The New Stack Makers

Read more https://thenewstack.io/ In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Kris Beevers about the importance of the traffic manager role and so much more as we look ahead to this year in enterprise tech. Seven years ago, Beevers co-founded NS1, the networking automation company or, as he calls it, “the system of record for many, many of the key domains and the applications on the Internet today.” He says that each of us interacts with NS1 dozens of times a day, like when we are connecting on LinkedIn or sharing files on DropBox. NS1 sits at the base of this new traffic management stack, steering that traffic across our increasingly complex and distributed systems. This stack also includes content networking delivery networks (CDN), load-balancing tooling, edge networking footprints, Service Mesh, service discovery, and egress optimization. This new role isn’t just about measuring if traffic is working correctly, but really understanding both your users and systems to know how traffic is reaching the application, if you’re using the right networking providers and venders, and if you’re choosing data centers, clouds and CDNs effectively. This new traffic management role sits at the heart of greater site reliability engineering trends like chaos engineering and progressive delivery. It’s about using your tooling stack to understand how your whole tooling reacts to prepare for the worst.

Read more stories like this 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. Agile development teams may able to meet software release and update cadences at faster and faster rates — but ultimately, their deployments are only as good as the underlying code. Applications that lack robustness or have vulnerabilities that are discovered until only after its too late can defeat the whole purpose of Agile DevOps. The hard truth is that policies and practices must involve testing and monitoring from the outset of code development while extending throughout the entire CI/CD lifecycle. The main theme of this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at Palo Alto Networks’ studio in Santa Clara, CA, is how to protect software throughout the entire supply chain. The guests were: Dr. Chenxi Wang, a managing general partner for Rain Capital, a keynote speaker and a “Forbes” contributor. Rochelle Mattern, a Google Cloud customer engineer at Google. Gareth Rushgrove, a director of product management at Snyk The New Stack Publisher Alex Williams hosted this episode.

Time series data management continues to underpin huge swaths of application deployments today across on premises, and increasingly, cloud native environments. Whether it’s video streaming, real-time financial security data management, energy utility management or any application that requires time stamps for often very complex datasets at massive scales, time series data will play an integral role. Today’s time series data platforms can typically be used for data analysis and forecasting by processing millions of data points per second. Pricing has also become affordable for a growing number of enterprises seeking high-powered data analysis as a way to distinguish themselves from the competition. These organizations also do not necessarily have the financial backing that the world’s largest financial institutions or Fortune 100 companies have at their disposal. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Chris Churilo, responsible for technical product marketing at InfluxData, offer some background and perspective on why organizations increasingly rely on time series databases to “make products or services better.” Churilo also discussed why organizations are shifting their databases and management to cloud environments and why InfluxData recently extended to its InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 serverless time-series Platform as a Service (PaaS) to include Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environments. “Time series data is useful for monitoring anything that you want to make improvements on,” Churilo said. “So, of course, your cloud infrastructure is one thing that you definitely want to always be monitoring to make sure that you can provide the best service, especially if you have applications sitting on top of it that are customer-facing or even internally-facing — no one can tolerate having a slow application.” Read more here: https://thenewstack.io/get-better-monitoring-with-a-time-series-database/

Prisma, from Palo Alto Networks, sponsored this podcast, following its Cloud Native Security Live, 2020 Virtual Summit held Feb. 11, 2020: http://bit.ly/39OjW11 The traditional role of the IT security professionals in the past largely involved drafting and implementing policies and best practices, as well as managing security-vulnerability detection and remediation. Interaction with developers was usually relegated to the post-deployment stages of software development. But in this new age of DevOps, security practices have evolved, especially for cloud native security. Many of the differences can be attributed to how software development underpins DevOps processes. Consequently, security team members have become more development-focused and should play a role throughout the entire production pipeline (think of it as part of a shift to the left in CI/CD). In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at Palo Alto Networks’ studio in Santa Clara, CA, how security practices have evolved and changed are discussed. The guests were: Ben Bernstein, senior vice president of product and engineering at Palo Alto Networks. Matt Chiodi, chief security officer of Public Cloud at Palo Alto Networks. Xiaobo Long, senior vice president of cloud security at Citibank. In many ways, the evolution of the role of the security professional for cloud native environments is part of the change. In that respect, security, as well as DevOps, is about culture, and thus, people. “The DevOps movement enabled not just a digital transformation on the business side,” but digital transformation also “transformed the processes and the things that people do to deploy software and to build software. New programming languages that were previously dictated by the company are now available to everyone,” Bernstein said. “So, it’s all about the people and giving them the ability to choose the best tools for themselves and security has traditionally not been that way. And what you can see is that for us as a security company, it’s very important to empower the people to not only make the right security decision but also give them a set of a wide range of capabilities to pick and choose what they think is most important.”

No matter what you call this role — developer community manager, developer evangelist, developer advocate, developer relations, or, cheekily, developer avocado — it's got two things in common. It's one of the most expensive, travel-heavy roles in a tech org and it's one of the hardest to measure. That combination means metrics often make or break your job. But first, what is this role? Good question to which there are many, many answers. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Camunda's Director of Developer Relations Mary Thengvall talked about her definition. And she should know, she wrote the book on the business case for developer relations. To her, the DevRel arena is "anyone who is responsible for enabling developer audiences and making them successful.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, The New Stack Founder and Publisher Alex Williams spoke with Ayesha Mazumdar, senior UX designer at Optimizely, during Node+JS Interactive in Montreal about what needs to be done — and why human-centered designs are becoming not only nice-to-have features but technical requirements. Oftentimes, when developers and engineers think about human-centered design, there is a “very prominent tendency to go around designing for humans like us,” Mazumdar said. “This is subconsciously something I think we all fall victim to, but I think [human-centered design] is becoming this technical requirement,” Mazumdar said. “We’re realizing certain users aren’t able to interact with the application we’ve built in certain ways, because we never accounted for that use case in the first place.” The main issue is that a design might be accessible for some people, but not necessarily for the end user, Mazumdar said. “Accessibility has to be continued down the line, and show up in the developers workflow so that we can ensure the final product is actually usable by absolutely everyone in all aspects,” Mazumdar said “And so I think, making it a technical requirement involves making it part of your development process,” including making it part of GitHub and Q&A processes, for example. “Inserting accessibility checks along the way ensures that we don’t lose it at any point during the development cycle,” Mazumdar said.

Prisma, by Palo Alto Networks, sponsored this podcast, in advance of its Cloud Native Security Live, 2020 Virtual Summit Feb. 11, 2020. For many organizations, becoming a software company hinges on making a successful shift to cloud native platforms. This makes sense as a rapidly growing number of organizations, both in the private and public sectors, can achieve very tangible benefits by making the transition. The ultimate goal is typically being able to vastly improve the digital experience for the end-use customer. In this, The New Stack Makers podcast, Morello and Aqsa Taylor, a product manager for Prisma Cloud Compute, discuss what organizations should know about security before making the cloud native native shift. The themes covered include, among other things, what a cloud native security platform should offer and the evolution of security in the cloud native era.”

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Guillermo Rauch, founder of Zeit, and co-creator of Next.js, said much of his work today involves network synchronization. More specifically, he described his work with state and how it’s synchronized over networks and how that has affected his creation of policy structuries for applications. He also described his ambitions to help improve the groundwork for coherent and consistent systems for data consistency models. The theme of interconnectivity is also “a great segue into how our deeper thinking has gone into building a resilient systems from both a service architecture perspective but also within the context of front-end applications,” Rauch said. Specific to the evolution of Next.js, the JavaScript library remains an interesting tool “but what we’ve seen really is that with the rise of Jamstack, the architecture of right your front-end application with .js gets distributed by a global network that gets served to the device and then runs on the device querying an API,” Rauch said.

In this latest, The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at IFX2019 in Downtown Las Vegas, Matt Taylor, senior vice president, worldwide sales and business development, Ampere Computing, a semiconductor technology provider, discussed how the options for server components, especially processors, are widening and the underlying business needs for why that is the case. “Those options are starting to become much more real, across the entire landscape and more accessible,” Taylor said. “They are more accessible for developers and end users, and I think it is becoming a lot more common.”

If there’s a sign something in IT has moved past the hype, it’s not that digital organizations continue to adopt it, it’s that they continue to see better and better results. Both the most traditional and the most forward-thinking, DevOps organizations are seeing continually improved outcomes. This is especially true for so-called DevSecOps orgs. You know, the ones that bake security right into their people, processes, pipelines and code. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, publisher Alex Williams sits down with Alanna Brown, director of product marketing at Puppet, and Charles Betz, an analyst with Forrester, to talk about the current state of security in DevOps. Brown is the co-author of 2019 State of DevOps Report — and of the previous six reports — while Betz is co-author of Top 10 Trends That Will Shape Modern Infrastructure And Operations In 2020.

During this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Daly about how you can go beyond the buzzword of open source toward true public collaboration, reaping all the benefits to your business that can come with it. First, while open source is a decidedly nice PR move, why would a company want to risk their trade secrets going public? And if it’s open source, couldn’t people use it in ways you don’t want them to? Daly argues that open source is an excellent asymmetrical strategy that (starts to) even the playing field between behemoth software corps and the little startups that could go global. She also says open sourcing software leads to easier patent and legal review. And that having a good patent will shield you from ne’er-do-wells. During this interview, Daly breaks down the two kinds of open source software patents, which differently allow people and organizations to read and use your open-sourced code:

Container security has always been a concern — especially now in the wake of recent highly publicized vulnerabilities and breaches. But while containers benefit from running in isolated environments and have other advantages compared to traditional application structures, the peculiarities of Kubernetes as an orchestration platform represents additional security concerns. As Kubernetes continues on its rapid path of adoption, the need for a  reliable framework for vulnerability detection and management becomes that much more important. The vacuum for a definitive audit of the state of Kubernetes security set the stage for publication of the Kubernetes Security Audit Working Group. On hand to discuss the audit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon were Jay Beale, CTO of InGuardians, and Aaron Small, a product manager for Google, who are also both co-leads of the Kubernetes third-party assessment project. They discussed this and how Kubernetes, compared to Docker containers, represents a new, and ultimately, risky world of dependencies during a live recording in San Diego for this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast.

In this next episode of The New Stack Makers, Editor in Chief Alex Williams sits down with Buddy Brewer to talk about the user experience that New Relic’s customers are working to deliver to their customers. And about how monitoring inside mobile and web apps for end users — including perceived performance and distributed tracing — helps everyone understand just what that experience is.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey discussed the resulting complexities of CD and software delivery management in 2020, as well as the role Jenkins X and CloudBees are expected to play in what should be an especially exciting year for at-scale development. For many organizations, 2019 was a pivotal year due to the snowball effect of Kubernetes adoption, as both opportunities — and complexities — emerged.

In this, The New Stack Makers podcast episode, Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO of InfluxData, discusses what is in store for 2020 for databases, both on an industry scale and how InfluxData’s development teams hope to rise to today’s challenges. Distributed tracing, serverless “pay as you go” business models, InfluxData’s Flux programming languages for databases and the outlook for stateful database applications in Kubernetes were also under discussion as Dix spoke freely and candidly about the different topics.