Software Engineering Daily

Modern applications are distributed systems. These applications require an installation mechanism that can run and update the software across multiple nodes. 

When a SaaS company starts to work with large enterprise customers, that company needs to figure out a way to deliver their product to the enterprise. This requires the SaaS company to deploy the product to whatever infrastructure the enterprise is running.

Some enterprises use on-prem infrastructure. Some use AWS. Some use a variety of cloud providers and on-premise servers. A SaaS company with limited resources must be able to have a standard deployment model that satisfies all of these different use cases.

Ev Kontsevoy is the CEO of Gravitational, a company that builds software for application delivery. Ev’s company maintains Gravity, an open source tool for application imaging and delivery. Ev was also the founder of Mailgun, a popular email API service. Mailgun was acquired by Rackspace, and in his time running Mailgun, Ev became deeply aware of the problems faced by developers and operators who manage server infrastructure.

Ev joins the show to discuss his experience building companies and the state of modern infrastructure. Full disclosure: Gravitational is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Render is a cloud provider built on top of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Render uses the compute abstractions provided by the major cloud providers to build a second layer cloud provider with the goal of providing a better user experience.

Anurag Goel is the founder of Render, and he returns to the show to discuss how Render works, and why there is a need for a new cloud provider. 

Everyone knows that the market for cloud providers is gigantic, so why are so few companies pursuing it? From Anurag’s perspective, there is no good reason. AWS, Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, and Heroku have only explored a small percentage of the potential ways a cloud provider could be built.

Anurag shares his strategy for building Render, and also talks through his belief around modern software engineering, including his belief that developers mostly choose their tools based on what they read from popular websites rather than what solves their problems–a phenomenon which he describes as “fashion driven development.”

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Cloud Foundry is a system for managing distributed applications.

Cloud Foundry was released in 2011, and has been widely adopted by enterprises that need a platform for deploying and scaling the applications that run within their company. The ecosystem around Cloud Foundry includes systems for continuous delivery, pubsub messaging, and containerization.

Abby Kearns is the executive director at Cloud Foundry Foundation, a nonprofit with the goal of raising awareness and adoption of the Cloud Foundry open source project. Abby joins the show to discuss her work with Cloud Foundry, and how the ecosystem has evolved with the maturity of distributed computing. We also talk about what enterprises need from an application runtime platform and how Cloud Foundry has adopted Kubernetes.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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A new employee at a software company needs access to a variety of tools. In order to get started working, the employee might need Slack, email, Google Docs, and Amazon Web Services, and all of these require an account with a username and password.

Setting up all of these accounts can be time consuming, because the company needs to go into their admin portal and create the accounts. The accounts need to have the right security policies and configuration settings. And when the employee leaves the company, all of these accounts need to be shut down.

Okta is a company that builds identity and access management software, such as an “SSO (single-sign on)” tool that allows users to log into all of these different types of accounts using only an Okta login. Okta was started in 2009 and has grown steadily since then, going public in 2017.

Hector Aguilar is the president of technology at Okta and he joins the show to talk about the software stack of Okta and how the company has evolved over time as it has become a core infrastructure provider and hired a large engineering team.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Amazon Web Services first came out in 2006.

It took several years before the software industry realized that cloud computing was a transformative piece of technology. Initially, the common perspective around cloud computing was that it was a useful tool for startups, but would not be a smart option for large, established businesses. Cloud computing was not considered economical nor secure.

Today, that has changed. Every company that writes software is figuring out how to utilize the cloud. Software companies with on-prem servers are migrating old applications to the cloud, and most companies that have started in the last decade do not even have physical servers. 

Applications that are started on the cloud are referred to as “cloud-native.” The architecture of cloud-native applications is a newer topic of discussion, and some software patterns that became established in the pre-cloud era make less sense today.

Cornelia Davis is VP of technology at Pivotal and the author of Cloud Native Patterns, a book about developing applications in the distributed, virtual world of the cloud. Cornelia was previously on the show to discuss Cloud Foundry. In today’s episode, our conversation centers on her book, and her perspective on the emerging patterns of cloud native software.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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The service mesh abstraction allows for a consistent model for managing and monitoring the different components of a microservices architecture. 

In the service mesh pattern, each service is deployed with a sidecar container that contains a service proxy. These sidecars are collectively referred to as the “data plane.” Each sidecar provides the service that it is deployed next to with a set of features such as security policy, rate limiting, and monitoring instrumentation.

The sidecars in the data plane communicate with a central module called a control plane. In the control plane, an engineer can operate across these individual services at scale, by pushing out updates to them.

Kubernetes has made it easier to manage large fleets of microservices, and has led to wider adoption of service mesh. Istio is one of the most popular service mesh products. In today’s show, Varun Talwar returns to the show to describe the state of the Istio project and the process of deploying Istio to a cluster. Varun is the CEO of Tetrate, a company building an enterprise-ready service mesh. Prior to Tetrate, Varun was at Google, where he helped found the gRPC and Istio projects.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Software applications running within a host operating system need to be isolated. Isolation prevents security vulnerabilities, such as one application accessing the memory of another.

In modern cloud environments, a single physical host might be running multiple virtual machines on top of a hypervisor. Those virtual machines might be divided up into containers. The different virtual machines and containers might be operated by different users, or even different companies.

gVisor is a container sandbox runtime open sourced by Google. gVisor runs containers in a new user-space kernel, and provides a container security system with low overhead. gVisor improves on the previous security properties of containers.

Michael Pratt and Yoshi Tamura work on gVisor at Google, and they join the show to talk through the purpose of gVisor and the engineering around the project.

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Sheng Liang was the lead developer on the original Java Virtual Machine. Today he works as the CEO of Rancher Labs, a company building a platform on top of Kubernetes. Sheng joins the show to discuss his experiences in the technology industry.

The container orchestration wars had many victims. The competing standards for how an enterprise should manage its numerous containers caused several companies to go down a path where they were building infrastructure which eventually had to be replaced.

As Sheng discusses in today’s episode, the container orchestration wars almost killed his company. Rancher was originally built on top of a different container orchestrator, and the migration to Kubernetes required a massive rewrite of the Rancher platform.

The container orchestration wars were not the first technology battle that Sheng has seen in his career–and it won’t be his last. In today’s show, we discuss the nature of technology wars. Are they necessary? How can a software company minimize the damage caused by a war between competing standards?

Sheng was an excellent guest and we didn’t cover nearly as many subjects as I wanted to, so we will have to do another show in the future!

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Kubernetes has made distributed systems easier to deploy and manage. As Kubernetes has become reliable, engineers have started to look for higher level abstractions we can define on top of Kubernetes.

An operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application.

Operators are useful for spinning up distributed systems such as Kafka, Redis, or MongoDB. These data systems are complicated, stateful applications with lots of failure domains. The operator framework enables a developer to deploy one of these complicated applications with less fear of the system crashing, or entering an erroneous state.

Rob Szumski is an engineer at Red Hat. He joins the show to discuss Kubernetes, the operator pattern, and his time at CoreOS, which was acquired by Red Hat.

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Cloud computing was popularized in 2006 with the launch of Amazon Web Services. AWS allowed developers to use remote server infrastructure with a simple set of APIs. But even with AWS, it was still not simple to deploy and manage a web application.

In 2007, Heroku launched a platform built on top of AWS. Heroku focused on the developer experience by optimizing for users who were deploying Ruby on Rails applications. Since then, Heroku has expanded into other forms of managed infrastructure, including other application frameworks like NodeJS, and databases like Postgres.

Heroku was the first popular “layer 2” cloud provider. Twelve years later, it is probably still the most popular. But there have been many other cloud providers built on top of AWS, including Netlify, Zeit, Spotinst, and Firebase.

Layer 1 cloud providers are Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, and other raw infrastructure providers. These companies provide a great service in their low cost, commodity infrastructure. But the layer 1 providers are not optimizing for developer experience. They need to cater to a broad set of developers, some of whom want to work at a low level.

A layer 2 cloud provider can build an opinionated solution that serves a subset of the overall cloud market particularly well.

Render is a layer 2 cloud provider that optimizes for specific developer workflows, such as deploying a NodeJS web server, a static site, or a Docker container. Anurag Goel is the founder of Render, and he joins the show to discuss the strategy and the economics of Render. Anurag was also one of the early employees at Stripe, and he discusses his experience and learnings from working at the company.

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