The New Stack Analysts

For this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Alex Williams and returning co-host Donnie Berkholz are joined by Phillip Liu, Founder, CTO, and Engineer at SignalFx, to discuss monitoring the modern distributed application.

"It's very easy to create a virtual machine," says Phillip, "and the virtual machine is basically sized for your application, so no longer are you in a world where you have big metal servers and you have many applications running on the same physical server."

However, if and when problems arise, it's not as easy to pinpoint the causes as it was ten years ago, when IT teams would triage these issues in-house.

Alex wonders, "How is monitoring moving to the center of this new generation of microservices architecture that users are building?"

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-41-monitoring-and-microservices/

For this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Alex Williams and returning co-host Donnie Berkholz are joined by Phillip Liu, Founder, CTO, and Engineer at SignalFx, to discuss monitoring the modern distributed application.

"It's very easy to create a virtual machine," says Phillip, "and the virtual machine is basically sized for your application, so no longer are you in a world where you have big metal servers and you have many applications running on the same physical server."

However, if and when problems arise, it's not as easy to pinpoint the causes as it was ten years ago, when IT teams would triage these issues in-house.

Alex wonders, "How is monitoring moving to the center of this new generation of microservices architecture that users are building?"

With the proliferation of microservices and the explosion of instances, Phillip says that "people just don't know where to start. There are actually a lot of great tools out there that tell you what happens when a particular instance goes down, but doesn't give insight as to how the overall service is doing."

These are the types of conversations that SignalFx promotes on its blog and carries into its customer relationships, which range from startups to Fortune 500 enterprise companies.

Antony Falco, CEO and co-founder of Orchestrate, joins his long-time Portland colleague Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack, for this TNS Analysts podcast episode. They discuss the evolution of query languages, the silicon graveyard of abandoned GitHub projects, and the growth of database as a service, especially as an accessory to the Internet of Things.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-40-the-problems-with-too-many-databases/

Antony Falco, CEO and co-founder of Orchestrate, joins his long-time Portland colleague Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack, for this TNS Analysts podcast episode. They discuss the evolution of query languages, the silicon graveyard of abandoned GitHub projects, and the growth of database as a service, especially as an accessory to the Internet of Things.

The recording is from an April 16, 2015 panel in Seattle, Containers and Continuous Delivery for the Enterprise, moderated by The New Stack founder Alex Williams at IC3, a training conference for IT executives and their staffs who are looking to change their organizations through DevOps. The sound quality is unfortunately not up to the usual high standards of The New Stack Analysts, but the discussion is definitely among the liveliest we’ve had the pleasure of sharing.

Regarding the hype around containers, Alex suggests that those who really believe in containers are very passionate, and that “there’s a difference between a ‘believer’ and a supporter.'” Still, he offers, “Why would you not believe in containers if you can take a monolithic application and reduce the time it takes to deploy that? You can do a build in thirty seconds versus fifteen minutes.”

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-39-containers-and-continuous-delivery-for-the-enterprise/

The recording is from an April 16, 2015 panel in Seattle, Containers and Continuous Delivery for the Enterprise, moderated by The New Stack founder Alex Williams at IC3, a training conference for IT executives and their staffs who are looking to change their organizations through DevOps. The sound quality is unfortunately not up to the usual high standards of The New Stack Analysts, but the discussion is definitely among the liveliest we’ve had the pleasure of sharing.

Regarding the hype around containers, Alex suggests that those who really believe in containers are very passionate, and that “there’s a difference between a ‘believer’ and a supporter.'” Still, he offers, “Why would you not believe in containers if you can take a monolithic application and reduce the time it takes to deploy that? You can do a build in thirty seconds versus fifteen minutes.”

“If you can achieve that, let’s do it. But, it takes a mind-set change in developers,” says Gavin McMurdo, VP of Operations at CenturyLink Cloud. “More importantly, getting something that quickly is great, but to what effect? Just because I can? What bugs are we fixing? What customer experience are we fixing?”

Using containers “helps us to get out of the shackles of legacy systems,” says Krishnan Subramanian, Director of OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat, “and it helps us re-think IT” toward a path Krishnan calls “the consumerization of IT.”

Krishnan suggests that the speed of deployment afforded by containers not only accelerates customer experience but also allows developers “to fail fast, learn from it, come back, and do it right.”

“I believe in containers,” says Lekha Bhargavi, Director of Product Management at Shippable. “The world moved from bare metal to VMs ten years ago. It’s gotten to critical mass now — containers are the next step in the same revolution.”

“It’s not a single bullet, for sure, but it’s definitely as close to one as you can get” in order to achieve the end goal of continuous delivery, says Lekha.

Gavin agrees that containers are a great solution, but only if there’s a mind-set among users that they can replace things very quickly. “If that mind-set doesn’t exist, I would argue that containers are not going to solve it.”

“For containers to work properly, you have to segment the data,” and be able to run an isolated instance, says Gavin. “If your application or your business methodology today doesn’t allow you to do that, then I would argue that containers would not help you today.”

“The second piece is: the orchestration of containers doesn’t exist today, properly,” Gavin continues. “While there are people making massive inroads — and I believe that this will be fixed in the next eighteen months — today it doesn’t exist. In the case of OpenStack, I would argue you have better orchestration today with VMs and old OpenStack than you do with any Docker platform.”

Alex draws the audience into the discussion at the mid-way point, and the questions range from the practical to the theoretical. Eventually the analysis turns to DevOps itself, as the panelists address the notion of whether DevOps is a discipline or a culture.

“Cloud became the canvas on top of which developers and operations could collaborate,” says Krishnan. “So, DevOps is more like a cultural thing for me.”

“DevOps is a cultural change you bring inside your organization where you align developers and operations together to meet the needs of business,” Krishnan says. “It has to be an organization-wide alignment.”

Gavin sees DevOps as leadership: “working with the business to achieve the needs of the customer in a very agile and cost-effective manner.”

“Shippable is actually involved in providing those tools for DevOps,” says Lekha, “so my view is that DevOps is definitely a discipline, and it’s a discipline that must be adopted by a developer.”

The New Stack was a media sponsor for this year's RubyConf India in Goa, and TNS represented with community manager Atul Jha in attendance.

For this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, recorded at the conference, Atul quarried a jocular panel comprised of keynote speaker Eleanor McHugh, Red Hat's Aaron Patterson, who's on both the Ruby core team and the Rails core team, and Sidu Ponnapa, Founder and CEO of C42 Engineering, a boutique software engineering consultancy.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-38-ruby-should-borrow-from-go-rust-and-the-rest/

The New Stack was a media sponsor for this year's RubyConfIndia in Goa, and TNS represented with community manager Atul Jha in attendance. For this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, recorded at the conference, Atul quarried a jocular panel comprised of keynote speaker Eleanor McHugh, Red Hat's Aaron Patterson, who's on both the Ruby core team and the Rails core team, and Sidu Ponnapa, Founder and CEO of C42 Engineering, a boutique software engineering consultancy.

It’s time once again for The New Stack founder Alex Williams to catch up with his fellow tech journalist and long-time ally, Wired writer Klint Finley, for a future-seeking glimpse into cutting edge startups. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast Alex and Klint also take a moment to acknowledge the demise of Giagom and to wish their colleagues the best.

Klint discusses his recently-published story about Percepto, “an Israeli company in the drone space.”

“The big thing is that they’re open-sourcing all of their machine vision technology,” says Klint. “What they’re hoping, like a lot of companies that open-source their technology,” Klint says, “is that it’ll drive some adoption, get more developers involved and advance the entire state of the art more quickly.”

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-37/

It’s time once again for The New Stack founder Alex Williams to catch up with his fellow tech journalist and long-time ally, Wired writer Klint Finley, for a future-seeking glimpse into cutting edge startups. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast Alex and Klint also take a moment to acknowledge the demise of Giagom and to wish their colleagues the best.

Klint discusses his recently-published story about Percepto, “an Israeli company in the drone space.”

“The big thing is that they’re open-sourcing all of their machine vision technology,” says Klint. “What they’re hoping, like a lot of companies that open-source their technology,” Klint says, “is that it’ll drive some adoption, get more developers involved and advance the entire state of the art more quickly.”

The conversation turns to the subject of Alex’s recent post “Vapor IO and The IoT Cloud,” a startup created by Anso Labs Founder Cole Crawford, and the potential bifurcation of the cloud ecosystem resulting in a dedicated cloud for the Internet of Things. Klint and Alex expand on Alex’s post and also segue into a discussion of Klint’s recent piece about Security in IoT.

Klint also talks about his experience at River, an accelerator that’s focused on virtual reality startups. “I was really skeptical of the whole VR thing because it’s been promised so many times over the years,” he says. “I was really blown away by some of the demos.” One company was working on movies for Samsung Gear VR, and “the trailers they showed me were just gorgeous and interesting.”

Other companies were focused on therapy and healthcare, particulary pain management and treating anxiety disorders such as phobias and PTSD. With consumer electronics bringing down the price of VR setups, pursuing these types of therapies would not be prohibitively expensive and apllied outside of a clinical setting.

“What’s enabling it is the rise of smartphones,” says Klint. “Making a VR headset work well, you need sensors, an accellerometer and so forth, so you can track when people move their heads. That’s built right into a cell phone. The same way that cell phones have revolutionized drones, because drones are essentially flying cell phones, they’re now starting to revolutionize VR.”

“A VR headset is just a phone you wear on your face,” says Klint.

“A phone you wear on your face,” Alex echoes. “Makes sense, in a way. Doesn’t it?”