The New Stack Makers

Atticus Finch, the wise country father and country lawyer literary character, in Harper Lee’s classic “To Kill a Mockingbird”, communicated one of the more timeless and poignant descriptions of what empathy means. Understanding another person’s point of view or plight, especially when it is removed from yours, requires one to “climb in his skin and walk around in it,” he says. Flash forward to today in this renaissance era in open stack development. While the act of understanding the “other” is critical in any context, empathy in the software development world is also especially important in a number of often surprisingly ways. Denise Yu, a senior software engineer at Pivotal, recently described in her The New Stack post “Why Empathy in Open Source Matters More Than You Think” just how broadly taking into account the wants and needs of others counts when dealing with colleagues, end-use software customers and people in general. Yu writes “Even without the financial motivations, empathy is something that we as product builders should care about because it is the right thing to do.” In a podcast hosted by The New Stack’s Joab Jackson, managing editor, at Cloud Foundry Summit North America last week in Philadelphia, Yu was able to continue her discussion on empathy and why it is so important in the software development sector. Jai Schniepp, product owner for cloud and Security at Liberty Mutual Insurance, also offered more details based on in-house practices and processes on why thinking of the other is critical.

Those working in the developer and DevOps space have invariably heard of DevSecOps and, at the very least, know how it plays a critical role in the software delivery pipeline. But every organization is different and the tools and mechanisms for software delivery very accordingly. And once you throw into the mix the hundreds of different CI/CD tools available today, as well as the challenges associated with more-modern platforms, such as container and microservices deployments, the challenges of security and DevSecOps become that much more dauting — and in many cases, confusing. “A lot of people don’t really know what [DevSecOps] entails. Not so much that they don’t understand the concept — they get DevOps and they know how to implement it — but I think folks are still a little skittish about DevSecOps and how to implement it,” Sonya Koptyev, director of product marketing and evangelism for Twistlock, said.

InfluxData is a sponsor of The New Stack. When Gianluca Arbezzano, now a site reliability engineer (SRE) for InfluxData, first approached Chris Churilo, director of product marketing, over two years ago, what an SRE was and did was a largely nebulous concept for him.”I was looking at myself more as a DevOps person, but I was never a systems administration,” Arbezzano said. “I always wrote code and automated [applications and deployments].” Initially, when Arbezzano reached out to InfluxData, “he said he was a fan of InfluxDB and we just hit it off and I said ‘we’ve got to do something together,’ Churilo said. Arbezzano then grew into the role from there and has since been instrumental in helping InfluxData in a number of ways, including helping to automate InfluxCloud processes and making sure customer deployments remain on track. In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Arbezzano and Churilo discussed what is like to be an SRE today and how it all fits together in InfluxData’s quest to help customers improve observability and analytics and automation with its time series platform.

Pivotal’s Corey Innis’ job function, on paper at least, falls under the traditional category of software developer or engineer. Indeed, their “official” business title is staff software engineer at Pivotal. But instead, Innis says they have claimed another job title that is more reflective of what they actually do. Innis’ true title, they say, is “software craftsperson.” “At really healthy software and information technology organizations, the work is really much more like that of a craftsman than it is as an engineer,” Innis said. “I’m also really interested in diversity in the workplace, including gender diversity, so I claimed ‘person’ instead of 'craftsman,' as in 'craftsperson.' So, that’s where that’s coming from.” In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Innis described how software development and culture have evolved over the course of his career that began in the pre-dot.com bust days of the 1990s. Over the past two decades, coding and software engineering have also certainly evolved into a new culture and mindset — much of which DevOps and agile development have fostered — that, at the end of the day, reflect a more craftsperson collective mindset.

Dieu Cao, director of product management at Pivotal Software, and the chair for the Cloud Foundry project management committee (PMC), says she was “at the right place at the right time” when her involvement with Cloud Foundry began. She had been directly involved with Pivotal before it became a company when Greenplum had contracted with Pivotal Labs. “I like to say that project went so well, that we decided to buy Pivotal Labs,” Cao said. After Pivotal became a separate company in 2013, Cao went on maternity leave in 2014. When she returned, Cao said her projects had changed. “I was looking for something to do,” Cao said. “Cloud Foundry was one of the projects that came into the Pivotal initiative. I’ve also been very product-oriented and I was in the right place at the right time. Initially, she became the project manager for the runtime team — which has now exploded from one to about 20 teams. After serving as the Runtime PMC Lead in the Cloud Foundry, she recently became the Cloud Foundry PMC chair. The Cloud Foundry Foundation has certainly changed during the past five years. Its evolution and exciting developments were the topic of a podcast hosted by The New Stack’s Joab Jackson, managing editor, at Cloud Foundry Summit North America last week in Philadelphia,

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Ramin Keene, CEO & Founder, Fuzzbox a brand new company that makes it safe to experiment in production.  She caught up with him at the LaunchDarkly Trajectory convention in Oakland, California where he ended his talk with the question “If it were completely safe to experiment in production, why wouldn’t you?” Keene said he’s had to make a shift that is common across the industry where he used to be able to know his company’s entire stack and knew exactly what to do to fix it.  But with the growth and addition of complexity, he’s now about three levels removed from what the engineers are doing.

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Lee Byron, the developer of GraphQL at Facebook and now manager of the web engineering team at the investment app Robinhood.  He also is a founder of the GraphQL Foundation, a neutral place for the GraphQL community to support the expansion of GraphQL and surrounding ecosystems, whose launch last November was covered by The New Stack.  Facebook’s mission when Byron joined in 2008 was to “map the social graph.” After that was complete, they moved on to new missions and GraphQL was developed in 2012 in response to the need to move Facebook onto mobile devices.  Facebook was originally designed on client-server architecture, and they clearly needed a native mobile data platform. By 2015, the React open source community gained traction and held their first conference.  The expanding use in the open source community, said Byron, led to the necessity to rebuild GraphQL from the ground up.

APIs have certainly evolved beyond the first application programming interfaces (APIs) of the late 1960s to become the focal point of software development today. But during the past three to four years, APIs have also evolved to become fully integrated with DevOps and front- and back-end development. Among the benefits APIs offer, well-developed APIs serve integral role allowing organizations to realize their business goals more efficiently and rapidly.And APIs continue to evolve, of course. Beerinder Rodey, senior product manager at TIBCO Software who works with the company’s Mashery API management product, discussed APIs’ recent developments with The New Stack’s Joab Jackson, managing editor, at the Cloud Foundry Summit North America in Philadelphia. Four or five years ago, for example, API management was more focused on distribution, Rodey said. Then, developers often would say “‘I’ve got APIs and I just need to be able to get them out to my consumers. I want to maybe put them in some packages and make sure they’re discoverable and get some docks in front of them,’” Beerinder said. “[It was] mostly a distribution layer.”

“Building bridges” and forging partnerships,” at face value, might seem like marketing speak. But put into context, these  concepts can mean a lot. To wit, during a podcast hosted by The New Stack’s Joab Jackson, managing editor, at the Cloud Foundry Summit North America last week in Philadelphia  Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers had a lot to say.  Among other things, he articulated how Cloud Foundry has worked to remove silos and boost collaboration for the development of new cloud-native technologies for the open source community during the past year.Indeed, Childers explained how the theme of the show is building the future. “That really applies in two ways: it applies, of course, — and I think, we spend a lot of time talking about this — to the contributors that build the Cloud Foundry platform. But it also equally applies to the end users, Because the whole reason why companies like American Airlines or Charles Schwab or Comcast or DICK’S Sporting Goods...are really focused on cloud native platforms,” Childers said. “They’re really trying to use software as a competitive advantage in the market that’s extremely technology centric now. You know, every markets becomes technology-centric. So, they’re building the futures of their companies using these technologies, using these open source platforms that they can build off of, right? So dual meaning.”

Very early in his career as a student, Andrew Jenkins was studying space dust and other payloads for the U.S. Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics as part of a NASA contract. It was there while working on communication protocols “almost from the physical layer” that he began to shift his attention to the software side. Monitoring, observability, logging and other capabilities that are increasingly essential for software production pipelines today could have already been put to use over 15 years ago when Jenkins was working for NASA. However, at that time, service meshes had yet to be developed — while Kubernetes, microservices and even DevOps were yet to come as well. After working as a graduate research assistant developing software for the International Space Station at the University of Colorado Boulder, Jenkins continued to shift “further and further up into the software side of things.” He began to see, after joining F5 Networks in 2013, how platforms could be used for application deliveries of load balancing, security and other tasks for cloud applications. By the time Aspen Mesh was formed in 2017 as a spinoff from F5, Jenkins had begun to develop true service mesh platforms to manage data traffic as part of a shift to Kubernetes clusters and the service-to-service communications in microservices. In other words, it is possible to say service meshes found Jenkins.

A major theme at Cloud Foundry Summit North America earlier this month in Philadelphia was interoperability and its importance to Cloud Foundry — as the  core functional tests validating Cloud Foundry Application Runtime releases for Project Eirini begin. Speaking to this during a podcast hosted by The New Stack’s Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, were: Dr. Xiujiao Gao, client lead and cloud engineer at Stark & Wayne; Bernd Krannich, technical lead, Cloud Foundry SAP; and Julian Friedman, Cloud Foundry project lead, IBM. As part of Cloud Foundry’s continued push to improve interoperability, Eirini was created with this goal in mind for scheduling for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. As Cloud Foundry notes, organizations can choose to adopt Diego/Garden or Kubernetes to orchestrate to application container instances. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZoKCs6r5I0

Machine learning-aided artificial intelligence (AI) might one day be able to eventually emulate the intelligence of hundreds or even thousands of human brains simultaneously, in such a way that human input would be obsolete throughout the software development cycle. In theory, a single system could not only replace a hundred-member DevOps teams, but assume the roles and tasks performed by hundreds of similar-sized DevOps teams. You could easily imagine, like taxi and truck drivers, the days of the software developer are numbered — except they really are not.As far as thinking outside of the box or finding ways to write elegant and creative code or when chaos occurs, AI is largely lost. This but only partially explains why machine-learning taught computers may never be able to create art or write poetry to the extend a human can, while the mass replacement of men and women in the software development and operations should thus not happen anytime soon.But what machine learning is already good at, Nick Durkin, field CTO for Harness said during this episode of The New Stack Maker podcast, is assuming a lot of the more data-crunching and mundane tasks in the production and deployment pipelines.

On today’s episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Sean Armstrong, VP of Products at AppNeta, a SaaS company providing actionable, end-to-end network performance monitoring for their customers.   “The performance of your application,” Armstrong said, “is subject to how well the customer runs their own network & how well the internet between you and your customer is actually working. So you could get blamed for poor performance that’s completely outside of your control, and they use AppNeta to diagnose and troubleshoot those problems. ”With the explosion of SaaS companies and APIs providing building blocks for the modern IT stack, many if not most of its components are outside of their control.  In addition, with the rise of remote working, it’s likely your users are no longer in a central office.   Traditional monitoring is about making sure that your devices are healthy.  But you simply can’t do that when you don’t own the devices. “You need visibility after your firewall,” he said.

Ransomware and other attacks are becoming increasingly common, as black hats discover how cloud native and other newer platforms can serve as softish targets. With the recently revealed Docker runtime exploit as an example of what can go terribly wrong, the pressure is obviously on security providers to stay ahead of the game — but finding the right solution for this new world of computer protection can mean the difference between a thriving architecture, or in the worst case, a complete shutdown of an organization’s operations. What to look for in the way of security solutions for cloud native, as well as serverless and more mature platforms was the main subject in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast with Neil Carpenter, a solutions architect for Twistlock, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack.

It is safe to assume that contributing patches and updates to the Linux kernel is something beneficial to do — regardless of what you do or where you are in your career. For some, it might just be a diversion from their lives as a full-time software developer. For others, learning how to design and apply patches can even serve as one of the ways to enter the field of computing, even if you are 16 or are as old as 60. You might have spent the past 10 years backpacking around Asia or working as a golf instructor. In any case, learning how to contribute means you will be furthering the continued expansion of Linux, as well to that common good of the open source community. During the latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack recorded during the Open Source Leadership Summit, Shuah Khan, a Linux Fellow, at the The Linux Foundation described what it takes to get starred on your journey as a contributor to the Linux kernel.