Software Engineering Daily

The Java ecosystem is maturing. The GraalVM high performance runtime provides a virtual machine for running applications in a variety of languages. TornadoVM extends the Graal compiler with a new backend for OpenCL. TornadoVM allows the offloading of JVM applications onto heterogeneous hardware.

Juan Fumero works on TornadoVM. He joins the show to talk about the use case for TornadoVM, the design, and the engineering that underlies the system. We also talk about the overall Java ecosystem.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Every software company works off of several different development environments–at the very least there is staging, testing, and production. Every push to staging can be spun up as an application to be explored, tinkered with, and tested. These ad hoc spin-ups are known as release apps.

A release app is an environment for engineers to play with, and potentially throw away or promote to production. Release apps have been made easier due to technologies such as infrastructure-as-code, continuous integration, and Kubernetes.

Tommy McClung is the co-founder of Release App, a company that makes it easy to spin up release environments for your software. Tommy joins the show to discuss release workflows, and his work building Release App.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Across a company, there is a wide range of resources that employees need access to. Documents, S3 buckets, git repositories, and many others. As access to resources changes across the organization, a history of the changes to permissions can be useful for compliance and monitoring.

Indent is a system for simplifying access management across infrastructure. Indent allows users within an organization to request access to resources, and keeps logs of the changes to who can access those resources.

Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie are the founders of Indent, and they join the show to talk through the application of access control management, and the architecture of Indent itself, which has numerous interesting engineering decisions within it.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Indent job opportunities

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Managing microservices becomes a challenge as the number of services within the organization grows. With that many services comes more interdependencies–downstream and upstream services that may be impacted by an update to your service. 

One solution to this problem: a dashboard and newsfeed system that lets you see into the health and changes across your services. With this kind of system, you can avoid accidentally shipping code that will impact other service owners. It can also help with testing, giving you an end-to-end picture for how a test can impact other services.

Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta are co-founders of Cortex, a system for managing your services. Anish and Ganesh join the show to talk about their work building Cortex, and the value that it provides to the companies that use it.

In a previous show we covered a company called Effx, which does something similar.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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GitHub has been a social network for developers for many years. Most social networks are centered around mobile applications, but GitHub sits squarely in a developer’s browser-based desktop workflow. As a result, the design of a mobile app for GitHub is less straightforward. GitHub did acquire a popular mobile client called GitHawk, which was developed by Ryan Nystrom.

Since joining GitHub, Ryan has worked on a new mobile app for GitHub, along with a team of engineers including Brian Lovin. Ryan and Brian both join the show to discuss GitHub mobile, and how they designed, architected, and built the app.

There is no company quite like GitHub–a social network combined with a version control system that provides a critical utility. All this made for an interesting episode about a one-of-a-kind mobile product.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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A service mesh provides routing, load balancing, policy management, and other features to a set of services that need to communicate with each other. The mesh can simplify operations across these different services by providing an interface to configure them. 

There are lots of different vendors who offer service mesh technology: AWS has AppMesh, Google has Istio (which is open source), Buoyant has Linkerd (which is also open source), and HashiCorp has Consul Connect. Unfortunately, these service meshes do not all play well together. And at a large enough company, different teams will be setting up different service meshes. So it would be useful for services in those different meshes to be able to communicate with each other.

Luke Kysow is an engineer at HashiCorp where he works on Consul Connect, and he joins the show to discuss service mesh usage, adoption, and possible strategies for maintaining multiple service meshes within a single organization.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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AWS has over 150 different services. Databases, log management, edge computing, and lots of others. Instead of being overwhelmed by all of these products, an engineering team can simplify their workflow by focusing on a small subset of AWS services–the defaults.

Daniel Vassalo is the author of The Good Parts of AWS. An excerpt from the book: “The cost of acquiring new information is high and the consequence of deviating from a default choice is low, so sticking with the default will likely be the optimal choice. A default choice is any option that gives you very high confidence that it will work.” Having confidence in your workflow–even if it is a simple workflow–has advantages.

S3, EC2, Elastic Load Balancers: for simple web applications, this is really all you need to build your business. Daniel Vassallo worked at AWS for more than 8 years before leaving to become an entrepreneur and author. He joins the show to talk about what the good parts of AWS are, and his strategy for building applications with that subset of services.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Kubernetes continues to mature as a platform for infrastructure management. At this point, many companies have well-developed workflows and deployment patterns for working with applications built on Kubernetes. The complexity of some of these deployments may be daunting, and when a new employee joins a company, that employee needs to get quickly onboarded with the custom dev environment. 

Environment management is not the only issue with Kubernetes development. When a service gets updated, that update needs to be live and usable as fast as possible. When Kubernetes-related errors occur, those problems need to be easily accessible in a UI for triage.

Dan Bentley is the CEO of Windmill Engineering, a company that makes a set of Kubernetes tools called Tilt. Dan joins the show to talk about the workflow for deploying Kubernetes infrastructure and the role of Tilt, the product he has been working on.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Kubernetes has become a highly usable platform for deploying and managing distributed systems. 

The user experience for Kubernetes is great, but is still not as simple as a full-on serverless implementation–at least, that has been a long-held assumption. Why would you manage your own infrastructure, even if it is Kubernetes? Why not use autoscaling Lambda functions and other infrastructure-as-a-service products?

Matt Ward is a listener of the show and an engineer at Mux, a company that makes video streaming APIs. He sent me an email that said Mux has been having success with self-managed Kubernetes infrastructure, which they deliberately opted for over a serverless deployment. I wanted to know more about what shaped this decision to opt for self-managed infrastructure, and the costs and benefits that Mux has accrued as a result.

Matt joins the show to talk through his work at Mux, and the architectural impact of opting for Kubernetes instead of fully managed serverless infrastructure.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Every software company is a distributed system, and distributed systems fail in unexpected ways. 

This ever-present tendency for systems to fail has led to the rise of failure testing, otherwise known as chaos engineering. Chaos engineering involves the deliberate failure of subsystems within an overall system to ensure that the system itself can be resilient to these kinds of unexpected failures.

Peter Alvaro is a distributed systems researcher who has published papers on a range of subjects, including debugging, failure testing, databases, and programming languages. He works with both academia and industry. Peter joins the show to discuss his research topics and goals.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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