TFIR: Open Source, Cloud Native & AI/ML

The Amazon EKS community has added support for Loft Labs’ open source project vcluster, which enables you to spin up lightweight, virtual Kubernetes clusters inside the namespaces of an underlying Kubernetes cluster. In this episode of Newsroom, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Lukas Gentele, Co-Founder and CEO of Loft Labs, to talk about how the idea of adding support for EKS with vcluster came about and how it is fostering further collaborations and supporting the open source community.

Summary: FlexiDAO provides software solutions and advisory to help companies achieve their net-zero goals by eliminating the carbon emissions from the electricity that they buy. The company helps organizations by monitoring and certifying the origin of their power, and its carbon emissions every hour of the day. The company uses blockchain technology as a certification enabler to ensure credibility to their claims.

Summary: Ondat is a Kubernetes-native platform for running stateful applications, anywhere, at scale. The company recently announced Trousseau, an open source project for the encryption of resources and in particular, the encryption of Kubernetes Secret. We sat down with Nic Vermande, Principal Developer Advocate at Ondat to learn more about the project.

Slim.AI, a company focused on building better containerized apps with less friction, has raised $31M Series A financing led by Insight Partners and StepStone Group with participation by boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP, Knollwood and TechAviv Founder Partners.

John Amaral, Co-Founder and CEO of Slim.AI, says, "I believe in two principles for a company at our stage: Build a great product that developers love and make sure they all know about it. So we will be doing a lot of the first thing, which is developing a lot of energy and investment in building something that developers love." Amaral continues, "So we'll be investing some in the ability to learn from developers, in product management, and even community. But the predominance of this is going towards R&D, building great software."

Salt Labs was created in 2021 to help the industry with tackling the increase in API threats. The research division of Salt Security focuses on not only finding API vulnerabilities, but also increasing awareness about API security and offering solutions to help mitigate such risks.

I sat down with Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research, to explore the factors that help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) & Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) select their cloud providers.

Structure Research was founded 10 years ago in Toronto Canada as a research firm of analysts focused on the infrastructure services space. Their organization has seen, during the 18-month long pandemic, an acceleration of cloud infrastructure. Such an acceleration has led to faster deployment and the removal of barriers. To that end, Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research, says, "We follow the results coming from the public markets and not just the hyperscale guys, but also the SMB-oriented providers. Providers targeting SMBs are all showing tremendous growth and, in fact, are positioning for accelerated growth throughout '21 and into '22." This has led analysts, like Shih, to conclude that the cloud has become mainstream and will be a mainstay going forward.

FireHydrant is a purpose-built tool for reliability. With FireHydrant, businesses can better manage and learn from incidents, work with their legal and marketing teams, and all the way through customer service. This is a tool for the entire reliability lifecycle.

Guest: Cole Potrocky

Company: Kintaba

Show: Let's Talk

Cole Potrocky, CTO and co-founder of Kintaba, talks with Swapnil Bhartiya about incident management.

Kintaba is dedicated to modern incident management, enabling companies to better respond to major incidents and outages. The company got into this space because they considered it a learning problem.

According to Potrocky, "We figured failure is sort of a constant theme, whether you're a one-person company or whether you're a thousand-person company. You learn through getting to the periphery of what failure is, and then you reflect on that failure."

In this episode of Dirk & Swap: Conversations on Open Source, we talk about Open Core. What is it? How different is it from Open Source or Closed Source software? What are the pros and cons of Open Core? Is it better than proprietary software as at least something is open there? How to do Open Core in the right way (if there is one)... We tackle many such complicated questions in this show. I hope you will enjoy it. We have also published a transcript of the recording so you can read it if you want to!

Cassandra Database reaches 4.0.

Nearly six years on from the release of Apache Cassandra 3.0, the community behind the popular open-source distributed database has announced the release of v4.0 of Apache Cassandra. Patrick McFadin, VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, and Ben Bromhead, CTO of Instaclustr, are with Swapnil Bhartiya to talk about it.

The first issue to be addressed is the importance Cassandra holds in the modern world. McFadin starts off by talking about what workloads Cassandra is focused on, which are websites and mobile applications. McFadin says, "When you use a mobile app on your phone, you're probably using Cassandra."

Since its inception, Cassandra has developed into a "really awesome, general-purpose database," adds Bromhead. More importantly, he makes mention of scalability when he says, "As people reach the limits of scalability or availability when it comes to some of the other databases out there (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL), we see developers reaching for Apache Cassandra."

The discussion then shifts to the new features available in Cassandra v4.0. Bromhead talks about structural changes based around the Netty networking framework, which has enabled several really cool features, such as zero-copy streaming which allows an Apache Cassandra node to stream the data it's responsible for and leads to wire-level streaming speeds between nodes. Practically speaking, that means users can now run denser nodes. The 4.0 release also saw the deprecation of the Thrift protocol, in favor of the CQL protocol, which was a major change.

As far as the upgrade process is concerned, version 4.0 should be considerably easier than previous releases. "If you had been upgrading Cassandra, before, like in the three and twos, there was always a long list of intermediate patches that you had to put into place, or you had to do some extra work mid-upgrade. Because of that, the developers decided it was of utmost importance to make it simple," explains McFadin.

Bromhead calls out to developers and admins to "not stress too much about this one. Still run through all the track checks and the standard processes you do. But again, this has been pretty well battle-tested."

To further highlight the upgrade process, McFadin mentions that the maintainers had a lot of discussion about the project and how improvements to the upgrade start at the developer level. McFadin says, "Instead of just having someone drop code in and ask everyone what they think, we have a proposal process. So you outline the change that you want to make, we have good discussions about it, and make some changes before there's actual code." Processes like this certainly go a long way in making a project more stable over time.