The New Stack Makers

During the pandemic, many organizations sped up their move to the cloud — without fully understanding the costs, both human and financial, they would pay for the convenience and scalability of a digital transformation. “They really didn’t have a baseline,” said Mekka Williams, principal engineer, at Spot by NetApp, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. “And so the those first cloud bills, I'm sure were shocking, because you don't get a cloud bill, when you run on your on-premises environment, or even your private cloud, where you've already paid the cost for the infrastructure that you're using. What’s especially worrisome is that many of those costs are simply wasted, Williams said. “Most of the containerized applications running in Kubernetes clusters are running underutilized,” she said. “And anything that's underutilized in the cloud equates to waste. And if we want to be really lean and clean and use resources in a very efficient manner, we have to have really good cloud strategy in order to d

Redis, best known as a data cache or real-time data platform, is evolving into much more, Tim Hall, chief of product at the company told The New Stack in a recent TNS Makers podcast. Redis is an in-memory database or memory-first database, which means the data lands there and people are using us for both caching and persistence. However, these days, the company has a number of flexible data models, but one of the brand promises of Redis is developers can store the data as they're working with it. So as opposed to a SQL database where you might have to turn your data structures into columns and tables, you can actually store the data structures that you're working with directly into Redis, Hall said.  Primary Database? “About 40% of our customers today are using us as a primary database technology,” he said. “That may surprise some people if you're sort of a classic Redis user and you knew us from in-memory caching, you probably didn't realize we added a variety of mechanisms for persistence over the years.” M

Let’s say you’re a passenger on a cruise ship. Floating in the middle of the ocean, far from reliable Wi-Fi, you wear a device that lets you into your room, that discreetly tracks your move from the bar to the dinner table to the pool and delivers your drink order wherever you are. You can buy sunscreen or toothpaste or souvenirs in the ship’s stores without touching anything. If you’re a Carnival Cruise Lines passenger, this is reality right now, in part because of the company’s partnership with Couchbase, according to Mark Gamble, product and solutions marketing director, Couchbase. Couchbase provides a cloud native, no SQL database technology that's used to power applications for customers including Carnival but also Amadeus, Comcast, LinkedIn, and Tesco. In Carnival’s case, Gamble said, “they run an edge data center on their ships to power their Ocean Medallion application, which they are super proud of. They use it a lot in their ads, because it provides a personalized service, which is a differentiator

Wayfair describes itself as the “the destination for all things home: helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home.” It provides an online platform to acquire home furniture, outdoor decor and other furnishings. It also supports its suppliers so they can use the platform to sell their home goods, explained Natali Vlatko, global lead, open source program office (OSPO) and senior software engineering manager, for Wayfair as the featured guest in Detroit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022. “It takes a lot of technical, technical work behind the scenes to kind of get that going,” Vlatko said. This is especially true as Wayfair scales its operations worldwide. The infrastructure must be highly distributed, relying on containerization, microservices, Kubernetes, and especially, open source to get the job done. “We have technologists throughout the world, in North America and throughout Europe as well,”  Vlatko said. “And we want to make sure that we are utilizing cloud native and open sou

In the rush to create, provision and manage Kubernetes, often left out is proper resource provisioning. According to StormForge, a company paying, for example, a million dollars a month on cloud computing resources is likely wasting $6 million a year of resources on the cloud on Kubernetes that are left unused. The reasons for this are manifold and can vary. They include how DevOps teams can tend to estimate too conservatively or aggressively or overspend on resource provisioning. In this podcast with StormForge’s Yasmin Rajabi, vice president of product management, and Patrick Bergstrom CTO, we look at how to properly provision Kubernetes resources and the associated challenges. The podcast was recorded live in Detroit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. Rethinking Web Application Firewalls  Almost ironically, the most commonly used Kubernetes resources can even complicate the ability to optimize resources for applications.The processes typically involve Kubernetes resource requests and limits, and

Feature management isn’t a new idea but lately it’s a trend that’s picked up speed. Analysts like Forrester and Gartner have cited adoption of the practice as being, respectively, “hot” and “the dominant approach to experimentation in software engineering.” A study released in November found that 60% of 1,000 software and IT professionals surveyed started using feature flags only in the past year, according to the report sponsored by LaunchDarkly, the feature management platform and conducted by Wakefield Research. At the heart of feature management are feature flags, which give organizations the ability to turn features on and off, without having to re-deploy an entire app. Feature flags allow organizations test new features, and control things like access to premium versions of a customer-facing service. An overall feature management practice that includes feature flags allows organizations “to release progressively any new feature to any segment of users, any environment, any cohort of customers in a contr

DETROIT — Rob Skillington’s grandfather was a civil engineer, working in an industry that, in over a century, developed processes and know-how that enabled the creation of buildings, bridges and road. “A lot of those processes matured to a point where they could reliably build these things,” said Skillington, co-founder and chief technology officer at Chronosphere, an observability platform. “And I think about observability as that same maturity of engineering practice. When  it comes to building software that actually is useful in the world, it is this process that helps you actually achieve the deployment and operation of these large scale systems that we use every day.” Skillington spoke about the evolution of observability, and his company’s recent donation of an open source project to Prometheus, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. Heather Joslyn, features editor of TNS, hosted the conversation. This On the Road edition of The New Stack Makers was recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North A

In this latest podcast from The New Stack, we spoke with Ricardo Torres, who is the chief engineer of open source and cloud native for aerospace giant Boeing. Torres also joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in May to serve as a board member. In this interview, recorded at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon last month, Torres speaks about Boeing's use of open source software, as well as its adoption of cloud native technologies. While we may think of Boeing as an airplane manufacturer, it would be more accurate to think of the company as a large-scale system integrator, one that uses a lot of software. So, like other large-scale companies, Boeing sees a distinct advantage in maintaining good relations with the open source community. "Being able to leverage the best technologists out there in the rest of the world is of great value to us strategically," Torres said. This strategy allows Boeing to "differentiate on what we do as our core business rather than having to reinvent the wheel all the time on all of the t

DETROIT — Developer relations, or DevRel to its friends, is not only a coveted career path but also essential to helping developers learn and adopt new technologies. That guidance is a matter of survival for many organizations. The cloud native era demands new skills and new ways of thinking about developers and engineers’ day-to-day jobs. At Dell Technologies, it meant responding to the challenges faced by its existing customer base, which is “very Ops centric — server admins, system admins,” according to Brad Maltz, of Dell. With the rise of the DevOps movement, “what we realized is our end users have been trying to figure out how to become infrastructure developers,” said Maltz, the company’s senior director of DevOps portfolio and DevRel. “They've been trying to figure out how to use infrastructure as code Kubernetes, cloud, all those things.” “And what that means is we need to be able to speak to them where they want to go, when they want to become those developers. That’s led us to build out a developer

Cloud giant Amazon Web Services manages the largest number of Kubernetes clusters in the world, according to the company.  In this podcast recording, AWS Senior Engineer Jay Pipes discusses AWS' use of Kubernetes, as well as the company's contribution to the Kubernetes code base. The interview was recorded at KubeCon North America last month.The Difference Between Kubernetes and AWSKubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform. AWS is one of the largest providers of cloud services. In 2021, the company generated $61.1 billion in revenue, worldwide. AWS provides a commercial Kubernetes service, called the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). It simplifies the Kubernetes experience by adding a control plane and worker nodes. In addition to providing a commercial Kubernetes service, AWS supports the development of Kubernetes, by dedicating engineers to the work on the open source project. "It's a responsibility of all of the engineers in the service team to be aware of what's going on and the

LOS ANGELES — Kubernetes, the open source container orchestrator, may have a big footprint in the cloud native world, but some organizations are doing just fine without it. Take, for example, SeatGeek, which runs a mobile application that serves as a primary and secondary market for event tickets. For cloud infrastructure, the 12-year-old company’s workloads — which include non-containerized applications — have largely run on Amazon Web Services. A few years ago, it turned to HashiCorp’s Nomad, a scheduler built for running for apps whether they’re containerized or not. “In the beginning, we had a platform that an engineer would deploy something to but it was very constrained. We could only give them certain number of options that they could use, as very static experience,” said Jose Diaz-Gonzalez, a staff engineer at SeatGeek, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. “If they want to scale, an application required manual toil on the platform team side, and then they can do some work. And so for us, w

OpenTelemetry project offers vendor-neutral integration points that help organizations obtain the raw materials — the "telemetry" — that fuel modern observability tools, and with minimal effort at integration time. But what does OpenTelemetry mean for those who use their favorite observability tools but don’t exactly understand how it can help them? How might OpenTelemetry be relevant to the folks who are new to Kuberentes (the majority of KubeCon attendees during the past years) and those who are just getting started with observability?  Austin Parker, head of developer relations, Lightstep and Morgan McLean, director of product management, Splunk, discuss during this podcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022 how the OpenTelemetry project has created demo services to help cloud native community members better understand cloud native development practices and test out OpenTelemetry, as well as Kubernetes, observability software, etc.  At this conjecture in DevOps history, there has been considerable hype aroun

DETROIT — Even in the midst of hand-wringing at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America about how the global economy will make it tough for startups to gain support in the near future, the news about a couple of young WebAssembly-centric companies was bright. Cosmonic announced that it had raised $8.5 million in a seed round led by Vertex Ventures. And Fermyon Technologies unveiled both funding and product news: a $20 million A Series led by Insight Partners (which also owns The New Stack) and the launch of Fermyon Cloud, a hosted platform for running WebAssembly (Wasm) microservices. Both Cosmonic and Fermyon were founded in 2021. “A lot of people think that Wasm is this maybe up and coming thing, or it's just totally new thing that's out there in the future,” noted Bailey Hayes, a director at Cosmonic, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. But the future is already here, she said: “It's one of technology's best kept secrets, because you're using it today, all over. And many of the applications tha

Organizations are now, almost by default, now becoming multi-cloud operations. No cloud service offers the full breadth of what an enterprise may need, and enterprises themselves find themselves using more than one service, often inadvertently. HashiCorp is one company preparing enterprises for the challenges with managing more than a single cloud, through the use of a coherent set of software tools. To learn more, we spoke with  Megan Laflamme, HashiCorp director of product marketing, at the HashiConf user conference, for this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. We talked about zero trust computing, the importance identity and the general availability of HashiCorp Boundary single sign-on tool. "In the cloud operating model, the [security] perimeter is no longer static, and you move to a much more dynamic infrastructure environment," she explained.What is the HashiCorp Cloud Platform?The HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) is a fully-managed platform offering HashiCorp software including Consul, Vault,

DETROIT — Modern software projects’ emphasis on agility and building community has caused a lot of security best practices, developed in the early days of the Linux kernel, to fall by the wayside, according to Aeva Black, an open source veteran of 25 years. “And now we're playing catch up,“ said Black, an open source hacker in Microsoft Azure’s Office of the CTO  “A lot of less than ideal practices have taken root in the past five years. We're trying to help educate everybody now.” Chris Short, senior developer advocate with Amazon Web Services (AWS), challenged the notion of “shifting left” and giving developers greater responsibility for security. “If security is everybody's job, it's nobody's job,” said Short, founder of the DevOps-ish newsletter. “We've gone through this evolution: just develop secure code, and you'll be fine,” he said. “There's no such thing as secure code. There are errors in the underlying languages sometimes …. There's no such thing as secure software. So you have to mitigate and then

Ukraine has a bright future. It will soon be time to rebuild. But rebuilding requires more than the resources needed to construct a hydroelectric plant or a hospital. It involves software and an understanding of how to use it. Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and Dima Zakhalyavko, board member at Razom for Ukraine, came to KubeCon in Detroit to discuss the push to provide training materials for Ukraine as they rebuild from the destruction caused by Russia's invasion. Razom, a nonprofit, amplifies the voices of Ukrainians in the United States and helps with humanitarian efforts and IT training. Razom formed before Russia's 2014 invasion of the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine, Zakhalyavko said. Since the full-scale invasion earlier this year, Razom has had an understandable increase in donations and volunteers helping in their efforts. Individual first aid kits for soldiers, tourniquets, and medics supplies are provided by Razom, but so is IT training, materials

Redis is not just a cache. It is used in the broader cloud native ecosystem, fits into many service-oriented architectures, and simplifies the deployment and development of modern applications, according to Madelyn Olson, a principal engineer at AWS, during an interview on the New Stack Makers at KubeCon North America in Detroit. Olson said that people have a primary backend database or some other workflow that takes a long time to run. They store the intermediate results in Redis, which provides lower latency and higher throughput. "But there are plenty of other ways you can use Redis," Olson said. "One common way is what I like to call it a data projection API. So you basically take a bunch of different sources of data, maybe a Postgres database, or some other type of Cassandra database, and you project that data into Redis. And then you just pull from the Redis instance. This is a really great, great use case for low latency applications." Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo's approach provides a lesson in

LOS ANGELES — When you’re deploying a business-critical application to the cloud, it’s nice to not need the “war room” you’ve assembled to troubleshoot Day 1 problems. When BOK Financial, a financial services company that’s been moving apps to the cloud over the last three years, was launching its largest application on the cloud, its engineers supported it with a “war room type situation, monitoring everything” according to BOK’s Andrew Rau. “After the first day, the system just scaled like it was supposed to … and they're like, ‘OK, I guess we don't need this anymore.’” In this On the Road episode of The New Stack’s Makers podcast, Rau, BOK’s vice president and manager, cloud services, offered a case study about his organization’s cloud journey over the past four years, and the role HashiCorp’s Vault and Cloud Platform played in it. Rau spoke to Heather Joslyn, features editor of The New Stack, about the challenges of moving a very traditional organization in a highly regulated industry to the cloud while m

DETROIT — Are we still shifting left? Is it realistic to expect developers to take on the burdens of security and infrastructure provisioning, as well as writing their applications? Is platform engineering the answer to saving the DevOps dream? Bottom line: Do Devs and Ops really talk to each other — or just passive-aggressively swap Jira tickets? These are some of the topics explored by a panel, “Devs and Ops People: It’s Time for Some Kubernetes Couples Therapy,” convened by The New Stack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, here in the Motor City, on Thursday. Panelists included Saad Malik, chief technology officer and co-founder of Spectro Cloud; Viktor Farcic, developer advocate at Upbound; Liz Rice, chief open source officer at Isolalent, and Aeris Stewart, community manager at Humanitec. The latest TNS pancake breakfast was hosted by Alex Williams, The New Stack’s founder and publisher, with Heather Joslyn, TNS features editor, fielding questions from the audience. The event was sponsored by Spec

What is Terraform?Terraform is HashiCorp’s flagship software. The open source tool provides a way to define IT resources — such as monitoring software or cloud services — in human-readable configuration files. These files, which serve as blueprints, can then be used to automatically provision the systems themselves. Kubernetes deployments, for instance, can be streamlined through Terraform. "Terraform basically translates what your configuration was codified in by your configuration, and provisions it to that desired end state," explained Meghan Liese, [sponsor_inline_mention slug="hashicorp" ]HashiCorp[/sponsor_inline_mention] vice president of product and partner marketing in this podcast and video recording, recorded at the company's user conference, HashiConf 2022, held this month in Los Angeles. For this interview, Liese discusses the latest enhancements to Terraform, and Terraform Cloud, a managed service offering that is part of the HashiCorp Cloud Platform. [Embed Podcast]Why Should Developers be Inte