TFIR: Open Source, Cloud Native & AI/ML: Recent Episodes

TFiR Media LLC

New, Views and Interviews about Open Source, Cloud Native and AL/ML.

While we would like to think that security is baked in from the start by developers, this is not always the case. Furthermore, security engineers and developers are not always on the same page when it comes to security testing. Code Intelligence aims to tackle this problem with CI Spark, a tool that harnesses AI to help write test code. In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Sergej Dechand, CEO and Co-Founder of Code Intelligence, talks about the company and the problem they are trying to solve. He talks about the role of AI in security and how it is being used for fuzz testing. He talks about CI Spark and how it is analyzing code and automating fuzz tests and he takes us through some of the key trends he is seeing in the industry.

While there are a lot of managed Kubernetes services nowadays, one company is differentiating itself by focusing on offering a small-footprint Kubernetes-managed service that can be deployed on the edge. Zededa has partnered with SUSE using EVE-OS and K3s in an effort to help tackle some of the challenges of deploying Kubernetes on the edge. In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Michael Maxey, Vice President of Business Development at Zededa, talks about how the company is helping customers deploy workloads to edge devices. He talks about their key focus on small-footprint Kubernetes and how they are helping to tackle some of the challenges associated with this. Since the company has just announced a managed Kubernetes service, he also discusses the benefits of offering customers this option.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Shaun O’Meara, Field CTO at Mirantis, talks about the company’s new open source project k0smotron, and how it is helping enterprises deploy and manage control planes.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Mona Rakibe, Co-Founder and CEO at Telmai, talks about the company and how it is helping companies improve their data quality and investigate anomalies. They go on to talk about the company’s journey so far, some of the key capabilities of the platform, and what sets them apart from competitors.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Martin Phan, Field CTO at CloudCasa by Catalogic, talks about how the company is helping organizations with their data protection needs. He goes on to discuss some of the challenges customers are experiencing and how CloudCasa is helping to address these problems.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Ryan Taylor, VP of Customer Success and Solutions Engineering at Transposit, talks about their new announcement about adding on-call capabilities. He also takes us through the evolution of incident management and what sets Transposit apart from its competitors.

With the growing adoption of Kubernetes, many technologies, including Cloud Foundry, are evolving to embrace this tectonic shift in the industry. Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) has been going through a major transformation to embrace this change. However, this change doesn’t necessarily mean that Cloud Foundry is on its way out. On the contrary, like many major technologies, it will continue to serve a wide range of users and customers. What really matters is how Cloud Foundry leaders, including the foundation and companies sponsoring the project, look at this change; how committed they are to the users of this open source project.In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Catherine McGarvey, Vice President of Software Engineering at VMware and Chris Clark, Program Manager at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, to discuss the state of Cloud Foundry today and how it is evolving as the momentum continues towards Kubernetes. They also discuss VMware’s continued commitment to the project and McGarvey’s recent appointment to the Cloud Foundry’s governing board.

Salt Security recently released the findings of their latest API Security Report, Q3 2022, which the company conducts every six months in line with the shifting currents of the market. In this episode of Let’s Talk, Michelle McLean, VP of Marketing at Salt Security, joins me to deep dive into the report. When she looks back at previous reports, she finds that one thing remains consistent — “We are still seeing a fairly high percentage of folks getting impacted or having at least some form of API security incident in the past 12 months.” Over 94% of companies experienced security incidents in production APIs, even though nothing catastrophic happened to them, with over 20% of companies reporting some sort of data breach as a result of security gaps in APIs.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Sanjeev Mohan, Principal Analyst at SanjMo, to discuss the key trends he is seeing with data and Kubernetes. Mohan is amazed at how Kubernetes is enabling companies to deploy databases more effectively and efficiently.

“A few years ago, if I were to deploy a database on hundreds of nodes, it would take me days. What if a node went down and I had to reinstall it? Today, what I'm seeing is an extreme scale of databases provisioned literally within hours,” he said.

Observability was one of the hottest topics of discussion at KubeCon this year. Mohan shares his views on its challenges and why he feels organizations need to change how they see the role observability plays in the pipeline.

Jetstack helps businesses to build and operate cloud-native infrastructure with Kubernetes. The company was formed back in 2015, just a year after the Kubernetes open source project was started. Matthew Bates, CTO of Jetstack, sits down with Swapnil Bhartiya in this episode of Let’s Talk from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU to introduce the company and its mission.

Jetstack recently released a comprehensive toolkit to help development and security teams secure the software supply chain. Bates feels that this is something we need to take seriously and people need to be made aware of the sophistication of the risks in the attacks they are seeing. He discusses what Jetstack is doing to provide a digestible means to better understand this topic.

On discussing why he thought Kubernetes was such a game changer when it was first released, Bates says, “We felt that this presented a really interesting opportunity to be able to build those systems, and also for enterprises to rethink the way that they develop, build and ship software as well. We thought it was the start of a real shift.”

Besides the opportunities Kubernetes brings, Bates gives some insights into the challenges enterprises face as they try to navigate Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. One of those challenges, security, continues to be a critical factor to handle. However, Bates feels that security is increasingly being made a priority earlier in the life cycle.

Key highlights from this video interview are: Bates describes what motivated him to form Jetstack and how the introduction of Kubernetes presented many opportunities for building complex, potentially stateful systems. He discusses what challenges enterprises faced as they looked to understand and embrace the new technology and how Jetstack has been helping. Bates explains that Jetstack is an advisory and a product company. He goes into depth about the customers they are helping, particularly with very large banks and how Jetstack is helping them understand the challenges and the breadth of the tools in The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to help address them. The cloud-native ecosystem is evolving, which compared to traditional IT is considerably more complex. Bates discusses the evolution over time they have seen in people consuming Kubernetes and how the ecosystem is maturing. Security continues to be a critical consideration for cloud with zero-trust remaining complicated to implement. Bates feels that DevSecOps is prioritizing security rather than it being an afterthought. He explains the benefits Kubernetes brings for having the ability to have security built into the platform.

The Amazon EKS community has added support for Loft Labs’ open source project vcluster, which enables you to spin up lightweight, virtual Kubernetes clusters inside the namespaces of an underlying Kubernetes cluster. In this episode of Newsroom, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Lukas Gentele, Co-Founder and CEO of Loft Labs, to talk about how the idea of adding support for EKS with vcluster came about and how it is fostering further collaborations and supporting the open source community.

Summary: FlexiDAO provides software solutions and advisory to help companies achieve their net-zero goals by eliminating the carbon emissions from the electricity that they buy. The company helps organizations by monitoring and certifying the origin of their power, and its carbon emissions every hour of the day. The company uses blockchain technology as a certification enabler to ensure credibility to their claims.

Summary: Ondat is a Kubernetes-native platform for running stateful applications, anywhere, at scale. The company recently announced Trousseau, an open source project for the encryption of resources and in particular, the encryption of Kubernetes Secret. We sat down with Nic Vermande, Principal Developer Advocate at Ondat to learn more about the project.

Slim.AI, a company focused on building better containerized apps with less friction, has raised $31M Series A financing led by Insight Partners and StepStone Group with participation by boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP, Knollwood and TechAviv Founder Partners.

John Amaral, Co-Founder and CEO of Slim.AI, says, "I believe in two principles for a company at our stage: Build a great product that developers love and make sure they all know about it. So we will be doing a lot of the first thing, which is developing a lot of energy and investment in building something that developers love." Amaral continues, "So we'll be investing some in the ability to learn from developers, in product management, and even community. But the predominance of this is going towards R&D, building great software."

Salt Labs was created in 2021 to help the industry with tackling the increase in API threats. The research division of Salt Security focuses on not only finding API vulnerabilities, but also increasing awareness about API security and offering solutions to help mitigate such risks.

I sat down with Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research, to explore the factors that help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) & Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) select their cloud providers.

Structure Research was founded 10 years ago in Toronto Canada as a research firm of analysts focused on the infrastructure services space. Their organization has seen, during the 18-month long pandemic, an acceleration of cloud infrastructure. Such an acceleration has led to faster deployment and the removal of barriers. To that end, Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research, says, "We follow the results coming from the public markets and not just the hyperscale guys, but also the SMB-oriented providers. Providers targeting SMBs are all showing tremendous growth and, in fact, are positioning for accelerated growth throughout '21 and into '22." This has led analysts, like Shih, to conclude that the cloud has become mainstream and will be a mainstay going forward.

FireHydrant is a purpose-built tool for reliability. With FireHydrant, businesses can better manage and learn from incidents, work with their legal and marketing teams, and all the way through customer service. This is a tool for the entire reliability lifecycle.

Guest: Cole Potrocky Company: Kintaba Show: Let's Talk

Cole Potrocky, CTO and co-founder of Kintaba, talks with Swapnil Bhartiya about incident management.

Kintaba is dedicated to modern incident management, enabling companies to better respond to major incidents and outages. The company got into this space because they considered it a learning problem.

According to Potrocky, "We figured failure is sort of a constant theme, whether you're a one-person company or whether you're a thousand-person company. You learn through getting to the periphery of what failure is, and then you reflect on that failure."

In this episode of Dirk & Swap: Conversations on Open Source, we talk about Open Core. What is it? How different is it from Open Source or Closed Source software? What are the pros and cons of Open Core? Is it better than proprietary software as at least something is open there? How to do Open Core in the right way (if there is one)... We tackle many such complicated questions in this show. I hope you will enjoy it. We have also published a transcript of the recording so you can read it if you want to!

Cassandra Database reaches 4.0.

Nearly six years on from the release of Apache Cassandra 3.0, the community behind the popular open-source distributed database has announced the release of v4.0 of Apache Cassandra. Patrick McFadin, VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, and Ben Bromhead, CTO of Instaclustr, are with Swapnil Bhartiya to talk about it.

The first issue to be addressed is the importance Cassandra holds in the modern world. McFadin starts off by talking about what workloads Cassandra is focused on, which are websites and mobile applications. McFadin says, "When you use a mobile app on your phone, you're probably using Cassandra."

Since its inception, Cassandra has developed into a "really awesome, general-purpose database," adds Bromhead. More importantly, he makes mention of scalability when he says, "As people reach the limits of scalability or availability when it comes to some of the other databases out there (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL), we see developers reaching for Apache Cassandra."

The discussion then shifts to the new features available in Cassandra v4.0. Bromhead talks about structural changes based around the Netty networking framework, which has enabled several really cool features, such as zero-copy streaming which allows an Apache Cassandra node to stream the data it's responsible for and leads to wire-level streaming speeds between nodes. Practically speaking, that means users can now run denser nodes. The 4.0 release also saw the deprecation of the Thrift protocol, in favor of the CQL protocol, which was a major change.

As far as the upgrade process is concerned, version 4.0 should be considerably easier than previous releases. "If you had been upgrading Cassandra, before, like in the three and twos, there was always a long list of intermediate patches that you had to put into place, or you had to do some extra work mid-upgrade. Because of that, the developers decided it was of utmost importance to make it simple," explains McFadin.

Bromhead calls out to developers and admins to "not stress too much about this one. Still run through all the track checks and the standard processes you do. But again, this has been pretty well battle-tested."

To further highlight the upgrade process, McFadin mentions that the maintainers had a lot of discussion about the project and how improvements to the upgrade start at the developer level. McFadin says, "Instead of just having someone drop code in and ask everyone what they think, we have a proposal process. So you outline the change that you want to make, we have good discussions about it, and make some changes before there's actual code." Processes like this certainly go a long way in making a project more stable over time.

How the Change to CentOS Affects the Community

This past year, Red Hat made some changes to how CentOS is developed and released. With CentOS's strong following, the change came as a big surprise to the community, the user base, and enterprise companies. To that, Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-founder of RackN (https://tinyurl.com/458kbjpd), had this to say: "If CentOS was designed originally to be an alternative for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it was supposed to be an enterprise-grade Linux based on Red Hat bits." According to Hirschfeld, that led to a degree of commercial tension between the enterprise version (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and CentOS.

But how did this impact the end-users? Hirschfeld makes it clear the impact was and is significant. At RackN, Hirschfeld says, "We heard immediately from customers, asking questions about how they were going to sustain their versions of deployed operating systems." Hirschfeld offered up some specifics on what happens when the previous version of an operating system (in this case CentOS 8) isn't maintained. He says, "When somebody has a patch, or a change, or an upgrade, or they're writing software that relies on that version, which is very common, then they do not have a way to get patches or fixes for the operating system, they have to literally forward port anything they've built on that operating system to the latest version." Hirschfeld also adds that this type of forced migration is very bad, unattractive, not desirable, or not even commercially feasible.

As far as competitors are concerned, Hirschfeld mentions both Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, both of which are forks of CentOS and whose developers have committed to maintaining versions over time. He adds, "It's also worth noting that there are a lot of Linux distributions, like SUSE, Ubuntu, and Debian, which should be considered as an alternative." However, Hirschfeld says of their clients, "We do see people waiting to look at these alternatives. Some of them are just saying, I'm going to switch to a distro where I don't have to deal with vendors like Red Hat."

Hirschfeld ends the discussion with talks of migration and says, "I think the jury's still out on whether or not we end up with as dominant a distribution as we have seen with CentOS. And that ultimately, I think, will cause further fragmentation in the Linux industries."

Contributing to an open-source project isn't only about coding.

Dirk Hohndel, VP and Chief Open Source officer at VMware, and Swapnil Bhartiya, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of TFiR, discuss various ways in which people can contribute to open-source projects.

Hohndel starts off with an idea that has been at play with the open-source community for years, when he says, "What very often happens with open-source components is that as you use them, you suddenly start seeing things that you would like to be different." He goes on by saying, "There is this problem in this integration; there is a mistake in the translation of the user interface, there is this other component that I work with and there is a problem between them, or here's a bug that I found." He finishes that thought by mentioning the first time you submit a bug report to the developers, you are contributing to open source. Hohndel states, "Any interaction with the developer team is a contribution."

To that point, Swapnil adds, "It is natural that if you're using an open-source tool, you will engage with code at some point."

But not everyone who uses open source has either the skill or the time to write code, so it's not an unavoidable path. And for those who do wish to contribute to an open-source project, it can be done via enhancement requests, submitting bug reports, helping to improve documentation, adding or fixing a translation, and helping with localizations.

One very interesting idea is that of snowflakes. Hohndel adds, "When you fix something locally, you have created a snowflake. You have created something that is unique. That is not what everyone else uses, but that is your version. And this is where the desire that I talk so much about, of contributing back to the project in a patch, in the form of code."

Fortunately, as Bhartiya says, "When you are using open source, the code is open to you. So you will be able to see problems and may want to fix them. And scratching your own itch can become a contribution as well." That idea is very much at the heart of where most open-source contributions start.

But what are the other ways in which companies can contribute to open source? Hohndel lists out some very good ideas such as, giving open-source projects money, helping to write code, translating documentation, helping project engineers to understand various use-cases and how the project is used in real life, creating a design process and providing input into the user interface, helping to make sure the software is usable to people with disabilities. To that list, Bhartiya adds the very important aspect of helping with marketing, which is a big part of what helps keep open-source projects healthy and viable.

How can you start contributing to an open-source project? To that end, Hohndel says the project's code repository (such as GitHub) is a great place to start. On services like GitHub, users can open an issue for a project, which is a fantastic way to start the conversation. Ultimately, Hohndel says, "When I engage with a new project, the first thing I do is look at their mailing list and read the last couple of weeks of posts. Or, if there is an IRC or Slack channel, I see how people are interacting." With that information in hand, you'll find it much easier to start contributing to an open-source project.

Observability is key to your cloud strategy

According to anynines, observability is defined as The value for how well the internal state of a system can be derived from external sources. Although monitoring can warn you of failure, observability can help you discover why something failed.

Patrick Hartz, Sales Engineer at anynines, starts off by remembering what application performance monitoring (APM) was 20 years ago (when he first started in professional software development): "APM was used to watch static models [and] to see how an application behaves." Today's development process is quite different. To that, Hartz says, "By adopting modern application development practices and splitting legacy applications into microservices, the way we observe the systems has changed. So apps are mostly deployed into a lot of containers. And therefore you have more complex scenarios, which demand specialized knowledge."

As Hartz puts it, one of the biggest challenges application developers often face is, "that they don’t have access to the internals of Cloud Foundry, they only own their application container. So Cloud Foundry is designed to let the application developers run their application and data service themselves."

Hartz goes on to discuss the different perspectives and different needs for observability. He says, "If you are a platform operator and you provide data services or the whole platform as a service to your customers, then you can have different kinds of SLAs." On the contrary, "As an operator, I will also observe your data service, for example, to guarantee that the opposite service always behaves in the best way." Finally, he adds, "You can immediately see that observability comes with the responsibility on how to operate and how to deal with your application and data service."

But what about the awareness of observability? To that, Hartz offers up a telling anecdote. "...In one of the meetings I had with end-users, I was asked to get system metrics of an application container. I was a bit surprised that I couldn't find an out-of-the-box solution."

Finally, Hartz hits on the importance of observability when he says, "Observability...works hand in hand with high availability. You need to be alerted to the fact that things are not healthy before it hits the customer. And you need the proper information and tools to investigate and react based on information, not feelings or guesses."

"How Self Service is All About Empowering Developers"

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider which empowers developers with cloud services to help them deploy and scale their applications. Raman Sharma, VP of Product Marketing at DigitalOcean, talks about how their self-service model is all about optimizing the path of a developer. Sharma starts off by pointing out there are multiple paths to take for application building: The full DIY Infrastructure as a Service model, the Platform as a Service model, and the Cloud Native method. To this end, Sharma says, "...We believe in providing them [developers] an experience where they can serve themselves; they should not need help from an expert or a service provider, just to be able to get started with that platform. So that's kind of what we are focused on."

Talking further about this self-service model, Sharma says, "The self-service model is about removing all friction, from the path of a developer towards successfully consuming your products, and going about their business." Sharma also indicates that DigitalOcean is not in the low-code/no-code space, but a platform for technical practitioners (people with slightly deeper technical skills) and that, "...From the point that you sign up on the website, to onboarding and getting started with your first project, and then the next step to adding more team members to your projects, we want to make sure that all of this is super seamless."

To that end, DigitalOcean is "feverishly focused" on ensuring this experience for developers (and small development teams) is super optimal and that they have all of the tools and knowledge available to get started. With everything in place, those who develop on the DigitalOcean platform can use the services themselves and won't have to rely on someone else to get everything set up and configured.

At the same time, DigitalOcean is seeing that, increasingly, developers care more about productivity and less about the underlying infrastructure. For that, Sharma says, "...We have created services like App Platform, which we released last year, which is a fully managed, Platform-as-a-Service offering, which actually runs on top of our compute and our Kubernetes infrastructure." Sharma follows up with, "But it provides an experience to developers, which is very seamless; they don't have to worry about managing or orchestrating the underlying infrastructure."

Finally, Sharma says that DigitalOcean thinks of their cloud as an "...open canvas which is available for developers to come and express their creativity by building applications."

As companies rush to embark on their cloud-native journey, it is becoming increasingly important to have visibility into their stack. In this interview, Richard Hartmann, Director of Community at Grafana Labs, talks about the importance of observability and why companies have it as a core requirement. In addition to understanding observability, we also talked about open-source technologies like Prometheus and how Grafana Labs is making it easier for customers to leverage these open source technologies.

Automation is one of the driving forces behind digital transformation and cloud-native adoption. There are many flavors of automation and RPA or Robotic Process Automation is one of those flavors. Robocorp is a fast-growing start-up based out of Helsinki and San Francisco that’s building RPA solutions on top of open-source technologies to help RPA developers with tools and platforms they need to get their job done.

In this episode of Let’s Talk, I sat down with the CEO and Co-Founder of Robocorp, Antti Karjalainen, to learn more about the company that just closed $21 million in series A funding. The discussion centered on RPA, open source and how Robocorp is offering support for cloud-native applications. We also talked about the areas where Robocorp would be investing in considering the Series A funding.

Guest: Antti Karjalainen Company: Robocorp

About the guest: Antti Karjalainen is CEO & Co-founder of Robocorp and member of the board at Robot Framework Foundation. An open-source enthusiast with a background in software engineering, he's on a mission to transform the RPA industry with open-source technology and delivery for software robots.

About the company: Robocorp empowers businesses and teams to work smarter by shattering previous boundaries of RPA and intelligent automation. It makes it easy, affordable and fast for developers to build software robots and automate manual tasks with first-class, open-source process automation tools. It also provides a robust, secure orchestration and execution platform to allow customers to run both cloud-based and self-managed robotic automations.

We all love to talk about our ‘multi-cloud’ stories and strategies, but the fact is most organizations go ‘multi-cloud’ by accident. Different teams within an organization pick their own cloud and they end up with ‘accidental’ multi-cloud, which leads to more complexities and problems. In this episode of Let’s Talk, Tim Wagner, CEO of Vendia, talks about such accidental multi-cloud deployments, what challenges they pose and what are the correct steps to embrace a truly multi-cloud strategy. He also talks about the concept of “Polycloud”, which he believes is the right way to approach ‘many’ clouds.

This discussion covers a wide range of topics including how companies fall into the trap of accidental multi-cloud, what role cross-cloud solutions like containers and Kubernetes play in accidental multi-cloud, and what are the side-effects of accidental multi-cloud beyond cost. Next, we take a deep dive into the Polycloud and how different it is from multi-cloud. Will we ever achieve cloud nirvana where users can run their workloads in ‘any’ cloud without having to worry about data gravity and getting locked into one vendor? We also talk about Vendia’s solution to address this problem and also ask Tim to share some tips on how to have a coherent and concrete multi-cloud strategy.

Show: Let’s Talk Guest: Tim Wagner (LinkedIn, Twitter) Company: Vendia Topics: Cloud Computing

About the guest: Tim Wagner is CEO of Vendia, and formerly kick-started the serverless movement with the development of AWS Lambda.

About the company: Vendia is a serverless, distributed data platform for sharing data and code in real time across clouds, teams, and partners. Vendia is designed to be simple to use and easy to deploy by bringing together the ease-of-use and unlimited scalability of serverless, with the decentralization benefits of distributed ledgers so that enterprise IT can access and manage data easily, securely, and at scale, no matter where it resides.

Learn more: https://www.leostream.com In this episode of Let’s Talk, we sat down with Karen Gondoly, CEO at Leostream, a company that leverages open-source technologies to offer vendor-neutral VDI solutions to organizations of all sizes. The pandemic has created a massive demand for remote access to application environments so users can continue to work accessing enterprise applications remotely. In this interview, we talked about how the pandemic has changed the world around and also explored how Leostream helps organizations better manage their resources and also allow them to work with talented people all across the globe without any need for relocation.

Guest: Karen Gondoly (LinkedIn, Twitter) Company: Show: Let’s Talk Topics: Virtualization, Remote Work, Open Source, Linux

About the company: Leostream provides the critical connection-broker technology required for enterprises to achieve successful large-scale VDI, hosted desktop, or hosted application environments in both private and public clouds.

About the guest: Karen Gondoly joined Leostream from The MathWorks, Inc., a technical software company where she was a developer for the Control System Toolbox before specializing in usability. Her technical background includes roles as a software developer, GUI designer, technical writer, and usability specialist. Karen holds bachelor's and master of science degrees in aeronautical/astronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk (which was recorded a while back), Sylvia Hooks, Vice President (Portfolio Marketing & Enablement) - Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, talks about one of the recent surveys by Aruba to better understand how IT leaders recognize that the ability of organizations to realize business value from data increasingly depends on their capacity to collect, process, store, and analyze that data at the edge.

We covered a wide range of topics in this interview including how Hooks would define the ‘edge’. How are modern enterprises already leveraging edge computing? What trends is Hooks seeing in the space in terms of edge adoption? Unique challenges that edge poses and what kind of solutions is Aruba building to tackle those challenges? We then talked about the data side of the edge and how companies are processing data at the edge itself, instead of sending it back to the cloud. We also touched upon one of the biggest focus areas of TFiR -Security. We concluded the interview with a discussion on how the edge is using AI and ML technologies.

Guest: Sylvia Hooks (LinkedIn, Twitter) Featured Company: Aruba Show: Let’s Talk Topics: Edge Computing

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, we invited Navya Dwarakanath, Solutions Engineer at Catchpoint, to talk about the importance of observability and SLOs as more and more companies are rushing towards digital transformation and embracing cloud-native technologies. We started off our discussion with learning a bit more about Catchpoint, a digital experience monitoring platform which is helping companies with end-user monitoring, using both active & proactive as well as reactive monitoring methodologies.

We then talked about the factors that are contributing to the increase in the growing popularity of observability. We also talked about the ‘holistic’ approach to observability so that users can take actions based on the metrics observability tools provide them with.

We also took a deep dive into the cultural or people and social side of observability which is as important as the tech aspect. We then moved to the core of the topic - SLO - as this interview was recorded as part of our coverage of SLOConf. What’s the difference between SLO and SLA and why organizations should care about SLOs? We also asked her for recommendations or suggestions that organizations should follow as they implement SLOs. She also warned against some of the mistakes that organizations make with SLOs.

Guest: Navya Dwarakanath (Twitter, LinkedIn) Featured company: Catchpoint Show: Let’s Talk Topics: Observability, Cloud Native, Kubernetes

Register now: https://bit.ly/3z56C65 Cloud Foundry Foundation will be hosting the next Cloud Foundry Summit Virtual in July this year. We sat down with Chip Childers, Executive Director of the Foundation, to talk about the format of the event and what are some themes and topics we should be looking forward to. Essentially, there will be three tracks throughout the event – the first will be about the end users’ stories and experiences, the second will be “How To”, the developers guide for using Cloud Foundry;, and the third track will be “Behind the Curtain” that is all about the interaction between and with the Open Source community who create the Cloud Foundry software. The Foundation will also organize certification exams that have become extremely popular.

Learn more about VMware Tanzu: https://bit.ly/3zdsKLu In 2020, we saw an uptake in the adoption of digital transformation and cloud-native technologies. Fast forward to 2021: As these adoptions are maturing, there has been a shift of focus towards Day 2 challenges and, more importantly, security. Security, as we all know, is no longer an afterthought in the cloud-native world and has moved into the developer’s pipeline with the Shift Left movement. In this episode of Let’s Talk, we invited James Watters, Chief Technology Officer at VMware’s Modern Application Platforms Business Unit, to talk about various aspects of security in the cloud-native world.

Upbound, the creator of open source Crossplane — the modern, cloud-native alternative to Infrastructure as Code (IaC), has announced an enterprise-grade distribution of Crossplane called Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP). The company also took two core products - Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry - out of beta and announced their general availability. In this episode of Let’s Talk, we sat down with Bassam Tabbara, Founder and CEO of Upbound, to learn about these announcements.

Replicated is the modern way to ship on-prem software. Replicated gives software vendors a container-based platform for easily deploying cloud-native applications inside customers' environments to provide greater security and control. We invited Replicated CEO and Co-Founder Grant Miller to talk about the state of software delivery in the Kubernetes world, how software vendors struggle to deliver Kubernetes-based apps to their customers and how Replicated helps such customers and vendors.

Learn more: https://fauna.com/features Fauna is the creator of FaunaDB — a disruptive, global serverless database that makes modern applications possible with rich clients and serverless backends. The founders of the company come from global tech giants like Twitter. In this episode of Let’s Talk, I sat down with Evan Weaver, Co-Founder and CTO of Fauna, to learn more about FaunaDB and what unique problem it's trying to solve.

RackN has announced the release of RackN Digital Rebar v4.6, which introduces a load of new features including continuous provisioning automation with self-contained high availability and multi-platform universal workflow. In this episode of Let’s Talk, RackN CEO and Co-Founder Rob Hirschfeld joined us to tell us more about what’s new in v4.6 and also where does it fit in the broader bare metal story.

Learn more about Puppet Relay: https://puppet.com/products/relay/ Puppet announced the general availability of Relay recently. We hosted Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO of Puppet to learn more about the project. He said that Relay is based on a couple of core hypotheses. If you are an ops type of person, you would find that automation in this kind of modern environment is too hard; things move too quickly. In addition, the tooling is inaccessible to the broadest range of users that need to have it. With Relay Puppet is bringing the low-code approach to Ops, an interface to automate across all those different tools that teams use in the modern cloud environments. “Relay lets you do things like automated incident response, cost management, better security and compliance auditing,” said Giridharagopal.

“SIOS provides clustering software that offers high availability for mission-critical applications, particularly when they're in the cloud. We protect them both on-premises in the cloud and in hybrid environments,” - Margaret Hoagland.

Hoagland was recently promoted as the Vice President of Global Marketing at SIOS Technologies. We invited her to our show TFiR Newsroom to talk about her new role and the importance of High Availability and Disaster Recovery in the cloud native world where companies can’t afford ‘any’ downtime.

“Open Policy Agent or OPA was designed to be a policy engine that enables users to have a unified solution to authorization and policies that are across that Cloud Native stack. That’s super important because when you start thinking about putting policies in place for different applications running in different clouds, or different platforms using different databases, different microservices built on different programming languages, what you really want to be able to do is have a single cogent way of solving that authorization problem of who (people) or what (machines) can perform which actions on that software. That’s why OPA is so powerful,” said Tim Hinrichs, Co-founder and CTO of Styra.

Lens is celebrating its first birthday this month. As companies accelerated their digital transformation and cloud-native journeys, Lens became an integral part of Kubernetes experience. Lens enjoyed wide-spread adoption within the Kubernetes ecosystem.

In this episode of TFiR INSIGHTS, Miska Kaipiainen, Senior Director Of Engineering at Mirantis, joined me to talk about Lens and how they are planning to celebrate its first anniversary.

Scarf helps open-source developers distribute their software more effectively and with better observability. They believe that the open-source community as a whole should not only be sharing source code, but also data about that source code and how it is used. Scarf is creating a world where open-source maintainers can proactively make data-informed decisions, and are fairly compensated for their work by connecting with and supporting their commercial users. In this episode of TFiR INSIGHTS, we sat down with the co-founder and CEO of the company, Avi Press, to talk about the company and the challenges that exist for open source developers.

Social: https://twitter.com/avi_press https://twitter.com/scarf_oss

Lin Sun recently joined Solo.io from IBM, where she focussed on Istio. When asked what attracted her towards Solo.io, a fairly new startup, Sun said, “I’m always impressed with Solo.io as a company as how fast they innovate. And they build those interesting solutions. On top of open source projects like Istio and Envoy, I would say Solo.io is really in the space of connecting services and API gateways to help our users transition from monolithic to microservices.”

Robin Schumacher, Vice President of Product at Netdata (https://www.netdata.cloud/), is an open-source veteran and in this episode of TFiR Insights, we discussed how open source is becoming a key piece of strategy for businesses of all sizes.

Register for PrestoCon Day: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/prestocon/ In this special episode of TFiR Insights for PrestoCon Day 2021, we talked to Vinoth Chandar, Creator of Apache Hudi. Apache Hudi came into existence when Chandar was working at Uber, designing its overall data architecture. His team ran into a lot of foundational gaps with the traditional data lake architectures of the time. Hudi was created as database abstraction, or data lake storage, with which you can then interact with the query from all your existing major league query engines. Chandar will be participating in a panel discussion at PrestoCon Day and this interview covers some of his work.

Topics of interest: Apache Hudi, PrestoCon, Vinoth Chandar, Ahana

Inspired by the success of PrestoCon 2020, the Linux Foundation is hosting a special half-day event for the PrestoDB community called PrestoCon Day on March 24.

We are covering the event remotely and hosting a series of interviews and panel discussions for the event in which we will talk to some of the core members of the PrestoDB community. In this interview, Dipti Borkar, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Ahana kick-starts the PrestoCon Day Coverage at TFiR.

Recommendation engines are quite popular in the consumer space, but they are even more effective and essential in the enterprise space. Robin Purohit, Co-founder and CEO of Peritus.ai (https://peritus.ai/) compares them with Grammarly that we all use in our work life to help write better, Peritus.ai recommendation engine does the same for DevOps engineers and Developers with technical content. “Millions of tech workers around the world are all trying to master the latest technology and do their job better, we are trying to provide them insights and how they can either support a customer or develop a new product faster by giving recommendations in the moment that they're doing their work,” said Purohit.

Further democratizing Apache Cassandra, DataStax (https://www.datastax.com) has announced a serverless option for Cassandra via DataStax Astra, its Cassandra-as-a-Service offering. “You can now deploy Cassandra without having to think about capacity,” said Patrick McFadin, VP, Developer Relations at DataStax. “It’s a huge shift for Cassandra as developers don’t have to worry about over-provisioning their capacity, which will have a direct impact on what they are going to pay for that capacity. Now in a pure serverless fashion, they can pay what they use.”

In this episode of TFiR Insights, we dug deeper into this announcement. Here are some of the topics we discussed:

• What is serverless Astra? • Why did DataStax feel a need to offer this now? • How is it more about giving developers greater control over what they pay? • What are the direct benefits for developers? • The evolution of DataStax Astra over time? • Discussion on Apache Cassandra, the heart and soul of Astra.

Patrick McFadin is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, where he leads a team devoted to making users of Apache Cassandra successful. He has also worked as Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra and consultant for DataStax, where he helped build some of the largest and exciting deployments in production. Previous to DataStax, he was Chief Architect at Hobsons and an Oracle DBA/Developer for over 15 years.

Codefresh (https://codefresh.io/) recently appointed Dan Garfield as Chief Open Source Officer. Garfield is a regular guest on TFiR Insights so we hosted him again to learn more about this new role and what it means to Codefresh and open source projects that the company is involved with. It does further prove the commitment the company has towards open source.

Learn more about Polyverse: https://polyverse.com/ In this episode of TFiR Secure IT, we discussed three major cybersecurity stories — Windows Exchange hack, Senate’s hearing on SolarWinds hack and NSA’s recommendations on zero trust. We were joined by Ron Nixon, Vice President at Polyverse, to deep dive into these stories and also discuss how Polyverse and polymorphing can offer proactive solutions to many such cybersecurity problems.

Airbyte (https://airbyte.io/) is a promising, cloud based open-source data integration alternative to sync data from any applications, APIs, and databases to data warehouses, data lakes, and other destinations. Airbyte was co-founded by Michel Tricot (former director of engineering and head of integrations at Liveramp and RideOS) and John Lafleur (serial entrepreneur of dev tools and B2B). The company recently raised $5.2 Million in seed funding round. We hosted both co-founders of the company to learn more about the company and the current state of data integration challenges in the cloud.

In this episode of TFiR Insights, I invited Chris Patterson, Product Manager, GitHub Actions – GitHub to join us and talk about how GitHub is approaching DevOps. We touched upon a wide range of topics which are listed below:

Under Investment In Software Development Will Hurt Companies: 2021 Predictions By Camunda by TFiR Media LLC

As much as we want to think that companies are prioritizing security in the cloud-native world, that is not the case. According to Karsten Samaschke, CEO of Cloudical, “Companies plan for security when pretty much everything is deployed, but that’s too late in the cloud and cloud-native environments.”

Misconfigurations and bugs are primary causes of security, but Samaschke believes not having the right processes in place also exposes companies to attackers. Security is as much a people/culture problem as it is a technology problem. Developers often have this mindset of looking at Ops and Security folks as their enemies. DevSecOps is trying to address that, but there is still a long way to go.

Samaschke also highlighted the complexity of modern cloud-native architecture that contributes to security issues. This has been an eye-opening discussion and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

“Security is one of those things where it's like a chain, if you have one weak link, it doesn't matter how strong the other links are, the chain as a whole is weak,” said William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant. Morgan believes that security has to be in place for every aspect of a business to be successful. It’s like an airbag in a car, or a parachute in a plane. When you need it, you wish you had one.

While advanced users who are experimenting with technologies like LinkerD are quite aware of Zero Trust and DevSecOps and are embracing these practices in their environments, there are still many other users who are still getting started with Kubernetes or still have legacy components and these users are still figuring out security.

In a nutshell, there is a huge opportunity for cloud native security players to help these users with securing their applications and environments.

Here is a discussion with Archis Gore, CTO of Polyverse about the challenges of security in the Kubernetes & Cloud Native world. The series titled ‘Cloud-Native Security’ is sponsored by Polyverse.

Linode is doing extensive work on improving the cloud experience for its users by improving the network. It's all open-source, software-defined network replacing proprietary black boxes with commodity hardware and open-source software. Linode has created its own Linux-based operating system called LNOS (Linode Network Operating System) which runs Linode’s full stack of orchestration and monitoring on top of Linux. This discussion with Dan and Maddie covers the work Linode is doing in the networking space. I hope you enjoyed the discussion.

This is a discussion with Javier Perez, Open Source Program Manager, IBM Z, and LinuxONE at IBM.

“Kubernetes is like a tsunami that is moving through every organization that’s doing computation,” said Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. “It’s lifting everyone off of the virtual machine world and putting them into the container world.”

Duena Blomstrom is Co-Founder and CEO of PeopleNotTech, a company that brings back focus on people from tech. Psychological health and safety is a key indicator of high performing organizations. Especially in the age of the hybrid workforce, companies need to pay attention to the psychological aspects of their employees. Blomstrom will be delivering sessions at the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit to cover these topics. We sat down with her to not only get a preview of her presentation at the summit but also learned the importance of psychological health and safety of employees.

This is a conversation with Archis Gore, CTO of Polyverse. Polyverse recently joined the newly announced Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a Linux Foundation project.

Gore argues that Open Source software is built collaboratively. It doesn’t have a single ‘owner’ or a vendor. The community as a whole is the owner. What it means is that when it comes to security there is no ‘throat to choke’. No one owns SSL flaws, no one owns Heartbleed. Where does the buck stop? The Linux Foundation has been working on improving the security of open source projects, whether it hosts them or not. OpenSSF is an ambitious project in the direction of promoting the security of open-source software.

“I really see a massive explosion just waiting to happen in security benefits from that specific point of view where all the Linux Foundation projects can institutionalize security learnings, patterns, behaviors and operate in ways which were only available to large corporations,” said Gore.

Here are some of the topics that we covered:

Q: What is OpenSSF? Q: What is the significance and importance of the foundation? Q: How will it have an impact across the Linux Foundation? Q: Security should be part of the development pipeline and not an afterthought? Q: What value is Polyverse bringing to the openSSF?

Kong has announced the private beta release of Kong Konnect, a full-stack platform for cloud native applications delivered as a service. At the heart of Kong Konnect is the new ServiceHub. It features a runtime manager that enables self-service provisioning and day-2 operations of Kong runtimes across different cloud and Kubernetes providers, as well as on-premises.

¬Most open-source projects start as private ‘scratch your own itch’ whether it’s by an individual or at a company. However, as soon as a project is made public and starts attracting both users and contributors it hits the problem of scale. Scaling an open-source project is a bit different from scaling a product. The real scalability challenges an open-source project face doesn’t really come with the growing user-base, it comes with the growing contributor base. In the 3rd episode of this show, Dirk Hohndel, VP, and Chief Open Source Officer at VMware and I discussed the scalability challenge of open source. It's a 30 minutes long conversation that I thoroughly enjoyed. I hope you will enjoy it too…

We are starting a new weekly show called ‘Open For Business’ featuring Blair Lyon, a seasoned executive who has been helping companies scale for the past 25 years. The show is hosted by Swapnil Bhartiya and sponsored by TFiR’s Founding Member Linode.

Untitled Project by TFiR Media LLC

In this special edition of TFiR Newsroom, we are offering exclusive interviews from #RHSummit. In this interview Stefanie Chiras, Vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux talks about not only RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2), but also how RHEL has evolved overtime to serve customers running workloads like AI & ML.

In this special edition of TFiR Newsroom, we are offering exclusive interviews from #RHSummit. In this interview, Rich Sharples Senior director, Product Management at Red Hat talks about the evolution of Java in these 25 years.

In this special edition of TFiR Newsroom, we are offering exclusive interviews from #RHSummit. In this interview, Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics talks about open source in Robotics world.

Spectro Cloud brings the ease of use of managed services to an enterprise’s own flexible Kubernetes infrastructure stacks. Their idea is t help people deploy at scale and no matter where they want to be.

In this special edition of TFiR Newsroom, we are offering exclusive interviews from the Red Hat Summit. In this interview, Paul Cormier, CEO, and Chairman of Red Hat talks about how Red Hat is maintaining neutrality in working with partners as part of IBM.

We sat down with Rob Hirschfeld, CEO of RackN to analyze today’s news that Google is planning to ‘donate’ Istio to a foundation. What does it mean for the project and the community? Which foundation will Google pick? Will it be another CNCF project or will it become an anchor project for a new Linux Foundation project?

Our interview with Alex Gounares, CEO and Founder of Polyverse on the topic of challenges for IT during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We talked to Tom Wilkie, creator of Cortex and VP of Products at Grafana Labs to deep dive into observability and why he crated Cortex.

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Open Source veteran Sam Ramji joined DataStax as its Chief Strategy Officer a few months ago. We sat down with him for almost an hour-long interview to talk about his career move and the work DataStax is doing in the Kubernetes space.

In this interview we discussed his signature keynote at the event, evolution of Kubernetes and what challenges it sees in 2020.

When Docker came into existence, it transformed the industry by making it easier to use containers. 2020 is a totally different world. So what is Docker, the company, today? We talked to Justin Graham, VP of Products at Docker to discuss just that.

KubeCF is an open-source distribution of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime (CFAR) designed to run on top of Kubernetes. The distribution works with the cf-operator from Project Quarks to deploy and manage releases built from cf-deployment, and can be configured to use Kubernetes as the underlying container scheduler using the work of Project Eirini.

As the world is under the Coronavirus Lockdown, companies are scrambling to figure out how to switch on the 'work from home' mode. GitLab is one of those companies that has 100% work from home culture. We can learn a lot from them.

Zero Trust is less about not trusting anyone and more about policies, strong authentication, authorization, encryption and confidentiality. In this interview Evan Gilman, Senior Engineer at Scytale.io and co-author of Zero Trust Networks, talks about Zero Trust security and two open source projects – Spiffe and Spire – that tackle this problem.

Read more about Scytale.io here.

Watch all our videos on TFiR: https://www.tfir.io/youtube/ Subscribe to our weekly newsletter: https://www.tfir.io/dnl Become a patron of this channel: https://www.patreon.com/TFIR Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tfir_io Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TFiRMedia/

After establishing itself as a leading OpenStack player, Mirantis has transformed into an agile company that evolves with its customers. Today, Mirantis sees itself as a fierce competitor to giants like IBM-Red Hat.

We sat down with David Van Everen, SVP of Marketing at Mirantis to talk about their new Kubernetes as a Service platform, Docker acquisition and more.

Read more about Mirantis here: https://www.mirantis.com/ Watch all our videos on TFiR: https://www.tfir.io/category/youtube/ Subscribe to our weekly newsletter: https://www.tfir.io/dnl Become a patron of this channel: https://www.patreon.com/TFIR Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tfir_io Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TFiRMedia/

... they want to become good citizens of the open source world, says Matthew Creager, founder of Manifold.co, a company that's creating marketplace for open source projects.

Check more about manifold here: https://www.manifold.co/ Watch all our videos on TFiR: https://www.tfir.io/youtube/ Subscribe to our weekly newsletter: https://www.tfir.io/dnl Become a patron of this channel: https://www.patreon.com/TFIR Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tfir_io Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TFiRMedia/

"Kubernetes is one of the technologies being in the hype cycle. So there's a lot of attention. People look at it and they know that they need to do something with Kubernetes, but not everybody has yet figured out what exactly it is and how it fits into the portfolio of modern operations," Julian Fischer, CEO and Founder of anynines.

Check out more about anynines: https://www.anynines.com/

Watch all our videos on TFiR: https://www.tfir.io/category/youtube/ Subscribe to our weekly newsletter: https://www.tfir.io/dnl Become a patron of this channel: https://www.patreon.com/TFIR Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tfir_io Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TFiRMedia/

As microservices scale, so does security complexity. “Just defending the perimeter is not enough anymore,” said Haim Helman, CTO of Octarine, a company focused on network security for microservices and Kubernetes workloads.

In this episode of TFiR Let's Talk, powered by Armory, Isaac Mosquera (CTO of Armory) talks about some of the pain points that users face with continuous delivery and how Spinnaker solves these problems for them. We also discussed the evolution of Spinnaker and how customers are leveraging open source technologies like Spinnaker and Kubernetes to solve CD challenges.

In this episode of Let's talk, Idit Levine, CEO & Founder of Solo.io discusses the challenges of service mesh and what Solo is doing to glue these environments together.

In this episode of ‘Let’s Talk’, Swapnil Bhartiya (Editor-In-Chief & Produce at TFiR) sat down with Andrew Glover – Director of Delivery Engineering at Netflix at the recent Spinnaker Summit, powered by Modev. The two discussed Glover’s journey and evolution of Spinnaker as well as what future looks like in 2020 for continuous delivery.

The interview series is powered by Modev, the organizers of the summit.

Cynthia Sanchez is the creator of eOS, design system project. The goal of the project is to create a consistent and modern design principle for open source projects.

High Availability (HA) is critical to modern applications and services where companies can’t afford to lose any data. SIOS is one of the biggest players in the HA space where they cater to on-prem and cloud. The company recently announced the availability of SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition for Microsoft Azure customers. We sat down with Frank Jablonski, Vice President, Global Marketing of SIOS to understand high-availability and the services SIOS is offering to cloud providers.

In this episode of "News Room", Jason Van der Schyff - Chief Operating Officer of SoftIron talks about storage related challenges in the HPC space and how Ceph helps solve them.

High Availability and data redundancy are becoming more and more critical to businesses. Cloud outage can lead to disruption of critical services and even financial losses. SIOS is among the pioneers of HA and redundancy.

In this interview, Stark and Wayne founder Dr Nic Williams talks about the evolution of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem.

In this episode of Let’s Talk, Janakiram MSV walks us through the evolution of IoT cloud and explains how it leads to convergence of AI and IoT into AIoT.

Greg Kroah-Hartman needs no introduction. He is the maintainer of the stable branch of the Linux kernel and a fellow of the Linux Foundation. In this episode of Let’s Talk (an un-interview talk show), we debated a wide range of topics primarily the state of security in Linux. We also touched upon what the kernel community and the Linux Foundation is doing to attract more developers (it seems like unlike the rest of the industry, the kernel community continues to get new developers). We also talked about how companies like Microsoft and Amazon are becoming good citizens and contributing to the kernel. One topic that PC users will like to listen to was – does the desktop matter anymore. He also disclosed what operating system he and his family uses. He talked about his disagreement with Richard M Stallman and why is he growing his beard. It’s a fun and informative interview, I hope you will enjoy it.

At the VOICE SUMMIT 2019, powered by Modev, we sat down with Emerson Sklar, Director of Voice Solutions and Technical Evangelist of Applause.

At the VOICE SUMMIT 2019, powered by Modev, we sat down with Stephanie Ciccarelli, Chief Brand Officer (CBO) of Voices.com.

Natural Language plays a critical role in voice-based interfaces so that when we talk to ‘computers’ the interaction is more natural.

At the VOICE SUMMIT (organized by Modev), we sat down with Jay DeWalt – COO of Arria NLG, a company that specializes in developed natural language generator, to understand the importance of ’natural’ language in voice-enabled interfaces.

“When developing such technologies we also need to keep in mind that we are not perfect, we don’t have a grammar filter when we speak, we need to keep such nuances in mind when developing voice-based interfaces,” said DeWalt.

In this episode of Let's Talk, we sat down with Elizabeth Joseph - Developer Advocate at IBM to talk about Mainframe and why it's a great platform for Linux developers.

IBM is also offering free VMs on mainframe LinuxOne. Grab your VM here: https://developer.ibm.com/linuxone/

The Linux Foundation hosted the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, Deb Goodkin, at the Open Source Summit in San Diego. In this episode of Let’s Talk, we sat down with Goodkin to talk about the FreeBSD project and the foundation.

Jeff Reser - Global Product and Solutions Marketing Manager of SUSE talks about High-Performance Computing.

At the VOICE Summit 2019 (organized by Modev), Jared Hauser, Marketing Director at Valence talks about the importance of voices-interface for enterprise customers. Voice isn’t an add-on, it’s going to be a critical piece of interface for enterprises that adds business value to their applications

At the Open Infrastructure Summit, 2019, we sat down with Joseph Sandoval, SRE Manager for the Adobe Advertising Cloud platform, to talk about the work he is doing with the Hispanic/Latinx Community.

At the VOICE Summit 2019 (organized by Modev), we sat down with Anil Lewis, Executive Director of the National Federation of the Blind, to discuss how Artificial Intelligence And Voice-based interface are helping disabled people to use computers. He argues that accessibility actually makes the product better for everyone.

NFB is the oldest and largest organization led by blind people in the United States.

At the VOICE SUMMIT 2019, powered by Modev, we sat down with Nathan Treloar, President and Co-Founder of Orbita.

Orbita helps to create and deliver HIPAA-compliant voice- and chatbot-powered virtual assistants designed to increase operational efficiencies and improve consumer, patient, and member experiences.

Topics we discussed:

00:00:21 What is Orbita 00:00:51 When and why did you find the company? 00:02:33 Voice is democratizing computing 00:03:49 How voice enables people with disability to use computers 00:6:07 State of voice assisted healthcare 00:08:04 What kind of organizations are using your voice solutions? 00:09:37 What unique challenges does voice assisted healthcare pose

Uday Akkaraju is founder and CEO of BOND.ai, a human-centric artificial intelligence company, which is helping banks ‘sound’ more empathetic and enhance the financial health of their consumers.

Event: Voice Summit 2019 (Powered by Modev)

Priyanka Sharma is the Director of Technical Evangelism at GitLab. She had started her own company when she met the founder of GitLab. She was so impressed with the culture of GitLab that she decided to join the company. In this interview, Sharma shared her journey and also talked about what makes GitLab an ideal place for open source developers to work at.

Carol Teskey is the Director of Global People Operations at GitLab. She joined GitLab from a traditional company and she could see huge differences between the culture of a modern all-remote company and legacy companies. While the first industrial revolution broke our families – which lead to many problems – the fourth industrial revolution may bring families back again and GitLab is writing the playbook for the future of work culture.

Liz Rice, VP of Open Source Engineering at Aqua Security sat down with Swapnil Bhartiya at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, Barcelona, to talk about a wide range of topics.

Here is the timestamp of topics we discussed. 00:02:31 How diverse and inclusive is the Cloud Native community? 00:03:51 What are the benefits of having a diverse community? 00:05:38 What kind of challenges are there for the Technical Oversight Committee? 00:06:51 Tell us a bit about new SIGs (Special Interest Group) 00:06:56 Are there any new initiatives around SIG? 00:08:14 Zero trust security in the Cloud Native world and where does GitLab fit into the picture

GitLab is one of the most innovative tech companies that’s disrupting the industry. First and foremost, it’s an open-source company that’s making Linus Torvald’s Git usable for everyone by offering it as a project and commercializing it as a product.

But what’s really unique about GitLab is the way it runs the business. It’s a fully remote company with no headquarters. It has employees in 50 different countries and they work when they feel like working, from home. We sat down with the co-founder of GitLab - Sid Sijbrandij to talk about his unorthodox methods to build one of the most promising open-source companies.

“Personally, GitLab CI is one of my favorite tools because everything is generally open source,” - CNCF CTO/COO

Recently GitLab forged a partnership with CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) to offer GitLab CI pipeline to CNCF projects. Chris Aniszczyk, CTO and COO of CNCF goes into detail talking about the impact of this partnership on CNCF projects and why GitLab CI is one of his favorite tools.

The interview was recorded at KubeCon, Barcelona.

Linode is a company that predates Amazon Web Services. Without any venture capitalist money, Linode has become a successful open source company that has empowered developers to use the cloud with our losing any control. We sat down with Blair Lyon, VP of Marketing at Linode to understand how the company managed to remain profitable and sustainable.

In this interview, we spoke to Haoyuan (H.Y.) Li, Founder, Chairman and CTO of Open Source Alluxio, a company that is democratizing data in the cloud.

Linode today launched new GPU-optimized cloud computing instances tailored specifically for developers and businesses requiring massive parallel computational power. The new instances are built on NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPU cards with all three major types of processing cores (CUDA, Tensor, and Real-Time Ray Tracing) available to users. Linode is one of the first cloud providers to deploy NVIDIA’s latest GPU architecture.

Microsoft recently applied to join a private Linux kernel mailing list that is meant for reporting and discussing security issues privately before they are made public.

Why does Microsoft need to join this particular list and why does such a list exists in the first place when the kernel community runs its business publicly. Neither of the two is as complicated as it might seem.

Let's discuss.

In this interview, Jochen Breuer, an engineer in the SUSE Manager Team, talks about SUSE Manager, Uyuni and Yomi. The interview was conducted at the openSUSE Conference. SUSE/openSUSE Sponsored the travel and lodging of the TFIR team for this interview.

In this interview, Darren Hart, Sr Director / Open Source Technology Center at VMware talks about how Open Source has democratized the development of new platforms.

Highlights of the interview: * Containers pose a security and compliance risk * Most cloud-native solution providers don’t know the code running in their software * Open Source community needs to address mental illness issue * How VMware integrates open source companies like Heptio and Bitnami after the acquisition * Comments on SFC’s legal battle with VMware

Support TFIR by becoming a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/TFIR Guest: Dirk Hohndel, VP and Chief Open Source Officer at VMware Location: KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, Barcelona Travel & Lodging was sponsored by CNCF

During KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Barcelona, we sat down with Bassam Tabbara – CEO and founder of Upbound to talk about the company he is building to make the next decade about Open / Open Source Cloud, breaking away from the proprietary cloud. Tabbara shared his insights into how AWS, Azure and the rest leverage open source technologies to create the proprietary clouds. He wants to change that.

During the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany, we sat down with the executive director of The Document Foundation. We talked about the evolution of LibreOffice to cater to new users and devices. We also talked about other activities of the foundation beyond managing the LibreOffice community. We also touched upon the importance of diversity and inclusion.

As companies go through their digital transformation journey to become cloud-native, software driven companies they often find themselves overwhelmed with all the emerging technologies surrounding them. They need help to pick and choose the best solution for their use-case. They need to train their staff. They need to…you get the point.

Grape Up is a 12-year-old consulting company that helps companies set out on their digital transformation and cloud-native journey.

We sat down with Roman Swoszowski, co-founder and VP of Cloud R&D at Grape Up to get a better grip of the problems companies face and how Grape Up help these companies using Open Source technologies.

The interview was recorded at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, Barcelona.

Linode is celebrating its 16th anniversary. Linode actually predates Amazon Web Services. We sat down with the founder and CEO of Linode, Christopher Aker, to talk about the history of Linode and how it enabled developers to reap the benefits of cloud before AWS came to exist.

Linode #Linux #OpenSouce

During Kubecon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona TFIR Publisher & Editor, Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Phil Straw, founder and CTO of SoftIron.

SoftIron has built server appliances based on Ceph open source project. Their goal is to obstruct everything (hardware and software) and enable users to simply reap the benefits of Ceph.

Learn more about SoftIron: https://softiron.com/

During the OpenSuse Conference in Nurnberg (German), Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek appeared on "Let's Talk' to talk about the importance of fully open source file sync and storage solutions for enterprise customers. As one of the early contributors to desktop Linux he also talked about the reasons why desktop Linux has not succeeded.

Learn more about Nextcloud here: https://www.nextcloud.com

Moving containers is easy, but moving your persistent data is not that easy. That’s where Reduxio comes into picture. In this interview Reduxio CEO, Ori Bendori talks about why they are relaunching the company as a Kubernetes Storage and Data management company.

In this episode of Let's Talk, Ori Bendori - CEO of Reduxio talks about the challenges companies face as they embark on their cloud native journey.

The interview was recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Barcelona.

https://www.reduxio.com

In this interview, conducted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (Barcelona), we discussed the state of security in the cloud-native world. Loris Degioanni is the CTO and founder of Sysdig, the container intelligence platform. He is also the creator of the popular open source troubleshooting tool, sysdig, and the open source container security tool Falco. Prior to founding Sysdig, Loris co-created Wireshark, the open source network analyzer, which today has 20+ million users. Loris holds a PhD in computer engineering from Politecnico di Torino and lives in Davis, California.

With the explosive growth of Kubernetes adoption, there is a growing demand for training. “People want to use new tool kits that make their jobs easier, but they don’t know how to use them,” said Mark Brandon, founder and CEO of SuperGiant. “We have partnered with the Linux Foundation to create courses that help these users.”

Brandon's team created Supergiant toolkit created to “scratch our their itch,” as they say. Their cloud bills were too high because the hardware utilization was too low. They found that the so-called autoscaling tools from most vendors only meant it was easy to scale up.

"Seriously? Anybody can scale up! Actually, scaling down is what is most important when you are on a budget and paying by the compute hour. At the end of the day, our utilization went from the low teens to over 92% utilization, saving us 50% off our cloud bill, a sum that amounted to over a half million dollars per year. Profit margins doubled, and we had the flexibility to invest in our own product rather than seeing money fly out the door into the pockets of the public cloud providers. This was too good to keep secret," - SuperGiant.

Find more about the Kubernetes training course: https://supergiant.io/training/

Limor Fried is an engineer and creator of Adafruit Industries, a New York-based company that builds and sells open source hardware. Limor Fried, then a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began selling electronic kits on her website from her own designs in 2005. She later moved to New York City to found Adafruit Industries.

In 2010, Adafruit offered a US$1,000 (equivalent to $1,149 in 2018) reward for whoever could hack Microsoft’s Kinect to make its motion sensing capabilities available for use for other projects. This reward was increased to $2000 and then $3000 following Microsoft’s concerns about tampering.

In 2013, the company had $22 million in revenue; for 2014 increased to $33 million.

We recorded this interview last year at Open Source Summit.

In this episode of “Let’s Talk”, Grant Schofield, Director of Infrastructure at Humio talks about how Humio managed to scale Kubernetes to run 100TB of ingest on 25 Humio nodes. We also talked about the evolution and growth of Kubernetes…and we also talked about his hobbies.

Host: Swapnil Bhartiya - founder & editor in chief, TFIR.IO Grant Schofield, Director of Infrastructure at Humio Location: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (Barcelona, Spain) Date of recording: May 22, 2019

Topics we discussed: 00:00:26 - What has been your experience at KubeCon? 00:01:44 What services does Humio offer? 00:03:30 What Observability trends do you seee 00:05:28 The scalability demo Humio gave at the event 00:06:50 Kubernetes is not a FAD 00:07:44 Hobbies

In this episode of “Let’s Talk”, Liran Haimovitch, co-founder of Rookout talks about data collection from modern apps.

Host: Swapnil Bhartiya - founder & editor in chief, TFIR.IO Guest: Liran Haimovitch, co-founder of Rookout Location: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (Barcelona, Spain) Date of recording: May 22, 2019

Topics we discussed: 00:00:28 What is Rookout 00:00:44 What was the reason you created Rookout? 00:01:32 When you decided to create a company around the project 00:03:50 Rookout is the only company that debugs Serverless 00:05:06 What trends do you see in this space 00:06:00 Your experience at KubeCon?

In this episode of Let's Talk, Dr Axel Braun talks about the new features and updates of the GNU Health project. He also talked about the increasing adoption of the project.

In this episode of Let's Talk, Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation talks about the importance of all other cloud-native projects that are showcased at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. She also talks about Project Eirini.

Python is one of the most widely used programming languages. Swapnil Bhartiya, the founder of TFIR, sat down with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python to talk about the origin of the langue and why he stepped down from the leadership of the very project he created.

Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS Technology Corp | SUSECON 2019 by TFiR Media LLC

Robin.io, provider of the industry-leading Hyper-converged Kubernetes platform, today announced a partnership with Google to bring storage and advanced data management capabilities to Google Cloud Services Platform (CSP). As part of the partnership: ● Google and Robin.io engineers are collaborating to design standardized APIs for data management capabilities needed for running data-centric workloads (link to Google Storage API Alpha blog) in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). ● ROBIN Storage is a key launch partner and featured as the preferred storage solution that has been tested and validated to support enterprise workloads in Google Cloud Services Platform (link to Google CSP page). Robin.io, as a first CSP Storage integration partner, provided deep feedback on the design of application-level snapshotting, backup and cloud portability. These sophisticated data management services represent an evolution of the current “state of the art” for running stateful workloads in GKE.

Every company our there, including MongoDB and Redislabs, should listen to what Chef has to say. Chef is going fully open source. The company already has most of its software released as open source. There were some components that were not open and now Chef is releasing them under Apache 2.0, one of the most widely used open source license.

In this episode of TFIR NEWSROOM, we talked to Banjot Chanana of Docker to discuss the collaboration between, Docker, Microsoft and Kubernetes community.

In this first episode of TFIR NEWSROOM PODCAST, we talked to Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs.

Margaret Dawson of Red Hat discusses the importance of diversity & inclusion in tech

To better understand the impact of this acquisition, we talked to Sidney Rabsatt, VP, Product Management at NGNIX and Lori MacVittie - Principal Technical Evangelist, Office of the CTO - F5.

Thomas Squeo Interview at SpringOne Platform Summit

Why We Need Agile Software Development Model: Elisabeth Hendrickson by TFiR Media LLC

In this episode of Let’s Talk, Tracy Ragan talks about the problem Kubernetes users face and how her company DeployHub is solving them. She also talked about her hobbies including horse riding.

Show: TFiR Let’s Talk Location: KubeCon 2018, Seattle Host: Swapnil Bhartiya, founder and editor-in-chief – TFiR Guest: Tracy Ragan, co-founder and CEO – DeployHub

James Watters is the Senior Vice President, Strategy of Pivotal. In this episode of Let's Talk, Waters talks about his thesis on Kuberntes in Enterprise.

Q&A with a Co-Chair of KubeCon & CloudNativeCon

We sat down with Liz Rice, Co-Chair KubeCon & CloudNativeCon, to talk about her experience in China, future events and diversity at CNCF events.

TFiR: How has been your experience so far in KubeCon & CloudNativeCon China?

Liz Rice: It has been phenomenal. This is my first time in China and it’s amazing to see these enormous Chinese companies who are embracing cloud native and doing advanced things with that.

I was particularly struck by the number of applications of AI on Kubernetes. There are power companies, genetics research that’s been done using cloud native technologies.

TFiR: Let’s look beyond China, what’s exciting about Seattle?

LR: I’m really excited because we just sold out. There will be more than 7,500 attendees at Seattle KubeCon & CloudNativeCon.

We are seeing this growing adoption of Kubernetes, so obviously there will be developers and technical discussions around technology. We want to maintain that, but we are also seeing end users and people with expertise and experience or running Kubernetes and cloud native in production. We want to hear more and more stories from them.

I’ve just seen the stage layout and from the perspective of actually standing on that a really big stage, it’s going to be quite fun. We will see a lot of projects that are going through the process of graduation and want to move from sandbox into incubation.

TFiR: Diversity is a topic that we cover here at TFiR. CNCF is doing incredible work to make its events more inclusive and diverse, will we continue to see that? LR: One of the things that I’m really impressed about the CNCF is that there is a genuine focus on trying to improve access for a diverse audience. We have diversity scholarships, and I believe 301 people have attended or are going to be attending KubeCon & CloudNativeCon this calendar year as a result of the diversity scholarships.

It’s great to see those people from really unusual and interesting places around the world getting to attend and take back some knowledge to their local communities.

You might not consider Oracle your traditional open source company, but when it comes to Linux, the company is no different from Red Hat or SUSE. Officially, Wim Coekaerts is Senior Vice President of Operating Systems and Virtualization Engineering at Oracle and heads the Linux kernel team at the company and his team works on upstream kernel projects. All the work by Oracle is done on upstream and then teams pull the code from Greg Kroah-Hartman's stable branch. Coekaerts' team includes maintainers or core upstream projects including XFS, Linux NFC Client, Linux SCUSI layer and so on. I sat down with Coekaerts for almost an hour-long interview at the Oracle Open

Alan Gates is one of the co-founders and architect of Hortonworks. I sat down with Gates at the DataWorks Summit (2018) to talk about a wide range of topics.

I sat down with Cindy Maike, VP Industry Solutions & GM Insurance, Hortonworks to understand how they are helping the insurance and healthcare industries in embracing Big Data.

What Makes Arch Linux a Great Distribution by TFiR Media LLC

Kunal Agarwal: How Big Data is transforming our world by TFiR Media LLC

LibreOffice In Windows Store, PowerShell in Ubuntu by TFiR Media LLC

Meet Red Hat CTO

Arduino is an iconic open source project that played a critical role in creating a breed of embedded developers by making it easy to interact with digital electronics. “The trick was to basically not tell them that they were embedded developers,” said Banzi.

Banzi, who also teaches interactive design in Europe, has been working on making it easier to interact with things that are being developed using digital electronics. Arduino summarized all the research work that he had done over ages.

Arduino revolutionized the embedded electronics space and triggered a makers movement. The open source 3D printer that I use is powered by Arduino; my RC car runs on Arduino.

“The first people who used Arduino were designers, artists, musicians, performers. It started off as a highly creative tool and then it became a tool for people to also innovate on products. Arduino enabled thousands of people to start using electronics as a tool to innovate and create companies,” he said.

Now Arduino is entering the next phase of its evolution. With the explosive growth of IoT devices, Arduino now wants to bring the same ease of use and tooling to the IoT community.

Interview with Kasten co-founder Niraj Tolia by TFiR Media LLC

Meet the CEO: Sirish Raghuram talks about Microservices by TFiR Media LLC

We talked to Microsoft to understand the impact of their partnership with Databricks.

In December last year, Microsoft partnered with Databricks to bring Apache Spark based technologies to Azure customers and bring Azure cloud to Databricks users.

To learn more about this partnership, I sat down with Mitra Azizirad, Corporate Vice President, Cloud Application Development, Data and AI Marketing @ Microsoft.

SUSE CTO Talks about SUSE technologies by TFiR Media LLC

In this interview, conducted at the Open Source Leadership Summit (2018), Swapnil Bhartiya talked to Nithya Ruff, Sr. Director of Open Source Practice at Comcast. Ruff detailed the amazing Open Source work Comcast is doing.

This interview is also part of our series on #Women In Tech. At TFiR, we are picking Wednesdays as Women in Tech day where we will be talking to a leader from the technology world. We are starting off the series with the interview of Ruff.