Cruise is a company that is building a fully automated self-driving car service. The infrastructure of a self-driving car platform presents a large number of new engineering problems. Self-driving cars collect vast quantities of data as they are driving around the city. This data needs to be transferred from the cars onto cloud servers. The

The software supply chain includes cloud infrastructure, on-prem proprietary solutions, APIs, programming languages, networking products, and open source software.  Each of these software categories has its own security vulnerabilities, and each category has tools that can help protect a company from attackers that are trying to exploit known vulnerabilities. As open source software has grown

GitLab is a company that builds an open source platform for managing git repositories. GitLab was started in 2012, and has grown to have a large enterprise business with additional products such as continuous integration and security tooling. GitLab is also known for being a large, entirely remote workforce. GitLab does not have any offices,

Automation has the potential to eliminate rote jobs such as call center workers and truck drivers. The downstream effects of automation also leads to new jobs, such as data labeling and robot operations. The net effect of modern automation technology is unclear, but it is likely to cause some disruption in the job market. Universal

Logging provides raw data that can be abstracted into higher level information. Logs are generated at every layer of infrastructure: physical host, virtual machine, container, pod, and Kubernetes cluster. Logs are generated by network proxies, edge servers, and API requests. There is far too much logging information to be read by humans.  Log messages need

Machine learning algorithms have existed for decades. But in the last ten years, several advancements in software and hardware have caused dramatic growth in the viability of applications based on machine learning. Smartphones generate large quantities of data about how humans move through the world. Software-as-a-service companies generate data about how these humans interact with

The container orchestration wars ended in 2016 with Kubernetes being the most popular open source tool for deploying and managing infrastructure. Since that time, most large enterprises have been implementing a “platform strategy” based around Kubernetes. A platform strategy is a plan for creating a consistent experience for software engineers working throughout an enterprise. At

Kubernetes has created a widespread system for deploying and managing infrastructure. As Kubernetes has been increasingly adopted, companies are thinking about how to leverage that common layer of infrastructure. With the common infrastructure abstraction of Kubernetes, it becomes easier to adopt other abstractions that are uniform across the entire company.  This has created a market

A cloud provider gives a developer low-cost compute infrastructure on-demand.  Cloud providers can be divided up into two categories: Layer 1 cloud providers and Layer 2 cloud providers. A Layer 1 cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services owns server hardware and sells compute infrastructure as a commodity. A Layer 2 cloud provider purchases compute

Java has been popular since the 90s, when it started to be used as a programming language for enterprises.  Today, Java is still widely deployed, but the infrastructure environment is dramatically different. Java is often deployed to containers in the cloud. If those containers can share resources, then those containers can share the same underlying