The New Stack Makers

Liam Crilly, Senior Director of Product Management at NGINX, discussed the potential of WebAssembly (Wasm) during this recording at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao, Spain. With over three decades of experience, Crilly highlighted WebAssembly's promise of universal portability, allowing developers to build once and run anywhere across a network of devices.While Wasm is more mature on the client side in browsers, its deployment on the server side is less developed, lacking sufficient runtimes and toolchains. Crilly noted that WebAssembly acts as a powerful compiler target, enabling the generation of well-optimized instruction set code. Despite the need for a virtual machine, WebAssembly's abstraction layer eliminates hardware-specific concerns, providing near-native compute performance through additional layers of optimization.Learn more from The New Stack about WebAssembly and NGINX:WebAssembly Overview, News and TrendsWhy WebAssembly Will Disrupt the Operating SystemTrue Portability Is the Killer Use Case fo

Jonathan Katz, a principal product manager at Amazon Web Services, discusses the evolution of PostgreSQL in an episode of The New Stack Makers. He notes that PostgreSQL's uses have expanded significantly since its inception and now cover a wide range of applications and workloads. Initially considered niche, it faced competition from both open-source and commercial relational database systems. Katz's involvement in the PostgreSQL community began as an app developer, and he later contributed by organizing events.PostgreSQL originated from academic research at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1980s, becoming an open-source project in 1994. In the mid-1990s, proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL dominated the market, while open-source alternatives like MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite emerged.PostgreSQL 16 introduces logical replication from standby servers, enhancing scalability by offloading work from the primary server. The meticulous design process within the PostgreSQL c

The practice of "shift left," which involves moving security concerns to the code level and increasing developers' responsibility for security, is facing a backlash, with both developers and security professionals expressing concerns. Peter Klimek, director of technology at Imperva, discusses the reasons behind this backlash in this episode.Some organizations may have exhausted the benefits of shift left, while the main challenge for many isn't finding vulnerabilities but finding time to address them. Security attacks are now targeting business logic vulnerabilities rather than dependencies, which shift left tools are better at identifying. These business logic vulnerabilities are often tied to authorization decisions, making them harder to address through code-level tools. Additionally, attacks increasingly focus on the frontend, such as API development and cart attacks.Klimek emphasizes the need for development and security teams to collaborate and advocates for using DORA metrics to assess the impact of se

Operational resiliency, as explained by Dormain Drewitz of PagerDuty, involves the ability to bounce back and recover from setbacks, not only technically but also in terms of organizational recovery. True resiliency means maintaining the willingness to take risks even after facing challenges. In a conversation with Heather Joslyn on the New Stack Makers podcast, Drewitz discussed the role of AI and automation in achieving operational resiliency, especially in a context where teams are under pressure to be more productive.Automation, including generative AI code completion tools, is increasingly used to boost developer productivity. However, this may lead to shifting bottlenecks from developers to operations, creating new challenges. Drewitz emphasized the importance of considering the entire value chain and identifying areas where AI and automation can assist. For instance, automating repetitive tasks in incident response, such as checking APIs, closing ports, or database checks, can significantly reduce inte

In this episode, Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker, highlights the evolving role of developers, emphasizing their increasing importance in architectural decision-making and tool development for applications. This shift in prioritizing a great developer experience and rapid tool development has led to substantial spending in the industry.Johnston expressed confidence that integrating generative AI into the developer experience will drive business growth and expand the customer base. He downplayed concerns about AI taking jobs, explaining that it would alleviate repetitive tasks, enabling developers to focus on more complex problem-solving. Johnston likened this evolution to expanding bike lanes in a city, leading to increased bike traffic, equating it to the development of more apps due to increased speed and efficiency.In his talk with TNS host, Alex Williams, Johnston emphasized that each advancement in programming languages and tools has expanded the developer market and driven greater demand for applications.

This episode of The New Stack Makers was recorded on the road at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao, Spain. A pair of technologists from Amazon Web Services (AWS) join us to discuss the development of Powertools for AWS Lambda. Andrea Amorosi, a senior solutions architect at AWS, and Leandro Damascena, a specialist solutions architect, share insights into how Powertools evolved from an observability tool to support more advanced use cases like ensuring workload safety, batch processing, streaming data, and idempotency.Powertools primarily supports Python, TypeScript, Java, and .NET. The latest feature, idempotency for TypeScript, was introduced to help customers achieve best practices for developing resilient and fault-tolerant workloads. By integrating these best practices during the development phase, Powertools reduces the need for costly re-architecting and rewriting of code.The success of Powertools can be attributed to its strong open source community, which fosters collaboration

KubeCon 2023 is set to feature three hot topics, according to Taylor Dolezal from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Firstly, GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are taking the spotlight, particularly regarding their security and integration with legacy infrastructure. Platform engineering is also on the rise, with over 25 sessions at KubeCon Chicago focusing on its definition and how it benefits internal product teams by fostering a culture of product proliferation. Lastly, WebAssembly is emerging as a significant topic, with a dedicated day during the conference week. It is maturing and finding its place, potentially complementing containers, especially in edge computing scenarios. Wasm allows for efficient data processing before data reaches the cloud, adding depth to architectural possibilities.Overall, these three trends are expected to dominate discussions and presentations at KubeCon NA 2023, offering insights into the future of cloud-native technology.See what came out of the last KubeCon event

Digital.ai, an AI-powered DevSecOps platform, serves large enterprises such as financial institutions, insurance companies, and gaming firms. The primary challenge faced by these clients is scaling their DevOps practices across vast organizations. They aim to combine modern development methodologies like agile DevOps with the need for speed and intimacy with end-users on a large scale.This episode features a discussion between Wing To of Digital.ai and TNS host Heather Joslyn about platform engineering and the role of AI in enhancing automation. It delves into the dilemma of whether increased code production and release frequency driven by DevOps practices are inherently beneficial. Additionally, it explores the emerging challenge of AI-assisted development and how large enterprises are striving to realize productivity gains across their organizations.Digital.ai is focused on incorporating AI into automation to assist developers in creating and delivering code while helping organizations derive more business

Moving workloads to the cloud presents cost prediction challenges. Traditional setups with on-premises hardware offer predictability, but cloud costs are usage-based and granular. In this podcast episode, Matt Stellpflug, a senior FinOps specialist at ProsperOps, discusses the complexities of forecasting cloud expenses with TNS host Heather Joslyn.Cloud users face fluctuating costs due to continuous deployments and changing workloads. There are additional expenses for data access and transfer. Stellpflug emphasizes the importance of establishing reference workloads and benchmarks for accurate forecasting.Engineers play a vital role in FinOps initiatives since they ensure application availability and system integrity. Stellpflug suggests collaborating with engineering teams to identify essential metrics. He co-authored an "Engineer's Guide to Cloud Cost Optimization," highlighting the distinction between resource and rate optimization. Best practices involve addressing high-impact, low-risk areas first, engagi

In her keynote address at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Europe, Fatima Sarah Khalid emphasized that being an ally is more than just superficial gestures like wearing pronouns on badges or correctly pronouncing coworkers' names. True allyship involves taking meaningful actions to support and uplift individuals from underrepresented or marginalized backgrounds. This support is essential, not only in obvious ways but also in everyday interactions, which collectively create a more inclusive community.Open source communities typically lack diversity, with only a small percentage of women, non-binary contributors, and individuals from underrepresented backgrounds. Khalid stressed the importance of improving diversity and inclusion through various means, including using inclusive language, facilitating asynchronous communication to accommodate global contributors, and welcoming non-technical contributions such as documentation.Khalid also provided insights on making open source events more inclusive, lik

In a recent conversation at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao, Spain, Gabriel Colombo, the General Manager of the Linux Foundation Europe and the Executive Director of the Fintech Open Source Foundation, discussed the potential impact of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) on the open source community. The conversation shed light on the challenges and opportunities that the CRA presents to open source and how individuals and organizations can respond.The conversation began by addressing the Cyber Resilience Act and its significance. Gabriel Colombo explained that while the Act is being touted as a measure to bolster cybersecurity and national security, it could have unintended consequences for the open source ecosystem, particularly in Europe. The Act, currently in the legislative process, aims to address cybersecurity concerns but could inadvertently hinder open source development and collaboration.Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, had previously mentioned the importance of forks in open

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Uma Daniel, a product manager at UST, discusses the current complexities in the global economy, marked by low unemployment except in the tech industry, high inflation, high interest rates, a volatile stock market, and the looming threat of recession. Amid these challenges, organizations are seeking ways to enhance their operational efficiency.Daniel introduces the concept of FinOps, which goes beyond just managing cloud costs. Instead, it focuses on leveraging the cloud to generate revenue. This represents a cultural shift in many organizations, emphasizing the need for a mindset change across different departments, including business, finance, and procurement.She dispels misconceptions, such as the belief that only certain teams should be involved in the FinOps process. Daniel stresses that it's a collaborative effort involving various teams, and it's best to adopt FinOps at the beginning of a cloud journey. Once an organization is already established in the c

Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3 in late 2022, various industries have been actively exploring its applications. Madhukar Kumar, CMO of SingleStore, discussed his experiments with large language models (LLMs) in this podcast episode with TNS host Heather Joslyn. He mentioned a specific LLM called Gorilla, which is trained on APIs and can generate APIs based on specific tasks. Kumar also talked about SingleStore Now, an AI conference, where they plan to teach attendees how to build generative AI applications from scratch, focusing on enterprise applications.Kumar highlighted a limitation with current LLMs - they are "frozen in time" and cannot provide real-time information. To address this, a method called "retrieval augmented generation" (RAG) has emerged. SingleStore is using RAG to keep LLMs updated. In this approach, a user query is first matched with up-to-date enterprise data to provide context, and then the LLM is tasked with generating answers based on this context. This method aims to prevent t

Observability in multi-cloud environments is becoming increasingly complex, as highlighted by Martin Mao, CEO and co-founder of Chronosphere. This challenge has two main components: a rise in customer-facing incidents, which demand significant engineering time for debugging, and the ineffectiveness and high cost of existing tools. These issues are creating a problematic return on investment for the industry.Mao discussed these observability challenges on The New Stack Makers podcast with host Heather Joslyn, emphasizing the need to help teams prioritize alerts and encouraging a shift left approach for security responsibility among developers. With the adoption of distributed cloud architectures, organizations are not only dealing with a surge in data but also facing a cultural shift towards DevOps, where developers are expected to be more accountable for their software in production.Historically, operations teams handled software in production, but in the cloud-native world, developers must take on these resp

Platform engineering is gaining prominence due to the need for faster application deployment, which directly impacts business velocity. Valentina Alaria, Senior Director of Product at VMware, emphasizes that not all organizations pursuing platform engineering have the same goals, context, or pain points. They tailor solutions to each organization's specific needs. Some focus on rapid onboarding for junior developers, while others aim to reduce complexity, friction, and support larger development teams with fewer operational staff.Platform engineering aims to streamline collaboration between developers and operations engineers. Developers want portable code and the ability to focus on coding without worrying about production requirements. Operations engineers and platform teams seek a seamless environment for deploying applications in different contexts.Successful platform engineering initiatives involve strong collaboration models, fostering a cooperative approach rather than a siloed one. The goal is to crea

ByConity is an open source project that emerged from ByteDance's use of Clickhouse, an open-source database system, to address their growing data volume. ByConity focuses on enhancing the separation of compute and storage, improving multitenancy support, and optimizing query performance in cloud-native environments.ByteDance's Vini Jaiswal, a principle developer advocate at the parent company of TikTok, highlights the power of open source in fostering innovation and collaboration. She shares her personal experience of leveraging open source to solve problems quickly and efficiently. She emphasizes the importance of getting involved in open source, even for those who might be hesitant, and suggests starting by identifying a pain point and making small contributions.ByConity's architecture, which separates compute and storage, offers benefits like preventing data lake corruption, read and write separation, elasticity, and scalability. Jaiswal also mentions her previous experience with open source during her tim

Along with discussing the emergence and ascension of platform engineering in this episode, we also discuss the role that Humanitec plays in helping organizations establish platforms for developers, as well as Backstage, a popular open source internal developer platform that was developed by Spotify for its own developers.An IDP, our guest Kaspar Von Grünberg explained, is a standardized interface for developers to build applications using a  golden path of vetted tools and libraries, allowing for a high degree of efficiency for both the developers themselves as well as the engineers who are supporting the developers. They can include an integration and delivery plane, a continuous integration registry, a platform orchestrator, observability tools and a resource plane."How you're consuming this is a little bit up to the individual preference of the user, and what the platform team has configured for you. So we're seeing some teams like to use a user interface and some teams like to use code based interactions,

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, technologist and author John Willis emphasized caution when considering AI solutions from vendors. He advised against blindly following vendor recommendations for "one-size-fits-all" AI products, likening it to discouraging learning Java in the past in favor of purchasing a product.Willis stressed that DevOps serves as an example of how human expertise, not just products, solves problems. He urged C-level executives to first understand AI's intricacies and then make informed purchasing decisions, suggesting a "DevOps redo" to encourage experimentation and collaboration, similar to the early days of the DevOps movement.Willis highlighted that early adopters of DevOps, like successful banks, heavily invested in developing their human capital. He cautioned against hasty product purchases, as the AI landscape is rife with startups that may quickly disappear or be acquired by larger companies.Instead, Willis advocated for educating teams on effective data management techniq

Deliveroo, a prominent food delivery company, relies on Apache Flink, a distributed processing engine, to enhance its three-sided marketplace, connecting delivery drivers, restaurants, and customers. Seeking to improve real-time data streaming and gain insights into customer behavior, Deliveroo transitioned to Flink, comparing it to alternatives like Apache Spark and Kafka Streams. Flink, with feature parity to their previous platform, offered stability and scalability. They initially experimented with Flink on Kubernetes but turned to the Amazon Managed Service for Flink (MSF) for enhanced support and maintenance.Engineers from Deliveroo, Felix Angell and Duc Anh Khu, emphasized the need for flexibility in data modeling to accommodate their fast-paced product development. However, flexibility can be complex, often requiring data model adjustments. They expressed the desire for a self-serve configuration feature in MSF, allowing easy customization of low-level settings and auto-scaling based on application me

Over the past five to ten years, the testing of microservices has seen significant growth. This surge in testing can be attributed to the increasing adoption of microservices and Kubernetes, which signify a shift away from monolithic application architectures. Bruno Lopes, a leader at Kubernetes company incubator Kubeshop, noted this trend. Kubeshop has initiated six Kubernetes projects, including TestKube, a Kubernetes native testing framework led by Lopes.This rise in testing is making it more accessible to a wider audience and is enhancing the developer experience through automation. Developers now have more time to focus on innovation rather than manual testing. However, there is often a disconnect between development and testing, as developers move quickly, outpacing organizational adaptation to modern testing methods.Lopes emphasized the importance of testing before production deployment and advocated for creating production-resembling testing environments that allow for rapid deployment without waiting