The New Stack Makers

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk about all this and more with Susanna Kass, who, after 30 years designing, building and operating data centers, is now the data center advisor for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Program. For data centers, it all comes down to stopping what Kass refers to as the “dirty cloud,” which sees most data centers depleting energy, land, and water. Data centers need to make a pledge to achieve carbon neutrality for every kilowatt hour that is consumed, be accountable for the phase out of coal, and transition to a carbon-neutral infrastructure by using and generating renewable energy per KW hour consumed by site. Kass describes this as using “nature-based technological solutions to protect our earth, resources and the environment.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Andrew Tunall, general manager, serverless and emerging cloud services; and Erica Windisch, principal engineer, from New Relic discuss how Lamba and serverless have changed and evolved and how some organizations have benefited. When the concept of serverless was introduced, Windisch said much time and effort were spent just explaining “to people what serverless was.” Today, organizations are introducing levels of complexity through their deployments on Lambda and serverless. Examples include distributed applications, Windisch said. “More people are running into these harder things: These sort of use cases with more complex architectures,” Windisch said. “It’s not because serverless is hard — it’s because people are at the maturity level that they can build, so they’re building complex applications in serverless rather than in containers.”

Maxine, the fictional character in Gene Kim’s latest book “The Unicorn Project,” likely shares your plight. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Kim, who is also the author of the seminal and now classic “The Phoenix Project,” discusses Maxine’s daily struggles — and without disclosing spoilers — successes. Maxine shares the developer’s modern-day angst in this paradoxically open source and DevOps Renaissance. While her plight is fictional, Maxine shows how developers, with management’s backing, can transform an enterprise’s DevOps with its from-the-front-lines fictionalized case study with human drama to spare. And, of course, it is never easy, whether you are trying to convince management to back you or your team to implement DevOps — or if you are Maxine in “The Unicorn Project.” In the the first third of the book, Maxine is stranded on an island” and “everything requires a ticket — not one ticket but like 30 tickets,” Kim said. “She’s having to pester people to get even license keys or environments,” Kim said.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Williams talks to Pivotal’s Cornelia Davis and Dell Technologies’ William Geller about this journey to bring this majority on-board with Kubernetes, and how to use managed architecture to overcome the often overwhelming complexity of Kubernetes orchestration. Davis, VP of technology at Pivotal, pointed to MiniKube as one of the major ways to bring those people on board. “With a simple download and a couple of commands, you’re on your way. You’re going to be pushing apps into Kubernetes. And you’re doing that on your own laptop or maybe they’re doing it with one of the cloud service providers.” She continued that “And it’s all so easy. It just works.”

The New Stack Founder and Publisher Alex Williams sat down at the IFX infrastructure conference with one of the companies looking to apply the speed, delivery, and, most importantly, the resilience built into software teams to the infrastructure side. After over a decade at Microsoft followed by more than a year at AWS, Luke Hoban, CTO of Pulumi, was ready to build something that helps developers work with the cloud. The way to bridge the chasm and bring the application development and infrastructure on either side closer together.

The New Stack Editor in Chief Alex Williams sat down with Steven Wong and Dejan Bosanac at KubeCon to talk about just this. Wong is a software engineer on the Cloud-native business unit at VMWare and Bosanac is a senior software engineer at RedHat. Both are also on the Kubernetes working group that looks to address the limitations of Kubernetes on the edge. Wong started by offering the example of modern luxury car models, which — from entertainment systems to antilock breaks to traction controls to even power windows and doors — may have as many as 37 computers riding around inside them. Each of these connected objects are sources of data that often need configuration and updates. He looks at Kubernetes orchestration as being uniquely suited to solving this problem — eventually.

Special Guest - Eliot Horowitz MongoDB. In this latest The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at IFX2019 in Downtown Las Vegas, Horowitz puts the complexities of today’s databases-development challenges into context and describes MongoDB’s evolution to keep up with the paces of change as applications become increasingly more cloud native-centric and stateless.

Brian Dawson, director of product marketing for CloudBees, certainly knows a lot about silos, and especially, how to remove them in support of a healthy DevOps culture and a well-oiled CI/CD pipeline. During the past 30 years of his career, for example, he's seen the adoption of many tools and languages. But unfortunately, new and powerful tools have also traditionally created more barriers to constant and intense collaboration for CI/CD. The problem has certainly been compounded by the explosion in choice of open source tools, especially for cloud native deployments.

Special guests Parasar Kodati and Audrius Stripeikis of Dell EMC speak with us about how the intrinsic battle in modern digital organizations lies between speed and security. As software development velocity seems to endlessly increase, IT organizations are looking at what tools are available to them to provide guardrails and governance —without slowing things down. Infrastructure-as-code is arising as the solution and the common language between the two sides. As cloud-like consumption is being demanded by developers and automation continues to be the secret to successful DevOps organizations, tooling and specification arises as the welcome solution.

This is what one can say with a reasonably high degree of certainty: organizations are deploying applications in hybrid environments consisting of legacy datacenters and often different cloud services, while the open source business models allowing them to do that are changing. In this context, for database management and use, the choice of NoSQL remains a safe bet for today’s deployments, especially for multi-cloud environments, Alvin Richards, chief product officer, Redis Labs said in this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast

At AWS re:Invent this December, The New Stack Founder and Publisher Alex Williams sat down with Liran Tancman and Corey Scobie. Scobie is the CTO of 10-year-old open source automation platform Chef. Tancman is the CEO of cybersecurity newcomer Rezilion, which allows cloud environments to self-protect and revert to the previous intended state automatically when an attack occurs. This week Rezilion announced $8 million in seed funding. Williams spoke with Tancman and Scobie about a new partnership between Rezilion and Chef to extend the automation and reliability of DevOps to include the necessary resiliency of security automation.

Data streaming is needed more than ever. It's a consideration as data becomes as much a requirement to achieve agility and composability with events-based principles to build business state as they come from multiple feeds and sources.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at IFX2019 in Downtown Las Vegas,  Zachary Smith, CEO and co-founder of Packet, and Ivo Rook, senior vice president at Sprint, discussed how bare metal fits into the IoT story. The December 4-5 event was Packet’s second annual vendor-neutral infrastructure conference and is organized at the same time as AW Re:Invent.

For the first 12 years of Gwen Shapira’s career, she worked on relational databases, where she learned all about both their power and limitations. In her The New Stack Makers interview, Shapira, a system architect at Confluent, excitedly shares how event-driven architecture literally breaks down those limitations and redefines the boundaries of service responsibilities. Event-driven architecture is part of the broader industry trend of separating components and streamlining processes so that releases are faster and organized around user activity. It's all about pulling apart applications into components — usually microservices — that you then chain together to better service business needs through the publishing of, listening to, and reacting to those events.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, Dell EMC's Nelson Hsu, director, solutions marketing for data protection, and Alexander Almeida, consultant, product marketing, describe the intersection of data protection and cloud native deployments and DevOps' roll in securing mission-critical workloads. Sponsored by Dell.