The New Stack Makers

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, who discusses the problems engineering managers have faced when scaling architectures to support the demands of the business. Mai Le is Nextdoor’s head of engineering. She and her team knew they had to do something for small businesses suffering in the pandemic. They needed to develop ways to connect them with their local customers and this was especially important for Nextdoor. Social networks have served as hubs for small businesses with Nextdoor standing out more than most. After her team’s considerable effort, it should have been smooth sailing. But, with only two weeks until launch, Le couldn’t get the new service to work.

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 Cloudf

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, with engineers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought. These are the stories about engineering management and how technology decisions are made for scaling architectures to support the demands of the business. Pooja Brown is vice president of engineering at Stitch Fix and also one of the founding members of ENG, a peer network of VPs and CTOs from leading SaaS companies. Brown spends most of the discussion talking about the work in developing a modern infrastructure prior to her work at StitchFix. Brown tells her story in four acts, discussing her work on monoliths and the move to a modern architecture that came with hiring. The developers were hired for their Node.js skills. And, they were quite different than the .Net devs they had once known so well.

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews conducted by our guest host Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart with engineering managers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought. The challenges engineering leaders face define how technology decisions are made for scaling architectures to support the demands of rapid-growth businesses. Heckart's first interview is with Adam Wolff, Robinhood’s former vice president of engineering who recalls two years ago when Kubernetes looked so right — and then the difficulties that followed when Wolff mandated the platform's adoption.

Next-generation data stacks and data centers will continue to meet the demands of software developer-led business models. But as new tools and platforms emerge to meet the deployment needs of today and tomorrow to run at scale, the data centers and cloud infrastructures will need to evolve as well. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Shrey Parekh, senior manager of product marketing, and Whitney Satin, director of product marketing, of Cisco’s AppDynamics discuss how data center and cloud environments are changing to accommodate next-generation applications and data stacks. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

Scripting behaviors and habits are hard to break as engineers are often accustomed to their own ways and processes. Meanwhile, the processes team leaders need to take when adopting new CI/CD processes and technologies, include engineering management from the bottom up and mapping people's skill sets and other processes. An example of a CI/CD process used to make the shift includes Harness’ platform that uses machine learning and other technologies to help DevOps engineer teams further their goals. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Tiffany Jachja, evangelist, Harness and Rajsi Rana, senior product manager, Oracle Cloud, discuss scripting, its background and how machine learning, CI/CD and other processes can help guide a shift in engineering culture to make the most of time and resources. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

In this episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Jonas Bonér, Akka creator and founder/chief technology officer of Lightbend, about the challenges of bringing state to serverless, reactive microservices frameworks, and Cloudstate itself. TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Charlotte Mach and Ian Crosby, CTO for Container Solutions, discuss a number of topics about next-generation computing. They include edge computing, hybrid and multicloud adoption, environmentally sustainable cloud computing and culture. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

For this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosts guest speakers Dina Graves Portman, developer relations engineer for Google, Emilie Schario, internal strategy consultant, data, for GitLab, and Nicole Schultz, assistant director of engineering for Northwestern Mutual to discuss how DataOps is defined and why its application in the context of DevOps is particularly relevant in today’s highly complex and increasingly distributed environments. Like DevOps, Schario describes DataOps as workflow-related, but it extends much further to help resolve data-management challenges.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Robert Haynes, cloud security evangelist, Palo Alto Networks, discusses Kubernetes security above and beyond what Kubernetes has natively and the evolution of the Kubernetes vulnerability landscapes since the first API attacks. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

For this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we ask Levine about the excitement around WebAssembly, its use in the Envoy proxy, and Solo.io’s new proposal for packaging WASM modules in the Open Container Initiative format. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson. Although WebAssembly was created for bringing advanced programming to the browser, Solo.io’s founder/CEO Idit Levine has been a vocal proponent of using the portable fast open source runtime to extend service meshes — citing Solo.io’s own work in offering tools and services to support commercial service mesh operations. In fact, WASM, as its also known, could be used to bring extensibility across a wide variety of cloud native projects, she argues.

For Kolton Andrus, CEO and co-founder, Gremlin, describing what chaos engineering is “is one of my favorite topics for debate,” and “is what makes chaos engineering sound fun and exciting." In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Andrus, in addition to defining chaos engineering, describes how organizations can make it work for them. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode. The very idea of chaos — and an IT organization’s embrace of it — can conjure up fear in many. “[Chaos engineering] scares the pants off of some old school folks that aren’t comfortable with that kind of chaos in their environments. And so most people think chaos engineering is randomly breaking things and seeing what happens,” said Andrus. “I think that chaos engineering is thoughtful, planned experiments that teach us about our system and one of the key concepts that goes with that is this idea of the ‘blast radius.’ When we run this experiment, whom might we impact? Because the goal is to

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sit down with Christina Hupy, GitLab’s senior education program manager, and Nuritzi Sanchez, GitLab’s senior open source program manager, in the lead-up to GitLab Commit later this summer. We talk about the ups and downs of inclusion in the open source world, how you can best leverage the career opportunities of open source, and most importantly, how open source communities can open themselves up more to better foster those opportunities. We discuss this all not only within the context of traditional enterprise settings, but at universities and in prisons. Much of both Hupy and Sanchez’s time is spent with the broader community of GitLab users. And it’s part of their job to bring external feedback inside the company. So they may be more prepared than most to answer the essential question: What does a better open source community look like?

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, talks to three members of the WeaveWorks team: Alexis Richardson, founder and CEO, Cornelia Davis, chief technology officer, and Stefan Prodan, developer experience engineer and the architect of Flux2 and Flagger. They reflect on the next generation tooling in the cloud native tech community. The quartet discusses how that tooling fits into the GitOps toolkit and, particularly, the next evolution of the Flux continuous delivery for GitOps projects.

Application and system observability was the focus of the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technology Radar end user survey, posted last week. So for this week’s TNS Context podcast episode, we invited Cheryl Hung, CNCF vice president of ecosystem, to discuss these latest findings. To get an additional industry perspective on observability, we’ve also invited Buddy Brewer, vice president of full stack observability for New Relic.

Java remains one of the most popular and trusted programming languages, but it is not necessarily well-suited for everything, including cloud native and containerized applications. While Java’s elegance and versatility is reflected in how it can be written once and run practically anywhere, the language was geared mainly for creating application stacks decades ago when it was first created. Cloud native and Kubernetes, of course, are different animals compared to the stacks of decades past. In other words, Java is not Golang for Kubernetes. And yet… Frameworks will likely serve as the solution to Java’s Kubernetes dilemma. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, DataStax’s Alice Lottini, Vanguard architect, and Christopher Splinter, senior product manager, open source, discuss how frameworks can allow Java to still work for creating applications that run better in cloud native environments and how they represent a new identity for the 25-year-old programming language. Alex Williams, founder and publi

The iterative software development model can help organizations improve agility and the efficiencies of production pipelines as DevOps teams continue to seek ways to create applications and updates at ever-faster cadences. GitLab serves as an example of an enterprise that is successfully taking advantage of iteration and applying lessons it has learned to contributing to and supporting its open source projects, as well as to the open source community. For this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, speaks with Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO at GitLab, about iteration, open source projects — including Meltano and Kubernetes— and how SpaceX’s iterative development processes in the hardware industry can teach the software sector.

The ideal state of a cloud native shop is to run a development and deployment pipeline that can seamlessly move applications from the developer’s laptop to the data center (or the edge) without any manual intervention. And while there are many tools available to facilitate such automation — Helm, Operators, CI/CD toolchains, GitOps architectures, Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform — all too often edge cases and exceptions still require personal attention, bringing DevOps pipelines to a halt. The missing pieces of the puzzles are a control plane and a unified application model for the control plane to run upon, asserted Phil Prasek, a principal product manager at Upbound, in this latest episode of The New Stack Context podcast. Prasek envisions a time when organizations can build their own customized set of platform services, where developers can draw from a self-serve portal the building blocks they need — be they containerized applications or third party cloud services, and have the resulting app

Michelle Norrali, a senior software engineer for Microsoft, wrote a statement on a whiteboard during Helm’s first days when she worked with Matt Butcher at Deis, which Microsoft acquired in 2017. “From zero to dopamine in five minutes,” is still the phrase Butcher, a principal software development engineer for Microsoft, and his team use to measure how they are building a developer experience for the popular package manager used to get Kubernetes up and going. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, host Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, speaks with Butcher and Matt Farina, a senior staff engineer for Samsung, about how updates to Helm help improve the overall Kubernetes experience and balance usability in such a large community to provide the best developer experience.

GitLab sponsored this podcast. The struggle is real. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape map has over 1,400 cloud native projects listed on it, over a variety of categories. The total market cap of the cloud native ecosystem is $18.66T, which gives you an idea of the scale of cloud business now. So as companies continue their inevitable migration from legacy IT systems to the new cloud native world, they have a mind-boggling number of choices to make. And it’s not just choices about cloud infrastructure and tools, but also how they run IT projects in the cloud era, and how operators and developers are increasingly working together using the DevOps approach. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we discuss these and other struggles of the cloud with two GitLab executives: Brandon Jung, vice president of alliances at GitLab, and Pete Goldberg, director of partnerships at GitLab. Both have extensive experience working in the cloud ecosystem, so they were able to provide insights on both the strugg