The New Stack Makers

At the OpenStack Summit Tokyo, the New Stack's Alex Williams interviews OpenStack board member Rob Hirschfield.

At the OpenStack Summit Tokyo, the New Stack's Alex Williams interviews IBM's Ralph Bateman and Daniel Berg.

Cloud for everyone — a set of APIs for accomplishing what you want with the underlying compute, whether you're a cloud provider, or running your own data centers. This is the world that OpenStack's mission hints at, and to Kelsey Hightower it's a world that he sees drawing closer since attending a recent briefing at Intel. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Kelsey discusses his newest perspectives on OpenStack and containers with Alex Williams for The New Stack Makers.

Wray took the time to speak with Williams regarding the future of IoT. Basho recently introduced a time series database which runs on top of their data platform. Basho has capitalized on the fact that there was initially no purpose built solution to handle linear data. They then built that solution with key value and object store features. Basho stresses showing businesses how to use their data to their advantage, focusing on real use cases that drive value. Basho utilizes a masterless architecture. Wray notes that NoSQL is a young technology, as are relational databases on the whole, with the potential for future discoveries as companies begin to leverage their collected data in new ways. In IoT, 90% of data collected is never touched. It often sits without review, or is thrown away. Wray continued, noting that IoT is about end devices, asking how can a company's data become a workload that has value?" Basho helps companies accomplish this by tying data to workloads specifically so clients do not have to figure out schemas, working at scale, or applying analytics. They can use Basho's preset settings to drag in a common case workload and run it. 

As the day continued, Williams sat down with Steve Herrod, Managing Director at General Catalyst to discuss the future of technology policy and investing. The world is moving toward multi-cloud platforms, with some running sass, others Amazon or VMWare along with multiple container vendors. As an investor, Herrod stressed that something that provides an industry-wide security policy is where tomorrow’s large companies will be built. Steve continued, noting an interesting discussion around Amazon's Lambda, asking that when writing at high extraction, does it truly matter how such code is implemented? As such, developers have to keep asking, "Is this the right abstraction?" and get rid of unnecessary complexity. This can be achieved with application centric infrastructure, and building smarter infrastructures to look at data and make it behave better. This also requires hardware that morphs to support different application types, making transitions between workflows seamless. 

Williams also had a chance to talk with Sirish Raghuram, Co-Founder and CEO of Platform9 regarding their company’s offerings for those moving to a cloud based workflow. Platform 9 makes private clouds for individual customers, whether they be enterprise-level or startups. Platform9 offers an open stack a as cloud managed service, where users can then sign up and get access to a private Amazon-like cloud platform. There is no hardware needed to run Platform9’s product, and it can pair with Linux or VMs so clients can bring their own service. Platform9 recently made their product available for V-Sphere, layering a non-invasive open stack in the process. Enterprise-level organizations currently running V-Sphere can use Platform9 direct from operation. This includes IO control, DRS storage, and other DevOps features without the need to re-tool them to fit. Additional features include SLA monitoring, troubleshooting, remediation, life cycle monitoring, and the ability to detect problems over time.

Jut aims to bring data stacks to developers streaming in digital exhaust, logs, and metrics to tell you what’s going on inside an application. Jut accomplishes this through streaming analytics in a way that powerfully combines reading data with analyzing it mathematically to visualizations. This helps developers to abstract the complexities of dealing with data analysis to better explain it to their team as a whole. Jut is used through its data flow language called Juttle. Developers can use high level declarative language within it, compiling code in real-time via their browser. Juttle also features an analysis engine, which is useful for big data aggregation. This includes windowed analysis, the ability to group by percentiles, and implements additional functionality on top of the Jut platform. Additionally, Jut can handle events, metrics, real time and historical data, allowing users to combine both facets at once if the need arises.

John Sheehan of Runscope discussed how APIs are changing the world of container-based workflows. Runscope specializes in API performance monitoring tools. These include uptime monitoring, workflows, chains, and end to end functional testing of APIs. Runscope aims to help businesses reduce lost revenue they may experience from broken APIs running slowly, as API slowdowns are often the first indicator something in an application is experiencing bugs. Sheehan noted that slowness can be anywhere in a development stack. Working with a multitude of microservices becomes more complicated as a project expands. Understanding how one microservice may affect others even though they are not directly dependent on one another is still problem to solve. Runscope handles this by having none of its databases used by multiple services. Each new data store receives a new service as a result. Search services use Elastic Search, while request vaults use Dynamo. With contained states, services on Runscope don’t need to know about other services, resulting in a more cohesive individual scale data store. These four discussions will be available for listening in their entirety on The New Stack’s Soundcloud channel. AWS Re:Invent 2015 was an exciting conference, with many opportunities to discuss the future of technology. Sitting down with Shannon, John, Loris, and Kamal offered a look into not only how containers, APIs, and security is changing, but how the industry can continue to develop products for use at-scale in enterprise level solutions, private sector, and via open source platforms. Creating products with value that also help individuals not in programming work with containers to help improve their businesses is crucial, as is continuing to improve the security of working within containers. Appcito, Sysdig, Runscope, and Rancher Labs all offer their own unique solutions to some common issues experienced by application developers and individuals alike. These interviews shed light on how these four companies aim to solve these problems, the solutions they have to offer, and how other businesses can adopt container-driven technology to suit their unique needs.

Rancher Labs is an OSS project offering private container services. The team at Rancher Labs is currently working on storage, helping people develop app catalogs, and management platforms for how they deploy things such as Docker compose templates. Rancher Labs released Convoy last month, allowing for container snapshots and backup to be sent to data stores and ran/recovered from cloud to cloud within the next month. Shannon Williams is the co-founder at Rancher Labs. He noted that Rancher Labs has seen an enormous demand for persistent storage when working in containers. This ranged from users running ephemeral cloud apps to deployments of 3 tier non-microservice SQL database back-ends. Convoy's container snapshots and backup works very well, allowing for users to disconnect a volume in container from the volume itself. If container host fails, it can then persist on local/mirror/EDS storage. This is a solution for not only next-gen applications, but legacy apps. These features help Rancher Labs users to accelerate their team's innovation, along with changing the speed at which users can modify applications they are deploying.

TNS Founder Alex Williams spoke with Kamal Anand of Appcito regarding their business and the services they offer. Appcito is focused on application delivery for DevOps teams, security, and analytics. A challenge Appcito addresses is container architecture vs. the security of services. Attacks initially coming from outside a container could be coming from inside of it because a microservice was compromised. Appcito aims to make it simple to provision popular apps such as WordPress, with the ability to create complex infrastructure with ease, provisioning over 600 rules in an app with a single mouse click. This means that one's security team can focus on the application, rather than what rules to apply to a particular app. Appcito aims to balance ease-of-use with advanced APIs and configurability, allowing for users to tailor their experience to their company's needs.

Loris Degioanni, CEO and Founder, Sysdig, offered insight to their company in another interview. Sysdig is a container visibility company building container monitoring and visibility products. Sysdig enables developers to use specific features of Linux to get visibility into a container from inside another. This allows for application monitoring and infrastructure without having to instrument it. One can view what services are running in a particular container and immediately start monitoring it. Sysdig can be deployed on a machine involved in services, with the ability to understand what’s running within a container and better understand the logical relationship between particular services. For example, containers with a web server service using a load balancer, the server itself, and a database need to report as a unity rather than individual services. Sysdig enables developers to keep track of the relationships between these services and report their performance no matter where Amazon allocates and structures it, allowing for cohesive logical application dependency.

A discussion about the new AWS container registry service, Docker Compose and the new integration with Shippable's continuous delivery platform.

Talk about unikernels is starting to gain momentum. Still, these are such early days for this technology that implements the bare minimum of the traditional operating system functions. At ContainerCon, we discussed the unikernel topic and its context with containers in a session moderated by Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack. Speaking on the panel were Jérôme Petazzoni of Docker, Adam Wick, research lead at Galois, an R&D firm; James Bulpin, head of technology for XenServer at Citrix; Anil Madhavapeddy, professor at the University of Cambridge, and Martin Lucina of Rump Kernels.

Adrian Cockcrof discusses the state of OpenStack at Mesoscon.

Cisco’s Microservices Infrastructure is software that launches servers and then configures them to support applications such as real-time data processing or continuous delivery, making it easy to run application containers alongside the likes of Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and other data-centric workloads. High-availability, service discovery, metrics, security, and logging are built in to Microservices Infrastructure, which deploys to multiple cloud providers in minutes. Version 0.4 is due to come out this week at MesosCon, says Ken Owens, CTO Cloud Services at Cisco Systems. “We’re looking at re-naming the project from ‘Microservices Infrastructure’ to ‘Mantl,'” he says during this interview with Alex Williams of The New Stack.