The New Stack Makers

GitLab sponsored this podcast. The developer experience today certainly offers software engineers the freedom to create applications at scale across often highly distributed microservices environments. But with this degree of freedom to create and update deployments at scale, developers are under pressure to deliver faster cadences. They also face security concerns as well as unknowns about the frontend user experience, even once the security and QA teams have properly vetted the code. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, correspondent B. Cameron Gain, speaks with Christopher Lefelhocz, vice president of development at GitLab and Ben Sigelman, CEO and co-founder of Lightstep, about how developers can leverage elasticity and other processes and tools to ensure software remains resilient and secure from the time the code is uploaded to GitLab’s repository and throughout the entire deployment and usage cycle.

TriggerMesh sponsored this podcast. Cloud native environments and the breadth of tools and platforms developers have at their disposal has made the developers’ experience, and especially, the scale and breadth of applications organizations can deploy today, that much richer. However, today’s cloud native and highly distributed environments typically involve much complexity, while the developer’s role increasingly involves managing applications deployments and integrating the applications they create. A number of tools and processes have emerged to help improve the developer experience, such as serverless environments that help developers concentrate more on their task of creating applications. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, TNS founder and publisher, speaks with Sebastien Goasguen, co-founder, TriggerMesh, about developers’ challenges and the tools and processes of event-driven architectures, including TriggerMesh for AWS EventBridge. Many developers rely on tools and processes that allow them to spend more time on developing code and less time managing deployments. “What we’re seeing in a lot of enterprises is that the developers really want to develop, write applications and deploy their apps — they don’t really want to have to deal with the infrastructure and scaling and configuring it,” Goasguen said. “They really want to concentrate on what they’re building, which is the apps.” TriggerMesh helps to improve the developer experience by bringing to the table what Goasguen describes as an “infrastructure mindset.” “Developers really want to get their job done and abstract the infrastructure and the difficulties — I think that’s where serverless really arrives,” he explained. “At the heart of serverless, you have events. And that’s where we are.” Events or event-driven architectures are also increasingly relevant for developers working in cloud native environments. By helping to improve the developer experience with its cloud native integration platform, TriggerMesh supports event-driven architectures for front-end environments. To this end, TriggerMesh is helping DevOps teams bring events from on-premises applications and cloud environments with AWS EventBridge. TriggerMesh opted to partner with AWS since it is “really evolving the way people are building apps on their cloud using functions.” “We’ve seen that with Lambda during the last few years, but now they are also tying all those functions and the other services through events,” said Goasguen. “And the entry point for events for AWS is EventBridge.”

The first 20 years of JavaScript marked the dawn of the Web stack and a new generation of Web developers who had to deal with a community of traditional technologists. They also faced the continuous looming threat of Microsoft explained Allen Wirfs-Brock in a recorded keynote from OpenJS Foundation's virtual conference in June. Wirfs-Brock was also project editor of the ECMAScript specification from 2008-2015 and wrote the book-sized journal article for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) entitled “JavaScript: The First 20 Years” for the History of Programming Language conference (HOPL), with co-author Brendan Eich, JavaScript’s creator. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, Wirfs-Brock of Wirfs-Brock Associates offers his historical perspective, including JavaScript’s changes during the 25 years after Eich created the language. “What really happened is what people thought was going to be a minor piece of browser technology — particularly over the last 10 years — has really taken over the world of programming languages,” said Wirfs-Brock. “And so it's quite remarkable.”

Open source maintainers have a different set of challenges today. To name just a few, bots help manage overload and emojis are as predominant in open source groups as they are in twenty somethings’ social circles. Meanwhile, maintainers are deeply involved in governance issues like never before. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, TNS founder and publisher, and VMware guests Dawn Foster, director of open source community strategy, Nikhita Raghunath, senior member of technical staff, and Michael Klishin, senior principal software engineer discuss what it is like to be an open source maintainer, to build a community and to be a leader.

Aspen Mesh sponsored this post. The adoption of a service mesh is increasingly seen as an essential building block for any organization that has opted to make the shift to a Kubernetes platform. As a service mesh offers observability, connectivity and security checks for microservices management, the underlying capabilities — and development — of Istio is a critical component in its operation, and eventually, standardization. In the second of The New Stack Makers three-part podcast series featuring Aspen Mesh, correspondent B. Cameron Gain opens the discussion about what service mesh really does and how it is a technology pattern for use with Kubernetes. Joining in the conversation were Zack Butcher, founding engineer, Tetrate and Andrew Jenkins, co-founder and CTO, Aspen Mesh, who also covered how service mesh, and especially Istio, help teams get more out of containers and Kubernetes across the whole application life cycle. Service mesh helps organizations migrate to cloud native environments by serving as a way to bridge the management gap between on premises datacenter deployments to containerized cloud environments in cloud environments. Once implemented, a service mesh should, if functioning properly, reduce much of the enormous complexity of this process. In fact, for many DevOps team members, the switch to a cloud native environment and Kubernetes cannot be done without service mesh.

Dynatrace sponsored this podcast. The Kubernetes era has made scaled-out applications on multiple cloud environments a reality. But it has also introduced a tremendous amount of complexity into IT departments. My guest on this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast is Andreas Grabner from software intelligence platform Dynatrace, who recently noted that “in the enterprise Kubernetes environments I’ve seen, there are billions of interdependencies to account for.” Yes, billions. Grabner, who describes himself as a “DevOps Activist,” argues that AI technology can tame this otherwise overwhelming Kubernetes complexity. As he put it in a contributed post, “AI-powered observability provides enterprises with a host of new capabilities to better deploy and manage their Kubernetes environments.” During the podcast, we dig into how AI – and automation in general – is impacting observability in Kubernetes environments. To kick the show off, I asked Grabner to clarify what he means by “AI observability.”

DataStax sponsored this podcast. About 10 years ago the tech industry rejected the single relational database, and demanded a way to scale — at scale — with distributed systems. This movement saw the birth of React, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Tokyo Cabinet, all to better manage distributed databases. “All those databases that grew from: ‘Hey, we have a scaled data problem and this single relational database is not solving it.’ And I think that was the first time we really had to solve scale problems and use distributed technology to make it work,” said Patrick McFadin, chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra and vice president of developer relations at DataStax. McFadin joined colleague Kathryn Erickson, head of strategy and product at DataStax, for this episode of The New Stack Makers. They sat down with founder and Publisher of The New Stack, Alex Williams, to reflect on how the industry has seen a sudden explosion of scale and how that’s now guiding the next steps toward fully self-service architecture.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast. The New Stack will shortly launch its latest edition of “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem” after the first edition of the ebook was published in 2017. Ahead of its publication, The New Stack was able to speak with Kelsey Hightower, principal developer advocate at Google Cloud, who is likely one of the most recognized voices in the Kubernetes space. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Hightower spoke about his role in Kubernetes since the beginning, his thoughts on the project’s leadership today and the challenges that lay ahead. During the early days of Kubernetes, there “were no ebooks available” on the subject, Hightower said. The main goal was to help “raise the profile of the people with the job of trying to manage applications." “I think the whole point was when I was showing Kubernetes off [as] a contributor [and] building things around the ecosystem, my product work at CoreOS — we were all trying to solve problems that we all had in the past,” Hightower said. “We were trying to uplift the community. We were pretty sure that technology was going to be okay over time.”

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. Both data and governed access to it play an integral part in our lives. With the freedom to access vast amounts of pervasive data comes the responsibility of ensuring protection is in place. For an organization, data protection is required for a range of access points, including apps, the hosts, the containers and serverless architectures. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, speaks with Darian Jenik, risk product security lead architect for public cloud migration at Refinitiv. Refinitiv offers financial-related information, data and analysis to 40,000 institutions worldwide. Jenik discusses how Refinitiv uses Prisma Cloud as a foundation for its custom cloud security reporting app. Among the themes covered, he shares his initial security challenges that drove Refinitiv to consider a third-party solution like Prisma Cloud, as well as what drove the need for the innovative new custom app.

Dell Technologies sponsored this podcast. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Savla and Chip Zoller, senior principal engineer for Dell Technologies, discuss infrastructure challenges associated with cloud native and Kubernetes and how the right tool choice can help to make the shift that much less painful. Kubernetes’ arrangement of container clusters and pods is one of the more amazing computing structures this writer has observed. Its relatively simplicity as a container orchestrator, in many ways, begs the question why such a straightforward system was so hard to invent in the first place. Regardless, in addition to the resource-savings capabilities Kubernetes offers, the hype about its versatility and scaling capabilities is also well-deserved. But then your organization decides to make the cloud native shift to Kubernetes — suddenly, DevOps sees the very steep learning curve ahead as they face the often immense challenges of managing a Kubernetes infrastructure. DevOps teams, for example, begin to think about the daunting prospect of ensuring a particular stack is safe and secure on Kubernetes, Boskey Savla, technical product line marketing manager, modern apps, for VMware, said. “These are the things a lot of times customers start thinking about [when adopting] cloud native architectures and they tend to think about this as an afterthought,” Savla said. “And they go all in on Kubernetes. But then they realize, ‘okay, we need to take care of all this. How do I even scale a cluster”’?

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem, CNCF, discusses CNCF’s the Technology Radar’s role in software development today. In many ways, the Technology Radar can “show reality,” Hung said. And in doing that, the purpose is to show and distinguish between what is important and what is just hype. “We are obviously all really interested in new projects, new tools and the new products that are coming out, but the question has always been is anyone actually using this?,” Hung said. “Is it real or is it hype that’s going to fade away in a few months or a few years? So, that was really my motivation behind this new report.”

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. In this edition of The New Stack Makers recorded for The State of Cloud Native Security virtual summit held on June 24, thought leaders from Palo Alto Networks discuss why the shift left for security in the software production process is essential for DevOps today. The topics discussed include how the trend to shift left has its roots in DevOps, its integration with continuous delivery (CD), security’s role not only in software development processes but for the enterprise as well and, ultimately, how the shift left helps to ensure software is safe and secure. Many, if not most, DevOps team leaders and CTOs are well aware of the importance of embedding security processes at the very beginning of the production pipeline. The guests from Palo Alto Networks are: Aqsa Taylor, a product manager for Prisma Cloud. Ashley Ward, solutions architect. Keith Mokris, head of product marketing, Prisma Cloud. Vinay Venkataraghavan, Cloud CTO, Prisma Cloud.

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services, and Accenture, in March 2020, began to survey over 3,000 cloud architecture, InfoSec and DevOps professionals, on a quest to uncover the practices, tools and technologies companies are using to meet and deal with challenges of securing cloud native architectures and methodologies — and to gain the benefits of moving to the cloud. This edition of The New Stack Makers features the keynote panel discussion with thought leaders from Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Accenture who shared their own experiences and anecdotes within their organizations as they related to the findings. Moderated by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, the panel discussion was recorded for the The State of Cloud Native Security virtual summit held on June 24. The panelists guests were: John Morello, vice president of product, Prisma Cloud. Mark Rauchwarter, multicloud security lead, Accenture. Daniel Swart partner solutions architect Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Dell Technologies sponsored this podcast. The tools and technologies DevOps teams rely on for infrastructure as code certainly has changed, especially as it has begun to scale for storage. At the same time, the tools, technologies, and platforms that started in the hyper-scale, cloud native applications and their DevOps environments have actually democratized “scale”. The concepts of configuration management and state-based declarative paradigms are actually reinforcing the fact that “Cloud is not a place” and instead it’s how you manage the operations to achieve objectives like self-service, elastic scale, and agile application development. During this The New Stack Makers podcast as part of the Dell Technologies Virtual Day of Podcast series, we discuss a number of topics relating to infrastructure as code and how it applies to storage — and what that implies in today’s increasingly cloud native-centric world. The guest are: Catherine Paganini, head of marketing for Kublr. Parasar Kodati, senior consultant, product marketing, Dell Technologies. Patrick Ohly, senior software engineer, Intel.

In this conversation for The New Stack Makers, Majors discusses a number of themes relating to observability and monitoring, as well as how she continues to make herself a better developer. The topics include how: Test-driven development and how it has evolved. Monitoring as a practice — much like test-driven development — was built for on-premises architectures. Observability is the successor to monitoring by allowing for the discovery of the “unknown, unknowns,” which Majors previously wrote is like “following breadcrumbs to find what you don’t even know what is there.” A robust architecture is required for observability. While observability has been referred to as a “missing link” in DevOps, Majors said, instead, “it’s not such a missing link as it is a necessary first step.”