The New Stack Makers

How do we promote diversity and inclusion from the comfort of our homes? How do we recreate those important hallway moments within a virtual environment? How do we continue to consider the consequences of what we’re building? We begin to answer these questions and more in this episode of The New Stack Makers, where we interview Emily Webber, independent agile delivery and digital transformation consultant, coach and trainer, and author of the book Building Successful Communities of Practice. Webber, like everyone The New Stack is interviewing as of late, was calling in via Zoom from her home office. Usually, she’d be working between her clients’ offices in London and in India. Even for someone who has built part of her brand on remote meet-ups, nothing about this is business as usual. Webber is based in London, where, in normal times, it’s completely common to see people eating lunch at their desks or even while walking back to work from the takeaway shop. But at her client in India, they all take breaks and share meals together in the canteen. There she’s not only experienced a huge leveling up in terms of cuisine, but she’s witnessed the innovation that comes from those chance encounters around the hallway, cafeteria, and water cooler. Webber has borrowed Etsy’s John Goulah’s term “assisted serendipity” and applied it to our temporarily remote-first world. This can be using a Slack app like Donut or Shuffl to facilitate random coffee pairings. Or host remote coffees or happy hours. It may be assisted, but it is an efficient way of crossing cross-departmental silos, as well as to fight isolation during these trying times.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with Glitch’s CEO Anil Dash and James Turnbull, vice president of engineering, about how Glitch could help developers remove much of the pain associated with installing and accessing application code and how it serves as an extension of GitHub. Glitch, which was originally called Gomix created under the Fog Creek Software umbrella — along with Stack Overflow and Trello — has served as the platform for over five million apps, according to Dash. Glitch can potentially take some of the pain out of application development since developers can begin working directly on abstraction layers while “taking away the the kind of boring, repeatable part of being a developer,” Dash said, who estimates about 80% of all code written is identical elsewhere. “Glitch provides people with a platform they can build on top of it without having to worry about installing this dependency or worrying about how this thing works,” Dash said. “That’s the way that a lot of the world has been moving and how the abstraction layer is moving further up the stack.” TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) framework, serves as a good case study, Dash said. “Frankly, when TensorFlow first came out, I had tried to get it running on my dev environment and gave up after several hours of frustration — which made me feel dumb and was probably not their intended goal,” Dash said. Now, for access to the JavaScript framework for TensorFlow, Google has embedded examples of the code for TensorFlow with Glitch, similar to how YouTube code is embedded for video. “So, where you would embed a YouTube video, we’ve got an app running instead,” Dash said. “And it’s showing you how to build a model around your ML libraries and how to actually get up and running.” For those seeking just to study how certain code and apps work, Glitch can “make it really easy for folks who are like journalists to go: ‘okay, I don’t really understand how this AWS thing works, but I’ve got an example of someone using this Python app to to map all this data together,’” Turnbull said. “I can create a visualization from that. And I think that’s an example of a strong use case framework-wise.” Ultimately, for the developer, the creative — or for many — the fun part of development work could potentially be more accessible. Applications are “built on top of the scaffold,” Dash said. “I think what we’re seeing here is that we can provide that abstraction layer and we can take away the the kind of boring, repeatable part of being a developer,” Dash said. “We can provide people with a platform that they can take and build on top of it without having to worry about things like ‘I need to install this dependency or I need to worry about how this thing works, or I need to set up this framework or, or this template.'”

Today, we speak with Cheryl Razzell, director of platform and Live Ops, at Polystream who has a particularly interesting narrative to share in what remains nevertheless a renaissance era in computing. Indeed, the assumption we can make is open source tools, platforms and, especially, talent will underpin how data is processed and managed as we win this war against the pandemic. As the ravages of COVID-19 continue to take their toll in London, where she is based, and worldwide, Razzell speaks of women in tech, and her career path from tech support to working at Apple, Microsoft, HBSC, DevOps and continuing her high-level IT career tech at Polystream, a 3D content platform provider. As mentioned above, regardless of whatever happens during the next few weeks and months, open-source development and tools will continue to serve as the foundation for what is yet to come. And during what will be a recovery eventually, organizations that thrive in the future will only do so by continuing to operate as software companies. But, this is just the context — lest we forget — that can often obscure how open source development and tools are only as good as the talents of the people constituting the DevOps teams that make the magic happen.

In this, The New Stack Makers podcast, Bill Mulligan, who plays a key role in helping customers to automate their IT operations with Kubernetes and operators for Loodse, discusses his background — taking him from the University of Wisconsin-Madison via the University of Oxford to his life in Berlin today — and the key role Cloud Native plays in supporting telcos and other Loodse customers.

Linus Torvalds first released his Git version control software 15 years ago, on April 7, 2005, in an effort to foster a more creative spirit in Linux kernel development. Since then, Git's role in software development has emerged well beyond its roots as a version control system and a software repository. It's become a cornerstone in how software is developed today by distributed teams and open source developers around the world. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with three Git thought leaders who about Git’s roots, its present context and its future. We learned that despite its present-day success, Git's future is not certain. Guests on this episode are: Jason Warner, CTO, GitHub. Cornelia Davis, CTO, Weaveworks. Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO, GitLab. For many, the possibilities that Git offers are exciting, both on an individual and macro level when many parties must collaborate on a project, particularly for CI/CD. You can use Git to upload personal pet projects, such whether you want to share a simple code sample or just documentation for something not necessarily related to software. For a large enterprise, developer teams can collaborate on application development concurrently whether they are scattered around the world or separated by only cubicle walls.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Nóva, chief open source advocate at Sysdig, about the progression of the open source world and her perspective examining it through the lens of San Francisco’s COVID-19 lockdown. She calls the book she wrote with Justin Garrison a kind of thesis that looks to predict the infrastructural patterns that could solve a lot of the challenges cloud-native infrastructure teams face.

Listen to more episodes here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/ In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Daniel Spoonhower, CTO of Lightstep, discussed and described what the “three pillars” concept means for DevOps, how monitoring is different, Lightstep’s evolution in developing observability solutions and a number of other related themes. Spoonhower — whose experience in developing observability tools traces back to work as a software engineer at Google — makes it clear that a “three pillar” observability solution consisting of metrics, logs, and distributed tracing represents, in fact, separate capabilities. “I think the thing that we’ve kind of seen is that thinking of those as three different tools that you can just kind of squish together is not really a great solution. I mean, the way that I think about observability is I like to get away from the what the specific tools are, and just say that observability is the thing that helps you connect the effects that you’re seeing — whether that’s performance or user experience, or whatever, connecting those effects back to the causes,” Spoonhower said. “And the thing that happened with deep systems is that it’s not like there are five or 10 potential causes to those problems, but there are thousands or tens of thousands of those things. And so you need a tool to help you find those.”

Listen to more episodes here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/ This episode of The New Stack Makers focuses on more the community and less on the tech side of the tech community — which we think matters now more than ever. Williams has dedicated her career to teaching, mentoring and helping others find the right roles in tech. In fact, she’s written a step-by-step guide on how to get your first job in this industry. This episode dives into how to build the right network Software Engineer and Developer Advocate Cassidy Williams started this decade looking forward to a year of global travel for React training, workshops, and public speaking gigs. She spent January in Boston, DC, and Austria. February saw her speaking in France and Ireland. Then, suddenly, the small consultancy she worked at went from having overbooked their March to an empty schedule. And the full-time staff was let go.

Listen to All New Stack Podcasts here: https://thenewstack.io/tag/podcast Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto option for managing containers, while microservices serve as the underlying distributed architecture of Kubernetes clusters. The continued rise of multi-cloud infrastructures is also seen as a conduit for the continued adoption of microservices for Kubernetes deployments for such widely distributed infrastructures. The need to create applications and manage such diverse infrastructures in this rapidly expanding multi-cloud universe. But, suddenly, the coronavirus worldwide pandemic has turned the world on its head in ways we have yet to fully realize, In this, The New Stack Makers podcast, Ankur Singla, founder and CEO at software as a service (SaaS) provider Volterra, discusses the profound influences Kubernetes, microservices, multi-cloud environments, and open source have had on computing and IT today — and what their impacts may be in a Covid-19 world. "Covid-19 throws a big wrench" into everything, Singla said. "The first thing we realized with lots of our large enterprise customers is that corporate networks are becoming a big bottleneck," Singla said. "And in order to reduce the load, many of the enterprises are already looking at how can they quickly migrate their apps from private data centers to the cloud, because the network to the cloud is a lot better than a network to private networks." The migration to the cloud also involves a "move to SaaS services," Singla said. "SAS services obviously require scale, and more and more of them are going microservices," Singla said. It is safe to assume that a particular technology or architecture has become mainstream, after surviving an initial hype cycle and becoming uniformly accepted and reliable. A technology associated with cost savings and demonstrably improved efficiencies is also another criterion used to determine whether a particular technology has acquired mainstream status. One can thus arguably assume microservices are on their to achieving mainstream status. "More and more enterprises are migrating to SaaS services, and SaaS is all about scale — and scaling is a lot easier with microservices," Singla said. Singla began to see the potential of microservices about five years ago when large enterprises largely had adopted microservices. "But it was becoming very clear to me that that would be an architecture paradigm, and increasingly so with serverless — so, then, the paradigm shift was starting to happen. And we thought that was a great opportunity to start a new company that helped solve many of the problems of going mainstream to multiple cloud providers and being able to build highly distributed edge locations...with the convergence of distributed applications and data," Singla said. "And we said, 'it's a great time to start a company to solve the problem of distributed application data. So, that's the background on Volterra." Feature image by from Pixabay.

Listen to All TNS podcast here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with IBM’s Lin Sun, whose official title is a senior technical staff member and “master inventor” for a comprehensive overview on what service meshes are for those not completely familiar with the topic, may have some familiarity and want to know more or want to also know more about emerging use cases. Sun’s expertise in service meshes largely draws upon her role as an Istio project maintainer and is also on the Istio Steering Committee and Technical Oversight Committee. Sun’s IBM title as “master inventor” may sound unusual or even arguably pretentious for some, or even “really cool,” as Sun describes it. But at IBM, the status as “master inventor” represents specific merits those who hold the title must first attain. “‘Master inventor’ is a title for someone who demonstrates the mastery of the IBM inventor process and is able to mentor other people to be successful in the invention process, and to be able to be productive yourself,” Sun said. Among the other requirements, a “master inventor” must also first file about a dozen patents and to have at least one issued patent, Sun said. You must also have worked with a ‘review board to reveal any incoming patent disclosures on behalf of IBM

Listen to all of our podcasts here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/ There’s a common misconception that the individual consumer’s actions will dramatically affect climate change. That we should recycle more and avoid plastic straws and bottles. These are nice-to-haves, but they don’t make an impact on the systemic contamination of industries like agriculture, travel, and, yes, tech. On the other hand, when scandal strikes tech, we point blame at the top, and we don’t drill down into the individual responsibility. What we found with the Volkswagen emissions scandal is that even the person who writes the code can be culpable. If we each bear some individual responsibility in the code we release, is there power in the green developer? In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sit down with Microsoft Green Cloud Advocacy Lead Asim Hussain to talk about what a green developer is. And we try to uncover what does that actually look like for a web developer, a machine learning engineer, a DevOps person, or a department with a huge fleet of Internet of Things fleet devices. Hussain says to start it’s not about a lack of motivation. “They care, they want to do something. And one of the questions I get asked a lot is from developers and all kinds of developers working on all different aspects of applications are, What can I do now?” Hussain said that then they end up only focusing on their own role when they should be looking at things end to end. He continued that “I used to think full stack meant like a website to a database. And now I understand full stack means like, from user behavior to how electricity is bought and sold on a grid.” In fact, Hussain predicts a whole new role emerges: sustainable software engineer. Or even better a multi-department team that looks to piece together the full software development lifecycle, from sourcing hardware materials to powering data centers to the deprecation of the tools and devices. This can start with just ardent, cross-functional green-conscious volunteers who make themselves know in an organization and who try to piece together this lifecycle. That’s how it started with Microsoft, growing into a 2,000-person green team. Where do you get started? Hussain says to start by examining the carbon efficiency and the carbon intensity of your application. Hussain points to little moves that have a big impact like choosing when to run your workloads, which “depending upon the renewable mix and the energy grid, you can, just by changing when you run a workload, you can reduce the carbon emissions by 48 percent per application.” And don’t just assume this is for the most modern microservices, he says this can even be more impactful when you are running certain jobs on legacy applications. Hussain continues to talk about the creation of a green public agreement. He also offers Microsoft’s sustainability calculator which allows you to start to measure because, as we’ve learned with the agile movement, you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Last week we wrote about how a true DevOps transformation doesn’t just focus on developers and operations but looks to unclog cross-organizational bottlenecks. One of those areas often overlooked — the one with so much of that coveted rapid feedback — is support. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Michael Shelton, VP of global customer support at NinjaRMM, about closing the cultural distance to reach support teams to drive the post-customer experience. When Shelton joined NinjaRMM five years ago, it was still a tiny team working on the then new remote monitoring and management platform. They didn’t have a support team yet — everyone was support. He admitted that back in the day they had a lot of bugs, but they used that to broach stronger customer relationships. Shelton said they built an ethos that continues today, talking to customers like partners and, sometimes even therapists: “You’re not wrong. Sounds like you’re having a really tough time. And sounds like we’re part of the cause of that. Let’s work together to figure out what the solution is.” The NinjaRMM team realized they could use the close relationship between support and the customer to drive the product. What do the customers love? What are they super frustrated about? What are their use cases?

To hear more podcasts listen here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/ Prisma, from Palo Alto Networks, sponsored this podcast, following its Cloud Native Security Live, 2020 Virtual Summit held Feb. 11, 2020. The adoption of “immutable infrastructure” has emerged as a viable way to improve DevOps processes and culture. By introducing more of a standardization in application deployment and management, immutable infrastructure helps, among other things, to foster a better collaborative environment among developers, operations, security team and other stakeholders. “Immutable infrastructure gives you the ability to have a consistent environment, across your entire fleet of systems, which gives you a simpler and more predictable deployment,” Mike Liedike, manager, Deloitte Consulting’s Innovations and Platforms team, said. “It allows you to do the testing more consistently and promote your environments from development to test to prod.” In other words, the adoption of immutable infrastructure is often a hallmark of a highly functional DevOps. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at Palo Alto Networks’ studio in Santa Clara, CA, Liedike offers further insight and analysis of what the adoption of an immutable infrastructure can mean for your organization. A good starting point to describe how immutable infrastructure works is by first detailing how it does not work — or more specifically, what “mutable” infrastructure is and how it differs compared to immutable infrastructure. Using the example of Apache servers, Liedike noted how admins might upgrade the servers by installing the latest version of the Web server software with configuration-management tools. The problem, Liedike said, is that “across 1,000 instances, you have a lot of room for error and inconsistency.” “With immutable infrastructure, instead of doing those changes in place, you would actually build a new server, with all the upgrades already in place, and then deploy your systems and decommission the old ones,” Liedike said. Sponsor Note

For the full video go here: https://youtu.be/honVx93d9aM As Nicole Hubbard, a developer advocate for HashiCorp observed, customers constantly face difficulties when trying to secure the communication between their services running inside of a Kubernetes cluster. The dilemma often involves trying to figure out how to lock down communications between the applications inside and outside clusters or with apps between clusters, Hubbard said. In this edition of The New Stack Makers video recorded live at Palo Alto Networks’ studio in Santa Clara, CA, Hubbard shows how Consul Connect with Envoy can help to securely maintain data communication between different Kubernetes and microservices environments. Hubbard describes, among other things, Consul Connects features and functions as a “one-on-one level intro to Consul.” The end result is that Consul Connect with Envoy secures communications between Kubernetes clusters, as well as different data sources. “If you look at the different ways you can run applications, you can run them everywhere between mainframes, your own hardware in your own data centers, virtual machines or even as far as containers and functions that are serverless. But the one thing that’s common between all of these is the network. You have to secure the communication between all the different services, no matter where they’re running,” Hubbard said. “But as you grow and you start to break these out into microservices, you run into the problem of how does ‘a’ talk to ‘b’ and how do I find where ‘b’ is.” Hubbard described how some bank partners can have as many as 4,000 services “that won’t scale with VLANs or firewall rules, without an extremely high operational overhead.” Hubbard described how within a service mesh, there is a control plane and the data plane, while “the control plane for us is Consul.” “And what Consul is responsible for is defining the roles, defining and tracking what services are available as well as provisioning that information to the data plane so that the data plane knows how to move traffic around,” Hubbard said. “The data plane is basically a pluggable proxy that receives this information from the control plane and uses it to route data correctly to the correct place.” For more insight from security thought leaders, Cloud Native Security Live, 2020 Virtual Summit is your opportunity to learn from the experience and expertise of developers, DevOps pros and IT leaders who all have so much at stake in container technologies and DevSecOps. Hosted by Prisma, from Palo Alto Networks, in partnership with The New Stack, you can still virtually attend this event held Feb. 11, 2020, for a full day of discussions about cloud native security — brought to you online wherever you may be.

Listen to more Podcasts from The New Stack here : https://thenewstack.io/ Prisma, from Palo Alto Networks, sponsored this podcast, following its Cloud Native Security Live, 2020 Virtual Summit held Feb. 11, 2020. The concept of DevSecOps is getting a lot of play these days — and for good reason. As organizations’ DevOps seek to boost their rates of deployments and updates at cadences unheard of just a few years ago, the risk of vulnerabilities can often increase at the same rate in theory. While it doesn’t have to be this way, of course, some organizations struggle with remediating vulnerabilities long after the software has been deployed, not only causing major potential headaches when breaches occur (think Equifax), but causing additional pain when developers must reconfigure code again, and in extreme cases, reinvent the wheel. The solution, of course, is for security teams to become vested in code development at the very beginning of the production cycle. This is what agile DevOps teams are supposed to do anyway, but many organizations have not implemented the necessary culture, tools and processes to do this. After years of existing as a concept, DevSecOps formalizes the often missing security links in development processes today. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, DevSecOps evolution and why it is so vital today were discussed. The guests were selected for there first-hand experience and experience with DevSecOps were: Rohit Gupta, global segment leader, security, for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cindy Blake, security advocate, for GitLab. Shaan Mulchandani, AWS security practice, for Accenture. The New Stack Publisher Alex Williams hosted this episode.