The New Stack Makers

Cloud native systems are, by definition, distributed —but to run databases securely and effectively on them, what’s needed is not only purpose-fit technology, but a change of mindset, according to this podcast episode’s guests.In this episode of Makers, the New Stack podcast, Jim Walker, principal product evangelist and Michelle Gienow, senior technical content manager, of Cockroach Labs (and a former New Stack reporter), discussed how distributed systems create new challenges for databases, the paradigm shift that’s needed to run databases effectively on Kubernetes, and the results of a new survey of Kubernetes users.The podcast was hosted by Heather Joslyn, features editor of The New Stack.

It’s that time of the year again, when we gather to discuss all matters related to Kubernetes and the other assorted tooling necessary to make cloud native computing happen.KubeCon+CloudNativeCon will be held in Los Angeles next month, October 11 -15.A key difference at this year’s event — the first onsite event from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation since the beginning of the pandemic — is that the flagship cloud native conference will offer a much more significant virtual experience for those unable to travel to the venue in L.A..The virtual aspect of this year’s KubeCon+CloudNativeCon “is expected to continue indefinitely,” Priyanka Sharma, general manager, CNCF said in this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast. Sharma was joined by conference co-chair Jasmine James, who is the Twitter developer experience lead and manager for engineering effectiveness. They discussed this year’s schedule and agenda, how it will all compare to KubeCon+CloudNativeCon of years past and general cloud native trends. TNS

Database giant Oracle added a container native CI/CD platform to its cloud portfolio when it purchased Wercker in 2017. Since the acquisition, Wercker founder, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, started Fiberplane, for which he is the CEO. In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, van Leuffen discusses the different aspects of the development of the Wercker and how that has parlayed into his work at Fiberplane, which offers collaborative notebooks for resolving incidents. Alana Anderson, founder and managing partner, base case capital, offered input from an investment capital firm perspective  as well.Alex Williams, founder and publisher, and Joab Jackson, editor-in-chief, both of The New Stack, hosted the podcast.

An organization that has any ambitions or hopes to scale application deployments across cloud native environments is not going to get very far without automation.From CI/CD support, increasing application deployment speed  — often across different environments — and maintaining compliance and security, operations teams manually managing these processes is just not humanly possible after a certain point.In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast,  Abby Kearns, Chief Technology Officer and head of R&D, and Chip Childers, Puppet Chief Architect, discussed what automation for infrastructure management for cloud native deployments means for Puppet and for the IT industry. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS, hosted this interview.

At last count, social media giant Twitter enjoys around 353 million active users, and streaming music service Spotify has 356 million active listeners. In both cases, open source tools and platforms for cloud native environments have served as the cornerstones for their tremendous growth.In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Spotify Senior Staff Engineer Dave Zolotusky, and Twitter Developer Experience Lead and Manager for Engineering Effectiveness Jasmine James discussed the role of open source software in their respective organizations. Katie Gamanj, ecosystem manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS,  co-hosted this interview.

There is much discussion about technology and tool gaps when organizations make the shift to cloud environments. However, a major — and often less-discussed — challenge is how to ensure that the DevOps team has the necessary skillsets to see the project through. Making sure that the right in-house talent and DevSecOps culture is in place to make the shift without exposing the organization's data and applications to security risks is especially critical.In this The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS,  guest Ashley Ward, technical director, office of the CTO, Palo Alto Networks, discussed the associated DevSecOps skillsets challenges for cloud deployments.

It's said we can all stand to make improvements when it comes to empathy. In software engineering, empathy is required to create something that the end user can easily figure out; it's unacceptable to build something you think is great but expect customers to figure it out on their own, just because you think they should.  Search engine giant, cloud services leader and Kubernetes creator, Google, realizes this.In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, The New Stack Founder and Publisher Alex Williams and TNS News Editor Darryl Taft sit down with Google’s Kim Bannerman, program manager for Empathetic Engineering, and Kelsey Hightower, principal developer advocate, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), to discuss Google's Customer Empathy Program and end-user satisfaction.

The definition of “low-code, no-code” remains a subject of debate. For some, it is the ability for a so-called “citizen developer” who lacks the training and skills to develop software — to be able to rely on a platform to deploy code with the same level of competence as that of a professional software engineer. Others describe low-code, no-code as a way to rely on a platform that facilitates software development — while automating many of the tasks in a build — to both simplify the process for inexperienced developers and to save time and resources for experienced developers. In both cases in this increasingly crowded space, low-code, no-code makes the coding and software development process simpler and more automated as a result.In the case of low-code, no-code platform provider gopaddle, the idea is to to “unleash the power of a no-code platform for modern applications.” How low-code, no-code can be applied to Go-centric applications running in cloud native environments was the main subject of this The New

As continuous integration and delivery provider CloudBees prepares for its annual DevOps World conferences, the company also is gearing up for a new phase of growth with a greater focus on security, AI and making DevOps easier.DevOps World will run September 28-30. Last year, the event drew around 30,000 virtual attendees. This year the event is again virtual and is also free. With a tagline of “building the future of software delivery together,” the focus of DevOps World will be to reach out to the entire DevOps ecosystem to share knowledge on the tools, techniques and best practices currently in use and those anticipated for the future.In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast we interview Sacha Labourey, co-founder and chief strategy officer of CloudBees, about both DevOps World and the future of the company. TNS Publisher Alex Williams hosted this episode, with the help of TNS News Editor Darryl K. Taft.

Both APIs and microservices play a key role in cloud native environments. Microservices serve as the cornerstone of distributed and shared computing resources. At the same time, APIs serve as a very efficient way to streamline many operations and development tasks from DevOps teams.However, both microservices and APIs carry with them their own security risks.  All it takes is for one compromised Kubernetes node to allow for an intruder to gain root access through an API to an organization’s entire container infrastructure across multiple clusters (a worst-case scenario).In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we look at how to both secure microservices with APIs and how to rely on APIs to delegate certain security tasks to a trusted third party. Our guest is Viktor Gamov, principal developer advocate for Kong, an API-connectivity company. The episode is hosted by Alex Williams, TNS founder and publisher, and Bharat Bhat, marketing lead, developer relations, Okta.

You have a teddy bear you want to love and protect. A big brother or sister takes the teddy bear and threatens to hold it for ransom until you pay up. What do you do?The teddy bear analogy is certainly simplistic, but it also reflects the reality of the ransomware attacks that organizations increasingly face. Attackers block access to critical data in exchange for increasingly outlandish ransoms. According to a Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 report, the highest ransom in 2020 was $30 million, up from $15 million in 2019.In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with Jason Williams, product marketing manager for Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, about what organizations should do to protect themselves from ransomware attacks. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS, hosted this episode.

Many organizations are finding that shifting to cloud native environments has become easier than it was in the past. However, the complexities and ensuing challenges can still surmount once at-scale deployments begin.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by TNS’ Alex Williams, founder and publisher, and Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor, application-deployment standards are the discussion of the day. The featured guests are Bruno Andrade, founder, Shipa, a provider of frameworks for Kubernetes; and Bassam Tabbara, founder and CEO, Upbound, which offers a universal control plane for multi-cluster management. 

Canonical's wildly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution continues to quietly play a role in the continued widespread adoption of Kubernetes. And that quiet support is as it should be, concluded Kelsey Hightower, Google Cloud Platform principal developer advocate, and Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, in this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS hosted this episode.Taking a step back, Ubuntu, as well as Linux in general, has become much easier to use, expanding beyond what many once considered to be a server operating system and an esoteric alternative to Windows.“There was this kind of inflection point where Linux has gone from like this command line server-side thing to something that you could actually run on a desktop with a meaningful UI and it felt like we were closing the gap on all the other popular open operating systems,” said Hightower.Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations ReportCanonical's Kubernetes Managed Services

Network connections can be likened to attending an amusement park, where Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), serves as the ticket to enter the park and the domain name system (DNS) is the map around the park. Network management and security provider Infoblox made a name for itself by collapsing those two core pieces into a single platform for enterprises to be able to control where IP addresses are assigned and how they manage network creation and movement."They control their own DNS so that they can have better control over their traffic,” explained Anthony James, Infoblox vice president of  product marketing, in this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack.

When it comes to at-scale software development, is continuous delivery and release automation (CDRA) the next step in the evolution of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD)?Forrester Research thinks so. The analysis firm describes CDRA as a way for organizations to deliver better-quality software faster and more securely, by automating digital pipelines and improving end-to-end management and visibility.In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast,  Anders Wallgren, CloudBees vice president of technology strategy, discusses CDRA, supporting tools and the goals and challenges DevOps teams have when delivering software today. CI/CD systems provider CloudBees was named a leading CDRA vendor in the report "The Forrester Wave: Continuous Delivery And Release Automation, Q2 2020."The episode was hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and co-hosted by Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor.

The amount of data created has doubled every year, presenting a host of challenges for organizations: security and privacy issues for starters, but also storage costs. What situations call for that data move to decentralized cloud storage rather than on-prem or even a single public cloud storage setup? What are the advantages and challenges of a decentralized cloud storage solution for data, and how can those be navigated?On this episode of Makers, the New Stack podcast, Ben Golub, CEO of Storj, and Krista Spriggs, software engineering manager at the company, were joined by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, along with Heather Joslyn, TNS’ features editor. Golub and Spriggs talked about how decentralized storage for data makes sense for organizations concerned about cloud costs, security, and  resiliency.

Once they have piloted Kubernetes, many organizations then want to scale up their K8s deployments, and run workloads across many clusters. But managing multiple clusters requires a new set of tools, ones that automate many routine and manual tasks. So, for its fifth Tech Radar report, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation surveyed the tools available for multicluster management, based on the input from its end-user community.In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, we talk with two people who helped assemble the report, Federico Hernandez, principal engineer social media analysis provider Meltwater, and Simone Sciarrati, Meltwater engineering team lead. We chatted about the report's findings and how the multicluster management tool landscape is taking shape. Co-hosting this episode is Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack and the Tech Radar's organizer Cheryl Hung, CNCF vice president of ecosystem.

Video games continue to explode in popularity, while the number of potential attack vectors increase as well. In this The New Stack Makers podcast host Alex Williams, publisher and founder of TNS and co-host Bharat Bhat, marketing lead, developer relations, for Okta, cover why and how video game platforms and connections should be more secure with guest Okta Senior Developer Advocate Nick Gamb.The gaming industry has often served as a showcase for some of industry’s greatest programming talents. As a case in point, John Carmack’s C++ code underpinning “Doom” is considered one of historical greats of programming not just for gaming but for software in general. For Gamb, while growing up, playing “Quake” and “Doom” before studying the code for these games served as his entry point into the software industry, as he noted how these games helped to “revolutionize gaming with first-person shooters (FPS).

The internet's fabled history includes such milestones as the Advanced Research Projects Agency's (ARPA) development of packet switching (ARPANET), paving the way for today's modern infrastructure, or Tim Berners-Lee’s research that culminated in the explosive adoption of the World Wide Web (WEB) in the 1990s.  Today, as microservices, Kubernetes and distributed environments and connections become more prevalent, the use of the Internet is becoming more decentralized as well.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS, Storj Labs' Ben Golub, chairman and interim CEO, and Katherine Johnson, head of compliance, discuss how the Internet today centers around decentralization — and more importantly — how decentralization reflects upon the roots of the internet.

Observability is widely misunderstood, but in an age of increased security breaches and more business being conducted online, it’s never been more important. How should organizations be thinking about their resources in multicloud environments? What strategies should they adopt to catch gaps in their security before hackers do? And also, what cultural changes might DevOps teams adopt to strengthen their observability?In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Maya Levine, technical marketing engineer and cloud native and cyber security evangelist for Check Point, joined co-hosts Alex Williams, The New Stack’s publisher, and Heather Joslyn, TNS’s features editor, for a discussion of what observability means now.