The New Stack Makers

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

GumGum is a company whose platform serves up online ads related to the context in which potential customers are already shopping or searching. (For instance: it will send ads for Zurich restaurants to someone who’s booked travel to Switzerland.) To handle that granular targeting, it relies on its proprietary machine learning platform, Verity. “For all of our publishers, we send a list of URLs to Verity,” according to Keith Sader, GumGum’s director of engineering. “Verity goes in and basically categorizes those URLs as different [internal bus] categories. So the IB has tons of taxonomies, based on autos, based upon clothing based upon entertainment. And then that's how we do our targeting.” Verity’s targeting data is stored in DynamoDB, but the rest of GumGum’s data is stored in managed MySQL and its daily tracking data is stored in ScyllaDB, a database designed for data-intensive applications. Scylla, Sader said, helps his company avoid serving audiences the same ads over and over again, by keeping track of w

Wix is a cloud-based development site for making HTML 5 websites and mobile sites with drag and drop tools. It is suited for the beginning user or the advanced developer, said Hila Fish, senior DevOps engineer for Wix, in an interview for The New Stack Makers at HashiCorp’s HashiConf Global conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. Our questions for Fish focused on Terraform, the open source infrastructure-as-code software tool: How has Terraform evolved in uses since Fish started using it in 2018?How does Wix make the most of Terraform to scale its infrastructure?What are some best practices Wix has used with Terraform?What are some pitfalls to avoid with Terraform?What is the approach to scaling across teams and avoiding refactoring to keep the integrations elegant and working Fish started using Terraform in an ad-hoc manner back in 2018. Over time she has learned how to use it for scaling operations. “If you want to scale your infrastructure, you need to use Terraform in a way that will allow you to do

DUBLIN — The mission of Linux Foundation Energy —  a collaborative, international effort by power companies to help move the world away from fossil fuels — has never seemed more urgent. In addition to the increased frequency and ferocity of extreme weather events like hurricanes and heat waves, the war between Russia and Ukraine has oil-dependent countries looking ahead to a winter of likely energy shortages. “I think we need to go faster,” said Benoît Jeanson, an enterprise architect at RTE, the French electricity transmission system operator.  He aded, “What we are doing with the Linux Foundation Energy is really something that will help for the future, and we need to go faster and faster. For this On the Road episode of The New Stack’s Makers podcast, recorded at Open Source Summit Europe here, we were joined by two guests who work in the power industry and whose organizations are part of LF Energy. In addition to Jeanson, this episode featured Jonas van den Bogaard, a solution architect and open source am

It's that time of the year again, when cloud native enthusiasts and professionals assemble to discuss all things Kubernetes. KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2023 is being held later this month in Detroit, October 24-28. In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with Priyanka Sharma, general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — which organizes KubeCon —and CERN computer engineer and KubeCon co-chair Ricardo Rocha. For this show, we discussed what we can expect from the upcoming event. This year, there will be a focus on Kubernetes in the enterprise, Sharma said. "We are reaching a point where Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard when it comes to container orchestration. And there's a reason for it. It's not just about Kubernetes. Kubernetes spawned the cloud native ecosystem and the heart of the cloud native movement is building fast, resiliently observable software that meets customer needs. So ultimately, it's making you a better provider to your customers, no matter what

Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto are long-time open source practitioners. It's that practitioner focus they established as core to their approach when they started HashiCorp about ten years ago. Today, HashiCorp is a publicly traded company. Before they started HashiCorp, Dadgar and Hashimoto were students at the University of Washington. Through college and afterward, they cut their teeth on open source and learning how to build software in open source. HashiCorp's business is an outgrowth of the two as practitioners in open source communities, said Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, in an interview at the HashiConf conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. Both of them wanted to recreate the asynchronous collaboration that they loved so much about the open source projects they worked on as practitioners, Dadgar said. They knew that they did not want bureaucracy or a hard-to-follow roadmap. Dadgar cited Terraform as an example of their approach. Terraform is Hashicorp's open-source, infrastructu

DUBLIN — Europe's open source contributors, according to The Linux Foundation's first-ever survey of them released in September, are driven more by idealism than their American counterparts. The data showed that social reasons for contributing to open source projects were more often cited by Europeans than by Americans, who were more likely to say they participate in open source for professional advancement. A big part of Gabriele (Gab) Columbro's mission as the general manager of the new Linux Foundation Europe, will be to marry Europe's "romantic" view of open source to greater commercial opportunities, Columbro told The New Stack's Makers podcast. The On the Road episode of Makers, recorded in Dublin at Open Source Summit Europe, was hosted by Heather Joslyn, TNS's features editor. Columbro, a native of Italy who also heads FINOS, the fintech open source foundation. recalled his own roots as an individual contributor to the Apache project, and cited what he called "a very grassroots, passion, romantic aspe

Brian Douglas was “the Beyoncé of GitHub.” He jokingly crowned himself with that title during his years at that company, where he advocated for open source and a more inclusive community supporting it. His work there eventually led to his new startup, Open Sauced. Like the Queen Bey, Douglas’ mission is to empower a community. In his case, he’s seeking to support the open source community. With his former employer, GitHub, serving 4 million developers worldwide, the potential size of that audience is huge. In this episode of The Tech Founder Odyssey podcast, he shared why empowerment and breaking down barriers to make anyone “awesome” in open source was the motivation behind his startup journey. Beyoncé “has a superfan group, the Beyhive, that will go to bat for her,” Douglas pointed out. “So if Beyoncé makes a country song, the Beyhive is there supporting her country song. If she starts doing the house music, which is her latest album, [they] are there to the point where like, you cannot say bad stuff about,