The New Stack Analysts

During the waning hours of the recent IBM InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, with the conference crew already packing up the Dev Lounge and the Social Lounge at the MGM Grand, Alex Williams convenes a panel of attendees, all of whom coincidentally have British accents, for this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-36-the-british-invasion-at-ibm-interconnect/

During the waning hours of the recent IBM InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, with the conference crew already packing up the Dev Lounge and the Social Lounge at the MGM Grand, Alex Williams convenes a panel of attendees, all of whom coincidentally have British accents, for this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

At our first WarmUp of 2015, on March 3rd in Seattle, we talked about the transition to new distributed environments, and the ways in which platform providers, app developers, operations pros and enterprises are adapting. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, which was recorded live at the event, host Alex Williams is joined by four excellent panelists who are on the front lines of managing and analyzing distributed systems:

Avi Cavale, co-founder and CEO at Shippable,

Heather McKelvey, vice president of engineering at Basho,

Richard Seroter, director of product management for CenturyLink Cloud,

and, Kit Merker, product manager at Google.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-35-discussing-all-things-distributed-from-the-new-stack-warmup/

At our first WarmUp of 2015, on March 3rd in Seattle, we talked about the transition to new distributed environments, and the ways in which platform providers, app developers, operations pros and enterprises are adapting. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, which was recorded live at the event, host Alex Williams is joined by four excellent panelists who are on the front lines of managing and analyzing distributed systems:

Avi Cavale, Co-founder and CEO at Shippable,

Heather McKelvey, Vice President of Engineering at Basho,

Richard Seroter, Director of Product Management for CenturyLink Cloud,

and, Kit Merker, Product Manager at Google.

For more episodes of "The New Stack Analysts" check out the podcast section.

"The thing that we have solved with containers," says Avi, "is, 'how do I get some process on a machine spun-up super fast and keep it isolated?'"

"Even though a piece of the puzzle has been solved, other inefficiencies are getting amplified — that is orchestration...'how do I manage all this chaos of all these containers?'"

"It's great that they allow you to break it into microservices," says Heather, "but from a classic point of view... it's very akin to an image service within compute. One of the keys that's going to need to be solved well there is, 'how do I keep those containers up-to-date with having to rebuild them all the time?'

"There's been maybe a meme or a myth about, 'containers are the new VM, and move away from VMs to containers," says Kit. "We really think of it a little differently, which is that containers are an approach to get the most out of your VM infrastructure."

"If you use containers as a way of reducing overhead — by sharing OSs, that's one piece of it — and the second is by stacking them and being able to take advantage of more of the CPU and memory resources available to you — that's a way of getting a better utilization," says Kit. "As you're scaling up and down, or you're changing the mix of the different workloads on those VMs, you're getting more out of them."

"Complexity is shifting," says Richard, "as you look at, even, microservices moving from these 'intelligent' middleware solutions that have all of this knowledge baked in, to dumb pipes and smart end points, where now even my different microservices have to be smarter about, 'how am I doing authentication; how am I centrally logging; how am I making sure that can scale horizontally effectively?' So, with all these things that maybe you didn't worry as much before: 'Now my end point has to be smarter; now this thing has to scale, support continuous integration, continuous delivery' — things that maybe you took for granted before — complexity is now potentially moving to that service level where I just can't things for granted."

"We're not getting any simpler," Richard says. "We're not going to look back a year from now and say 'it's easier to do distributed systems.'"

"The mainframe lasted for a while, but as IT got decentralized, the physical machine became the fundamental unit that people used, in order to think about their infrastructure and their architecture — having the host as the center of the universe," says Alexis Lê-Quôc, CTO and Co-Founder of Datadog, during this conversation with Alex Williams and co-host Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk about monitoring distributed architecture.

Alexis continues, "You wouldn't think in terms of, 'they're just apps that run somewhere, and someone's taking care of the ether in which they run.' It's really, 'it's the machine — it's there — I can see it,' or, 'it's in the data center next door.' I clearly map an application to a machine to the point where, when I say 'the database,' I mean 'the application' but I also mean 'the machine that runs the database.'"

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-34-monitoring-distributed-architectures/

"The mainframe lasted for a while, but as IT got decentralized, the physical machine became the fundamental unit that people used, in order to think about their infrastructure and their architecture — having the host as the center of the universe," says Alexis Lê-Quôc, CTO and Co-Founder of Datadog, during this conversation with Alex Williams and co-host Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk about monitoring distributed architecture.

Alexis continues, "You wouldn't think in terms of, 'they're just apps that run somewhere, and someone's taking care of the ether in which they run.' It's really, 'it's the machine — it's there — I can see it,' or, 'it's in the data center next door.' I clearly map an application to a machine to the point where, when I say 'the database,' I mean 'the application' but I also mean 'the machine that runs the database.'"

"So, we have this universe where machines matter, and then we start to distribute applications, just because the machines can scale-up only to a point, and yet the demand for processing — the demand for apps — outstrips the scale at which we scale-up the machines. So we need to distribute — instead of having one database, I have a cluster of databases, and then I have multiple clusters. There's still a relatively static mapping between part of the architecture and machines."

"A lot of demand right now is around Infrastructure as a Service. People want machines. Twenty years from now we may come back and say 'this was dumb, because that set us back decades, because we carried over a lot of the baggage we had from the physical environment.'"

Alexis posits that this attachment to the notion of "the host" is the central fallacy of monitoring distributed architecture. "The host works as the center of the monitoring view because it's stable. It exists for a period of time that we as people can relate to," Alexis concludes, "but that's also, conversely, why it doesn't work for heavily distributed architectures."

"The move to distributed architectures where things change all the time, forces monitoring to go from very imperative to go to something much more declarative."

"It's very much India's Go Conference. It's not just us coming in and talking at you," says Dave Cheney, an Australian speaker, blogger, and open source author. Dave co-organizes the Sydney Go Users group and has been an active contributor to the Go project since February 2011. He spent some time during GopherConIndia 2015 to talk with Atul Jha, Community Manager for The New Stack, for this episode of The New Stack Analysts."

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-33-go-developers-talk-shop-at-gopherconindia-2015/

“It’s very much India’s Go Conference. It’s not just us coming in and talking at you,” says Dave Cheney, an Australian speaker, blogger, and open source author. Dave co-organises the Sydney Go Users group and has been an active contributor to the Go project since February 2011. He spent some time during GopherConIndia 2015 to talk with Atul Jha, Community Manager for The New Stack, for this episode of The New Stack Analysts.

Atul shares his reflections here on GopherConIndia, which was held in his own city of Bengaluru, and which had an invitee list of about 350 participants. Also at GopherConIndia and joining Atul for the podcast were:

William (Bill) Kennedy, managing partner at Ardan Studios, a mobile and web app development company in Miami, FL. Bill is a co-author of the book Go In Action, the author of the blog goinggo.net, and the organizer for the Go and MongoDB meetups in Miami.

Julia Poladsky, a frontend developer for CommericialTribe in Denver, CO.

Francesc Campoy Flores, who joined the Go team in 2012 as Developer Advocate after several years as a Python and C++ developer.

Verónica López a mobile developer and computer science researcher at UNAM (Mexico’s National Autonomous University) focusing on data structures, and was the lead mobile developer of Mexico’s tax collection service (SAT).

Satish Talim, Organizer of GopherConIndia.

At the Node Summit last month, Donnie Berkholz and I recorded a discussion with TJ Fontaine about a new foundation for Node.js that was announced just before the conference. It follows the formation of io.js, a new Node community that split fom the core Node.js group.

The interview with Fontaine, project lead for Node.js, started with a bit of joking that actually proved to be quite perinent to the issues about open source governance that have surfaced over the past several months.

The interview covers a lot about the balance between the needs of the big users, such as Microsoft and IBM with the interest in pushing node forward and trying new things.

The discussion gets a lot into the technical future of Node with a foundation model and how it might compare to other open source groups.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-32-the-node-js-foundation-io-js-and-the-new-world-of-open-source-governance/

At the Node Summit last month, Donnie Berkholz and I recorded a discussion with TJ Fontaine about a new foundation for Node.js that was announced just before the conference. It follows the formation of io.js, a new Node community that split fom the core Node.js group.

The interview with Fontaine, project lead for Node.js, started with a bit of joking that actually proved to be quite perinent to the issues about open source governance that have surfaced over the past several months.

The interview covers a lot about the balance between the needs of the big users, such as Microsoft and IBM with the interest in pushing node forward and trying new things.

The discussion gets a lot into the technical future of Node with a foundation model and how it might compare to other open source groups.