The New Stack Makers

Three years ago, Lukas Lehmann, head of cloud services, Swisscom described how his organization at that time was largely client-server dependant. In order to achieve its goals as both Switzerland’s largest telecom and as an IT provider, it became apparent that the Swiss firm had to find ways to scale across its entire operations in a way that remained consistent and robust. In this podcast from Cloud Foundry Summit EU hosted by Hosted by Alex Williams, The New Stack founder and editor-in-chief, Lukas Lehmann, head of cloud services, Swisscom discussed his organization was able to scale to achieve its shift to at-scale application development goals across cloud environments thanks largely to partnership with Cloud Foundry.  Stefan Voegele, expert middleware engineer, for insurance provider Swiss Re, was also on hand to discuss how his firm uses Swisscom’s platform as a service (PaaS) in its shift to a cloud environment. “Helping our customers and ourselves make a digital transformation is key to us,” Lehmann said. “That is why such a platform [as Cloud Foundry’s] and being involved in such an ecosystem is very important for us.” Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/42mNdpu_6wc

Alex Delgado, a security engineer at the Gremlin chaos testing service, points to the disconnect many enterprises have. It’s not that the developers aren’t building with the newest technologies like Kubernetes and microservices. It’s just that security and compliance haven’t even heard of these things. And it's increasing risk. “You can’t secure something that you don’t know how it works,” he said, on this episode of The New Stack Makers, where Delgado reflects on his past at a security and defense enterprise and his present at scale-up Gremlin. He began his career in customer support and then remediation of customer concerns. That put him in an interesting but often frustrating position as he moved into security, which had him throwing code over the wall that was released maybe three months down the line.

Automating security is now more of an issue as attack surfaces become more expansive and change. We sat down at GitLab Commit Brooklyn with Shamiq Islam, Head of Application, Blockchain, and Infrastructure Security at Coinbase and Philippe Lafoucrière, Distinguished Engineer at GitLab to discuss all things security automation and why today’s enterprises should look into automating their security and closing the software development life cycle loop. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JfZ-SoBRFkU

All things continuous integration, continuous delivery, the GitLab experience in new environments, and even mainframes were the topics of discussion taking place at GitLab Commit during an interview TNS founder & Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams had with Eddie Zaneski, Developer Relations Manager at DigitalOcean, Kyle Persohn, Senior Engineer at Northwestern Mutual, and Sean Corkum, Senior Software Engineer at Northwestern Mutual. Launching the discussion was the topic of CI/CD in an organization. Specifically, how organizations can get their teams involved with and building out CI/CD. "It has to be ingrained in the culture of the team to really take full advantage of everything that you can get from that. Making sure you're building fast, failing fast, and everyone understands and is totally on board like, 'Yeah, this is the right way that we should go,'" said Corkum.

It is certainly never easy to port existing software production pipelines and operations to a cloud native or, more typically, to a mix and match of cloud, bare metal and on-premises server environments. This assumption certainly held true for the situation T-Mobile was in during its digital journey . But while T-Mobile’s operations are on a gargantuan scale of magnitude compared to most organizations, T-Mobile succeeded by applying many of the same practices any organization needs to rely on, whether for a 10-person shop or if the company is Google. This includes an increasing reliance on GitOps for version control (VC) and repository functions but also as a way to combine all data access and functions into a single source to help manage the enormous complexity of multi-cloud and server environments, including, of course, Kubernetes deployments. One of T-Mobile’s main goals was moving “a lot of those pieces out of the traditional location where they might be in a database of inside of a certain system of record, and a service registry and more into a repository. So,  we're able to recreate things on the go to manage our user base in a more dynamic fashion,” Philip Marc Schwartz, principle engineer, software, T-Mobile, said. “It's been an eye-opening experience to be able to work through the problems that you see with those systems as you're trying to get them working. And it's very interesting to see those problems solved where you can really work on them in a finite level.” Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yT5zogF_NT0

"Cloud Foundry is a project that predates Kubernetes, and as container orchestration has evolved, we have started seeing more microservice components built into Cloud Foundry that were used as a way to containerize to some extent. This speaks to the history of project Eirini and project Quarks," said TNS founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams during a live interview recorded at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe, where he was joined by Jennifer Spinney, Staff Software Engineer at Pivotal, and Vlad Iovanov, Technical Lead at Cloud Foundry SUSE. Spinney went on to explain, "So, Cloud Foundry traditionally has this component called Diego, which is actually a rewrite of the old way that containers used to be run in Cloud Foundry via these DEAs, we replaced that with Diego when we did that we introduced this hard boundary between the API of CF and the back end that schedules containers and schedules your actual app workloads. So then when Kubernetes started picking up steam, because we have this hard boundary now between the Cloud Foundry API and the back end that's actually scheduling jobs, we could look at swapping out Diego with just Kubernetes because it's kind of doing the same thing. Back when we started Diego, Kubernetes wasn't fully there yet, there was still a lot of maturing to do. Now I think we're seeing Kubernetes becoming way more mature, and it's much more possible to just drop in Kubernetes instead of Diego."

At GitLab Commit, GitLab's first user conference that took place last week in Brooklyn, GitLab announced that it has received 268M in funding, valuing the company at 2.75B dollars. TNS Founder Alex Williams dove into this announcement and many more with GitLab CEO & co-founder Sid Sijbrandij, asking candidly what the next steps are for GitLab after it received that kind of funding. "We're going to continue what we were doing. This money will enable us to keep hiring people, and keep hiring people to make GitLab more mature in every single aspect. GitLab is incredibly broad, started with version control and CI, but now we go all the way from planning what you want to do to monitoring the results of that. We want to make sure every part of GitLab becomes as good as the best parts," said Sijbrandij.

Once largely reserved for the finance industry, times series databases are increasingly emerging as must-haves for many organizations. A classic SQL database,  for example, is not designed to process thousands or — in many cases — millions of data points per second that a time series database can monitor, track,  analyze and assimilate for forecasting applications for real-time analytics and business intelligence. These applications often include application, server, network  monitoring, for industrial or IoT data. However, many organizations are faced with the conundrum of not being able to afford investing in the required hardware infrastructure for time series data analysis or most of their operations are cloud-based and they have faced a dearth of viable alternatives. As a solution, InfluxData, a leading data has launched InfluxDB Cloud 2.0, the first serverless time series platform as a service (PaaS). In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO, InfluxData, discussed InfluxDB Cloud 2.0, and how the evolution of time series databases have evolved to create a need for a cloud-based alternative.

A question we’re asking a lot is: What is a developer advocate? Often followed by: Which department do you report to? How do you measure your role? It’s a somewhat old role in the fact that people have been marketing to devs since software started getting sold. It’s a somewhat new role under its name. When Rob Zazueta mentioned he was hired at WeWork to build a developer relations team focused on internal developers first, it surprised me to realize that companies — even ones with massive API programs — aren’t really advocating to their internal developers. This is a shame. This would promote reusable code, shared learnings, and brand advocates that can go out and talk for you. On this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sit down with Brian Douglas, developer advocate at Github. This is something he does for both external and internal developers.

When applying for an open award for people that did activism in the Portland tech community, Netlify's Head of Community Perry Eising found himself having to identify outside of his gender identity as a result of the form not having an option for nonbinary people to be recipients of the award. After realising he was getting mixed signals, he decided to ask the company about it directly, "That moment of bravery was just, I didn't know how they were going to respond. I didn't know how clued in they were to having people who were nonbinary as part of their organization, whether they knew what that was, whether they were going to treat me well, whether they were going to laugh at me. Us as underrepresented people in tech, I think there's always that nervousness if we're going to bring up a concern to people who were organizing something, whether they're going to have the knowledge to take that in,  or whether they're going to reject us, or whether they're going to laugh at us," Eising said. Eising's experience addressing the issue of exclusion with the event organizer in question turned out positive, as they didn't realize their form had been excluding those that were nonbinary. This interaction began a collaboration between Eising and the organization where he volunteered and collaborated with them to make their events more inclusive. "It's not always like that, you don't always have those experiences where you're welcome when you bring something forward and so I decided that I wanted to respond to this personal event of mine by creating a guide that kind of laid out that experience, of this sort of mismatch of signals you can experience, and give opportunities for people to understand why that was the case but also provide really hands-on solutions for people that are planning, promoting organizing, orchestrating events to be more gender inclusive." Thus, the Gender Inclusive Events Guide was created.

The user journey evolves at many levels, says Pivotal Software Senior Director of Product Marketing Dormain Drewitz. "There's a couple of different user journeys that are really happening. You've got user journeys at the developer level, you have user journeys at more of the platform, engineering level, and the teams that are operating and building the platforms, and you have user journeys kind of at the business level and what does that mean for lines of business and their whole relationship to software?" During a podcast with TNS Founder & EiC Alex Williams at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe, Drewitz discussed not only the user journey, but the evolution of the developer persona itself. In particular, how developers can learn from those that came before them. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HeZd6J4TsKc

Part of the transition to DevOps that comes with cloud native application development, has been a shift in responsibility for storage, away from dedicated specialists towards developers who are increasingly responsible for provisioning the storage for the applications they build. “People do not want storage to be a complicated task,” said Chris Merz, principal technologist at NetApp. “It is a piece of infrastructure. It should be simple, it should be scalable, it should be self healing. They should follow the same patterns as the systems that DevOps practitioners and cloud native architects are building every day.” Before Kubernetes, building and operating container-based applications was onerous—it involved manually handling tasks like DNS management, load balancing, scaling and resource monitoring. Now the Kubernetes ecosystem handles all of that—but there needs to be a way to get the same level of automation for storage, Merz said.

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder & EiC Alex Williams sits down with Jeroen Coussement, Co-founder & CEO, Factry to focus on the use of OPC-UA and InfluxDB in industrial settings. Coussement built an open-source OPC-UA server to bring data from and to process control systems as well as demonstrate the value of a time series database by collecting data from industrial control systems, adding further context with additional data (and interpreting the result visually), using this as a basis for optimization. When working in an industrial IoT context, there are many concerns that one has to keep in mind throughout the software development process. When Coussement built the OPC-UA server and the Node OPC-UA Logger, he emphasised 'flattening out' the schema when building the server, and made Node the language of choice when developing the logger. "You just configure it and it will log the data from your process to InfluxDB. That's basically it in a nutshell. It also provides buffering, because typically you don't want any data loss, so you install that collector on one of your automation servers, where it's as close to the source as possible. There, it will start collecting the data and if there's some kind of network issue, it will buffer the data so when the network comes back online, it will send over the data it has been collecting in the meantime," said Coussement.

There are common perceptions that organizations have about open source — but  these perceptions also vary a lot. This is especially the case when it comes to describing what organizations’ role in open source development should be, as well as the best way to take advantage of this ongoing explosion in open source tools and their availability. (Call it a renaissance, if you will). What open source means — and what it should mean — is a main topic of this episode of this The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded during the Open Source Summit in San Diego, with the recently released results of the survey the second annual survey “Open Source Programs in the Enterprise.” Dirk Hohndel, vice president, chief open source officer, VMware, discussed his take on the results and what they meant for VMware, which  co-sponsored the survey in partnership with The Linux Foundation’s TODO Group. The survey results also served to quantify many of the operations Hohndel has made during his work with the open source community. Given that enterprises increasingly describe themselves as software companies, a key consideration is to determine how software's role specific to your organization. Or more specifically,  Hohndel said,  most businesses view software as "key to what they do."

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder & EiC Alex Williams sits down with Sam Charrington, Founder of This Week in Machine Learning & AI (TWiML & AI). The inaugural TWIMLcon conference takes place October 1st-2nd, 2019 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, California. TWIMLcon aims to bring a fresh perspective to AI & ML events, growing out of conversations that Charrington had with enterprises that, “Tended to be at a very interesting transition point.” Noting that he heard towards the end of last year that, “Companies kicked off a lot of machine learning proof-of-concept types of projects, they had some initial successes, their data science teams were out evangelising, and some of those proof-of-concepts were starting to mature [...] And so all of a sudden these organizations, they were challenged with the transition from ‘How do I successfully execute an individual machine learning project,’ to ‘How do I become an engine for delivering machine learning at my organization?’” said Charrington.