The New Stack Makers

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Varun Badhwar, senior vice president, product, Palo Alto Networks, puts today’s multicloud security challenges into perspective. He also describes how Prisma Cloud 2.0 offers a single and comprehensive security alternative for cloud native applications across different cloud platforms.

Welcome to our new series ‘Security @ Scale’ on The New Stack Makers with Okta exploring security in modern environments with stories from the trenches including security horror stories and fantastic failures. In this episode, co-hosts Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and Randall Degges, head of developer advocacy at Okta, speak with guest Marc Rogers, vice president, cybersecurity, Okta, and co-founder of the CTI League, to discuss the anatomy of what will likely be considered to be one of the most disruptive hacks in the history of Wall Street. It could also change how institutional and individual investors buy, sell — and short — stocks in the future that are traded on U.S. exchanges.

This The New Stack Makers podcast series features a number of guests who speak during Palo Alto Networks’ Cloud Native Security Virtual Event. In this segment, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosts a roundtable with Palo Alto Networks customers who share their experiences and insights about cloud native security and other related topics. The guests are Brian Cababe, director of cyber security, architecture and governance, Cognizant; Tyler Warren, director of IoT security, Prologis and Alex Jones, infosec manager, Cobalt.io. A key talking point is how legacy on-premises practices and processes cannot be directly transferred to work for cloud native security and management. Jones noted, for example, that when moving to the cloud, the first question for threat modeling is “what are we doing?”

This edition of The New Stack Makers podcast features a number of guests who speak during Palo Alto Networks’ Cloud Native Security Virtual Event. It kicks off with none other than Seth Meyers, an Emmy Award-winning comedian of “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “Saturday Night Live (SNL)” fame. Meyers’ interview with Palo Alto Networks founder and CTO Nir Zuk is followed by a customer roundtable hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, with guests Brian Cababe, director of cyber security, architecture and governance, Cognizant; Tyler Warren, director of IoT security, Prologis and Alex Jones, infosec manager, Cobalt.io. Meanwhile, the event concludes with a talk on Prisma Cloud 2.0, given by Varun Bradhwar, senior vice president, product, Palo Alto Networks. Meyers began the session by declaring that “much like Nir Zuk, I am a cyber security luminary.” He also said he didn’t want to “brag too much” about his accomplishments, but said using your mother’s maiden name to recover passwords was his idea. Meyers then asked Zuk, while at least feigning to be serious, what cloud native means for organizations, as well as its impact on security management.

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. Security teams need a higher appetite for risk. While accepting, and even embracing risk is widely accepted outside the sphere of IT, risk also often plays a role in DevOps operations, developer and SRE team culture. However, security teams typically have yet to accept and manage risk in this way. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, how and why security teams need to rethink risk, with the aim of improving resiliency and achieving other benefits that thus far have remained elusive for many organizations, is discussed. The guests were Matt Chiodi, chief security officer of Public Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, Meera Rao, senior director of product management, Synopsys and Tal Klein, chief marketing officer, Rezilion.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. Palo Alto Networks John Morello, vice president of product, has for a long time talked about the basics that come with cloud native security. In this edition of The New Stack Makers, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Morello discusses how APIs are less the weakest link and are more so better known due to the widespread use of APIs, especially in the past five years. There are more people developing APIs, there are more people consuming APIS and there are more attackers who are exploiting APIs — and that makes the basics more important than ever both now and as more applications go online.

Harness sponsored this podcast. The growing pains continue: As organizations push ahead, shifting to Kubernetes and cloud native environments at scale, the complexities of managing Kubernetes clusters increase as well. The associated challenges of adoption, and then managing these highly distributed containerized environments, remain daunting. For many DevOps teams, the advent of “Kubernetes complexity fatigue” has become a concern. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by TNS founder and Publisher Alex Williams, Kubernetes complexity fatigue, and more importantly, what can be done about it, are discussed. The guests were Ravi Lachhman, evangelist at Harness, and Frank Moley, senior technical engineering manager at DataStax.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. This edition of The New Stack Makers podcast featured a news announcement: Palo Alto Networks is providing a new approach to protecting APIs with the release of its WAAS (web application and API security). As BotNets become more sophisticated, Palo Alto’s WAAS bot-defense platform offers API security, runtime protection, and other security features for today’s cloud native environments. Hosted by Alex Williams, founder, and publisher of The New Stack, guest Ory Segal, senior distinguished research engineer, Palo Alto Networks, discussed how the company’s WAAS offers apps end-to-end protection for loosely coupled services in declarative environments and a range of other capabilities.

In this, The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams; guest Nanda Vijaydev, distinguished technologist and lead data scientist, HPE, discusses how the concepts of loosely coupled architectures are now playing a part in data-centric applications on Kubernetes. It’s an evolution that has been taking shape, preceded by the use of Kubernetes for microservices development — as opposed to data-centric approaches that have historically been developed on tightly coupled, monolithic architectures.

In my 2021 web development predictions, I identified 2 key trends heading into this year: serverless expanding into a more full-featured platform (for example, stateful apps becoming a reality on serverless), and the continued growth of JavaScript (and especially React). Jamstack is another growth area, although that’s at a much earlier stage. To discuss these and other frontend trends, I spoke to David Cramer, co-founder, and CTO of Sentry, an application monitoring platform. You can hear the full discussion on The New Stack Makers podcast, but in this article, I’ll review the main talking points.

New Relic sponsored this podcast. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Wendy Shepperd, general vice president of engineering, New Relic, describes the challenges of migrating New Relic’s telemetry platform to a cloud native environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Hosted by TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams, Shepperd discussed key lessons learned about New Relic’s shift to AWS, as well as implications for observability following the move.

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. Infrastructure as code is a movement ready to boom. It’s also emerging as one of the three pillars in cloud security that are bringing DevOps and security together in the evolving DevSecOps market, said Varun Badhwar, senior vice president, Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, in this episode of The New Stack Makers hosted by TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams. Infrastructure as code is also a major component of the DevOps’ trend to shift left. “Shift left security now means application security, it means software composition analysis and it means infrastructure as code scanning — and all of that now is available for DevOps teams to do in the pipeline,” Badhwar explained. “And in an ideal situation,” he continued, “you want to tie all of that to the tools that your infosec teams want to use in runtime in production, such that you have one set of policies globally recognized in your enterprise. And you’re working against the same standards — it’s just a matter of fact about where you’re deploying those tools in your lifecycle.”

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, that cover the challenges engineering managers have faced when scaling architectures to support the demands of the business. Uber. Recall the company in 2017, the management, the scale, and the post by Susan Fowler, who detailed experiences that speak to the hopes and terrible realities at the company. That’s the scenario that faced Donald Sumbry, who now heads reliability engineering at Airbnb in this interview with Heckart. He was not aware of the issues internally at Uber due, he says, to the work and all the technical problems that needed resolving. "In early 2017, we had the Susan Fowler blog post, and one of the things I remember the most was that some of what was what had happened was actually a surprise to me," Sumbry said, "And I realized that I was so knee-deep in the work that I was doing, that there were so many problems to solve. And we attracted the type of people that just jumped into a problem. Joining Airbnb, Sumbry brought what he learned at Uber about looking at the big picture. He also learned to avoid the savior complex. Every company is different, no matter how much it may seem that the engineer has seen it all and can solve all the problems.

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast. Kubernetes is certainly evolving, but it will be some time before organizations deploy and run applications seamlessly in cloud native environments without today’s associated challenges of its adoption and maintenance. Amazon Web Services (AWS), of course, is both an early proponent of Kubernetes and a leading provider of cloud native services and support, and has thus been implicitly involved with its changes over the past few years. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, AWS’ Bob Wise, general manager of Kubernetes, and Peder Ulander, head of product marketing for enterprise, developer and open source initiatives, described AWS’ role in Kubernetes and how cloud native plays into the company’s open source strategy. They also discussed how Kubernetes is evolving in the market, including in terms of how customer needs are changing, and why open source technologies are critical to fill in gaps in order for cloud native to realize its full potential. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of the New Stack, hosted this episode.

New Relic sponsored this podcast. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) OpenTelemetry project was created to help foster the adoption of observability by helping to improve interoperability among the different observability toolsets through a vendor-neutral framework. In this way, OpenTelemetry should help to provide a single set of APIs, libraries, agents and collector services to capture distributed traces, metrics and other information from an application for improved observability. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams, Ben Evans, principal engineer and JVM technologies architect, New Relic, discussed OpenTelemetry and New Relic’s contributions to OpenTelemetry and other open source projects. The genesis of OpenTelemtry was not to create a technology for its own sake in anticipation of what observability users might need, but to serve as a common framework to meet palpable challenges organizations already face.