The New Stack Analysts

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In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, host Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack and co-host Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at CNCF Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), discuss why secrets management is essential for DevOps teams, what the tool landscape is like and why Vault was selected as the top alternative. CNCF Tech Radar contributors and featured guests were Steve Nolen, site reliability engineer, RStudio — which creates open source software for data science, scientific research and technical communication — and Andrea Galbusera, engineering and co-founder, AuthKeys, a SaaS platform provider for managing and auditing servers authorizations and logins.

In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams virtually shared pancakes and syrup with guests to discuss how Apache Cassandra, gRPC and, other tools and platforms play a role in managing data on Kubernetes. Mya Pitzeruse, software engineer and OSS contributor from effx; Sam Ramji, chief strategy officer at Datastax; and Tom Offermann, a lead software engineer at New Relic were the guests. They offered deep perspectives about the evolution of data management on Kubernetes and the work that remains to be done.

On the last The New Stack Analysts of the year, the gang got together — remotely, obviously — to reflect on this year. And oh what a year! But for a year in tech, 2020 still had a lot of hits — and some misses. Publisher Alex Williams was joined by Libby Clark, Joab Jackson, Bruce Gain, Steven Vaughan-Nichols, and Jennifer Riggins. We looked back on the year that saw millions die, no one fly, and a lot of jobs in turmoil. It was also a year that, while many things screeched to a halt, much of the tech industry had to keep going more than ever.

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. Identity and access management (IAM) was previously relatively straightforward. Often delegated as a low-level management task to the local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) admin, the process of setting permissions for tiered data access was definitely not one of the more challenging security-related duties. However, in today’s highly distributed and relatively complex computing environments, network and associated IAM are exponentially more complex. As application creation and deployment become more distributed, often among multicloud containerized environments, the resulting dependencies, as well as vulnerabilities, continue to proliferate as well, thus widening the scope of potential attack surfaces. How to manage IAM in this context was the main topic of this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendees joined TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams and guests live for the latest “Virtual Pancake & Podcast.” They discussed why IAM has become even more difficult to manage than in the past and offered their perspectives about potential solutions. They also showed how enjoying pancakes — or other variations of breakfast — can make IAM challenges more manageable. The event featured Lin Sun, senior technical staff member and Master Inventor, Istio/IBM; Joab Jackson, managing editor, The New Stack and Nathaniel “Q” Quist, senior threat researcher (Public Cloud Security – Unit 42), Palo Alto Networks. Jackson noted how the evolution of IAM has not been conducive to handling the needs of present-day distributed computing. Previously, it was “not exactly a security thing” nor a “developer problem,” and wasn’t even “a security problem, he said. “[IAM] really almost was a network problem: if a certain individual or a certain process wants to access another process or a resource online, then you have to have the permissions in place to meet all the policy requirements about who can ask for these particular resources,” Jackson said. “And this is an entirely new problem with distributed computing on a massive and widespread scale…it’s almost a mindset, number one, about who can figure out what to do and then how to go about doing it.”

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast. How to manage database storage in cloud native environments continues to be a major challenge for many organizations. Database storage also came to the fore as the issue to explore in the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Tech Radar report. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, host Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack and co-hosts Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Dave Zolotusky, senior staff engineer at Spotify discuss stateless database storage, recent results of the report findings and perspectives from the user community. The podcast guests — who both contributed to the CNCF Tech Radar report and hail from the database storage user community — were Jackie Fong, engineering leader, Kubernetes and developer experience for Ticketmaster, and Mya Pitzeruse, software engineer, OSS contributor, effx.

Accurics sponsored this podcast. Who doesn’t love hotcakes? And to make them right, you need to wait until the batter starts to bubble up before you flip them. Immutable infrastructure management and related security challenges are also “bubbling up” these days, as many organizations make the shift to cloud native environments, with containerized, serverless and other layers. In this The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams asked served up pancakes with KubeCon attendees who joined him for a “stack” at the “Virtual Pancake Breakfast and Podcast” while they offered their deep perspectives on what is at stake as immutable infrastructure security and other related concerns take hold. The guests joining the virtual breakfast were Om Moolchandani, co-founder and CTO for Accurics, Rosemary Wang, developer advocate for HashiCorp, Krishna Bhagavathula, CTO, for the NBA (who also brought his own L.A. Lakers-branded spatula), Chenxi Wang, Ph.D., managing general partner of Rain Capital, and Priyanka Sharma, general manager, for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is known for its particle accelerator and experiments and analysis of the properties of subatomic particles, anti-matter and other particle physics-related research. CERN is also considered to be where the World Wide Web (WWW) was created. Research and experiments conducted at the largest particle physics research center consisting of a 27-km long tunnel generate massive amounts of data to manage and store. All told, CERN now manages over 500 petabytes — over half of one exabyte — which, in a decade's time, is expected to total 5,000 petabytes, said Ricardo Rocha, a staff researcher at CERN. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts, we learn from Rocha how CERN is adapting as a new accelerator goes online in the next few years with the ability to manage 10x the data it manages now.

Some legacy infrastructures are certainly more difficult to manage than others when organizations make the shift to cloud native. In the case of the heavily regulated financial services industry and the deep legacy infrastructure involved when banks transition to the cloud, challenges inherent in the sector abound. Regulatory and compliance and data-management challenges are also usually amplified when the bank has an especially large international presence. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as part of The New Stack’s recent coverage of end-use Kubernetes, Michael Lieberman, senior innovation engineer, vice president, of Tokyo-based MUFG, discusses his company’s journey to scale out architectures in a microservice and Kubernetes environment in the world of financial services. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted the podcast with co-hosts Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Dave Zolotusky, senior staff engineer at Spotify.

In the serverless paradigm, the idea is to abstract away the backend so that developers don’t need to deal with it. That’s all well and good when it comes to servers and complex infrastructure like Kubernetes. But up till now, database systems haven’t typically been a part of the serverless playbook. The assumption has been that developers will build their serverless app and choose a separate database system to connect to it — be it a traditional relational database, a NoSQL system, or even a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solution. But the popularity of serverless has prompted further innovation in the data market. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, we talked about the latest developments in regards to managing data in a serverless system. My two guests were Evan Weaver, co-founder and chief technology officer of Fauna, and Greg McKeon, a product manager at Cloudflare. Fauna is building a “data API” for serverless apps so that developers don’t even need to touch a database system, while Cloudflare runs a serverless platform called Cloudflare Workers.

Kubernetes is becoming boring and that’s a good thing — it’s what’s on top of Kubernetes that counts. In this The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS Founder & Publisher Alex Williams asked KubeCon attendees to join him for a short “stack” at our Virtual Pancake & Podcast to discuss “What’s on your stack?” The podcast featured guest speakers Janakiram MSV, principal analyst, Janakiram & Associates, Priyanka Sharma, general manager, CNCF, Patrick McFadin, chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra and vice president, developer relations, DataStax and Bill Zajac, regional director of solution engineering, Dynatrace. The group passed the virtual syrup and talked Kubernetes, which may be stateless, but also means there’s plenty of room for sides.

A lot of the time, it’s harder to convince your friends and family than a stranger. The first group is usually more decisive and direct with you. The same goes for your work family. When you’re building an internal infrastructure for autonomous teams, it becomes your job to not only provide that technical backbone, but to act as sales and customer support. Nobody said internal developer advocacy would be easier. The sixth episode of The New Stack Analysts End User Series brings together again our Publisher Alex Williams with co-hosts Cheryl Hung from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ken Owens of Mastercard. In this episode they talk with Simone Sciarrati, the engineering team lead at Meltwater media intelligence platform about the autonomous engineering culture, molding developer experience, and those tough technological decisions.

Spotify is well known worldwide for its music service. Not so well known, is its path to Kubernetes Oz has been a road with many twists and turns. What also may be a surprise to many is that Spotify is a veteran user of Kubernetes and how it owes much of its product-delivery capabilities to its agile DevOps. Indeed, Spotify continues to increasingly rely on a container and microservices infrastructure and cloud native deployments to offer a number of advantages. This allows its DevOps teams to continually improve the overall streaming experience for millions of subscribers. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as part of The New Stack’s recent coverage of end use Kubernetes, Jim Haughwout, head of infrastructure and operations, shares Spotify’s cloud native adoption war stories and discusses its past and present Kubernetes challenges. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack; Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard hosted the podcast.

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast as part of a series of interviews with Kubernetes end users. Listen to the previous stories about the ups and downs of Box’s Kubernetes journey and what Wikipedia’s infrastructure is like behind the firewall. It started simply enough but soon the site needed more than a server to keep things managed. Today, EquityZen runs on Kubernetes and is considering its next moves, in particular exploring how container as a service may serve them. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Andy Snowden, engineering manager, DevOps, for EquityZen, discusses how he helped the company begin its cloud native journey and the challenges associated with the move. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack; Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard hosted the podcast. When Snowden joined EquityZen, he immediately began to apply his background managing Kubernetes environments to help solve a chief concern the company had: The reliability of its infrastructure. “During our initial conversations, they explained to me that ‘hey, we are having these issues and we are having these big site hits where the site will go down’ and that is really bad for our customers. They also asked ‘what have you done in your past that has worked well for you?,’” said Snowden. “And knowing Kubernetes as I knew it, I said this sounds like a really good use case for it and I explained that these are the sort of things I might consider doing.” Once convinced that a Kubernetes environment would both boost reliability and help the company to better scale its operations, making the shift was, of course, a major undertaking.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon sponsored this post. Box was one of the first companies to build on Kubernetes. Initially building its platform on PHP, Box’s architecture still uses some parts of the PHP architecture. Today, Box serves as a case study of a software platform’s cloud native journey that began a few years ago. The company also continues to rely on its legacy infrastructure dating back to the days when PHP ran on Box’s bare metal servers in its data centers. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Kunal Parmar, director of engineering, Box, discusses the evolution of the cloud content management provider’s cloud native journey with hosts Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard. Prior to Box’s adoption of Kubernetes, the company sought ways to “create more services outside of the monolith in order to scale efficiently,” Parmar said. One way to do that, he explained, was to shift its legacy monolith applications into microservices. “For anybody who has [made the shift to Kubernetes], they would know this is a really long and hard journey. And so, in parallel, we have been focusing on adopting Kubernetes for all of the new microservices that we have been building outside of the monolith,” said Parmar. “And today we are at a point where we're actually now looking at also starting to migrate the monolith to run on top of Kubernetes so that we can take advantage of the benefits that Kubernetes brings.”