The New Stack Makers

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. BankUnited N.A. falls under the mid-sized bank category. Based in Miami Lakes, Florida, it has about $32.9 billion in total assets and serves both the consumer and commercial sectors. Not one of the largest banks or one of the smallest banks in the U.S., BankUnited N.A., a subsidiary of BankUnited, reflects what it is like for an organization in the financial sector, seen as a barometer for cloud native adoption, to make the switch to cloud native. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Felipe Medina, vice president, IT security operations, InfoSec engineering, and Michael Lehmbeck, cloud architecture and operations manager, for BankUnited N.A. spoke about their DevOps’ cloud native journey in the financial sector. The podcast was recorded for The State of Cloud Native Security Virtual summit that took place on June 24. BankUnited N.A. began to make its switch to the cloud about three years ago. The initial idea was to “test the waters” in order to achieve “some tangible returns,” Lehmbeck said. The DevOps team set about testing its disaster recovery capabilities. “We proved our ability to be able to failover between our primary data centers, to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a disaster recovery-type scenario,” Lehmbeck said. “So, that basically enabled us to get an initial footprint stood up and proof out that our mission critical systems could in fact run in that cloud estate.”

Dell Technologies sponsored this podcast. Enterprises worldwide are often revamping their IT organizations amid the great shift to cloud native infrastructures and the ongoing effects of the Coronavirus pandemic. In the New Stack Makers podcast, Jonas Emilsson, concept manager for hybrid platforms for Atea, discusses the impact on his firm’s delivery of IT infrastructure solutions services for its main customer base in Europe and the Baltics. One macro trend Emilsson has observed is how the role of the developer has changed as DevOps adopts software-defined datacenters and Kubernetes. “We’ve seen a greater change in the market in terms of how customers and users, in general, are using the technologies,” Emilsson said. “A lot of it lies within the software-defined data center, of course. We thus do a lot of business with self-service portals and automation.”

One of the bright points to emerge in Kubernetes management is how the core capabilities of the Istio service mesh can help make engineering teams more efficient in running multicluster applications. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with Dan Berg, distinguished engineer, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services and Istio, and Neeraj Poddar, co-founder and chief architect, Aspen Mesh, F5 Networks. They discussed Istio’s wide reach for Kubernetes management and what we can look out for in the future. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, technology thought leaders from Dell EMC and VMware discuss the dynamics of data protection and other DevOps-related themes for today’s highly complex cloud native environments.

It sounds pretty basic, but getting your infrastructure ready for modern apps, and centrally managing your clouds and cluster requires a modernized app platform. And that’s exactly what we explored with Dell Technologies in our series of five recordings scheduled to start tomorrow. Dell Technologies and VMware are making continued investment in the cloud native market. It’s perhaps most apparent with the acquisition of companies such as Heptio, Wavefront, Bitnami, and most recently Pivotal. It’s now transformed into initiatives using Dell Technologies’ and VMware’s Tanzu solution portfolio. VMware Tanzu is built upon the company’s infrastructure products and technologies that Pivotal, Heptio, Bitnami, Wavefront, and other VMware teams bring to this new portfolio of products and services.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we discuss the infrastructure requirements for organizations making the shift to modern-day application development, deployment and management — and how Dell Technologies’ expertise can help to make that possible. Our guests are Bob Ganley, cloud senior consultant, product marketing for Dell Technologies and Dormain Drewitz, director, product marketing and content strategy, at VMware. Before tasking DevOps with technology adoption to take advantage of the immense opportunities application development can offer with the right mix of tools, platforms and usually cloud environments, it is essential to both determine what users really want. Once that is established, making sure that the infrastructure can support the adoption of the technologies to deliver is also essential.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Wang spoke about these and other third-party security trends. The podcast was recorded in anticipation of the The State of Cloud Native Security virtual summit to take place on June 24. Major exploits such as the Target and Equifax hacks made headlines a few years ago. But these infamous attacks have not necessarily served as a wakeup call for many, if not most, organizations. They lack the security tools, processes and culture required to properly protect their data, Chenxi Wang, Ph.D., managing general partner, Rain Capital, said. “Everybody read about those headlines but translating that into the work [organizations] do day to day, I think there’s still a gap,” Wang said. “As security industry professionals — myself included — we need to reach out more to the adjacent community and especially with Dev these days. I mean software is eating the world and Dev is the one driving software, so we need to work with dev to make it happen.”

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, our Publisher Alex Williams sits down with Raj Dutt, CEO and co-founder Grafana Labs, provider of the open source observability platform Grafana. They’re talking about creating a more seamless transition among observability, tracing, metrics and logs, across different data types and open source projects. Observability and distributed tracing are intrinsically linked to reliability of increasingly distributed systems. Observability-driven development uses data and tooling to observe the state and behavior of a system to learn more about its patterns for weaknesses. Distributed tracing provides the metrics and logs that allow for diving into individual requests and to get closer to the problem. In this powerful pairing, observability happens at the event level, which drives your questions, and tracing happens at the request level, which helps answer them.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder, and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, Keith Mokris, head of product marketing, Prisma Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, and Mark Rauchwarter, cloud and infrastructure security for Accenture Security, discuss the key talking points of the Prisma Cloud Native Security Summit and what the results of the survey mean for the DevOps community. Join Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks June 24 at 9:00 AM PDT at The State of Cloud Native Security virtual summit for a full discussion of the “The State of Cloud Native Security” report and other topics relevant to your organization’s digital journey. The summit will feature a panel session hosted by The New Stack’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams, with security thought leaders from AWS, Accenture, and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.

Bloomberg’s involvement as a financial information leader with the OpenAPI Initiative and the open source community is built on wider aspirations than it is about choosing the right tools to grow its business. The stakes are especially high in these turbulent times as the ravages of COVID-19 continue to take its toll, already wiping out large swaths of the economy . In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with two open source leaders from Bloomberg: Richard Norton, head of the data license engineering group. Kevin Fleming, head of open source community engagement and member of Bloomber’s CTO office. Bloomberg’s collaboration and backing of OpenAPI as well, its involvement with open source and what this means for the financial sector are discussed. From the outset, APIs are seen as a core underpinning of what Bloomberg offers with, of course, its famous Bloomberg terminals. The data and analytics Bloomberg provides its financial institution and other customers — which might include data feeds for futures or commodities — allows for key decisions to be made, often affecting world capital markets.

There’s no doubt we are in weird times. There are a lot of stressors, but the majority of the tech community has more opportunities than ever to do what we do working from home. Just last week Google and Twitter announced that employees can work from home for the rest of the year or even indefinitely. For The New Stack Publisher Alex Williams, there’s one resounding reason why — the internet is awesome. And what’s driving much of that awesomeness right now is no doubt Kubernetes and its highly distributed community. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Williams sits down, over Zoom, with two grounded frequent fliers — Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat and co-chair of OKD, Red Hat’s distribution of Kubernetes, and Paris Pittman, developer relations program manager at Google and a leader in CNCF’s Kubernetes contributor strategy. They spoke fresh off of running a particularly successful, inclusive — and very big — Red Hat Summit. “Now, because it’s virtual, there’s no reason for them not to participate. And so we saw like this phenomenal exponential growth of people coming and participating at Red Hat,” Mueller said.

The hype around Kubernetes has created many repercussions in the IT industry — while not all of the effects have been net positive for many organizations and DevOps teams. Infrastructure management is a prime example. Missing too often are security management tools for Kubernetes deployments and infrastructure management. Ultimately, these tools should have the capacity to replace security and IT skills gaps and talent shortages by automating vulnerability detections and fixes, for example. “Kubernetes is something powerful and impactful, but has too many components and moving pieces,” Moe Abdula, vice president of engineering, SaltStack, said. “How do you ensure that you can build an architecture and a system around something like a Kubernetes that is easy to maintain, easy to support, easy to extend?” In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with Abdula and Gareth Greenaway, vice president of engineering, SaltStack, about how and why the infrastructure- and security-management aspects of Kubernetes, as well as infrastructure, have been neglected, what the risks are and what can be done to fix it.

Rare is the DevOps team that has the bandwidth to manually parse through and prioritize what needs to be fixed among what can number millions of application-error alerts. This includes distinguishing between minor glitches and those errors that can bring to a screeching halt an organization’s capacity to meet its customers’ needs and expectations. A viable error-monitoring system should, ideally, automate the communication of error data in a way that indicates what must be done to make a fix. A system might be able to signal every single error, perhaps totaling millions of alerts. The error alerts users receive must be “actionable,” Ben Vinegar, vice president of engineering, for Sentry, said. “That’s a really hard problem,” Vinegar said.

Twenty years ago, Dries Buytaert founded Drupal right at the dot-com bust. Then in 2008, at the start of the so-called Great Recession, he started Acquia, a digital experience platform for Drupal sites. Some would say those are unlucky times to start businesses. Not Buytaert. He’s convinced well-loved free and open source software or FOSS is recession-proof. And that’s what this episode of The New Stack Makers dives into.

What is remote-first? In normal times, it’s an organization that is built in such a way that anyone can go remote if necessary. “Whether or not you want to allow your employees to go remote, you should have the processes in place to be able to just-in-case because you see transportation problems loom all over the world, weather problems all over the world, sick children at home. There were all kinds of reasons why a business should be putting remote processes into place,” said Lisette Sutherland on this episode of The New Stack Makers. For Sutherland, founder of Collaboration Superpowers remote team workshops, longtime remote work podcast host, and author of A Handbook on Working Remotely — Successfully — for Individuals, Teams, and Managers, we’ve been technologically ready for a remote-first world for about five years now. And she says there’s always been logic in factoring a remote-first mindset into your business continuity planning. Plus, giving the option of remote work often makes for a much more inclusive workplace that in turn empowers a business to hire the best candidate no matter where they live. With remote work, “people can hire people who love what they do, rather than people who are just doing their job,” Sutherland said.