observations of network infrastructure saturation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Derek Weeks, vice president at Sonatype, about the results of a new community survey the company just released on DevSecOps that provides some insights on how teams are incorporating automated security tools and how that shift affects company culture and developer happiness.
Sonotype’s Nexus open source governance platform helps more than 1,000 organizations and 10 million software developers simultaneously accelerate innovation and improve application security. This is the seventh year that Sonatype has done this DevSecOps report, and, according to the company, it’s the longest running community survey on this topic. We discuss with Weeks how the practice of DevSecOps changed since the company started doing the survey, and the challenges organizations face in embedding security within their DevOps practices. We also ponder the reasons behind the puzzling finding that those companies with mature DevSecOps actually have more security breaches.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
For more episodes listen here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with a couple of folks from cloud workload protection platform provider Rezilion: CEO Liran Tancman, and Chief Marketing Officer Tal Klein. We discuss how current best practices in security are actually outdated and how they think companies should be approaching security practices in the age of DevOps.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Klein wrote a contributed article for TNS on “Why Vulnerability Management Needs a Patch,” where he argues that current best practices and tools around security patching, such as the CVSS system for rating vulnerabilities, are outdated, particularly for modern DevOps shops.
As Klein says in the interview:
When you’ve got vulnerabilities, it’s very tough to figure out which ones to fix first, and the fact is that more and more vulnerabilities are discovered every year. So there’s, there’s a greater amount of things to patch and if you don’t know which ones to patch first, you’re never going to be able to address the full patching needs of your organization. And that’s been a cat and mouse game for a long time.
Then later in the show, we discuss some of our top podcasts and stories of the week. Our sister podcast, The New Stack Makers, posted an interview with DevRel trailblazer (and Coder-Twitter celeb) Cassidy Williams, on building software communities. COVID-19 continues to tear through the IT community, and so we look at the shifting network traffic patterns that have come about from the pandemic, as well as the additional babysitting duties that many IT professionals have to now mix into their daily work from home routines. Finally, we discuss The Eclipse Foundation’s Theia code editor, which has been billed as “a true open source alternative to Visual Studio Code.”
Listen to ALL of our shows here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Kelsey Hightower, a developer advocate at Google, and Ben Sigelman, CEO and co-founder of observability services provider LightStep, about whether or not teams should favor a monolith over a microservices approach when architecting cloud native applications. Hightower recently tweeted a prediction that “Monolithic applications will be back in style after people discover the drawbacks of distributed monolithic applications.” It was quite a surprise for those who have been advocating the for operational benefits of microservices. Why go back to a monolith?
As Hightower explains in the podcast: “There are a lot of people who have never left a monolith. So there’s really not anything to go back to. So it’s really about the challenges of adopting a microservices architecture. From a design perspective, like very few companies talk about, here’s how we designed our monolith.”
Sigelman, on the other hand, maintained that microservices are necessary for rapid development, which, in turn, is necessary for sustaining a business. “It’s not so much that you should use microservices, it’s more like, if you don’t innovate faster than your competitors, your company will eventually be erased, like, that’s the actual problem. And in order to do that, you need to build a lot of differentiated technology,” he said. Microservices is the most logical approach for maintaining a large software team while still maintaining a competitive velocity of development.
Later in the show, we discuss some of the top TNS podcasts and news posts of the week, including an interview with IBM’s Lin Sun on the importance of the service mesh, as Sysdig’s offer of a distributed, scalable Prometheus, a group of chief technology officers who want to help the U.S. government with the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the hidden vulnerabilities that come with open source security.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Listen to more from The New Stack here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Liran Tal, a developer advocate at container security platform provider Snyk and a member of the Node.js security working group, about who should own security in the DevOps process — the security team or the development?
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Tal wrote an article for us recently, “‘DevSecOps Insights 2020’: Who Really Owns Security in DevOps,”which summarized the results of a survey the company carried out covering security, development and operations. The post included a couple of surprising survey results, namely that only 14% of respondents reported that they test for known vulnerabilities in container images, and 38% of respondents don’t integrate automated security scanning into their DevOps pipeline.
As Tal writes in the post:
When that many respondents agree security is a major concern when trying to deliver software quickly, it means we need to scale up security to enable fast delivery of security fixes. The key to doing that is developers, as they ultimately fix security issues in an application’s source code.
We also get Tal’s views on incorporating security into the a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), the need for development speed, as well as his thoughts on the recent purchase of npm by GitHub.
Then, later in the show, we discuss some of the top podcasts and news stories from the site. An episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast provides fodder for discussing service mesh adoption. Also on the agenda: Frustrations mount over Python 3 migrations; Project Calico offers a faster data plane with the help of eBPF; and an excellent side-by-side comparison offered by StackRox’s Karen Bruner of the managed Kubernetes offerings from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Listen to all of The New Stack podcasts here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week we spoke with Mohan Raj, IT senior manager of the CloudOne developer experience at NetApp. Over the past two years, he has been building a DevOps platform at NetApp that provides cloud services, automation, and CI/CD release models for the company’s application development teams that need to build cloud native applications — using NetApps own tools.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
To hear more episodes go to: https://thenewstack.io/
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week we spoke with Rob Skillington, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Chronosphere, a monitoring company that came out of stealth late last year and is built around the open source metrics platform, M3, which Skillington and Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao helped develop at Uber.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
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Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week we spoke with Ryan Staatz, head of DevOps at LogDNA, about running stateful services on Kubernetes, as part of our series of posts and podcasts on the challenges of running Kubernetes in 2020.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson. Each month on The New Stack, we pick ta heme to devote a certain amount of coverage, issues that we hear are important to our readers. This month, we looked at one of the ongoing challenges for Kubernetes around how to run stateful applications.
As Staatz explains in his post on the subject, “A Blueprint for Running Stateful Services on Kubernetes,”
“State” refers to the condition that an application is in at a particular point in time. A stateful application changes its behavior based on previous transactions; in other words, it maintains a memory of the past. Examples of stateful applications include databases, caches, and content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress. With stateful applications, the application must have a location where it can store its state as data. This data needs to be available to the application throughout its lifespan. In a basic single-server, single-instance application, this could be as easy as storing data directly on the host filesystem.
We chat with Staatz about his preferred approaches to running stateful applications on Kubernetes, as well as how LogDNA supports these architectures with its own logging service. Then, later in the show, we discuss some other recenet posts on the topic: Analyst Janakiram MSV in his post, “Different Approaches for Building Stateful Kubernetes Applications,” reveals that there are a number of different ways to provide stateful support to K8s. A Q&A with Saad Ali, the chair of the Kubernetes Storage Special Interest Group at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, discusses the work already done to make run stateful workloads easier, as well as the challenges that remain and what to look for in the future.
We also give a listen to The New Stack Makers podcast with InfluxData’s Chris Churilo, who offers some perspective on why organizations increasingly rely on time series databases to “make products or services better.”
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week we have two guests, who discuss their experience with the challenges of securing open source software.
First, we talk to Frank Nagle, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-director of the Census II project to assess security practices in open source software components, in partnership with the The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII). We discuss his findings, including the surprising state of under-management for most open source projects.
We also chat with Neeraj Poddar, Aspen Mesh co-founder and engineering lead who developed the fix for a recent vulnerability in the Istio service mesh project. We speak with Poddar about the challenges of quickly fixing an bug in an open source program when there are so many stakeholders, and how the work should be cordoned off until a public announcement is ready to be made.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. Today we’re talking to The New Stack news correspondent Mike Melanson, about his recent coverage of the ongoing debate over the value of microservices. We also discuss the top podcasts and news stories for the week, covering topics such as developer relations, mobile platform development and optimization, and distributed architectures. We have been covering the debate over the relative merits of microservices for a while now. Microservices offer a number of advantages on the development side. Separate teams can work different parts of a language, even in their preferred languages and tools. Updates can be quietly inserted without needing to refresh the entire application. But while the hype around microservices is considerable, industry observers have been starting to recognize the limitations as well. Many have been advocated returning to the opposite approach: building single large “monolithic” applications.
Recently, Melanson wrote about Google cloud native evangelist Kelsey Hightower’s belief that monoliths are the future.
“Monoliths are the future because the problem people are trying to solve with microservices doesn’t really line up with reality,” Hightower wrote in his own blog post. A company lacking coding discipline that ends up with a disaster of a codebase may see microservices as an answer, but in reality, it is just trading class instantiation for function calls. “They’re initiating things and throwing it over a network and hoping that it comes back,” Hightower writes.
In this podcast, we ask Brock about the changes she has seen in the U.K., post-Brexit, as well as the open source culture in the country, and what can be done to bring more visibility to the vast pools of developer talent that the country possesses.
Then later in the show, we discuss the top topics on the site for the week, including the need to improve user interfaces, Bruce Perens’ departure from the Open Source Initiative, a new World Wide Web Consortium standard that will help distributed tracing, and the surprising utility of the humble Unix awk command.
This week, we chat with Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO at Puppet, about the announcement that Goldman Sachs will no longer go public with companies that have no female or under-represented minority board members. Late last week Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon announced that the investment firm would not underwrite IPOs by companies that have no diversity on their board of directors, and that the policy would specifically focus on women. This could be an important turning point for our industry, as it may bring about a change in how tech companies are run and advised in the future. The announcement came just after California passed a law that fines companies $100,000 for going public with all-male boards.
Wassenaar draws from her experience not only as a member of the Puppet board, but also as director for a number of other boards, including Forrester Research, Anaplan, and Harvey Mudd College. We asked her about what role the new laws will play in the policies that companies and investors are taking going forward. We also asked about the challenges of increasing the diversity in large corporations.
Then, later in the episode, we discuss some of the top podcasts and news posts on the site, including a discussion with Zeit founder Guillermo Rauch about distributed systems, a new serverless integration provider called TriggerMesh, SaltStack's plan to help developers minimize the amount of YAML they need to write, and why IBM turned to Humio to scale up its ELK deployments.
Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this episode, along with TNS Publisher Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week, we chat with Catherine Paganini who leads marketing at Kublr, about her recent ongoing series of posts that explain IT concepts for business leaders. We discuss the process of writing about technology, and the sometimes arduous process of learning about DevOps-driven cloud native computing. Then later in the show, we chat about the week's top stories. Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this episode, along with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week, we chat with The New Stack's Linux correspondent Jack Wallen who writes regular tutorial articles for us and covers the latest Linux and security news. We chat about the recent comments from Linux chief maintainer Linus Torvalds about the ZFS file system, as well Red Hat's recent decision to pull the Docker software from its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution, replacing it with its own Podman software. Libby Clark, the editorial and marketing director of The New Stack, hosted this episode, with the help of TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. In this week’s episode, we talk with John Jeremiah, product marketing manager at GitLab, about the GitLab Commit user conference happening on January 14 in San Francisco.
Libby Clark, the editorial and marketing director of The New Stack, hosted this episode, with the help of TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
GitLab, a sponsor of The New Stack, made its name with git-based version control but is now looking to automate and consolidate continuous integration and continuous deployment into a single lifecycle. We attended GitLab’s last Commit event, held in Brooklyn back in September, which gave us a lot of interesting stories around DevOps practices. So we quiz Jeremiah about some of these emerging trends that no doubt we’ll hear more about in San Francisco, including DevSecOps and DataOps.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast we discuss databases and microservices. We chat with Kyle Davis, Redis Labs' head of developer advocacy and Loris Cro, Redis Labs' developer advocacy manager, about their new e-book, "Redis Microservices for Dummies." We discuss the new requirements for database systems in the the world of microservices, as well as the emergence of data streaming. We also discuss the news of the week with TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson. Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this podcast.
The New Stack Editor in Chief Alex Williams sat down at the IFX infrastructure conference with one of the companies looking to apply the speed, delivery, and, most importantly, the resilience built into software teams to the infrastructure side. After over a decade at Microsoft followed by more than a year at AWS, Luke Hoban, CTO of Pulumi, was ready to build something that helps developers work with the cloud. The way to bridge the chasm and bring the application development and infrastructure on either side closer together.
The New Stack Context is joined by our very own Jennifer Riggins to discuss this week's topic of Continuous Documentation and its roll in the industry.
In the first segment of this episode, TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark talks with Dave Harrison, senior application development manager at Microsoft, and Raygun co-founder and CEO John-Daniel Trask about how developers can help customers and improve their software development life cycle feedback loops.
Then later in the show, TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson discuss some of the top news and podcasts from the week, including the release of Kubernetes 1.17, continuous documentation for CI/CD, Packet's Tinkerbell bare metal deployment technology, and the importance of data protection in cloud native operations.
In Context Episode #95 The New Stack Crew discusses two conferences this week: Amazon Web Services' RE:Invent 2019 and Packet's IFX conference. TNS Publisher Alex Williams hosted this episode, and we speak with TNS European Correspondent B. Cameron Gain. This episode was sponsored by CloudBees.
My how KubeCon (now “KubeCon+CloudNativeCon”) has grown! We remember four years ago, when the conference was held in the second floor of a Seattle hotel, you could take a tour of all the booths within a few minutes. This year, more than 12,000 attendees packed the San Diego Convention Center, dozens of vendor booths span three gigantic rooms. You needed a map just to find one you were looking for. A good number of the companies we met with back in 2016 have grown into full-fledged businesses. And thanks to a sponsorship of Portworx, we were able to dispatch a team of crack reporters to capture many of the product updates that debuted at the show.
On this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we discuss some of these stories as well as the event itself. In this episode, we are joined by Alex Williams, founder and editor-and-chief of The New Stack, as well as TNS correspondent Emily Ormier and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark served as host.
Among the topics we touched upon included the emerging issue of integrating Kubernetes into the enterprise, the ongoing challenge of securing containers, and whether or not the service mesh is ready for production use. We also share our personal highlights from the event, discussing the conference's free daycare for children (thumbs up!) and Kelsey Hightower's bittersweet farewell keynote.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a weekly podcast where we discuss the latest news and views from the cloud native community. This week we speak to Joe Fernandes, Red Hat's vice president of product for the company's cloud platforms business unit. We discuss the past year and the future of Kubernetes, as well what to expect next week at the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon conference in San Diego next week. Libby Clark, who is the editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this podcast, along with Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack.
Today on The New Stack Context podcast we talk with Kara de la Marck, open source community manager at CloudBees, about when it makes sense to rely on open source tools and when proprietary alternatives should be considered.
The abundance of tooling in the cloud native ecosystem can be overwhelming as teams weigh which options work best for their business needs, infrastructure and workflows. To help provide a framework for the decision, De la Marck wrote a contributed article this week on “Open Source Tools: The Good, The Bad and The Truth in Between” as a preview of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's upcoming KubeCon and CloudNativeCon San Diego event in a few weeks.
On this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we discuss Kubernetes and cloud native storage with NetApp's Business Director for its Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit, Dale Degen, during NetApp's annual user conference this week in Las Vegas, NetApp Insight 2019.
Since its acquisition of StackPointCloud last year, storage giant NetApp has become a leader in Kubernetes management. The NetApp Kubernetes Service provides a control plane for running any commercial or even homegrown Kubernetes distribution. Users can deploy a complete Kubernetes distribution within three clicks. When used in conjunction with NetApp's OnTap storage operating system and Cloud Volumes, users can set up a multicloud Kubernetes deployment.
Then later in the podcast, we chat about the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019, which was attended by Alex Williams, TNS founder and editor-in-chief. We also discuss some of the top news from the TNS site, including Pivotal's recent Spring Platform conference, some tips for running Kubernetes in production, and the future of serverless and cloud computing.
Welcome to The New Stack Context podcast, where we discuss the week’s hottest news around cloud native technology. On this week’s episode, we discuss one of our favorite yearly events, All Things Open open source conference, held earlier this month in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Our guests for the week are Matthew Broberg, technical editor for Red Hat’s OpenSource.com, and Anais Dotis-Georgiou, who is a developer advocate at InfluxData, as well as a speaker at the conference. We discussed the grassroots independence that makes All Things Open so enjoyable, as well as what open source trends we caught at this year’s show.
Then, later in the show, we discuss some of the top posts and podcasts for the week, including a wide-ranging interview with Pivotal’s Cornelia Davis, a tutorial on how to get the most from the ZFS file system on Ubuntu, how Microsoft has been been making it easier for developers to use Kubernetes, as well as the state of Linux kernel open source after the recent wave of CPU-based vulnerabilities.
Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at TNS hosted this podcast, along with Alex Williams, TNS founder and editor-in-chief, and Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor.
On this week's episode, we spoke with The New Stack founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS correspondent and columnist Mike Melanson about the Pivotal SpringOne Platform developer conference in Austin, which they both attended last week.
Pivotal is a sponsor of The New Stack and made a number of announcements at the show.
The company unveiled the beta of its managed version of the Spring Cloud Gateway, which the company describes in a blog post as “a developer-friendly way to configure and route API requests to application services.” With the beta release, Spring Cloud Gateway will get ongoing maintenance and support from Pivotal, as well as the addition of Pivotal Platform’s single sign-on module, the company’s identity and access management tool for applications and APIs.
Also at the show, Pivotal and Microsoft previewed Azure Spring Cloud, a fully managed service for deploying Spring Boot applications on Microsoft Azure. Spring Boot is based on Pivotal’s popular Spring framework and is an open source Java-based framework used to create microservices, which it does by packaging the runtime together with the application.
Then later in the show, we discussed Escape, a multicloud conference held this week by Cockroach Labs, which Jackson attended.
This week we speak to Maria Colgan, Oracle master product manager, to learn about the company's Oracle Autonomous Database. Last month, at Oracle OpenWorld, the company introduced a new free tier to this cloud offering.
Then, for the second half of the show, we discuss three conferences we attended this week, including SpringOne Platform in Austin, TX, Puppetize PDX, and SAP TechEd 2019 in Barcelona.
For this week's episode, we’re talking with Wayne Ariola, chief marketing officer at Tricentis. Tricentis develops DevOps tools for continuous software testing and is a sponsor of The New Stack. Ariola is a frequent contributor to The New Stack on the topics of software quality, agile and continuous testing, test automation and, most recently, robotic process automation (RPA). We’ll spoke with him about how DevOps processes and tools have changed for cloud native architectures and what that means, in particular for software testing.
Then later in the show we’ll cover the top stories on The New Stack over the past few weeks, including a new Linux memory management proposal, and our recent coverage of Red Hat’s AnsibleFest.
For this week's episode, we're conversed with Srinath Perera, software architect and vice president of research in the CTO Office of WSO2, about his research on the practical uses of blockchain.
WSO2 is a sponsor of The New Stack and it offers an integrated platform for API management, integration, identity and access management, analytics and IoT. And its research is also on the cutting edge of cloud native technology. It is also the company behind the Ballerina cloud native programming language.
Perera leads these research efforts and has written recently about serverless technologies and blockchain for us. With blockchain, his team wasn’t sure which use cases are feasible and would also deliver a clear value. So they did a systematic analysis of blockchain technology using the company's Emerging Technology Analysis Canvas (ETAC).
This week we’re talking with Chris Grams, the head of marketing at open source subscription startup, Tidelift.
Tidelift offers a managed open source subscription to help companies manage and maintain their dependencies on open source projects. They’re also a sponsor of The New Stack and our partner on a survey we did earlier this year about how developers use open source to build applications in the workplace.
We spoke with Grams about how much time do developers spend handling maintenance and security issues related to unmaintained open source dependencies, what is preventing coders from using more open source components, and what the most important factors developers to consider when choosing a new open source project.
This year at its annual user conference –Seattle this year—HashiCorp introduced two new tiers to its Terraform Cloud service, a paid version that isn't the full enterprise version, but one for smaller teams, and another one that covers governance, and cost prediction. Terraform Cloud is like the GitHub to Terraform's git. Terraform, an infrastructure management tool, can be used from a laptop, and HashiCorp offers a free tier on Terraform Cloud, where the CLI commands are translated into API calls. The new Teams tier offers the ability to manage teams, with full RBAC control. and the Governance edition, also paid, has a code framework for enforcing granular rules against infrastructure, and even cost estimation, which provides a prediction of how much a proposed infrastructure will cost to run in the cloud.
In our talk, Dadgar explained that the tier addresses a heretofore underserved segment for the rapidly growing company: projects that have blossomed into full-scale apps that need predictable infrastructure. They don’t quite require the governance controls that the enterprises (aka the “Fortune 2000”) do, but they do require coordination. As a Terraform’ed project grows, the company reasons, it will have more contributors, and everything will need tracked and controlled.
This week, we're recording from TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco, held September 5. Our guest is Haley Daiber, a senior associate at Unusual Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund.
The New Stack has been talking and writing a lot about TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise over the past few months, as a media partner and also a participant. We held a pancake breakfast and podcast panel in the morning and TNS founder Alex Williams moderated a session in the afternoon. And we were excited about this event because it signals a new excitement and heat in the enterprise software space. This has been evident so far in the keynotes we’ve heard today, at the event: Jason Green from Emergence Capital for example, called this "the golden age of enterprise." So we spoke with Daiber about what enterprise software looks like from an investor’s perspective.
Then, later in the podcast, we discussed the week's top stories and podcasts, including excellent contributed posts on adopting role-based access control for Kubernetes and migrating to Python 3. We also discuss a new service mesh, and how "punk rock" music from the 1970s resembles open source today.
This week we discuss all the news from VMware's annual VMworld conference, held this week in San Francisco, with special guest RackN founder/and CEO Rob Hirschfeld. RackN is provider of next generation infrastructure automation software for provisioning bare metal, VMs, clouds, and edges.
At the event, VMware announced it’s going all-in on Kubernetes. There were hints the company was going in that direction with its acquisition of Heptio in November, a company founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who were among Kubernetes’ founders. At the show, the company announced that vSphere with Kubernetes in a new alpha offering called Project Pacific.
Hirschfeld opined that, with this Kubernetes support, VMware is playing defense, given that operations teams using the vSphere platform might be getting requests from their developer counterparts for Kubernetes support.
This week we spoke with Andreas Grabner, a DevOps Activist at Dynatrace, about why Kubernetes and artificial intelligence (AI) are made for each other.
Grabner wrote a contributed post for us last week, “How AI Solves the Kubernetes Complexity Conundrum” in which he argues that integrating Kubernetes with artificial intelligence and an AIOps culture can make Kubernetes deployments more manageable for IT and DevOps teams. Dynatrace, a sponsor of The New Stack, builds AI-assisted, full stack and completely automated monitoring software for dynamic, web-scale, hybrid cloud ecosystem.
"Kubernetes offers enterprises a valuable new tool for kicking digital transformations and time-to-market timetables into a new gear. But to take full advantage of it, IT and DevOps need to drive a culture shift toward AI and automation; most other existing IT approaches simply do not adequately work or scale in this new world," Grabner wrote in the blog.
This week we spoke with Chip Childers, technology chief of staff at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, about the technical and architectural decisions that help define the modern enterprise. Cloud Foundry Foundation is the independent organization that oversees the development and adoption of the Cloud Foundry platform, and it’s a sponsor of The New Stack.
More than half of the Fortune 500 uses Cloud Foundry, so the Cloud Foundry Foundation depends on the enterprise using, contributing to, and advancing its open source projects. Childers works closely with developers and CIOs at all of the foundation’s member companies, and so he has a deep understanding of what it is that a modern enterprise needs in order to succeed in today’s rapidly changing technology landscape. In a recent post for The New Stack, he wrote that “Modern enterprises ... think critically about what they should build themselves and what they should source from somewhere else.”
This week, we talk with Charity Majors, chief technology officer of Honeycomb.io and a pioneer in observability about the three-year anniversary of that movement which has significantly changed how applications are monitored and maintained in the cloud native era.
Majors contributed a post that appeared on The New Stack this week in which she takes a closer look at why the observability movement formed and why other approaches and methods fall short. She explained why engineering teams must continue to focus on this approach in order to better understand, debug, and maintain large-scale distributed systems.
"When we blew up the monolith into many services, we lost the ability to step through our code with a debugger: it now hops the network. Our tools are still coming to grips with this seismic shift," Majors writes.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and views from the cloud native community. This week, we spoke Luca Mezzalira, chief architect at sports video streaming site DAZN (Da-Zone), about the idea and evolution of microfrontends, or the equivalent of a microservices approach to scaling frontend development.
Mezzalira has written and presented talks about his journey to design the company’s scale-out frontend streaming application, one that he calls one of the most challenging architectures he’s ever created. DAZN was dealing with a lot of the same issues that companies with large, monolithic backends face as they tried to quickly, and massively scale. We’ll hear about how his team developed the DAZN microfrontends. If content is king, then distribution is the queen, he reminded us in this lively interview.
Then later in the show, we’ll discuss the recent data breach at Capital One due to a “firewall misconfiguration” that allowed a hacker to access data on over 100 million customers in the company’s AWS S3 buckets. As regular readers know, The New Stack has had dozens of posts (most recently) about the dangers of cloud security over the past few years. And they all have the same basic underlying message: even if you use third-party cloud services, security is still your responsibility.
In this week's episode, we’re talking with a couple of VMware folks about a way to optimize continuous deployment with a new technique called continuous verification.
Dan Illson, native cloud advocate at VMware cloud services, and Bahubali (Bill) Shetti, director of cloud advocacy at VMware, wrote on the site this week that many applications are not ready for use at the completion of their deployment pipelines.
Post-deployment work to “operationalize” or “harden” services is still fairly common practice and generally slows the overall rate of software delivery. We’ll hear from them about how a practice of continuous verification can help teams deliver software faster. The idea with CV is that it can augment the CI/CD process by moving many of the post-deployment steps into feedback loops within the pipeline. The tools are already there. In fact, any monitoring or security tool that can report on its work by way of an API can be fit into an existing pipeline (depending on how flexible the CI/CD server is at handling APIs, of course),
Then later in the podcast, we discuss some of the week's stories and podcasts on the site. We delve into the basics of Robotic Processing Automation, and Kubernetes. We delve into the Unix pipe command, and how it has proved so instrumental to modern computer programming. And we discuss the evolving role of the site reliability engineer.
This week's episode was recorded (mostly) live from O'Reilly's flagship open source conference, OSCON 2019, held this week in The New Stack's home base of Portland, Oregon.
Our special guest for this episode was Thomas Grassl, who is a vice president, and global head of developer relations and community at the enterprise and software services delivery company SAP. One may not initially think of SAP and open source together but in fact the company has had a hand open source projects for decades now, including Cloud Foundry, Eclipse and many more. The company is the second largest contributor to Java, after Oracle itself. "To understand these projects, you need to have an active engagement in," he said.
We also discussed SAP 's own Open Source Programming Office, which has spawned its own project, including CLA Assistant, an effort to handle contributing licensing agreements after the company itself found no rational process to manage them. This opened the conversation about the ongoing tension between open source projects and the giant cloud providers about licensing and fairness. We also chatted about about SAP's involvement in the Open Data Initiative with other enterprise giants such as Adobe and Microsoft. "It's very much a customer-driven initiative," Grassl said. "You have data you need to combine between different vendors. This is definitely one of the big hurdles that a lot of customers have."
This week, we discuss the use of the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to improve container monitoring.
For this discussion we are joined by Daniella Pontes, who is the senior manager of product marketing at InfluxData and Luca Deri, founder of the ntop network monitoring tool. Deri and InfluxData have partnered to produce a container monitoring tool, based on eBPF, ntop and the Influx DB time-series database system.
Pontes and Deri wrote about this new project in a recent post for TNS, "IT Monitoring in the Era of Containers: Tapping into eBPF Observability." In the world of containers and microservices, they write, monitoring services from the outside only doesn’t work. Instead, IT teams should read system metrics directly to gain insight into the activities inside and between the containers themselves. eBPF is one way to get system information about the workload running on the container.
This week, we catch up with The New Stack founder and Publisher Alex Williams to learn about his trip to Shanghai, China, to attend the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2019.
In this chat, we discussed the ongoing trade issues between China and the U.S., and how they effect Asian companies such as Huawei, and well as efforts of the Linux Foundation to unify the efforts to build an open source community that spans the globe. We also discuss two keynote talks that were given, by Linux founder Linus Torvalds, and the chief maintainer of the older Linux kernels Greg Kroah-Hartman, about open source communities and the need for better vulnerability management, respectively.
Then later, in the show, we discuss with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson a conference that he attended last week, Redis Day New York. There the company unveiled its new timeseries database configuration, as well as some exciting new benchmarks, showing the database as capable of executing 200 million operations per second.
Today we’re talking with Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, about how and why to use managed services from a cloud provider such as AWS.
Epsagon is a sponsor of The New Stack that provides automated observability and cost management for serverless applications using distributed tracing and AI technologies. He wrote a post for us this week on the evolution of managed services such as AWS Fargate and Amazon EKS, the tradeoffs and benefits of using them and his tips for how to choose a managed service.
Then later in the show, we discuss the latest news from EnterpriseDB's Postgres Vision, JFrog's swampUp, and QCON New York conferences, as well as our top podcast pick from the week, an interview with Gitlab's Ashish Kuthiala about the changing role of CI/CD.
This week, we spoke with Jonas Bonér, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of real-time system provider Lightbend, about some experimental work his company is doing to create a serverless interface for general purpose, stateful applications. Jonas gave a talk at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon in Barcelona last month called “Serverless is Interesting but FaaS is Not Enough” that addressed this topic.
And back in February on The New Stack, Bonér wrote a contributed piece calling for the creation of the next generation of serverless technology, what he’s also calling “serverless 2.0” or stateful serverless. "The programming model for serverless is still mainly limited to stateless functions — the so-called Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) model — which limits the range of use-cases supported," he wrote in that post.
In this podcast, we discuss the “serverless 2.0” movement brewing from OpenFaaS and other open source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem. We also chatted about the definitions that the cloud native community is settling in on that next phase is for serverless, and what that should constitute serverless 2.0.
Then in the second half of the show, we’ll discuss our top podcast and stories for the week.
How is the open source Kubernetes container orchestration engine actually used out in the wild? Does it drive large clusters for service providers to run multi-tenant apps? Or are its clusters small, fit for managing the lifecycle of a single app? Rob Hirschfeld, CEO of bare metal infrastructure management company RackN, did his own informal Twitter survey to find some answers, and got a wealth of answers, which he summarized in a blog post for The New Stack.
On this episode of the The New Stack Context, a weekly wrap-up podcast of news and views in the cloud native computing community, we talk with Hirschfeld about his survey, and what the future may hold for Kubernetes.
"As Kubernetes emerges as the de facto management platform, we are still figuring out what that means. The challenge is that it exists in a gray zone between a specialized application platform and general purpose infrastructure abstraction. I wanted to understand if one set of use-cases was more common," he wrote.
In the second half of the show, we talk with our Oakland technology news correspondent T.C. Currie about her recent podcast interview with Zack Butcher, a founding engineer at Tetrate.
This week, we come live from the the Monitorama conference, held this week in Portland, where we spoke with Liz Fong Jones, developer advocate at observability service provider Honeycomb.io and Quintessence Anx, developer advocate, at troubleshooting firm Logz.io. Then later we discuss some of the other news items and podcasts from the week.
With Jones and Anx, we discussed the culture of burnout in the IT industry and how companies can better consider the humans who design and run their systems. We also discussed our takeaways from the conference itself. Then later in the show, show host Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at The New Stack, discusses the top news from the site with Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor. We discuss the update to Honeycomb.io's observability platform, and Palo Alto Networks intended purchase of container security provider Twistlock and serverless security provider PureSec. Oh, also we discuss Pivotal's new Spring-based OpenJDK distribution, and alarming new research on "deepfake" videos.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast we discuss how the enterprise can deploy microservices, with two authors of the recently published book, "Microservices for the Enterprise: Designing, Developing, and Deploying." Kasun Indrasiri is the director of integration architecture, for WSO2 — a sponsor of The New Stack — and Prabath Siriwardena, vice president of security architecture for WSO2.
The book delves into the key challenges and solutions around building microservices in a vendor-neutral way. Microservice fundamentals are explained via use cases from the enterprise software architecture. The book covers integrating microservice and eliminating the central Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), selecting the best Inter-service communication technique for your service, API Management and Governance of microservices and much more. In the podcast, we discussed the challenges of bring microservices to the enterprise, with the authors offering many practical tips.In the second half of the podcast, we discuss the some of the posts this week from the site, including the latest Docker vulnerability, as well as a step-by-step tutorial on using WSO2's Ballerina programming language with Amazon Web Services' Lambda serverless service.
We also wrap up some leftover news from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019, which was held in Barcelona earlier this month. We also discuss a recent podcast with Maddie Patrichi, senior software developer for Oracle, and Gregg Altschul, co-founder and CTO, for Autom8.Network, who chat about new services and tools continue to emerge for cloud native deployments.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, recorded live from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019, we’re talking all about monitoring and observability. Our guests are Kresten Krab Thorup, chief technology officer for Humio and Colin Fernandes, director of product marketing at Sumo Logic,
Sumo Logic is a machine data analytics company that has just announced an additional $110 million round of funding, making it worth over $1 billion. Humio is demonstrating the intake of 100 terabytes of data per day on only 25 nodes while delivering real-time observability of data. Both are on the cutting edge of understanding what intelligence we can gather from the operating conditions of our machines.
We spoke with them about the trends they’re seeing around data management and logging, both practices are seeing tremendous change, as end-users collect more and more data, while wanting to see analysis in real-time. We also talk about changes in cloud native monitoring and logging, including the recent consolidation of OpenTracing and OpenCensus into a single project, called Open Telemetry.
In the second half of the show, we offer our top podcast and stories picks, including the move to free some proprietary Kubernetes extensions with a new project called KubeMove. We also discuss our recent @Scale podcast, which confronts the challenges that the newly-launched CD Foundation has in normalizing the vast set of cloud native tools for continuous delivery.
The New Stack editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, with the help of TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
On this week's episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Mark Brewer, CEO of Lightbend, as well as with Lawrence Hecht, research director and columnist at The New Stack, about the current state and future of data streaming technology.
The New Stack recently partnered with our sponsor Lightbend to produce a survey on data streaming. Lightbend released the results of that survey last week and the report is titled “Streaming Data And The Future Tech Stack,” and it is all about how developers and software architects are using data streaming in their applications today.
For the podcast, Brewer shares his top takeaways from the survey, and Hecht discusses how he analyzed the numbers and what his conclusions were. We also talked a bit about Lightbend's Akka message-driven runtime.
We also discussed the top news of the week, including VMware's purchase of Bitnami, Intel's new special-purpose Linux hypervisor for cloud native workloads, and New Relic's platform for the future, New Relic One.
Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at The New Stack, hosted this episode, with the usual support from Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Nicole Huesman, open source community and developer advocate and Georg Link, an open source community strategist and PhD student, about their work on the Linux Foundation's CHAOSS project.
Yes, that’s CHAOSS with two s’s and it stands for Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software. It is an effort to project focused on creating analytics and metrics to help define community health. The pair contributed an article on The New Stack last week about how the group went about creating a set of standard metrics for diversity and inclusion in open source projects. And here, they share what they learned and set out the next steps the group plans to take to help open source communities begin to measure and document their progress around diversity and inclusion.
Then in the second half of the show, we’ll review the top podcast and stories for the week as well as discuss two conferences that were held this week, Red Hat Summit 2019 and Microsoft Build 2019.
In this episode, we do a recap of DockerCon 2019, Docker's flagship user conference, which was held in San Francisco this week. The big news for the week was the release of Docker Enterprise 3.0, the only end-to-end platform for building, sharing and running container-based applications. This fully integrated package includes a developer’s desktop interface and all the tools for managing the entire application lifecycle at every stage, either in the cloud or behind the firewall. Docker delivers the fastest time to production for any application — from legacy apps to brownfield to greenfield — with the ability to securely run them anywhere — from hybrid cloud to the edge.
Then, later in the show, we celebrate the fifth anniversary of The New Stack, as Williams takes a walk down memory lane to retell the origin story of this very site, an origin story that involves Docker as well!
Pulumi and Puppet, both mentioned in the podcast, are sponsors of The New Stack.
Today we’re talking with Joe Duffy, co-founder and CEO of Pulumi, who spoke with us about what’s fueling his company’s growth and why they’ll be at DockerCon next week. Also joining us today are Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor. I’m Libby Clark, editorial director at The New Stack.
Pulumi is a sponsor of The New Stack, based in Seattle — not too far from TNS headquarters in Portland! — and we’re happy to have Joe on the show today in advance of DockerCon in San Francisco next week. Building on the idea of infrastructure as code, Pulumi is focused on enabling developers and DevOps teams to use popular programming languages and tools to deploy to any public or private infrastructure — and across infrastructures. Co-founders Duffy and Eric Rudder come from Microsoft and Chief Technology Officer Luke Hoban from Amazon.
Then in the second half, we’ll discuss the top podcast and stories for the week and discuss what we're looking to cover at DockerCon next week. We'll be on site, recording interviews for a new episode of our newly relaunched @Scale podcast and talking to companies on the show floor about the latest in container management tooling and application architecture.
Today on The New Stack Context we talk with Garima Kapoor, COO and co-founder of MinIO, about using Spark at scale for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) workloads on Kubernetes. The Apache and Hadoop ecosystem hasn’t had much overlap with Kubernetes in the past, but as we learned at KubeCon in Seattle last November, that is quickly changing. As Iguazio’s Yaron Haviv wrote in a contributed article on TNS titled “Will Kubernetes Sink the Hadoop Ship?”
“Early adopters are realizing that they can run their big data stack (Spark, Presto, Kafka, etc.) on Kubernetes in a much simpler manner. Furthermore, they can run all of the cool post-Hadoop AI and data science tools like Jupyter, TensorFlow, PyTorch or custom Docker containers on the same cluster.”
Fast forward to now and we are approaching the Spark + AI Summit which Databricks is putting on in San Francisco next week and we are curious…How is Spark being used in cloud native architectures these days, with the likes of MinIO -- the open source, container native object store -- to, say, create machine learning data pipelines on Kubernetes? What is driving this trend to high-performance object stores? Kapoor breaks down the trends in the first half of the show.
This week, we spoke with Oakland The New Stack correspondent TC Currie who attended LaunchDarkly’s Trajectory conference in Oakland this week. Then later in the show our own Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor, discussed the news coming out from Google Cloud Next in san Francisco this week. Libby Clark, editorial director at The New Stack, hosted the show.
LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that provides feature flagging for CI/CD pipelines. Back in February, Currie interviewed LaunchDarkly’s CEO and co-founder Edith Harbaugh on our Makers podcast as one of this year’s winners of the Cloud-Now's "Top Women in Cloud" award.
Then in the second half of the show, we talk about the Google Next conference. The show has been generating a lot of energy and coverage from our cloud services correspondent Mary Branscombe. We spoke about Google’s Anthos hybrid cloud platform which came out of beta this week, and its new partnership with seven leading open source projects it will begin offering as fully managed services.
This week, we’re talking with Toby Fee, community developer at serverless software provider Stackery, about how to apply the principles of the 12-factor application model to serverless apps.
In the second half of the show, we spoke with Roman Swoszowski, vice president of cloud research and development at Grape Up, about this week's Cloud Foundry Summit, in Philadelphia. Fee has been writing a series of posts for us over the past few weeks that explores each of the principles in the 12-factor application through a serverless lens. She writes: No two serverless apps are identical, and the design decisions you make greatly affect how hard or easy you make your developers’ lives. Serverless should be a choice that makes the dev experience easier not more difficult, following these guides can help.In the second half of the podcast, we discuss the Cloud Foundry Summit.
Today we’re talking with Bob Quillin, vice president of Oracle Cloud developer relations, about how to move IT operations to the cloud when personnel is resistant to make the change.
Last year, a survey from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation found that the number one issue for companies in adopting cloud native technologies was “cultural changes with the development team.”
And that’s not surprising, Qullin writes on The New Stack this week:
The DevOps culture necessary to effectively use open source, cloud native technologies has fundamentally changed software and team processes. The culture of DevOps is expanding how we work and think. For some, this presents an exciting opportunity. Others approach it with more trepidation.
This week, we spoke with Sharone Revah Zitzman, developer relations at AppsFlyer and author of the contributed piece we ran last week titled “What the Fork, Amazon?”
In the last episode, we talked about Amazon Web Services’ new distribution of the open source Elasticsearch which has stirred up much debate and angst in the open source community.
The move was necessary, AWS’ Adrian Cockcroft argued in a blog post, in that elastic has intermingled proprietary code with the open source code that makes up the core of Elastic. He writes that with Elastic:
Neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open source and what is proprietary. Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code. This is hard to track and govern, could lead to breach of license, and could lead to immediate termination of rights (for both proprietary free and paid). Individual code commits also increasingly contain both open source and proprietary code, making it very difficult for developers who want to only work on open source to contribute and participate.
In particular, AWS releases open source components of Elastic providing functionalities that were previously only handled by Elastic’s proprietary code, namely security, event monitoring and alerting.
This week, on The New Stack Context podcast, we talking about how cloud providers are affecting open source companies with Karthik Ramasamy, co-founder and CEO of Streamlio. Streamlio offers cloud native messaging, processing and event storage as a service, powered by Apache Pulsar.
This week, everyone was buzzing about Amazon’s new distribution of Elasticsearch. AWS was careful to say it wasn’t a fork of the project on which the company Elasticsearch runs a lucrative business. But instead justified the move by saying it was too difficult for users of the project to distinguish between the open source code and the proprietary code which the company charges for.
Karthik will talk in the first half of the show with us about this battle between the cloud providers and commercial open source companies and how business models are evolving. He wrote about this very topic a few weeks ago on The New Stack in a post called “2019: The Cloud’s Impact on Open Source.”
Then later in the show, we catch up on all the news from the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit, in Half Moon Bay, California.
This week, in a nod to the RSA Conference that was held this week, we spoke to Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata, about what your Kubernetes security checklist is probably missing.
Bugwadia wrote a post for The New Stack in which he shares the security model Nirmata uses to guide its enterprise customers with Kubernetes adoption. Nirmata is a DevOps platform for containerized application deployments and is a sponsor of The New Stack. In the second half of the show, we review our other podcast and stories for the week, including some of the news coming out of RSA, such as Twistlock’s new release that promises container native security for VMs as well as Scytale’s new SPIFFE-based Service Identity Management tool.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we talk about how feature flagging promotes cross-team collaboration and DevOps with Adam Zimman, vice president of product and platform at The New Stack sponsor LaunchDarkly.
As Zimman wrote in a post this week, feature flags are increasingly being used in release management to decouple feature rollout from code deployment. Using feature flags, a new feature can, say, be tested on a small and friendly group of users before it’s rolled out to everybody. But did you know that using feature flags can actually encourage different teams, developers and product managers, for example, to work together more closely?
Then in the second half of the show, we discuss Mary Branscombe’s article this week about some of the issues companies are running into due to the limited Kubernetes support for IPv6 addresses.
This week, we’re talking with TNS correspondent Mike Melanson about Google’s new Cloud Services Platform. It’s a software offering (now in beta) that links Google’s managed Kubernetes service GKE with its on premises version, GKE on-prem, for enterprises that want to run workloads on premises and in the cloud using the same management environment. Google is following Amazon Web Services (with Outposts) and Microsoft (Azure Stack) in offering a on-premises version of its cloud stack, though Google is the first one to Istio as part of the package.
Later in the podcast, we discuss the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit North America , to be held in Philadelphia on April 2-4, 2019. As you know, Cloud Foundry is a Platform -as-a-Service software designed to make it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Companies such as Allstate, Royal Bank of Canada, and CSAA Insurance Group have all used Cloud Foundry in production settings.
In this week's episode of The New Stack Context, we talk about New Relic’s growth into AI ops with its recent acquisition of SignifAI. Aaron Johnson, SVP of Product Management at New Relic and Guy Fighel, co-founder and former CTO of SignifAI and now the GM, AIOps & VP of Product Engineering at New Relic both shared their vision behind the acquisition and how machine learning can be used to monitor and troubleshoot complex IT systems.
Then later in the show we discuss how to get rid of technology debt. Is the answer to stop using open source libraries and frameworks? Robert Lefkowitz, the recently retired Chief Architect of eyewear provider Warby Parker, is advocating that approach, and we'll delve into that.
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this show, with the help of Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor and Alex Williams, TNS co-founder and editor-in-chief.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Rob Zuber, chief technology officer of CircleCI about what it means for an organization to reach DevOps maturity.
"The good news is the kind of growth we see in DevOps organizations of all kinds is compounded: the more skills and processes teams put in place, the more ready they become to handle the issues of scale and increasing complexity that face them down the road as they grow," Zuber wrote in part 1 of his contributed series on The New Stack. DevOps helps teams get more productive, and then helps them gracefully handle the growth that stems from that productivity. This is what we mean by DevOps maturity."
Later in the show we also discuss news coming from the O'Reilly Software Architecture conference, held in New York this week.
For this week's episode, we speak with Rich Adams, a senior engineer of security and incident response at PagerDuty. A few weeks back, PagerDuty released as open source the documentation for how organizations can set up a process for responding to incidents, including the establishment of a command center and the designation of an incident response leader. The guidelines are based on the company's own standard operating procedures for handling a crisis.
In the second half of the show, we spoke to Kong co-founder Marco Palladino, about the end of what calls "software tribalism," as open source moves the industry to a hybrid world driven by developers, not software stack vendors.
For this week's episode, we speak with Sonya Koptyev, who is the director of evangelism for cloud native security provider Twistlock, which is holding a webinar/conference, Cloud Native Live this Monday, on Jan. 29.
There are a lot of great speakers on this day-long event. In the main keynote, Pivotal’s Dormain Drewitz will share secrets of enterprises who have successfully adopted the best principles of digital transformation. CI/CD expert Brice Fernandes will explain the GitOps model, identifying best practices and tools to use on this emerging practice. Other speakers include Priyanka Sharma, director of cloud native alliances at GitLab and Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
For this week's episode, we're speaking with Emily Freeman, a software engineer and cloud advocate at Microsoft, about the role of developer relations in developer marketing. Freeman wrote on her personal blog late last year about the role of developer relations, otherwise known as devrel, in software engineering. Developer relations roles have become more popular at large enterprises and the major cloud providers. We recently noticed Amazon Web Services advertising a raft of new developer relations openings focused on serverless and the Azure team alone has 15 advocate roles open. But the position has taken a bit of heat, of late, among a vocal group of Twitter critics. So Emily is here to help clarify what devrel is all about and why you might just want to thank the next one you see.
In the second half of the show, we’ll review our top stories for the week, including Mary Branscombe’s article this week on HTTP/3. When HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol, was invented, the needs were pretty clear — to ship Web pages quickly and reliably from servers to end clients, which back in the early 1990s, was always a home computer. As the Web grew and spread onto other platforms, such as mobile devices, and took on new formats, such as streaming video, the packet-switching technology started to hit its limits.
This week on The New Stack Context, our weekly news wrapup podcast, we spoke Paul Dix, founder and chief technology officer of InfluxData, about why time series databases are needed now.
The New Stack sponsor InfluxData launched InfluxDB, an open source time series platform, in 2013. Since then, the software has had millions of downloads, built an expanding list of enterprise customers, and fostered a growing community. InfluxData CMO Mark Herring writes on The New Stack this week that most data is best understood in a time dimension, so the time series space is really just getting started. Paul spoke with us about why this is the case, and also shared some info about the company's new query language for time series data, called Flux, as well.
In the second half of the show, we’ll review our top stories for the week and discuss Exoscale's Container Stack, a conference all about doing DevOps with Kubernetes which will be held in Zurich on Jan. 30-31.
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a weekly wrapup of the hottest news in scalable IT development and deployment. This week we’re talk with Essence Boayue, a full-stack engineer in training at the Holberton School for software engineering, as well as Max Johnson, a former Holberton student who is now a DevOps engineer at conversational AI provider Pypestream.
Boayue and Johnson have been investigating the meaning of "cloud native DevOps" for The New Stack in a set contributed articles. Boayue's post discusses roles and responsibilities of cloud native DevOps engineers. And check back next Friday to read Johnson's post, to be posted next Friday, on how applications built to run and scale in the cloud need to be managed in a completely new way.
We talk with Boayue and Johnson about their own DevOps journeys, what cloud native DevOps is and some of the roles and responsibilities of DevOps in building and maintaining cloud native applications. We also chat about the approach that Holberton takes in training the next generation of full-stack engineers.
This week on TNS Context, our weekly news wrap-up podcast, we speak with our technology culture reporter David Cassel, who has been filing stories each weekend about the weirder cultural edges of technology and the Internet. If you've read the story about Jeri Ellsworth’s home-brewed chips, the troubled legacy of ‘God’s Lonely Programmer’ Terry Davis, or the origins of grep, then you've joined Cassel in his travels across the cybersphere.
Then, later in the show, we discuss the general availability of the Kubernetes kubeadm tool, which the creators hope will help standardize the way Kubernetes provisions clusters.
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, along with TNS Founder Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
This week on Context we talk with Tom Wilkie, VP of product, at Grafana Labs, which just announced a new open source log aggregation tool for Kubernetes called Loki. Unlike other log aggregation tools, instead of indexing the full text of the logs, Loki indexes only the metadata and follows the same service discovery technology as Prometheus.
"A lot of systems don't have that metadata and they're really powerful for finding content in the logs, but finding where those logs came from and when they were generated, maybe what host and what version of the software, that's really where we've put the focus. The same as you can with Prometheus," Wilkie said.
Loki has already grabbed the community's attention, appearing at no. 1 on Hacker News the day after it was annnounced and receiving more than 2,000 stars on GitHub. In this podcast, Wilkie talks with Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, and Libby Clark, editorial director at The New Stack, from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Seattle.
"We think this is super powerful because it's going to be much easier, much more cost effective to run, much easier to operate than Elastic clusters." Wilkie said.
Later in the show, we give our takeaways from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. The New Stack livestreamed our podcasts from the show, held numerous pancake breakfasts and published a lot of news.
This week we’re talking with Joel Speed, a cloud infrastructure engineer at Pusher who’s been helping build its internal Kubernetes platform. Joel wrote a contributed post for us this week about how to solve Kubernetes configuration woes with a custom controller, so we’ll talk to him first about that.
Later in the show, we talk with TNS managing editor Joab Jackson and TNS editor-in-chief Alex Williams about what we’re expecting from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Seattle next week. The New Stack have two pancake breakfasts and a full schedule of podcasts and livestreams, so visit our web site or follow us on Twitter @thenewstack next week for live updates from KubeCon.
This week The New Stack hits the road again, hitting two conferences in Las Vegas. TNS managing editor Joab Jackson calls in from Amazon Web Services' annual user conference, AWS Re:Invent, which brought a plethora of new services and features.
Most notably, the cloud giant introduced two new technologies to further integrate serverless into other cloud-based IT operations, lambda Layers and the Lambda Runtime API. Lambda Layers provides a way to centrally manage code and data so that it can be shared across multiple functions. And the Lambda Runtime API provides a simple interface to use any programming language, or a specific language version, within Lambda. This allows users to bring in other programming languages. Already, partners have developed packages to run code written in Rust, C++, Erlang and even Cobol to run Lambda. And through Layers, companies are offering their monitoring and security services, including Datadog, IOPipe, Epsagon and NodeSource.
Welcome to The New Stack Context podcast where today we will be discussing the release of Semaphore 2.0 tool for continuous delivery on Kubernetes. We’ll also be discussing yet another hot acquisition — this time it’s VMware announcing plans to acquire Heptio from two original Kubernetes creators at Google. Then later in the show we’ll share our top podcast and articles on the site.
Our guest this week is Marko Anastasov, co-founder at Rendered Text, who wrote about the company's Semaphore 2.0 product launch this week on The New Stack. Anastasov explained a bit about how Semaphore works as well as the challenges in integrating CI/CD systems.
In this week's episode we will be discussing the news about IBM acquiring Red Hat for $34 billion, with special guests Ritesh Patel, co-founder at Nirmata, and Benjamin Ball, TNS marketing director and native of Raleigh North Carolina, corporate headquarters of Red Hat.
Every once in a while, an acquisition comes along with the potential of drastically changing the business landscape. Think back to Oracle buying Sun Microsystems, or, more recently, Microsoft buying GitHub. IBM's purchase of Red Hat could very well be in that category. IBM is buying Red Hat for $34 billion, a 64 percent premium over Red Hats closing price last Friday. This event is significant in several different ways, not to mention that this is the largest software only acquisition till date.
This week on The New Stack Context, our weekly news wrap-up podcast, we take a look at some of the results of a survey we did for our newly-released eBook on serverless technologies. We also discuss All Things Open, a conference held earlier this week in Raleigh North Carolina, that covered a range of open source technologies.
To discuss our survey, we invited TNS analyst Lawrence Hecht as a guest. The TNS eBook presents the results of our original research on serverless adoption trends and use cases. It also provides a high-level overview of what organizations should consider as they build, deploy and manage serverless functions and applications.
This week on TNS Context, the editorial team catches up on some events we’ve attended recently. TNS correspondent TC Currie is here to talk about GitHub Universe, which was held this week. We also have TNS Founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams to talk about Cloud Foundry Summit Europe and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson to chat about Node+JS Interactive in Vancouver. Both of those events were held last week.
Last week on the podcast we talked with IBM's Jason McGee about some cloud news at the Cloud foundry conference. But we didn’t get to hear much about what else happened. Williams gives us some of the highlights of what else happened at the show, including some great conversations about the Cloud Foundry BOSH lifecycle management tool. Currie discusses GitHub's first big user conference since since the Microsoft acquisition was announced in June, including all the buzz around the repository's new workflow tool, GitHub Actions. Then later in the show, Jackson will tell us about some of the TNS stories he gathered from Node+JS Interactive.
IBM is building out its portfolio of cloud services in order to offer cloud native capabilities with higher degrees of security and isolation for the enterprise, combined with the user experience of public cloud such as self-service provisioning, pay-as-you-go pricing and elasticity. So this week on Context we talked with Jason McGee, an IBM Fellow, and VP and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform about IBM’s new enterprise cloud services which include the Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment announced this week.
McGee and TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams recorded live from Cloud Foundry Summit in Basel, Switzerland, where TNS hosted a day of podcasting and a pancake breakfast on topics such as BOSH and Kubernetes; integrating data services into Cloud Foundry; the importance of allies in advancing inclusivity; and the work companies and projects in the cloud native space are doing to improve the developer experience.
Then later in the show, TNS managing editor Joab Jackson tells us about some of the top stories on the site this week, including a story by TNS correspondent Susan Hall about Pulsar, a data streaming tool and Kafka alternative that just reached top-level status at the Apache Software Foundation.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we spoke with Matthew Fornaciari, Gremlin chief technology officer and co-founder, about a new feature in the Gremlin's chaos engineering package that allows developers to apply resilience testing to serverless serving. Gremlin is on the forefront of chaos engineering, the practice of hobbling different components within an infrastructure to that that infrastructure's resilience against unplanned failure.
The feature comes from the company’s new Application-Level Fault Injection(ALFI) technology, which provides a way to do failure testing at the application level by inserting breakpoints into the developer’s code itself. The software works with all major serverless platforms, including AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.
We also discuss Gremlin's first-ever ChaosConf, held last month in San Francisco, where practitioners discussed the latest ideas in chaos engineering, or, as Walmart Labs’ Vilas Veeraraghavan called it during his presentation, "resilience engineering."
Later in the show, we discuss some of the week's stories on The New Stack, including a new tool from Pulumi, called KubeSpy, that gives developers more insight into the status of a Kubernetes object as it is being deployed.
This week on the TNS Context podcast, we talk with Alex Peay, SaltStack vice president of product, and Gary Richmond, a SaltStack product manager, about automated security compliance scanning and event-based orchestration. Also joining us today is TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Jackson was in Salt Lake City this month covering SaltConf, where Peay and Richmond spoke about event-driven automation and orchestration using SaltStack Enterprise. The company's configuration management and remote execution engine is a stepping stone for automated IT operations, offering a way to automate the checking and remediation of desired configurations. We discuss the promise of automated security remediation with Peay, and venture into event-driven orchestration with Richmond,
Then later in the show, we discussed some of the top stories on the site this week, including a story by TNS correspondent Jennifer Riggins on Linus Torvalds’ most recent apology and decision to take some time off of Linux kernel development to work on his people skills.
On this episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we’re recapping the Serverless Days event we attended in Portland last week and discussing the 2.0 release of the Linkerd service mesh project. Joining us today is TNS managing editor Joab Jackson, TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams.
Williams and I attended Serverless Days in Portland this week where The New Stack was a media sponsor, as well as co-hosted the after party with our sponsor Stackery. In this episode, we discuss what we learned about serverless trends from that event, including the latest definition of serverless, what serverless means for DevOps, monitoring and security.
Then later in the show, we discuss some of the top stories on the site this week, including Buoyant's release of Linkerd 2.0, the open source service mesh project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that was just completely rearchitected with a lighter, more nimble codebase.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast we’re talking with Emily Freeman, the new CloudOps advocate for Microsoft about PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco this week. Also joining us today is TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Forbes just declared the incident response company PagerDuty to be “the new cloud unicorn” after the company announced an additional $90 million in funding. This new round gives PagerDuty a billion-dollar-plus valuation and puts it on par with other cloud tools like Slack and GitHub. So, we saw that this was creating quite a bit of energy at PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco this week.
This week, we have a wrap-up discussion with TNS contributor Scott M. Fulton about the VMWorld 2018, in which the giant of virtual machine software is taking bold steps into Kubernetes and containers, through a managed Kubernetes offering and also with its sister company's Pivotal PKS managed container service. The company is pitching its NSX virtual networking software as the basis of container operations in the cloud. But the package's automation capabilities leaves some network administrators wondering if they will have jobs in the years to come. "When infrastructure becomes truly programmable, who — or what — will be responsible for it? More to the point, will it be someone other than the people in charge of it now?" Fulton writes.
In the second half of the show, we discuss what the phrase "cloud native DevOps" means. Next week we are kicking off a series of articles on setting up and deploying cloud native DevOps, and Fulton offers some insight into this topic as well.
Today on The New Stack Context podcast, we talk with Chris Aniszczyk, co-founder of the TODO Group and Chief Technology Officer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) about the results of our recent open source program management survey. We also talk about WS02's new cloud native programming language, Ballerina.
Joining Context host TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark for this episode is TNS Founder Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
This week, we released the results of a survey on how companies are managing open source software and the benefits and challenges of formal policies and programs. The survey was sponsored by The Linux Foundation, and specifically the TODO Group, which is a professional organization for open source managers.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
This week, we recorded the podcast live at the Sensu Summit, which took place live in Portland. Joining us this week are Google Developer Advocate Kelsey Hightower and Sensu CEO Caleb Hailey, to discuss the challenges of microservices monitoring. Many traditional monitoring tools, such as Nagios, or even Amazon Web Services' CloudWatch, fail to capture the full picture of what is going on within a system, the panel agreed.
This week, Hailey wrote a post for TNS how Sensu can automate the process of collecting sensor data from multiple tools, and multiple formats. "Hybrid cloud monitoring becomes a lot easier to reason about when everything is a 'workflow.' It’s not only easier, but the possibilities for what you can monitor (and how) are virtually endless," he wrote.
This week on The New Stack Context, we speak with our security correspondent Lucian Constantin about what he saw at the recent trio of security conferences held in Las Vegas last week, BlackHat, DEF CON, and Security B-Sides. Turns out, industrial control systems — such as medical devices and in-car computation systems — are still quite vulnerable to malicious attacks, Constantin told our host this week, TNS founder Alex Williams.
We also spoke about the increased scrutiny that authentication is getting in server-side software, as well as a new open source tool released by Netflix, called CloudTrail, that can detect when credentials are a breach on AWS systems (Netflix's cloud provider). Keep an eye out for Constantin's posts from these events on this website.
On this week's episode, we talk with technology evangelist Ravi Lachhman from AppDynamics, a sponsor of The New Stack, about the rise of software development kits for container orchestrators. Also joining us today are TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams.
Lachhman wrote a post for us this week about packaging your applications for delivery in this new, complicated cloud-native world where clients and end users want choice as to where and how to install your product.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we discuss the 1.0 release of the Istio service mesh as well as a new private container registry project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation called Harbor. We also speak with TNS editor-in-chief Alex Williams about the ServerlessConf, which was held this week in San Francisco.
The CNCF is a sponsor of The New Stack and it's been busy assembling open source projects to create a full cloud-native stack. Until recently that stack was missing an essential piece — namely, a container registry. This week VMware donated its open source container registry to fill out this part of the stack.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast we talk with Pivotal Director of Technical Marketing Dan Baskette and Pivotal Senior Staff Engineer Mark Fisher about Knative, which is a new tool Google and a few other partners such as Pivotal built to help developers build functions on top of Kubernetes. Also joining us in this episode is TNS San Francisco correspondent Alex Handy, who spoke about some of the other news from this week's Google Next 2018 conference.
Knative is an open source software layer which turns Kubernetes into a runtime for serverless functions. Google announced the project and released it on GitHub this week — and it seems to be the news of the week out of Google Next. Baskette contributed a post to the site this week, offering all the technical details of Knative. The New Stack sponsor Pivotal has provided the eventing model from its own Project Riff to Knative and is building its upcoming Pivotal Function Service on Knative.
Google revealed a range of enhancements to its cloud services, ranging from automated machine learning to a version of the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that can work on-prem. It all shows that Google may finally be getting serious about serving the enterprise market, Handy noted later in the podcast.
This week we spoke with our San Francisco correspondent Alex Handy about containerizing Java applications. The Google Cloud Platform recently released Jib, a new open-source container image builder for Java developers. Google says that Jib “does not require you to write a Dockerfile or have docker installed, and it is directly integrated into [the] Maven and Gradle,” Java build tools. Jib comes with many of the cloud-native build-tool features you’d expect, including incremental builds, a configuration-as-code approach, and reproducible build images for faster deployments and rollbacks.
We spoke with Handy about why you’d even want to run a Java application in a container and the recent updates in Java 10 that aim to reduce the challenges that come with CPU and memory usage when Java runs in a container.
Then, later in the show, we previewed O’Reilly’s open source conference, OSCON, which is back in Portland this year. TNS editor-in-chief Alex Williams and I will be at OSCON next week, attending sessions and talking to folks on the ground. We spoke about what we’re looking forward to at that event. And you can catch our livestream on The New Stack Founder Alex Williams's Twitter feed (@alexwilliams), next Tuesday and Wednesday.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
For this Context, we talk with two data scientists from Pivotal, who write this week about the pros and cons of using Apache Spark for running data science workloads at scale. Apache Spark is an in-memory data analytics engine that is wildly popular with data scientists because of its speed, scalability and ease-of-use. Plus, it happens to be an ideal workload to run on Kubernetes, the Pivotal team writes.
We spoke with them about the pros and cons of Apache Spark, what data science workloads they’ve been experimenting with lately at Pivotal, and how application architectures are evolving, in general, to better support data storage and processing at scale.
Then, later in the show, we'll go over the highlights from his day at QCon developer conference in New York, including microservices debugging and how the Envoy service mesh is preparing to work with Kafka.
TNS editor-in-chief Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson co-hosted this episode of Context.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
On this week's episode we speak with GridGain CEO Abe Kleinfeld who writes this week on The New Stack about how in-memory computing is helping many organizations solve their speed and scale challenges. In the past three decades Kleinfeld has led several companies through successful liquidity events including three mergers and two IPOs. And since he joined GridGain in 2013 the company has averaged triple-digit annual sales growth and been ranked the second fastest growing private company in Silicon Valley.
GridGain has an open source in-memory computing platform built on Apache Ignite. In memory computing (IMC) is seeing surging adoption, as Kleinfeld writes on The New Stack this week. IMC technology itself is also evolving. A memory-centric architecture offers greater flexibility and improved ROI for a range of data-intensive use cases. This has the potential to further accelerate the adoption of IMC.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
This week on Context we’re talking with The New Stack correspondent Mark Boyd who writes this week about the business process and cultural decisions that play into building a serverless application architecture.
Serverless computing, including Functions as a Service, is a rapidly evolving technology that is seeing enterprise adoption on par with containers among companies that run their applications in the public cloud. And experts and visionaries in distributed systems believe serverless is the future of application infrastructure.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/ at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
Microsoft announced on Monday that it was acquiring GitHub. And that’s all the Internet could talk about for a few days. TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson wrote a piece for us summarizing the acquisition and some of that initial Internet reaction. And Scott Fulton examined a Plan B for developers who may be nervous about projects pulling out of GitHub and leaving a trail of broken dependencies.
And now that we’ve had some time to sit with it a bit we are starting to understand some of the other, longer term implications that this deal will have for developers.
This week on Context we’re talking with Alexis Richardson, founder and CEO of Weaveworks. As the originator and leader of the GitOps movement, Alexis has a unique perspective on this. So we’ll talk with him in the first half of the show about the relationship between GitOps and GitHub and what Microsoft could (maybe) do to make life easier for developers in the cloud.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we delve into the latest project from our resident hardware hacker, Dr. Torq, offer a summary of last week's ChefConf conference.
Last week, TNS Editor Alex Williams attended ChefConf in Chicago where he hosted a day of podcasting. We’ll hear his top takeaways from that event, including the latest on InSpec, Chef’s compliance automation tool. The company just announced an integration with their its version of Automate - the company’s automation platform. Williams says InSpec is really innovative and could be big for the Chef’s cloud native strategy going forward.
We also spoke with Dr. Torq, who has been writing for us regularly about his Raspberry Pi and machine learning project called Hedley, the robotic skull. This week he’s teaching Hedley how to talk with a combination of Arduino code and a standard, hobby-size servo motor. The goal is to eventually use a pre-recorded audio file to play through a speaker while sending data to the Arduino to move the jaw. And he can now speak into a microphone and the robot’s jaw will follow his voice fairly well.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies and at-scale application development, and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
Joining us this week is TNS guest contributor Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, vice president of product management at Maxta. Sreenivasamurthy wrote a guest post for TNS this week on the differences between software-defined storage (SDS) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). While both solutions “software-define” the infrastructure and abstract storage from the underlying hardware, there are important distinctions, he says. It comes down to how you want to manage your storage. Are you a storage expert? Or do you want more of a hands-off approach to storage?
In the second half of the show, TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson gives us the highlights from OpenStack Summit which took place in Vancouver this week. We discussed Mark Shuttleworth’s controversial keynote comparing OpenStack vendors. There were also a boatload of project and product updates, including two CI/CD projects: AT&T’s Airship and the OpenStack project’s own CI tool, Zuul.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/ at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
Hacker News and the Twitterverse were alight this week with discussion of Datadog engineer Jason Moiron’s blog post titled “Is Kubernetes Too Complicated?” This article hints at a Kubernetes backlash afoot, with ongoing concerns about its complexity. We speak with TNS correspondent Scott Fulton, who has a TNS article summarizing these issues.
In the second half of the show, we’ll talk with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson about his story on TNS about how Facebook keeps its website snappy for billions of users worldwide. There are so many static packages that a page could use that it would be impossible to download them all at once. Yet all the right elements must be downloaded to the browser within a few seconds. We discuss how they’ve solved this problem with machine learning, and the engineering team they’ve built up in New York.
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we are all about the git open source version control software. Last Friday, TNS correspondent Michelle Gienow has kicked off a series git, with an introduction to git for everyone. This week, she continues that work with an introduction to its most popular online hosted version, GitHub.
She writes, “life as a software developer is much more social and collaborative than the stereotypes would have non-coders believe — at times, even frustratingly so. Thankfully, there is git... to bring collaboration with project team members right back where it belongs: on the command line.”
This week on The New Stack Context, the editorial team recorded live from Copenhagen, Denmark, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon -- the CNCF’s premiere event focused on Kubernetes and other cloud-native open source projects including Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd and others. The New Stack managing editor, Joab Jackson, editor-in-chief Alex Williams, and Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate at the CNCF, discuss the latest with the Kubernetes community after the recent release of Kubernetes 1.10.
Earlier this week, we hosted a pancake breakfast and podcast discussion on the CNCF's first security project called SPIFFE, which is aiming to build a secure identity framework for cloud-native production environments. And we hosted two days of podcasting and livestreaming from the show floor, sponsored by Red Hat and the CNCF.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_ld1PoOiv0s
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/ at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
Next week, the New Stack editorial team will be traveling to Copenhagen next for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon which is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s premiere event focused on Kubernetes and other cloud native open source projects including Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd and others.
On Tuesday we’ll be at the Red Hat Commons event on machine learning. Thursday we’ll be hosting a pancake breakfast and podcast discussion on the new CNCF project called SPIFFE, which is aiming to build a secure identity framework for cloud-native production environments. And we’ll host two days of podcasting and livestreaming from the show floor where we’ll be talking to companies such as Red Hat (which is sponsoring us), Aqua Security, IBM, Google, Booking.com, VMware and many others.
So for this week's podcast, we chatted with Red Hat's director of OpenShift product strategy, Brian Gracely. about what we might expect to see at Kubecon. We' also spoke with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson about how SUSE's Cloud Application Platform uses Kubernetes to manage a containerized distribution of Cloud Foundry.
The New Stack editorial team is reporting live this week from Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston. We hosted a pancake breakfast and podcast discussion on the intersection of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes this morning. And we’ve been hosting a day of podcasting and livestreaming from the show floor where we’ve talked to companies such as Dynatrace, Pivotal, Snyk, Grape Up, and many others.
In this episode of Context we’re going to have a roundtable discussion about the news from Cloud Foundry Summit and some of our top takeaways so far from the keynotes and sessions.
But first we’re going to bring on Jennifer Kotzen, senior product marketing manager at SUSE to talk about their new Cloud Foundry distribution, how it integrates with Kubernetes and how it’s the first to package up Cloud Foundry into containers.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z7IxIDYMoF0
On this week's episode of The New Stack Context, TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson was reporting live from AnacondaCon in Austin, Texas. He covered the annual data science conference for Anaconda users and came back with some insights on Anaconda and machine learning in the enterprise. We’ll hear more about that in the second half of the show.
But first, we discuss TNS Correspondent Scott Fulton's article about how Kubernetes is beginning to make it into the telco industry’s stack. Scott talked to Randy Bias, Juniper’s vice president for cloud technology and strategy, and one of the long-time key figures in the containerization movement. He says the time may be imminent for telecommunications providers to get behind their counterparts in the data center, and adopt Kubernetes as their orchestrator for network functions.
This week on The New Stack Context we talk with CircleCI CEO Jim Rose about a three-part series of posts he just wrote for The New Stack about the metrics that the company has found are useful for measuring an organization’s DevOps performance. The series is full of lots of data and graphics to help explain some standard metrics like mainline branch stability, deploy time and deploy frequency. Rose spoke to us about the report CircleCI put together, how they came up with those metrics, and how they can be useful for DevOps teams.
Also, this week, TNS managing editor Joab Jackson discusses Camunda, a company out of Berlin that provides workflow automation for developers building microservices-based applications. In an article this week, he offered details on their enterprise platform and open source project, called Cockpit, which allow developers to coordinate and oversee the complex operations of multiple components, or microservices.
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, along with TNS founder Alex Williams.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
This week we start with news from Docker, that its founder and former CTO Solomon Hykes has announced he’s leaving the company. Alex Handy first reported that Hykes stepped down as CTO back in November. At the time he said he was staying on as VP of the board of directors. Then this week Hykes published a post on the Docker blog announcing he’s leaving the company he started 10 years ago. Alex Handy has the story for us again.
Also this week, we discuss Nvidia’s AI and deep learning event, the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson, who attended the event. The New Stack is ramping up our machine learning coverage, especially as it relates to infrastructure automation and developer tooling. You, our readers and listeners told us in a survey back in December that AI is one of your top 5 areas of interest this year and so we are diving in -- starting with GTC.
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, with the help of TNS founder Alex Williams.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/ at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
This week, we’re joined by Joel Speed, a DevOps engineer at Pusher who is working to build their internal Kubernetes Platform. Speed has been writing a series of articles for The New Stack recently about how Kubernetes handles authentication and how to create a single sign-on experience for Kubernetes users. The team at Pusher has developed its own in-house single sign-on solution for their Kubernetes users that also offers more fine-grained access control. Speed spoke to us about the SSO set up at Pusher and how it came about.
We also spoke to TNS founder Alex Williams about The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit, which Williams attended a few weeks back. He recorded several interviews at the event, which we’ve been publishing this week on our other podcasts, TNS Analysts and TNS Makers.
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, along with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
This week, we’re joined by TNS correspondent Michelle Gienow, TNS Research Director Lawrence Hecht and TNS founder Alex Williams. This week, Gienow published the second article in our new weekly feature series focused on microservices. We’ll be covering cloud native microservices from start to finish for the next few months — starting with some of the things that organizations should consider when they’re weighing the decision to move to a microservices architecture. Michelle shares some of what she learned so far about why companies are adopting microservices architectures.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a weekly podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
This week we're speaking with Katy Farmer, Developer Advocate at InfluxData, who has been writing a regular series for The New Stack on time-series data.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies and at-scale application development, as well as look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
On this week's episode, TNS security correspondent Lucian Constantin joins us to talk about how companies can and should handle security reports. His latest story on this subject is based on a recent survey of 1,700 bug bounty participants on HackerOne. The survey revealed that one in four ethical hackers have had cases where they eventually gave up on reporting vulnerabilities because the affected vendors didn't respond to the issues. And this wasn't because of a lack of trying to contact those organizations. Constantin explained how your company sets up a good vulnerability reporting policy so you’ll learn about vulnerabilities from ethical hackers first, before customer data end up for sale on the underground market.
Then, later in the episode, managing editor Joab Jackson talked about the O'Reilly Software Architecture conference he attended in New York this week. He heard a lot about event-driven microservices and got a preview of Camunda, a workflow engine for coordinating complex arrangements of microservices.
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, along with TNS Founder Alex Williams.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
This week, from a snowy Portland Oregon, we spoke with Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS. Ellis has hired on to VMware to work full time on the OpenFaaS serverless software, as part of VMware’s new Open Source Technology Center. Until now, Ellis has been working on OpenFaaS in his spare time while holding down a day job as an application developer at ADP. We spoke with him about why he made the decision to join VMware and what it means for the OpenFaaS community.
We also discuss Chef’s latest update to its security compliance and automation tool InSpec, and spoke with The New Stack Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams about a three-part New Stack Makers podcast series we just wrapped up with HPE that focuses on some of the challenges enterprise IT and developers have in moving to new cloud native architectures.
The New Stack Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this week's edition of Context, along with The New Stack Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context podcast, where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.
This week we were busy reporting from events in New York, starting with Oracle’s Cloud Day event on Monday where he brought us an update on the cloud provider’s autonomous services. On Tuesday he also attended InfluxDays, a time series data and application conference, and he’ll give us the highlights from that event as well.
This week we are still talking about the CoreOS acquisition by Red Hat last week. TNS contributor Scott M. Fulton had the chance to talk with CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi and Red Hat’s vice president for OpenShift Ashesh Badani, for a story on TNS. He got the lowdown on what “may” happen to products like Tectonic and Container Linux now that they’re part of Red Hat’s portfolio. “May” being the keyword here.
The New Stack also launched a free ebook this week on Kubernetes Deployment and Security Patterns which helps ops teams evaluate Kubernetes based on their organizations’ needs and how they manage workloads. The size of your organization and the number of containers you deploy really determine the challenges you face with a Kubernetes deployment, for example. We’ll dive into some of the data and share what we learned.
Download our latest EBook, Kubernetes Deployment and Security Patterns free of charge at: https://thenewstack.io/ebooks/kubernetes/kubernetes-deployment-and-security-patterns/
This week on The New Stack Context weekly news wrap podcast, we talk with TNS European correspondent Mark Boyd about his fascinating story on how serverless architectures are turning developers into accountants. Or, at least, making cost a central consideration of how applications are designed.
We also chat about the recently announced acquisition of CoreOS by enterprise Linux giant Red Hat. We talk about Red Hat's acquisition strategy, how CoreOS' container focus fits into Red Hat's open source enterprise software stack, what the deal means for Docker, and, most importantly, the fate of Brian Redbeard's beard.
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode and was joined by TNS founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
This week on The New Stack Context weekly newswrap podcast, we talk with with TNS San Francisco correspondent Alex Handy about a fascinating story he wrote on a startup in Israel called Codota that’s applied machine-learning to the concept of pair programming. It's developing a coding tool that would essentially substitute a machine for one of the two developers in a pair-programming team. The software is using machine-learning to augment and complement the abilities of the developer.
We also discussed BeyondCorp, which is Google’s approach to enterprise security. The company has ditched VPNs in favor of the concept of “zero-trust” or “perimeter-less” security. Our recent article about BeyondCorp has seen a lively discussion on Hacker News.
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode and was joined by TNS founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
This week on the New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Jenny Gao, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, about the suitability of serverless technologies to the enterprise. We explore the future of serverless and whether it’s feasible, or maybe even likely, for companies to just skip over containers altogether and go directly to a serverless architecture.
We also talk about the evolution of “instant operations” in the form of voice commands. Can ops teams run their day-to-day duties, coordinate incident response and receive status updates using a Siri-like virtual assistant? PagerDuty thinks so and they have a name for this next wave of digital operations: “VoiceOps.”
TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, and was joined by TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.
We're rolling into 2018 with many unanswered questions: Will Meltdown and the Spectre CPU flaws turn our highly-tuned cloud-native applications into performance sludge cakes? How many new JavaScript front-end frameworks will we have to learn this year? And what does 'immutability' actually mean, anyhow? So many questions.
Fortunately, we have all the answers, in this newest edition of The New Stack Context podcast, our weekly roundup and discussion of the hottest news stories about all matters cloud-native and scalable computing. This week, our regular TNS hosts — Editorial Director Libby Clark, Managing Editor Joab Jackson and Publisher/Founder Alex Williams — are joined by Michelle Gienow, a front-end web developer who writes the Code N00b column for The New Stack and covers programming news for us.
We discuss the fallout from the Meltdown/Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, as well as the present state of JavaScript and if it could become the programming language of choice for cloud-native operations.
There is no “normal” for a microservices environment. And if a groundbreaking November 2016 white paper, produced by a team of six researchers from the University of Messina, the U.K.’s Newcastle University, and IBM Research, is to be taken at face value, perhaps such a state of equilibrium may never be attained. Every data center, the researchers write, has unique operating requirements. Once microservices are deployed there, the configurations they require become not only unique, but baked into their respective systems.
“Moreover, these microservices have both control and dataflow dependencies,” the white paper reads. “The challenges exist in dealing with heterogeneous configurations of microservices and cloud datacenter resources driven by heterogeneous performance requirements. . . the mapping of microservices to datacenters demands selecting bespoke configurations from an abundance of possibilities, 5 which is impossible to resolve manually.”
So if your job is to monitor the behavior of your data center’s microservices environment using an applications performance management (APM) platform, what is it that you’re looking for? When will you know if the behavior of certain services, or the system as a whole, is out of the ordinary? And once you’ve determined what “ordinary” is, for the place and time where you work, how long do you expect that to remain the case before it changes completely?
“With an APM system, in practice, it’s a Web app. So a request comes from an end user, it travels over the open Internet, it hits some servers, and then it’s fed through to a database, where a record is updated and the request returns a response, which follows the same path back to the user,” explained Alexis Richardson, the CEO of WeaveWorks, in an interview with The New Stack for an edition of the Context podcast.
“In a cloud-native system, the architecture is not particularly so simple,” Richardson continued. “Maybe fifty microservices cooperate and deliver one response to one end user. That’s an extreme example. Or maybe one microservice calls another. So if you drew it as a picture on a board, the request would ping-pong around, like a 1980s Breakout console game, until eventually returning to the user, instead of having a straightforward, up/down, request/response. Tracking all of that is very different than tracking in a typical APM setting.”
WeaveWorks produces a commercial version of the Prometheus monitoring platform, called Cortex. Richardson told us he agrees that any APM platform vendor that says it can academically extend its agent-based monitoring system from a client/server to a microservices model, is stretching things a bit.
“An APM vendor that grew up building support for Web apps, now claiming that it can do the same level of support for any other kind of application, is frankly a pretty hopeful — or maybe hopeless — remark,” he said.
Yet how realistic is such an assessment, given the fact that APM platforms are being extended into microservices, and customers are experiencing some results?
For this edition of The New Stack: Context, produced by Scott Fulton and Luke Lefler, we conducted interviews with:
Alexis Richardson, CEO, WeaveWorks
Loris Degioanni, CEO, Sysdig
Jim Gochee, Chief Product Officer, New Relic
The ideal of a technology ecosystem is that the people who benefit most from it — presumably, the customers — share the fruits of their labor with the producers who maintain this system. Both the suppliers and the demanders benefit each other, and in so doing, exchange roles from time to time. It’s the phenomenon we first saw with the Apple II in the late 1970s — the first community-driven economy devoted to a commercial computing product.
A viable ecosystem relies principally upon the exchange of a kind of common currency: benevolence. This virtue typically thrives in the absence of ill will.
Yet it’s hard for a producer to maintain the right level of benevolence among the members of its ecosystem community, while at the same time defending its own interests against competitors. Just ask Docker. What’s more, contributors become skeptical whenever a company’s self-interests become visible.
Still, such a slip of one’s slip is virtually inevitable. That’s why companies pre-empt their embarrassments by preaching the gospel of platform agnosticism. We’re completely open, says a project like Cloud Foundry or a company like ClusterHQ, to whatever the market decides.
When the market is in control of the ecosystem’s value structure, as Intel founder Gordon Moore discovered, the only way to stay current is to innovate at such a rapid pace as to justify the product’s plummeting market value. In the open source business model, value applies to support. If the value of support declines too much, the business falters. So the objective for each vendor becomes making sure its model is the one being supported — often in lieu of all others. What started out as a Platonic symposium of shared interests becomes a Darwinian scrimmage for survival. As my mother often put it, “To Eat His Own.”
Just ask ClusterHQ. Or, actually, you can’t. It shut its doors in December 2016.
Is a modern IT ecosystem is centered around, and driven by, vendors any more? Or have customers become the ones in charge?
That’s the subject of our first edition of The New Stack: Context for 2017, produced by Scott Fulton and Luke Lefler.. Our guests for this podcast are:
Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation
Alexis Richardson, CEO, WeaveWorks; TOC Chair, Cloud-Native Computing Foundation
Peng Zhao, Founder, Hyper.sh
I would use the term “trump card,” except that I don’t want to jinx anything. VMware holds a very high card in its portfolio of infrastructure resources: its installed base among enterprises. Its existing server virtualization platform is said to hold as high as 80% worldwide market share in terms of current sales. And as we’ve noted here before, some market analysts actually rate VMware as the leader in containerization, simply because its competitors in that space (you may have heard of Docker, for instance) have too few assets to bother examining them.
For a great many enterprises — as one survey reveals, nearly 9 in 10 — the container revolution stops at the boundaries of the virtual machine. In these environments, containers don’t seep into the infrastructure at all. So hyperscale — the type of environment one would need, arguably, to truly deploy applications as microservices — never actually happens there.
If it were up to VMware Chief Technology Strategy Officer Guido Appenzeller, and if architecture were the only factor under consideration, as he stated in an interview for this edition of The New Stack: Context, he would be running containers every day.
“Everybody’s running containers inside of VMs — pretty much everybody I talk to,” said Appenzeller. “I can’t recall a single instance where people are actually running it on bare metal.”
VMware would prefer not to stand in the way. However, it has clearly engineered a pair of options for expanding containerization (if not to hyperscale, then at least beyond a single VM) whose paths are channeled through one of its own principal products: the NSX network virtualization platform.
“I think the changes we will see in infrastructure, and the full automation of infrastructure, will be accelerated because of containerization technology,” admitted VMware VP Paul Fazzone, who heads NSX product management. “If you think about how quickly and easily a developer can spin up tens or hundreds of containers in an environment, and stitch them together into an application, that will push the envelope on how performant and how responsive the infrastructure will need to be.”
Fazzone went on to admit he believes that human beings should not stand in the way of progress here — that as long as barriers do exist to the implementation of containerization as automation tools, developers will find ways around those barriers.
So it isn’t as if VMware is trying to create some artificial barrier to entry, the way a certain other market share leader in a different market segment successfully did, up until the middle of the last decade. Moreover, it’s taking advantage of the natural barricade that already exists, supported by enterprises’ uncertainty around security, compliance, and interoperability. It’s cutting more than one path through that barricade. In an environment where analysts and advisors set the stage, so Docker may not even be a player, which path — if either — will enterprises choose?
It wasn’t all that long ago — not quite a year — that the leaders in the OpenStack community were openly discussing whether their platform should be expected to support both conventional and cloud-native workloads simultaneously. Some expressed their fear that customers were demanding an evolutionary path, and vendors may be answering demands for such a path, that the platform wasn’t intended to take — and that contributing developers didn’t want to follow.
And on the other side of the fence, the rapid rise of Docker led some prominent voices to declare the impending death of OpenStack.
Fast-forward to last August, when Markus Riedinger, a cloud architect for SAP — an OpenStack customer, not a producer — demonstrated how he and his team produced an automated, containerized, CI/CD-compatible OpenStack in their own enterprise. It seemed as though OpenStack’s own customers couldn’t compel the platform community to adapt to the path they wanted, so they took matters in their own hands.
How SAP accomplished this was not by staging Kubernetes through an OpenStack component, or alternately, by cramming OpenStack into a container. Rather, the team re-architected the division of labor in OpenStack among multiple containers, as though it were created that way to begin with. It deliberately separated operations along the control and data planes, to maintain that division. And it created redundancies along both planes as a way of accomplishing immutable operations.
“To clearly separate control and data,” Riedinger told attendees, “allows an independent, service-level objective for the data path compared to the control [path], which also implements independent processes and procedures to scale each of the aspects — the control and the data — separately, leading to extending and fixing and improving the existing model to operate the vendor gear. SAP is quite the classical organization… no self-developed hardware. And the existing operating model should be persisted, and just fixed and extended.”
Very cleverly, Riedinger’s team leveraged the concept of decoupled services to untangle all the OpenStack components that muddle each other in the typical enterprise, along SDN-style lines of control and data. This way, it’s never a case of whether the service level of the application is being met by the underlying layer of infrastructure. Rather, it’s as if OpenStack were architected as an SDN system from the very beginning.
SAP’s project may not be the first to successfully containerize OpenStack, but it may well be one of the first to be migrated fully into production.
The subject of open source customers using open source processes to openly make software work the way they need it to — rather than to suit the marketing requirements of vendors — is the subject of the latest edition of The New Stack: Context, produced by Scott Fulton and Luke Lefler.
“Serverless computing,” at the time of this writing, is an emerging ideal that’s past the embryonic stage, yet not quite fully formed. It has a variety of advocates, some of whom make more sense than others.
But what does the term “serverless” mean, exactly? We speak with two such advocates who put forth the most sensible cases thus far: Michael Hausenblas, a developer and developer advocate at Mesosphere, and author of a recent New Stack article entitled, “Making Sense of Serverless Computing”; and Chad Arimura, the CEO of Iron.io and a previous guest of our podcasts with Alex Williams.
Our conversations with Hausenblas and Arimura were separate, but they made much the same case: specifically, for eliminating the appearance of dependencies between software currently under development, and its underlying resources and infrastructure. If you remember the era where you turned on your personal computer, saw a “READY” prompt, and everything you’d ever need to reference was on a memory map — it’s like the modern evolution of that.
When we started the whole cloud-native development paradigm, it was with the idea that the cloud could mask the details of deployment and implementation from the developer. Then when we started the whole container orchestration business, it was with this notion that the developer was the person doing the deployment and implementation. Arimura and Hausenblas suggest that, if the details of software implementation can be condensed to a more basic form, a developer could conceivably produce a draft that meets a basic requirement of a service-level agreement. This way, an automated deployment pipeline could test its container, fail it or pass it, and in the latter case, re-attach the necessary details and deploy it to production.
Imagine an operator petitioning a developer for an app that performed a function whose performance rated, say, a 7 on a 10-point scale. The developer wouldn’t need to know why, just that the performance level sits about mid-way between average and maximum. It’s not so much “serverless,” therefore, as “less server-ish.” Maybe we should attach an asterisk to “serverless,” followed by a footnote: “May contain some traces of server.”
The bigger question, though, is whether this is really “DevOps.” That is to say, does server-less-ness suggest that developers and operations professionals collaborate, or just participate in the same pipeline?
Four years ago, the virtualization industry was blown wide open by the arrival of Docker — a format which made it possible to stage workloads and scale them without the overhead of VMware, Xen, or KVM virtual machines. Last year, Docker Inc. graciously donated its container standard to the Open Container Initiative, run by the Linux Foundation — a neutral governing party. The idea was to end all the bickering over what the container format should be. Instead, what’s happening is a fresh re-opening of the debate over why there should be just one.
“I think, a couple of years down the road, people are going to be talking less and less about containers, and people are going to be talking more and more about applications again,” said Ben Hindman, the founder and lead engineer of Mesosphere.
What a bank in New York City really wants, said Hindman, is the opportunity to test an application on its data center the same way one of its executives tries out an e-mail client on her laptop. If data center apps became more analogous to mobile or desktop apps, the entire business of serving large enterprises could be revolutionized. “At the end of the day, what people care about. . . is being able to run these sophisticated, distributed applications. At least what I hope, in five years’ time from now, everyone is talking about that as an ecosystem.”
What we’ve been calling “container architecture” deals primarily with the packaging and constitution of containers — small, firmly packed virtual machines without the hypervisor. Up to now, a lot of folks thought container architecture and container orchestration were the same topic. They’re not. The critical issue that data centers are facing today is how to network their workloads. In a container network, each container has its own address. Natively, Docker creates a subnet of containers, each of which has its own port number.
For data centers where port numbers have specifically designated purposes — like port 80 for Web traffic — that won’t work. They’d already be violating compliance frameworks just for trying this. That’s why Kubernetes and Mesosphere and Docker have all adopted different means of orchestration, where each container is given its own IP address. There are different ways of doing this through network overlays, some of which scale better than others. But this does solve the problem with Docker’s native networking. However, it also solves a broader class of problem, because VMs have their own IP addresses too. As long as IP addresses provide a layer of abstraction between virtual components and their orchestrators, the substance to the argument in favor of a single container format, disappears.
In May 2015, analysts at Gartner rejected OpenStack as a viable platform, for reasons which boil down to its being disruptive. Not quite a year later, analysts at Gartner appeared on stage at OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, to embrace OpenStack as a viable platform, for reasons which boil down to its being disruptive. It sounded a little two-faced, as though the analysts group were presenting both a negative and a positive view of a cause-and-effect relationship simultaneously.
But when Gartner analyst Donna Scott showed up last April to make peace with OpenStack, what she said outright struck many attendees as startling. She offered bimodal IT to IT professionals as a metaphorical tool, quite literally to give their business managers the perception that the IT department was moving at warp speed, when not everything actually is.
Gartner and OpenStack have kissed and made up. And in a clear and sharp clarification of the emerging battle lines, two weeks ago at DockerCon in Seattle, Docker CEO Ben Golub told attendees that Gartner will not be invited to any of his parties soon.
“The data is also clear,” Golub explained, “that as people are adopting Docker, it’s no longer simply for next-generation, greenfield microservices applications. While clearly the top use cases are in areas like that… one of the most common use cases for Docker is migrating legacy apps to microservices. And an equally common use case is containerizing legacy apps. You might say, ‘Containerizing a legacy app? That’s heresy!’ But in fact, there are really good reasons to take a legacy app, Docker-ize it, and then move it around.”
Docker’s customers are looking to employ containerization as a way to mix applications in a unified environment, he explained, not partition them into metaphysical states of being. He singled out bimodal IT specifically as a “fallacy,” suggesting that the effort involved in making old applications coexist with new models could be described as “Mode 2,” and that the migration process requires careful consideration and planning that Gartner would describe as “Mode 1.”
The reconciliation between the old and the new models, and the disagreements with the bimodal concept — which extend to OpenStack and OpenShift leader Red Hat as well as Docker — are the subject of this week’s edition of The New Stack: Context, a podcast produced by Scott Fulton and Luke Lefler.
Our latest edition of The New Stack: Context dives nose-first into three sides of the container security pond simultaneously, to see which side cracks first. In this podcast, you’ll hear more from our visit to the Cloud Security Alliance summit at the last RSA Conference, where we’ll talk to the cloud service provider community and the security services community. And we’ll compare their vantage points to that of Docker, which so far has had to go it alone with respect to forging a new model for infrastructure security.
The one most prophetic, emerging fact of life in a technological world where open source is the most prominent ethic, is that there may always be more than one open methodology contending for the same market space, at any one time. The moment enough factions come together around a single methodology, such as pooled storage or application orchestration, another group of factions come together around a viable competitor. An open source world will perpetually be a contest of ideas.
For OpenStack, which has just emerged triumphant in the battle for the open source hybrid cloud platform space, its next great contest has already begun. It needs to become capable of scaling high-availability, high-bandwidth workloads, including the network functions used by customers in the telecommunications space, with a mechanism other than the ones it has now. AT&T has surged into a leadership position very rapidly, having thrown down the gauntlet last March, pushing open source developers to help it build its next-generation data network services. It uses OpenStack now, but it can’t deploy OpenStack in any of the ways it’s been designed.