The New Stack Makers

For this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosts guest speakers Dina Graves Portman, developer relations engineer for Google, Emilie Schario, internal strategy consultant, data, for GitLab, and Nicole Schultz, assistant director of engineering for Northwestern Mutual to discuss how DataOps is defined and why its application in the context of DevOps is particularly relevant in today’s highly complex and increasingly distributed environments. Like DevOps, Schario describes DataOps as workflow-related, but it extends much further to help resolve data-management challenges.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Robert Haynes, cloud security evangelist, Palo Alto Networks, discusses Kubernetes security above and beyond what Kubernetes has natively and the evolution of the Kubernetes vulnerability landscapes since the first API attacks. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

For Kolton Andrus, CEO and co-founder, Gremlin, describing what chaos engineering is “is one of my favorite topics for debate,” and “is what makes chaos engineering sound fun and exciting." In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Andrus, in addition to defining chaos engineering, describes how organizations can make it work for them. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode. The very idea of chaos — and an IT organization’s embrace of it — can conjure up fear in many. “[Chaos engineering] scares the pants off of some old school folks that aren’t comfortable with that kind of chaos in their environments. And so most people think chaos engineering is randomly breaking things and seeing what happens,” said Andrus. “I think that chaos engineering is thoughtful, planned experiments that teach us about our system and one of the key concepts that goes with that is this idea of the ‘blast radius.’ When we run this experiment, whom might we impact? Because the goal is to prevent outages, not to cause an outage and we never want to inadvertently cause customer pain. We never want to cause an outage because we were being cavalier in our approach.”

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sit down with Christina Hupy, GitLab’s senior education program manager, and Nuritzi Sanchez, GitLab’s senior open source program manager, in the lead-up to GitLab Commit later this summer. We talk about the ups and downs of inclusion in the open source world, how you can best leverage the career opportunities of open source, and most importantly, how open source communities can open themselves up more to better foster those opportunities. We discuss this all not only within the context of traditional enterprise settings, but at universities and in prisons. Much of both Hupy and Sanchez’s time is spent with the broader community of GitLab users. And it’s part of their job to bring external feedback inside the company. So they may be more prepared than most to answer the essential question: What does a better open source community look like?

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, talks to three members of the WeaveWorks team: Alexis Richardson, founder and CEO, Cornelia Davis, chief technology officer, and Stefan Prodan, developer experience engineer and the architect of Flux2 and Flagger. They reflect on the next generation tooling in the cloud native tech community. The quartet discusses how that tooling fits into the GitOps toolkit and, particularly, the next evolution of the Flux continuous delivery for GitOps projects.

Java remains one of the most popular and trusted programming languages, but it is not necessarily well-suited for everything, including cloud native and containerized applications. While Java’s elegance and versatility is reflected in how it can be written once and run practically anywhere, the language was geared mainly for creating application stacks decades ago when it was first created. Cloud native and Kubernetes, of course, are different animals compared to the stacks of decades past. In other words, Java is not Golang for Kubernetes. And yet… Frameworks will likely serve as the solution to Java’s Kubernetes dilemma. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, DataStax’s Alice Lottini, Vanguard architect, and Christopher Splinter, senior product manager, open source, discuss how frameworks can allow Java to still work for creating applications that run better in cloud native environments and how they represent a new identity for the 25-year-old programming language. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

The iterative software development model can help organizations improve agility and the efficiencies of production pipelines as DevOps teams continue to seek ways to create applications and updates at ever-faster cadences. GitLab serves as an example of an enterprise that is successfully taking advantage of iteration and applying lessons it has learned to contributing to and supporting its open source projects, as well as to the open source community. For this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, speaks with Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO at GitLab, about iteration, open source projects — including Meltano and Kubernetes— and how SpaceX’s iterative development processes in the hardware industry can teach the software sector.

Michelle Norrali, a senior software engineer for Microsoft, wrote a statement on a whiteboard during Helm’s first days when she worked with Matt Butcher at Deis, which Microsoft acquired in 2017. “From zero to dopamine in five minutes,” is still the phrase Butcher, a principal software development engineer for Microsoft, and his team use to measure how they are building a developer experience for the popular package manager used to get Kubernetes up and going. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, host Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, speaks with Butcher and Matt Farina, a senior staff engineer for Samsung, about how updates to Helm help improve the overall Kubernetes experience and balance usability in such a large community to provide the best developer experience.

GitLab sponsored this podcast. The struggle is real. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape map has over 1,400 cloud native projects listed on it, over a variety of categories. The total market cap of the cloud native ecosystem is $18.66T, which gives you an idea of the scale of cloud business now. So as companies continue their inevitable migration from legacy IT systems to the new cloud native world, they have a mind-boggling number of choices to make. And it’s not just choices about cloud infrastructure and tools, but also how they run IT projects in the cloud era, and how operators and developers are increasingly working together using the DevOps approach. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we discuss these and other struggles of the cloud with two GitLab executives: Brandon Jung, vice president of alliances at GitLab, and Pete Goldberg, director of partnerships at GitLab. Both have extensive experience working in the cloud ecosystem, so they were able to provide insights on both the struggles and the solutions. Prior to GitLab, Jung worked at Google and Canonical. He’s also currently a Linux Foundation board member, so I asked him what are some of the challenges he’s seeing in the cloud native ecosystem given how popular it’s become?

Many projects are initiated to solve a problem that an organization or a user is experiencing. Thanks to the magic of open source, the community can serve to help solve the problem and, ideally, offer solutions better than the creators had originally hoped for. The maintainers’ main mission is largely about helping to make sure the software platform or tool continues to improve and to ensure the contributions are properly maintained and managed. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, host Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack and guests Michael Michael, director of products, VMware, Travis Nielsen, senior principal software engineer, Red Hat, Annette Clewett, principal architect, Red Hat and Rob Szumski, senior manager, product management, OpenShift at Red Hat discuss how an open source project develops, changes and becomes sustainable.

Tech is building the future, so it should set the example, right? While it could always do better, the tech industry does do better than some more traditional sectors at attempting diversity and inclusion. And D&I all comes down to the words we choose and the people we call out to make it happen. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, our Founder & Publisher Alex Williams talks to two women who’ve taken non-traditional paths to the tech industry. This episode features Kate Milligan, who went from selling mobile phones to global ISV alliance manager for DevOps at Red Hat, and Sara E. Davila, who journeyed from the oil and gas industry to senior manager of partner marketing at GitLab. They dive into how they’ve witnessed an embracing — and lack — of inclusive language and actions and how GitLab and Red Hat are proactively contributing to a more inclusive future. After all, the core values of open source collaboration should be core to any future. “In a COVID world, the key to success or, you know, what’s really driving digital transformation, is communication,” Davila said, “just really open, transparent and honest communication.” While we are all in kind of a holding pattern of tentative re-emergence, we are also all sharing in virtual fatigue. What started out as a novelty of online sharing and learning back in March and April has become, as summer closes, what Davila calls “an over-saturation of webinars.”

An organization’s shift to a cloud native environment will invariably involve the adoption of control, data planes, and a number of other Kubernetes and microservices-specific platforms and tools to help manage the Kubernetes “parallel universe.” Additionally, many DevOps team members, including developers, will need to adopt new skill sets to make the shift. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, TNS founder and publisher, speaks with analyst Janakiram MSV about the context of the Kubernetes parallel universes. They also discuss the developer experience, how GitOps is helping to plug in some of the gaps and the idea of cluster sprawl and how it relates to multicloud environments. The New Stack recently published its latest edition of “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem” ebook, which MSV authored that can also serve as a guide. The second chapter of the ebook offers a detailed overview of the cloud-ready and cloud native worlds. The chapter “maps” the new ecosystem that is “growing exponentially.”

Kubernetes and containers are obviously much talked about in the IT world today, but how to manage the stateful applications and data that run on top of cloud native platforms is also — especially for operations — important. The process includes managing the data from legacy stateful applications as organizations make the shift to highly distributed containerized environments. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, discusses the concepts of big data, storage and stateful applications on Kubernetes. Guests Tom Phelan, fellow, big data and storage organization, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE); and Joel Baxter, distinguished engineer, HPE, draw from their deep experience managing stateful applications and data in containerized environments. They also discuss KubeDirector, an open source platform for running non-cloud native stateful applications on Kubernetes.

Citrix sponsored this podcast. It would be an understatement to say 8×8’s ability to offer its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) requires high bandwidth to provide its voice, video and other enterprise-class API solutions. While the company has always sought ways to boost its throughput capabilities, the Coronavirus pandemic has placed huge pressures on the company’s bandwidth needs to both maintain and improve its users’ network experience. Earlier this year, for example, traffic surged by 50-fold in less than one month. Ultimately, 8×8’s DevOps largely relied on Kubernetes infrastructure and a load balancer and other support that Citrix, an application-delivery solution provider, offered to help manage the unprecedented traffic. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, spoke with Pankaj Gupta, senior director of product marketing, cloud native, DevOps, security, analytics and network, for Citrix and Lance Johnson, director of engineering, cloud R&D, for 8×8. They discussed how Kubernetes and Citrix helped 8×8 achieve and maintain agility while delivering a better customer experience for its collaboration product portfolio during this time of exceptional demand for video and other networking infrastructure capabilities.

Aspen Mesh sponsored this podcast. A key function of what service meshes should increasingly offer is to help DevOps teams have better observability into what events are causing application deployment and management problems. They should also help to determine which team can take appropriate action. In this final episode of The New Stack Makers three-part podcast series featuring Aspen Mesh, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and correspondent B. Cameron Gain, discuss with invitees how service meshes help DevOps stave off the pain of managing complex cloud native as well as legacy environments and how they can be translated into cost savings. With featured guests Shawn Wormke, vice president and general manager, Aspen Mesh and Tracy Miranda, director of open source community, CloudBees, they also cover what service meshes can — and cannot — do to help meet business goals and what to expect in the future.