The New Stack Makers

Executives from Pivotal joined this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at the SpringOne Platform conference to discuss what the developer experience is like around the world. They were particularly well-suited to offer input about what developers face as customers worldwide since each executive is based in the U.S., Europe and Asia, respectively. The common-thread experiences they described also covered what it's like to deploy software on Kubernetes and CI/CD best practices and tools. The podcast guests from Pivotal were Lionel Lim, vice president and managing director, Asia Pacific and Japan; Chad Sakac, Americas Sales; Bas Lemmens, vice president and general manager, EMEA.

At least in the tech industry, the word “community” is teetering somewhere between adage and advantage. As developer experience becomes more of a necessity, does building a community have to be part of your business strategy? In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sit down with Jono Bacon, community and collaboration strategy consultant, speaker and author. Our conversation unsurprisingly begins with talking about the emerging role of developer relations, developer advocate or developer evangelist. It is often an external-facing role, and yet acts as the liaison among infrastructure, product and marketing. It’s a role that is still rather a fish out of water, often immeasurable and flopped around from department to department.

Stateful data management and storage are set to remain ever-present in IT infrastructures for the foreseeable future. But as containers and Kubernetes take hold, storage management for stateless and multiplatform environments is set to change. This holds true whether your organization employs hundreds of developers spread around the world who regularly spin up stateless containers or if your organization has data spread among multicloud and on-premises legacy environments. In any case, all of this data must be stored somewhere in a stateful form. At the end of day, all that “state” really means is that “data outlasts containers,” Murli Thirumale, CEO and co-founder of Portworx, said. However, in this era of stateless data, a new kind of storage has emerged. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded during TC Sessions: Enterprise in September in San Francisco, Thirumale described this new era of storage management and Portworx's role in this context as a provider of stateful storage for containers and multiplatform environments.

How does your product change when it scales up in the open source world? How does that change your drive to create a better developer experience? In this episode of The New Stack Makers recorded at the SpringOne Platform conference, The New Stack founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams sits down with Olga Kundzich, senior product manager for the Spinnaker continuous delivery platform at Pivotal. They discuss the best practices that help drive Pivotal's open source community, and how that informs Spinnaker's roadmap.

It wasn't that long ago when data fabrics were mainly relegated to various strategies organizations had in place for data management. The concept was largely limited to making sure data was where it should be and stored in the right places. Flash forward to today, and data fabrics are very much tied to often mission-critical analysis, often across a mix of multicloud and on-premises environments. DevOps teams, of course, increasingly rely on data fabrics to help support DevOps operations and culture.  In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Neil Stanley, product manager, data fabric at NetApp Cloud Data Services, and Jason Blosil, senior product marketing manager, cloud solutions, for NetApp, spoke about what data fabric means today, and how NetApp has adapted its architectural approach for modern DevOps challenges.

Data engineering is 10 years behind the software engineering world and, in many ways, remains mired in "spreadsheet land," Danielle Morrill, general manager for the GitLab startup Meltano, said. As a way to make up for the lack of viable data engineering processes, Meltano can meet the needs of organizations without the in-house expertise of software developers who can invent a tailored solution from scratch. "A lot of people are great with spreadsheets and can't write code or think they can't write code, but conceptually, they already are," Morrill said. "So, I think the roadmap [for Meltano] is very much about bringing them along." In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recording during the GitLab Commit conference in Brooklyn, New York in September, Morrill described how Meltano casts an as wide net as an open source alternative for data modeling, analysis and management.

It wasn’t that long ago when Dell Digital’s software product teams were typically bogged down in very silo'ed development cycles. One of the more troubling effects was how long it took to complete projects, often measured in months. In some cases, software releases could even take a year before deployment. And all to often these very long development cycles did not result in something that met Dell Digital’s business goals — as in, creating something the customer wanted or needed. Besides the requisite culture for agile development, missing in Dell’s digital-transformation strategy was a single underlying platform that Pivotal Labs eventually provided, said Greg Bowen, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Dell Digital (the IT organization that supports Dell). With the help of Pivotal Labs' platform and the adoption of a more agile DevOps culture, Dell Digital's teams are now "extremely hyper-focused on the outcome with the business partner right there in the development process,” Bowen said. “And so, that's allowed us to take the scale of an enterprise company, and become almost startup in nature.” In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at the SpringOne Platform conference, Bowen discussed how Dell Digital's transformation was dependent as much on culture and processes as it was on selecting the right technologies and tools including, as mentioned above, Pivotal Labs' platform.

There are many opinions out there about what your organization must do — or buy — to make sure container environments are secure. But taking a step back, containers stand on the shoulders of open source, and the security and compliance processes that teams have learned during the past decades remain applicable in many instances. At the same time, container security has its own set of rules and best practices that are often less than apparent. Worse still, much of the confusion around open source security remains, further compounding the challenges. “If I look at the container environment, we’re kind of back in the bad old days where the container Docker file may have a license, but almost always it is not the license for all of the software that is included in the container, which usually contains many components,” Dirk Hohndel, vice president and chief open source officer at VMware, said. The quintessential question, Hohndel says, is how do you find secure containers and “ensure that the one that you have is actually secure?” In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, host Alex Williams discusses the status of compliance and security now that containers are becoming such a core part of open infrastructure. He is joined by VMware’s Hohndel and Andrew Wilson, a long-time chief open source compliance officer at Intel.

The technology industry is undergoing a data revolution in which the unlimited storage and compute power of the cloud is changing how data is stored, processed and managed. Alluxio is a platform for data orchestration that aims to simplify and standardize how data is managed across different types of infrastructure by creating a layer of abstraction between the storage and application layers. The Alluxio orchestrator virtualizes data and allows applications to access it in a way that’s compute, storage and cloud agnostic. It’s a platform designed to eliminate data silos and make data readily available and performant for developers. Haoyuan (H.Y.) Li, CTO and founder of Alluxio, is a co-creator of the Apache Spark streaming library and built Alluxio as an open source virtual distributed file system for a computer science PhD project at Berkeley. Li is now building a startup, which currently boasts 40 employees and several large enterprise customers. The company offers enterprise features and support on top of its open source project.

Porsche has always been about technology since Ferdinand Porsche founded the iconic brand in 1931. This is manifest in today’s new models, whether it’s how engineers have shaved milliseconds from the turbo rotations for an even more responsive takeoff blast in the new 2020 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 or the battery-powered motor for a zero-to-60 mph acceleration in the Taycan Turbo S in a slam-you-back-in-your-seat 2.6 seconds. But Porsche is radically changing, the company asserts. This means the Porsche experience — for those lucky enough to have driven one of the fabled models — is no longer brought to you by a sports car manufacture...but by Porsche as a “mobility provider.”  And this Porsche metamorphosis as a mobility provider hinges on software development, company executives say.  In this latest The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at Cloud Foundry Summit EU, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack, Porsche’s Matthias Hub, Porsche IT project manager and prototyper, and Thorsten Türk-Steppe, Porsche product owner, described how Porsche is reinventing itself as a company through its DevOps’ software emphasis as a mobility provider. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/9zReDsl41ac

When The New Stack Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams sat down with Pivotal’s VP of Technology Cornelia Davis at SpringOne Platform in Austin Texas, they had a lot to talk about. Almost 40 years. Davis’s tech career began in aeronautics which could go give years from code written to rocket launched. She has journeyed right alongside as we went from SOA and SOAP to REST to the distributed systems we have today. During her talk and in this conversation, she reflects on the patterns that drove APIs from a RESTful layer toward toward true autonomy, where everything is as loosely coupled as possible, with bounded context. A chat with Davis feels one third practical computing, one third theoretical mathematical foundations, and a third grammar. To give context to the chat, let’s give some background. The traditional object-oriented or imperative programming is focused on using statements to change a program’s state. On the other hand, declarative or functional programming focuses on what the program should accomplish and isn’t worried about how that result is achieved, This is why the first is referred to as stateful programming, while the latter is stateless. In this conversation, Davis describes functional programming as a statement of relationship between the first part of a problem and the rest of the problem. You trust that the second half of that problem is correct, so all that is important is how you combine these things. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZCbWNBw_fHg

One of the main components of the mantra “all companies are software companies” is organizations’ DevOps must deploy and update applications rapidly and at scale. The supporting infrastructure hosting the production pipelines and deployments must also be both safe and sound, regardless of whether it is on the cloud, on premises or — more likely — a mix of both The main theme of this episode The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack, was how NetApp offers a foundation for DevOps deployments and data management across cloud native and on premises infrastructures. NetApp’s Diane Patton, hybrid cloud services (NetApp Cloud Services on HCI)  and Robert Esker, product management and strategy, discussed, among other things, how NetApp’s HCI can serve as the underlying foundation for a number infrastructures. "We provide this common set of tools, so no matter where the developer wants to deploy their application, they can use that exact same toolset and deploy it either on-prem or deploy in any of the major cloud providers as well.," Patton said.

Building enterprise level software takes a lot of skill and creativity. When developers want to come together to discuss, create, and inspire one another, the place they flock to is the SpringOne Platform conference, which took place this year in Austin, Texas. Pivotal Senior Vice President of Product James Watters said it best at the keynote for the event, which he later recapped alongside VMware Principal Engineer Joe Beda in an interview with TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams. "It's because it's the one place for people who are really passionate about building modern applications in enterprises all hang out. There's some places where that's considered like, 'Oh that won't happen,' or 'We're not doing that yet,' or, 'We're straddled with so much heritage,' but you know, this is the conference where on stage you can see Netflix saying, 'We're all in on SpringBoot, it's how we build all our applications,' and then the next customer gets up from Home Depot or TDA and says, 'We do it the same way,' and to me that's kind of inspiring because it's I think kind of a lifeblood for enterprises to come to a place where they have a peer group that's doing the same difficult thing which is modernizing their applications," said Watters.

One of the themes of the Cloud Foundry Summit series has always been to help reinforce the strong sense of community among those who take part in the open source movement. In this way, the recently held Cloud Foundry Summit EU in September lived up to its mission. Among those on hand at the conference whose jobs are to initiate and educate organizations, about open source and the Cloud Foundry, as well as to include more individuals in the movement, were Ivana Scott, business operations manager, EngineerBetter and Sara Lenz, sales and account Manager, anynines. They were the guests on The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at Cloud Foundry Summit EU, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack. Both Lenz and Scott are particularly well-positioned to offer a fresh perspective on how to grow the community through education. Scott first became involved in the open source community in in 2007 when she joined training provider in London. There, she was  part of the events team, and was involved in organizing events, training courses, conference and meetups, while devoting a “huge amount”  of effort to support open source communities. She then became directly involved in the Cloud Foundry community after joining EngineerBetter in 2018. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CZ45-j2e_eY

A question that may come to mind for those managing enterprise workloads is: What is Trident? This is the main question that George Tehrani, Director of Product Management, Open Ecosystem answered on this episode of The New Stack Makers, hosted by TNS founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams.
 "By and large, any workload of importance to the enterprise needs some sort of persistence. So what Trident is, is an open source storage orchestrator that NetApp developed and continues to maintain. It greatly simplifies the creation, management, and consumption of persistent storage for enterprise workloads in Kubernetes, as well as the other major distributions of Kubernetes such as OpenShift."