The New Stack Analysts

"The mainframe lasted for a while, but as IT got decentralized, the physical machine became the fundamental unit that people used, in order to think about their infrastructure and their architecture — having the host as the center of the universe," says Alexis Lê-Quôc, CTO and Co-Founder of Datadog, during this conversation with Alex Williams and co-host Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk about monitoring distributed architecture. Alexis continues, "You wouldn't think in terms of, 'they're just apps that run somewhere, and someone's taking care of the ether in which they run.' It's really, 'it's the machine — it's there — I can see it,' or, 'it's in the data center next door.' I clearly map an application to a machine to the point where, when I say 'the database,' I mean 'the application' but I also mean 'the machine that runs the database.'" Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-34-monitoring-distributed-architectures/

"It's very much India's Go Conference. It's not just us coming in and talking at you," says Dave Cheney, an Australian speaker, blogger, and open source author. Dave co-organizes the Sydney Go Users group and has been an active contributor to the Go project since February 2011. He spent some time during GopherConIndia 2015 to talk with Atul Jha, Community Manager for The New Stack, for this episode of The New Stack Analysts." Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-33-go-developers-talk-shop-at-gopherconindia-2015/

At the Node Summit last month, Donnie Berkholz and I recorded a discussion with TJ Fontaine about a new foundation for Node.js that was announced just before the conference. It follows the formation of io.js, a new Node community that split fom the core Node.js group. The interview with Fontaine, project lead for Node.js, started with a bit of joking that actually proved to be quite perinent to the issues about open source governance that have surfaced over the past several months. The interview covers a lot about the balance between the needs of the big users, such as Microsoft and IBM with the interest in pushing node forward and trying new things. The discussion gets a lot into the technical future of Node with a foundation model and how it might compare to other open source groups. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-32-the-node-js-foundation-io-js-and-the-new-world-of-open-source-governance/

"It was the second-highest user-voiced request," says Neal Shrader, Senior Software Engineer at DigitalOcean, discussing their move to support FreeBSD. "It's understandable why people wanted it. People who are into BSD are passionate about BSD and they have no problem in voicing that." Dealings with the community have been great, says Thor Swehla, Software Engineer at DigitalOcean. "It helped us make the offering a lot more solid and tailored to what the users were trying to do," he says. "I would definitely look for something with that strong of a community, or make sure that we were talking to the right community, for anything that we launch in the future." Neal and Thor join The New Stack founder Alex Williams and co-host Donnie Berkholz for this episode of The New Stack Analysts. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-31-digitalocean-learned-adding-freebsd-support/

Klint Finley, writer for Wired magazine, joins his long-time colleague Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack, in the PDX Airport terminal to record this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast. Using Klint’s recent piece on Black Duck’s Open Source Rookies of the Year as a touchstone, the conversation covers a number of these cutting-edge projects. Without question, there are some very interesting ideas being realized, and the discussion is well worth a listen. Alex and Klint also talk about past Rookie of the Year winners, the mainstream adoption of Kubernetes, and a wide range of trends and products that will increase in relevance in the months ahead. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-show-30-black-ducks-open-source-rookies-year/

At the time of recording this episode, Alex was still researching his January 29, 2015 in-depth post on The New Stack, “SDN, Docker and the Real Changes Ahead,” and he engages Michael in quite a bit of thinking out on the topic of SDN. Referring to a John Willis presentation that he captured at DockerCon Europe, Alex summarizes the transition from traditional, centralized software-defined networking to the current trend toward decentralized, distributed SDN. According to Willis, says Alex, there are two major factors that are affecting the way we think about networking. One issue is density, “the amount of virtual machines on any physical server, and how heavy they are because they carry that operating system.” Docker containers being more light-weight, “you may have the possibilty of thousands of containers on a server,” says Alex. “Secondly,” Alex continues, “data gravity comes into play because we have lots of services and apps that might be inside of these containers,” requiring more thought toward management and orchestration. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/new-stack-analysts-show-29-docker-density-data-gravity-new-complexity-sdn/

Looking forward to a schedule full of conference activity, The New Stack founder Alex Williams and co-host Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk ease into this first-of-the-year episode of The New Stack Analysts by comparing their go-to travel planning tools. RedMonk's Monki Gras is first up later this month, and its theme is "Nordic Craft Culture and Tech." Donnie explains the impetus behind the choice to focus on the Nordic and Scandinavian influence on technology. "A huge amount of really vital internet infrastructure has come out of the Nordic countries - a lot that I hadn't realized." "Many people know that Linus Torvalds who wrote Linux grew up in Finland," says Donnie, "but what people may not know is that tools like SSH , IRC, MySQL, Skype - more recently Spotify and Varnish - have all come out of the Nordic countries as well - a lot of these core pieces of internet infrastructure that really do a lot to equalize communication and equalize technology for the rest of us..." Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/new-stack-analysts-show-28-monki-gras-nordic-dev-communities-data-science-matters-sysadmin/

To explore the response to the recently-disclosed Git security vulnerability (which we wrote about at: http://thenewstack.io/major-git-security-vulnerability-discovered-causing-github-to-encourage-update-to-git-clients/) and to provide some context for it in a world of imperfect code, The New Stack Founder Alex Williams called upon Tal Klein of Adallom and Bryan Helmkamp, CEO and Founder of Code Climate, for this episode of The New Stack Analysts. Bryan refreshes us on the nature of the Git vulnerability: “It allows an attacker who has control of a Git repository to execute arbitrary code on the client machine of anybody connecting to that Git repository with a vulnerable version of the Git client.” Tal is not at all surprised by this news: “Vulnerabilities are going to happen; there’s no such thing as perfect code,” he says. “Git was another popular attack vector for the Shellshock vulnerability,” says Tal, describing Git as the perfect candidate through which to attempt to obtain privileges to escalation. “It’s actually the second scenario in which Git itself becomes an attack vector,” he says. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-27-the-git-vulnerability-and-its-aftermath/

Alexis Lê-Quôc, CTO & Co-Founder of Datadog, sits in with The New Stack Founder Alex Williams, and co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Coté of 451 Research, for this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast. Alexis discusses the genesis of the checklist, which presents Datadog’s understanding of the AWS ecosystem and service portfolio. “We have an emphasis (in the checklist) on monitoring because that’s what we do, but even as an end user of integrated services, we find ourselves asking the same questions over and over for each new service that’s coming out,” says Alexis. For operations, it serves as a template with which to look at these new services, and one that could also be extended to services that have yet to be announced, and to services in general. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-26-datadogs-aws-checklist-and-herding-distributed-services/

Always willing to take the heat for convening a Friday afternoon Google hangout, The New Stack Founder Alex Williams is joined by co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Coté of 451 Research for this episode of The New Stack Analysts, because not only is there a podcast to record, but there is also news to discuss regarding the launch of the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-25-the-cloud-foundry-foundation-and-managing-open-source-projects/

This episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast was recorded in the NEMO Science Center in Amsterdam at the conclusion of DockerCon Europe 2014. Co-host Michael Coté reflects on the conference and ponders the Docker juggernaut with The New Stack Founder Alex Williams. “It seems like it’s moving even faster,” says Alex. Michael wonders how does one measure the success of Docker? Total number of individual contributors and partners? “It would be interesting to come up with a good way of modeling out how you measure a company operating in the new stack space,” says Michael. “What are the key numbers for them, if not revenue? If it’s not revenue, which is always the easiest and most generic, how do you measure their success?” Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-24-dockercon-europe-redux/

I keep thinking of this important week for Docker when listening to this recording from OpenStack that we did in Paris last month at our WarmUp event. Lke OpenStack, this week's DockerCon is a community event, Both OpenStack and DockerCon are reminders that confusion is customary in emerging technology markets and there will be efforts to divert thinking. We see that in almost any technology community. The container community is no different. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-23-docker-its-just-the-beginning/

The New Stack Founder Alex Williams hosts this episode of The New Stack Analysts from the semi-arid climes of Broomfield, Colorado during the Defrag 2014 Conference. Alex is joined by Shippable Co-founder & CEO Avi Cavale and API Evangelist Kin Lane, and co-host Michael Coté. Before Alex turns the discussion to the topic of tech conferences in general, with particular reflection on the positive aspects of the Defrag conference, the panel looks at the relationship of application programming interfaces (APIs) to Docker, and specifically how both APIs and Docker, the very popular platform for distributed applications, are gaining considerable presence on the web, contributing to much innovation, and much staking-out of territory. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-22-apis-docker-and-containers-in-the-cloud-casino/

Off the record (but not off one of the records in his vast and eclectic collection of vinyl), The New Stack founder Alex Williams had been characterizing the different types of tech press, from Microsoft Groupies to SaaS Bloggery, and taking no prisoners. Co-host Michael Coté, prowling for viability, recounts these merciless dissections past the intro and into the Thunderdome of this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-21-the-tech-press-as-it-were-and-the-new-stack/

OpenStack blueprints are used to track the implementation of significant features in OpenStack. The New Stack tracked the 11 integrated projects of the OpenStack Juno release, covered in: A Guide to Developer Contributions in the OpenStack Juno Blueprints. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast presented with Alex Williams and co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Cote of 451 Research, we explore the research Analyst Atul Jha conducted. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-20-an-analysis-of-openstacks-juno-blueprints/