The New Builders Podcast

On this month's episode of The New Builders Podcast, host Joshua Carr is joined by Mark Chmarny, Technical Program Manager for Serverless at Google, and Michael Behrendt, Distinguished Engineer and Serverless/FaaS Chief Architect for IBM Cloud Functions to discuss the exciting new possibilities presented by Knative.

At its core, Knative is a set of primitive building blocks that allow people to build serverless offerings on top of Kubernetes. It is an open-source project launched in July of 2018 by IBM, Red Hat, SAP, and Google, and it's built entirely in the open on GitHub.cWith Knative, we are one step closer to ending the serverless versus containers debate among developers.

The New Builders Podcast is back! We're now a part of the New Builders Initiative on the IBM Cloud Blog, and we're going to continue to bring you interesting guests and deep dives into fascinating topics in the cloud world.

Our new host is Joshua Carr, Head of Developer Content Strategy for IBM Worldwide Marketing, and he is joined in this episode by Simon Kofkin-Hansen, Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions. We covered the scene at VMworld US and the upcoming VMworld Europe, AI and machine learning, platform capabilities and converged infrastructure, and the importance of security in the cloud.

Episode Highlights

0:08: Joshua Carr Introduction

0:23: Introduction of Simon Kofkin-Hansen – CTO IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Director, & Distinguished Engineer

2:28: Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen at VMworld US in Las Vegas - Taking the skateboard language around tricks and feeding it into Watson AI to see what the AI can do within the skateboarding community. It's a bit of a "concept car"—something that showcases the abilities and direction that AI can go in.

4:45: Turning the skate language into machine learning – Watson AI and machine learning tech are able to take and interpret the intricate and interesting language around skateboarding tricks and show other possible trick combos. It's leveraging and showing how we can train the AI in a new particular language and how the machine learning can be applied to that language to form a result.

7:29: What is VMware? – VMware has their virtualization platform and their VMs, but they are moving very much into the network and the multi-cloud space. They're providing products for companies to move their workloads into the various clouds. They're also moving into containers—stringing together hybrid platforms.

10:20: The partnership between VMware and IBM – We've been working together for 7 or 8 years now, and the relationship has evolved over time.

11:46: What is VMworld? – VMworld US in Las Vegas in one of VMware's two premier events of the year. Everyone shows off all the cool stuff that they're into with VMware. VMworld Europe is upcoming in Barcelona, and IBM has some big announcements coming up.

14:08: Platform capabilities – IBM Cloud was showing off our platform capabilities at the US show, and we believe that we have a 12-month headstart on our competitors. While the US show was more of a showcase, the big announcement will come at VMworld Europe.

16:00: What is "the platform"? - It's a converged infrastructure—we've automated the deployment of bare metal servers and converged that together with the software stack. Clients can choose a combination of products in a standardized, supportable platform and deploy it pretty quickly. Deployment has gone from months to hours, and deployment is guaranteed.

20:00: What this means for devs – This new platform requires no new training or knowledge for admins and developers since VMware is so widely utilized.

23:37: Team IBM vs. Team AWS – We've made VMware on IBM totally open, and each client is treated with their specific needs in mind. Banks need more security and privacy, and we can provide it while maintaining flexibility. Complete transparency and full access to the platform. Watson's capabilities also provide some really interesting opportunities.

28:21: The interesting times that we live in, with machine learning, AI, and automation. 

31:02: Security and IBM's trusted role – Security in the cloud is our number one focus, and our cloud security is often more secure than many on-prem environments.

Links

• IBM at VMworld US in Las Vegas
• IBM Presents: Freestylin' the Cloud with Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen (video)
• VMworld Europe in Barcelona
• IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions
• IBM Cloud | VMware - Introducing a smarter, more seamless migration to the cloud (video)

We're excited to welcome IBM Fellow and VP of IBM Cloud Jason McGee and CNCF COO and Linux Foundation VP of Developer Relations Chris Aniszczyk to discuss the world of containers. We kicked off the conversation by discussing the increase in use of Kuernetes and it's tipping point (01:14), does the development of Kubernetes certification courses and learning resources make K8s boring (04:14), cloud native apps and moderingizing and extending existing apps (06:34), Kubernetes and DevOps, how Istio is making things easier for developers and what to expect in 2018 (09:20), how Istio fits into the equation to make developers' lives easier (11:35), how Istio  manages microservices (13:28), containers versus serverless (16:05), and end talking about the relationship between Kubernetes and AI/ML (21:02).

 

Links:

• IBM Cloud Container Service – https://ibm.com/cloud/container-service
• CNCF Serverless White Paper - https://github.com/cncf/wg-serverless/tree/master/whitepaper
• CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape - https://s.cncf.io

This week, Teri Chadborne joins to Thom introduce Offline Camp, a gathering of people who come together to focus on developing with an Offline First mentality before jumping into a great discussion. Bradley Holt, IBM dev advocate, led a discussion with Daniela Borges from YLD, Myles Borins from Google, and Boaz Sender from Bocoup, on Offline First as a social movement. They begin with introductions (04:23) and jump right in to everyone discussing what offline first means (06:00), why it's necessary for everything to be built offline first (08:22), what personal interests everyone has in offline first (10:53), offline first as a social movement and how it can impact people (16:33), how offline first is being iterated on the web and mobile platforms (23:15), the way offline first is making the web better (25:59), and how offline first "levels the playing field (32:40).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on iTunes, SoundCloud and developerWorks TV. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at IBM.co/watsondataplatform. Contact hosts Jim Young and Thom Crowe on Twitter (@JW_Young, @thomcrowe) or email ([email protected], [email protected]).

This week on the New Builders Podcast, Preetam Kumar interviews IBM Analytics Engine offering manager Rohan Vaidyanathan. IBM Analytics Engine is a service that makes it easier for data engineers, data scientists and developers to develop and deploy analytics applications. Preetam kicks off the podcast by introducing Rohan, and Rohan tells a little about what he does at IBM (6:21). Rohan explains what Analytics Engine is and how it benefits data scientists (7:59) before delving into good use cases (9:21) and why a business would want to use it (11:57). They wrap up the episode by discussing what makes Analytics Engine unique (14:11).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on iTunes, SoundCloud and developerWorks TV. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform atIBM.co/watsondataplatform. Contact hosts Jim Young and Thom Crowe on Twitter (@JW_Young, @thomcrowe) or email ([email protected], [email protected]).

The New Builders Podcast is back after a short hiatus with great content from all over the data universe. We're joined in this episode by Kelsey Hightower, open source advocate, Go expert and Kubernetes guru, to discuss k8s.

Kelsey opens up the conversation with his background, how he found Kubernetes while working at CoreOS, and what caught his eye four years ago during DockerCon (5:01). Kelsey talks shop with JP Phillips, platform engineer at Compose, about keeping up with what's happening in the world of Kubernetes, and Kelsey gives recommendations for how to stay on top of the ever-changing Kubernetes projects and release updates (6:00).

From there, they discussed the recently released version 1.9 (8:21), initializes and Istio (9:38), Kelsey's go-to database (11:38), his thoughts and hesitations around running databases with Kubernetes (13:38), modern ideas of serverless on services like Heroku and AppEngine instead of jumping straight into Kubernetes (17:43), and how listeners can get involved with Kubernetes and the Kubernetes community (22:04).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on iTunes, SoundCloud and developerWorks TV. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform atIBM.co/watsondataplatform. Contact hosts Jim Young and Thom Crowe on Twitter (@JW_Young, @thomcrowe) or email ([email protected], [email protected]).

In the world of wealth management and financial investments, even the most sophisticated risk management tools aren't always enough to shield a portfolio from catastrophic losses.   Rob Seidman and Rob Hodgson, from IBM Cloud for Financial Services, are trying to solve this problem with Investment Insights with Watson, a tool that uses natural language processing and graph database technology to contextualize the impact of news events on investments.   In this episode of the New Builders Podcast, they start by sharing the backstory behind the tool, involving the indictment of a politician who had a large insider stake in a company that a sovereign wealth fund had invested in years prior, and the inability of traditional risk management practices to "stress test" an individual (5:00).   From there, they discuss the limitations of risk management and its tendency to rely exclusively on structured data (7:14), how the graph database embedded in Investment Insights with Watson enables risk managers to determine whether news could impact their portfolio (12:00), their surprise at database integration with IBM Cloudant taking only one day (17:55), and how the market has been "blown away" by the power of the tool (21:30).   To learn more about Investment Insights with Watson, try the starter kit for yourself or watch the tool in action.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@JW_Young) or email ([email protected]). The show's music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Glynn Bird (@glynn_bird) remembers the days when he had to install servers in racks and maintain connectivity manually. Since then, the unit of scalability has evolved from the server, to the platform - and now to individual event-driven functions.

In this episode, Glynn gives a primer on function-as-a-service (FaaS) and Apache OpenWhisk™, including why you can think of FaaS as "the ultimate microservice" and an extension of PaaS (4:00), why a FaaS and microservices approach may be a better fit for startups and teams that need to keep things small (8:40), how to get started with OpenWhisk (11:40), and how he used OpenWhisk and IBM Cloudant to program his Alexa to report temperature readings from his house (16:52).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@JW_Young) or email ([email protected]). The show's music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Earlier this month, Compose's JP Phillips (@jipperinbham) gave a talk at CoreOS Fest, "Data Pipelines Made Easier with Kubernetes." JP joins the New Builders to share a little bit about his talk (3:06) and broader issues around containers and open source, including the current state of Kubernetes (7:24), the role of Compose Transporter as an ETL pipeline (11:05), CoreOS's etcd and the emergence of zetcd to serve ZooKeeper requests (13:30), and how Compose's Governor project (providing autofailover and HA for PostgreSQL) laid the groundwork for Patroni (15:13).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@JW_Young) or email ([email protected]). The show's music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

In David Taieb's view, the best line of code is the one you didn't have to write. Hence the inspiration behind PixieDust, an open source helper library, built by Taieb and his team. PixieDust makes it easier for users of Jupyter Notebooks to start analyzing data quicker, without nearly as much coding, and simplifies data science for developers and business users.

David shares the origin story behind PixieDust and how he built it (5:20), PixieDust's compatibility with the user's preferred flavor of Jupyter, be it Apache Spark, Python or Scala (7:54), some of the other rendering engines (Mapbox, Bokeh, Matplotlib) that come built in (13:08), the companion project of HTML- and CSS-powered PixieApps (15:13), and PixieDust's role in enabling businesses in the Middle East to make better data-driven decisions (18:58).

Register for the IBM Data Science Bootcamp at Spark Summit to learn the ins and outs of the open source PixieDust library and how it simplifies working in a Jupyter Notebook.

IBM Data Science Experience (DSX) is now available as part of the IBM Bluemix Catalog. See it in action with a free trial of DSX. 

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@JW_Young) or email ([email protected]). The show's music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!