The New Stack Makers

In this The New Stack Makers podcast featured during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, Eric Sorenson, technical product manager for Relay at Puppet and Dave Lindquist, general manager and vice president engineering, hybrid cloud management, Red Hat, discuss the state of Kubernetes cluster configuration management, associated DevOps challenges and how problems can be solved in the future. TNS correspondent B. Cameron Gain hosted the episode.

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews with engineering managers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought, conducted by guest host Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart. Bhawna Singh had two mandates at Glassdoor when she started as senior vice president of engineering and CTO: open an office in San Francisco to access the region’s talent pool, and rebuild the search vertical for job results. Glassdoor is a job and recruiting site that offers services that allow people to see information such as company reviews, salary reviews, and benefits that a potential employer offers. To improve the quality of search, the team had to set metrics that the team trusted. Performance challenges surfaced when the team focused its efforts on the tactical aspects of architecting the platform. The Glassdoor team had tuned the system for quality; building out the deployment infrastructure and adding machine learning models. The work made the system heavier and less performant.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, publisher and founder of The New Stack, spoke with Ev Kontsevoy, co-founder and CEO of Teleport, about what the shift to a widely distributed architecture means for engineers and developers and how Teleport accommodates their needs in this new dynamic. Teleport was formerly known as Gravitational until just recently when it rebranded itself after the name of its flagship unified access plane platform. Built with Go on Google’s cryptography, Teleport allows engineers, among other things, to bypass layers of legacy architecture in order to securely take advantage of cloud resources from any location worldwide with an Internet connection.

What is DataOps? Why is a real-time data platform essential to the use cases driving it? How can you build data pipelines with open source complexity? In this episode of The New Stack Makers live — yet from our respective sofas — from KubeCon North America, we talk to Andrew Stevenson, chief technical officer and co-founder of Lenses, about how Apache Kafka and Kubernetes can together dramatically increase the agility, efficiency and security of building real-time data applications.

VMware sponsored this podcast. SaltStack’s Salt is a leading automation and security platform for configuration management for on premises and cloud native environments. Created with Python, Salt is in use among Juniper, Cisco, Cloudflare, Nutanix, SUSE and Tieto, as well as a number of other Fortune 500 technology companies, as well as banks. Saltstack also offers a suite of tools, including SaltStack Enterprise for Salt, Plugin Oriented Programming (POP) and Tiamat, SaltStack’s portfolio has also been merged with VMware’s suite of offerings, following VMware’s purchase of SaltStack earlier this year. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, SaltStack’s Thomas Hatch, founder and CTO and Salt’s creator, and Janae Andrus, community manager for Salt, discuss SaltStack’s roots, evolution and integration with VMware’ platforms and technologies. The future of SaltStack’s open source projects were also discussed. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this podcast.

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. Rack and stack memories often come up when enterprise engineers talk about building an SaaS. There is respect there when people recall the work that others did. It’s something that is oftentimes lost, circa 2011-12, when startups rushed into the enterprise space. Social tech was hip. Cloud was fascinating. APIs, webhooks, the evolution of RSS into social technologies — it was like this sudden excitement, the intoxicating rush of services — loosely coupled technologies changing the world! Nicolas Fischbach, CTO of Forcepoint, provides a view that is often heard from enterprise managers at technology companies. The legacy technologies are there to stay but there is an excitement that comes from building a new SaaS.

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. Roadside service. The car breaks down, the driver makes a call, an agent answers and help is on the way. Turn to the past few years and the agent is no longer central to the experience. The app is the roadside assistant. The change in the market has turned a company like Agero from a B2B company into one that deals directly with the consumer. Bernie Gracy is chief digital officer for Agero, a white label roadside assistance platform that provides support for 12 million roadside events per year through its digital assistance platform. Agero built its business on empathy as a foundation for its service. Its empathetic agents were tasked with getting travelers through often stressful experiences. Moving to a digital experience put a load on the platform that could not be sustained.

In this The New Stack Makers livestream podcast recorded ahead of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Founder and Publisher Alex Williams and Managing Editor Joab Jackson hosted a roundtable discussion covering the status of cloud native adoption and its near- and long-term outlook. The guests were Rachel Stephens, an analyst for RedMonk, Steven Vaughan-Nichols, a long-time journalist for ZDNet and well-recognized Linux professional and Katie Gamanji, a cloud platform engineer for American Express and member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee.

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, who discusses the problems engineering managers have faced when scaling architectures to support the demands of the business. The idea behind building a logging analysis tool is fairly simple. That is until it’s time to scale across multiple teams and manage it beyond day two. Then things become a bit more complicated. There comes the temptation to build a logging platform because, well, how complicated could it be?

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, who discusses the problems engineering managers have faced when scaling architectures to support the demands of the business. Mai Le is Nextdoor’s head of engineering. She and her team knew they had to do something for small businesses suffering in the pandemic. They needed to develop ways to connect them with their local customers and this was especially important for Nextdoor. Social networks have served as hubs for small businesses with Nextdoor standing out more than most. After her team’s considerable effort, it should have been smooth sailing. But, with only two weeks until launch, Le couldn’t get the new service to work.

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, with engineers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought. These are the stories about engineering management and how technology decisions are made for scaling architectures to support the demands of the business. Pooja Brown is vice president of engineering at Stitch Fix and also one of the founding members of ENG, a peer network of VPs and CTOs from leading SaaS companies. Brown spends most of the discussion talking about the work in developing a modern infrastructure prior to her work at StitchFix. Brown tells her story in four acts, discussing her work on monoliths and the move to a modern architecture that came with hiring. The developers were hired for their Node.js skills. And, they were quite different than the .Net devs they had once known so well.

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews conducted by our guest host Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart with engineering managers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought. The challenges engineering leaders face define how technology decisions are made for scaling architectures to support the demands of rapid-growth businesses. Heckart's first interview is with Adam Wolff, Robinhood’s former vice president of engineering who recalls two years ago when Kubernetes looked so right — and then the difficulties that followed when Wolff mandated the platform's adoption.

Next-generation data stacks and data centers will continue to meet the demands of software developer-led business models. But as new tools and platforms emerge to meet the deployment needs of today and tomorrow to run at scale, the data centers and cloud infrastructures will need to evolve as well. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Shrey Parekh, senior manager of product marketing, and Whitney Satin, director of product marketing, of Cisco’s AppDynamics discuss how data center and cloud environments are changing to accommodate next-generation applications and data stacks. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

Scripting behaviors and habits are hard to break as engineers are often accustomed to their own ways and processes. Meanwhile, the processes team leaders need to take when adopting new CI/CD processes and technologies, include engineering management from the bottom up and mapping people's skill sets and other processes. An example of a CI/CD process used to make the shift includes Harness’ platform that uses machine learning and other technologies to help DevOps engineer teams further their goals. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Tiffany Jachja, evangelist, Harness and Rajsi Rana, senior product manager, Oracle Cloud, discuss scripting, its background and how machine learning, CI/CD and other processes can help guide a shift in engineering culture to make the most of time and resources. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Charlotte Mach and Ian Crosby, CTO for Container Solutions, discuss a number of topics about next-generation computing. They include edge computing, hybrid and multicloud adoption, environmentally sustainable cloud computing and culture. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.