The New Stack Makers

Cloud native computing is bringing about such a sea change in how applications are developed, deployed and run, that, not surprisingly, it is changing the rules for information security as well. Case in point: serverless computing.In this latest edition of The New Stack makers podcast, we speak with Check Point's Cloud Security Strategist Hillel Solow, who has been at the cutting edge of these changes.  Solow co-founded Protego Labs, a pioneer in serverless security. Security vendor Check Point saw the writing on the security wall early on and gobbled up Protego in 2019. The New Stack Publisher Alex Williams and TNS Editor Joab Jackson hosted this episode.

The number of services cloud providers alone have begun to offer over the past couple of years has exploded, potentially exposing an exponentially larger number of microservices to vulnerabilities that support these services across multiple cloud and on-premises environments.In this The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Jack Wallen, a correspondent for The New Stack,  TJ (Tsion) Gonen, head of Cloud Security, Check Point, puts microservices security in context and describes the critical role security tools play and the support that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) offer.

The definitions of progressive delivery can vary, while many, if not most, would agree it represents an evolution of CI/CD. In this The New Stack Makers podcast The New Stack’s Alex Williams, publisher and founder, and B. Cameron Gain, correspondent, of The New Stack, cover why progressive delivery will play a large role in the future of DevOps. Nick Rendall, senior product marketing manager, CloudBees, is the featured guest.While progressive delivery is universally accepted as important for DevOps and software development, delivery and post-deployment management, how best to implement it remains a challenge for many organizations. “Everyone understands that progressive delivery is a good thing, and now it's like, ‘okay, great, but how do we really do it and let's take this concept and let's really build it out into our big enterprise organizations,” said Rendall.

The tech industry is broken. We deify overworking, and think burnout comes with bragging rights. But how do we break this exhausting cycle? In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk with LaunchDarkly's Manager of Developer Marketing Dawn Parzych about how to identify burnout in others and in yourself, how to treat it, and how to build a psychologically safe working environment that allows folks to say no.With a masters in psychology and a DevRel role that certainly straddles people and tech, Parzych's work often sits on the people side of what they're building."I love the idea ofthe socio-technical systems that we're building,like tech, doesn't exist in a bubble. People are building the technology. They're very interrelated and you can't just focus on the tech, the people are the hardest part of tech. And we spend more time talking about how tech's the hard piece,where it's reallythe people and the interrelation betweenthe people and the machines," she said.

No longer considered an ephemeral concept as it originally was, data management has become a huge issue and challenge, especially for managing stateless data in Kubernetes environments. Cloud Native Data Management Day at the recently held KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 event in May and the state of data management were the subject of discussion in this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack. The guests were Michael Cade, senior global technologist, Veeam Software and Nigel Poulton, owner of nigelpoulton.com, which offers Kubernetes and Docker training and other services. Both Cade and Poulton were also involved in the organization of Cloud Native Data Management Day.

Today’s developer seems to be working with more tools than ever. Building a Node.js-based JavaScript application could require over a dozen tools at times to get code out into production. It's easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole and not stay focused. Debugging an application once in production can also be a challenge: You want as much context at your fingertips as needed while maintaining a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio.Dan O’Brien, a software engineer for feature management platform provider LaunchDarkly, has a personal interest in how to keep from being distracted/staying in the flow when working on a new feature or any piece of code.In this very latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we ask O'Brien about the complexities he sees in today’s developer workflow, as well as some tips he has to stay “in the zone” when writing code. We’ll also discuss the tools that LaunchDarkly has that can help expedite application development. TNS founder and Publisher Alex Williams, along with TNS Managing Edit

No matter how much we prepare, deployments don’t always go as planned. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Isabelle Miller, software engineer, LaunchDarkly, describes how DevOps teams can build processes to help remove unwanted surprises during release cycles —  and why they do not need to be stressful.One of the main things Miller said she has discovered since joining LaunchDarkly at the beginning of 2020 is the importance of having procedures in place for when things do go wrong, “because things are going to go wrong,” she said.“You need to be able to manage that problem as quickly as possible, and minimize any harm before things get out of control when that happens,” said Miller. “So, one of the great things about working at LaunchDarkly is that I get to use our products. And one of the wonderful things about LaunchDarkly’s feature flags is that you can just turn things off.”

How Adidas manages for scale gives a sense for how a sportswear company is also in part similar to a software house just in terms of measuring how much code they run.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, speaks with Adidas’ Iñaki Alzorriz, senior director platform engineering, and Rastko Vukasinovic, director solution architecture, on how Adidas  scales DevOps and resiliency on Kubernetes. They also discuss how Adidas views managing at scale in three ways: technically, culturally and strategically.

Debate continues in the industry about what observability is, and more specifically, what it should offer DevOps, especially those working in operations who are often responsible for detecting those “unknown unknowns.” In this The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Bartek Plotka, a principal engineer at Red Hat, a SIG observability tech Lead for Thanos and a Prometheus maintainer; and Richard Hartmann, community director at Grafana, a Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder and a CNCF SIG observability chair member, discuss how observability should be easier to use and how it can be cost effective.

At this year’s KubeCon EU 2021, some things were the same — it was still virtual which meant it attracted a huge turnout of a more broadly international audience — and some things were different — like that almost everyone’s bought into Kubernetes and cloud native architecture, it’s now just how they use it. Another KubeCon tradition, The New Stack hosted a live pancake breakfast to reflect on the maturity of Kubernetes particularly around data persistence and storage.Our Publisher Alex Williams hosted this year’s very early discussion (at least for him) with Itzik Reich, VP of technologists, and Nivas Iyer, senior principal product manager, both at Dell Technologies, along with pancakes regular Cheryl Hung, VP of ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The adoption of GitOps, improvements to APIs and the increasing reach of virtual machine language WebAssembly (Wasm) are influencing the developer experience, and ultimately, how DevOps teams reach their application-deployment and -management goals. These were among the more talked-about themes at Cloud Native Computing Foundation KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EUPutting it all into context, Alex Williams, founder and publisher, and Joab Jackson, managing editor, of The New Stack, are the hosts of this The New Stack Makers podcast. The featured guests are Bryan Liles, principal engineer, VMware and Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem, CNCF.

A major part of improving developer velocity is about getting the most out of an observability platform. While that is a commonly held assumption, this best practice is also a far-reaching goal for many DevOps teams.Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, this The New Stack Makers — podcast recorded during a virtual pancake breakfast — features a discussion on improving observability for developers. The featured guests were Zain Asgar, general manager, Pixie and New Relic open source and CEO and co-founder of Pixie Labs, Roopak Venkatakrishnan, engineering manager, Bolt (an e-commerce retailer tool), Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Christine Wang, senior solutions engineer, Grafana Labs.

As GitOps moves beyond improving how code repositories are managed for continuous integration/continuous integration (CI/CD), the security component of GitOps has become more of a pressing issue as the use of Git, and GitOps, becomes more widely adopted. The open source community should also play a critical role in improving GitOps.Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, this recording features Om Moolchandani, co-founder and CISO/CTO, for Accurics, Cindy Blake, senior security evangelist, GitLab, Frank Kim, fellow, SANS Institute; Sanjeev Sharma, head of platform engineering, Truist Financial and Katie Gamanji, ecosystem advocate, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Developers just want to know if they have a vulnerability before putting code into production. But often, the answer back is not what the developer wants to hear.More analysis is needed, the software security group will often reply, said Meera Rao, senior director of product management at Synopsys, in this latest episode of The New Stack Makers, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack,Rao is the creator of a new intelligent orchestration technology that helps developers get their issues resolved without a long wait. That long wait is remedied by relying on Synopsys’ system to let developers know what’s wrong and whether specific security holes require immediate fixing or not.

What we do know about Kubernetes? It’s a raw, gaping maw. It’s not meant for most of us. What is needed? Access to the grinding, digital gears that make what we know of as distributed architectures. Istio is an example of a management layer for Kubernetes, said Zack Butcher, part of the founding engineering team at Tetrate, a service mesh company. He joins Varun Talwar, co-founder at Tetrate for a discussion about the service mesh Istio and its role in the management of highly distributed networks, including, of course, Kubernetes in this The New Stack Makers podcast. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Joab Jackson, managing editor for The New Stack, we speak two of the fabled conference’s key organizers about what to expect and what the organizers’ goals are: Priyanka Sharma, general manager for CNCF and Stephen Augustus, engineering director and head of open source at Cisco. This is no business-as-usual KubeCon conference, of course. Last year’s KubeCon EU was cancelled just a few weeks before the event was scheduled to take place. Then, many question marks remained during the early days of the pandemic about not only the future of conferences but how workers in the IT industry would continue to live and work. As it turns out, this year’s event is virtual, of course, and at the very least, there is no shortage of talks and events. All told, for KubeCon, experts from organizations including Adobe, Apple, CERN, Nvidia and OVHcloud will deliver more than 100 sessions, keynotes, lightning talks, and breakout sessions. There will also be more than 60 s

This The New Stack Makers podcast explores the state of open source software today and features a case example of what is possible: Kasten by Veeam has created Kubestr to identify, validate and evaluate storage systems running in cloud native environments. As Michael Cade, a senior global technologist for Veeam, describes Kubestr, the open source tool provides information about what storage solutions are available for particular Kubernetes clusters and how well they are performing. The software project is also intended to offer DevOps teams an “easy button” to automate these processes. Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Cade and fellow guest Sirish Bathina, a software engineer, for Kasten, describe Kasten’s long-standing collaboration with the open source community and how Kubestr serves as case study example of both an ambitious open source project and what is possible today for stateful storage in Kubernetes environments.

The New Stack Makers’ recent “eBay Baby! How eBay Is Working for Developer Speed” livestream podcast covered a lot of ground about eBay’s five successive reengineers of its IT architecture. Recorded on April 1 and hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, eBay’s challenges and achievements were certainly no joke. The eBay guests Randy Shoup, vice president, engineering and chief architect, Mark Weinberg, vice president, core product engineering and Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh, vice president, buyer experience engineering offered their insight and lessons learned over pancakes.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Lad discusses ThousandEyes’ work as a network monitoring provider to meet the challenges of the day. Lad discussed his background in networking, the evolution of networking and software in general and the parallel growth of the Internet as it relates to ThousandEyes. Needless to say, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a profound impact on remote work in a number of ways. Mohit Lad, general manager, co-founder and former CEO of ThousandEyes, has been at the front lines. He and his team at ThousandEyes have helped a number of customers meet the networking- and infrastructure-management challenges associated with tremendous surges in remote data connections during the past year.

In 2018, Kubernetes had become too big to run on Raspberry Pi. For a while, it meant that kubeadmin could not run on the micro-device. K3s changed that and represents a new take on Kubernetes: stripped of code, K3s is a lightweight version of Kubernetes meant to run on edge devices. Today, K3s is seeing a rise in popularity as are a host of other new services that focus on the edge for Kubernetes architectures. It’s now at the point that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is planning Kubernetes on Edge Day at KubeCon, said Bill Mulligan, marketing manager for CNCF in a podcast recording with Alex Ellis, founder at OpenFaaS and the author of a new course on K3s that will be available for KubeCon, scheduled for May 4-7.