The New Stack Analysts

Off the record (but not off one of the records in his vast and eclectic collection of vinyl), The New Stack founder Alex Williams had been characterizing the different types of tech press, from Microsoft Groupies to SaaS Bloggery, and taking no prisoners. Co-host Michael Coté, prowling for viability, recounts these merciless dissections past the intro and into the Thunderdome of this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-21-the-tech-press-as-it-were-and-the-new-stack/

Off the record, The New Stack founder Alex Williams had been characterizing the different types of tech press, from Microsoft Groupies to SaaS Bloggery, sparing no one. Co-host Michael Coté, always on the prowl for ammunition, carries these merciless dissections past the intro and into the Thunderdome of this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

Michael suggests that he and Alex belong to the "generic enterprise and infrastructure software crowd," affording him the liberty to put Alex on the spot with the question, "How do you source people to write for your site?"

"Finding the right people is the hardest part," sighs Alex. "I go through referrals, so you referred Nancy [Gohring] originally. I went and found her and now she's going over to Fierce Enterprise."

"I have a fancy journalism degree," volunteers Alex.

"So, you know what's supposed to happen," Michael realizes. "Do you think that journalism at a place like The New Stack is much different than the way you were trained and the way journalism happens elsewhere, or is it pretty much the same thing; you just have fancier graphics and more incomprehensible words?"

OpenStack blueprints are used to track the implementation of significant features in OpenStack.

The New Stack tracked the 11 integrated projects of the OpenStack Juno release, covered in: A Guide to Developer Contributions in the OpenStack Juno Blueprints. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast presented with Alex Williams and co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Cote of 451 Research, we explore the research Analyst Atul Jha conducted.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-20-an-analysis-of-openstacks-juno-blueprints/

For whom are developers developing? Within what environments will they develop? The answers to these questions will not only shape the next generation of developers, but they will also affect technology development over the next five to ten years.

The New Stack founder Alex Williams offers up this topic to his guests, Jerry Chen, Partner at Greylock, and John Edgar, Chief Technology Evangelist at DigitalOcean, in this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-19-web-vs-mobile-vs-native-vs-open/

OpenStack blueprints are used to track the implementation of significant features in OpenStack.

The New Stack tracked the 11 integrated projects of the OpenStack Juno release.

Every feature added to a project is equally significant. Incubated projects have to follow a lifecycle before getting considered as an integrated project. Priority of a blueprint is the value added it brings to the project.

The Compute project has many new features added along with the addition of proprietary drivers by third party vendors.

Priority of a blueprint is decided by the developers who are committed to that particular project.

Glance has few blueprints implemented. One reason: the project is relatively mature.

Storage policy seems to be one common feature added to most of these projects.

The OpenStack dashboard has a relative larger number of features added. That is in part due to the integration of the Sahara project, which aims to bring data intensive application cluster on top of OpenStack.

Complete workflow and requirements for a project to be part of OpenStack is provided at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/NewProjects.

OpenStack Neutron blueprint has considerable activity. One of the main reason: networking vendors are adding their driver to the Neutron Core. Neutron brings network as a service to OpenStack. Project details can be found at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Neutron.

Smaller companies are also making their presence felt in overall OpenStack project like B1 Systems and Torsera.

OpenStack releases post Havana are in end of life and carrier providers are asking for some kind of long term release. The release cycle of OpenStack project is at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Releases.

For whom are developers developing? Within what environments will they develop? The answers to these questions will not only shape the next generation of developers, but they will also affect a lot of the technology development over the next five to ten years. The New Stack founder Alex Williams offers up this topic to his guests, Jerry Chen, Partner at Greylock, and John Edgar, Chief Technology Evangelist at DigitalOcean, in this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

When John first joined Digital Ocean, he spent some time at college hackathons "talking to students about what their hacks were and how they were implementing them."

"They're coming out of school with a really deep computer science knowledge," John observed. And besides, they all had mobile devices in their hands. Not surprisingly, the students' experience with sharing their current development projects with their friends (and, by extension, the market) was quicker and better with a mobile app than with a web app.

As more and more developers enter the market, says John, "native (particularly the Apple and Google ecosystems) is the direction things seem to be going." Upon realizing this, John recalls, "alarm bells were starting to go off in my head, partly because our company is definitely one that ties into a web application a lot better than a native application; the story is a lot better there."

Alex notes, from his experience in covering the enterprise, that the discussion around mobile app development is happening as much in the boardroom as it is among young college students.

Web on the PC still makes sense for big clients, says Jerry, adding that "the mobile web is sick, not dying; native apps is taking off."

One reason, Jerry observes, is that the experience is so much better right now. Also, he says, distribution channels, namely the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, are much better in terms of promotion and discovery. And these large incumbents' incentive is to encourage native apps versus the mobile web. "They have the ability to differentiate with native apps vis-a-vis each others' or third parties'. As a result, a ton of information is now being stuck behind native apps."

As an investor as well as user of the Internet, Jerry is concerned. "What was really a free and open sharing of data on the web is now getting hidden behind a bunch of native apps. It doesn't have to be hidden completely; there's ways you can still unearth all of this data. But how you interact with their data, how you search, how you use their data via native apps is very temperate."

Alex is curious about what trends Jerry has observed in the course of hearing companies' pitches.

Foremost, says Jerry, with every end-user facing application that's a mobile-first website, it's usually a native app that the user sees. And, the mobile user experience is markedly different, and affects monetization, for example. Web users are sitting in front of their PCs or Macs having that familiar impression of ads in their browsers. Conversely, "there is some mobile advertising that's largely dominated by Facebook and a couple other of the major properties, but all of these small apps that don't necessarily have the same kind of eyeballs, the way you monetize them is either a paywall, a subscription, or event triggers," such as location awareness or app awareness.

What impact is this gravitational shift having on DigitalOcean?

"There's always going to be a need for abstracted infrastructure," John maintains, "so it's not something that we're particularly concerned about as a short-term issue."

Alex Williams and co-host Donnie Burkholz are joined by Tal Klein of Adallom in this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, in which Tal’s recent article for The New Stack, "Architecting a SaaS and PaaS for the Neophyte Developer," is a touchstone for the discussion. Alex also brings up his George Plimpton moment at the Open Data Center Alliance, memorialized in "Who Knows How To Use AWS?"

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-18-the-ripple-effects-of-saas-and-paas-integration/

Alex Williams and co-host Donnie Burkholz are joined by Tal Klein of Adallom in this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, in which Tal’s recent article for The New Stack,” Architecting a SaaS and PaaS for the Neophyte Developer,” is a touchstone for the discussion. Alex also brings up his George Plimpton moment at the Open Data Center Alliance, memorialized in ”Who Knows How To Use AWS?”

The integration of SaaS and PaaS creates a ripple effect that affects business, consumers and developers. But, “the thinking about this started a long time ago,” says Tal. “There’s two converging trends: one is that, as we know, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vendors are trying to move towards Platform, and obviously Software-as-a-service vendors are also moving toward Platform, so there’s a sort of meeting in the middle where features and functionality, and more importantly, users and actual data provided by the SaaS providers can become the foundation for a custom SaaS that uses those SaaS applications as a platform.”

The conversation is changing because the environment is expanding to include platforms such as Salesforce where users have amassed a lot of their own data. Alex sees that the interest in development technologies has grown to such an extent that many people are trying out these connectivity tools to build their own applications. This new class of citizen developers still needs simple, visual tools to work with as opposed to writing code.

“What I’m actually seeing,” says Tal, “is a consolidation back into IT or DevOps (or whatever you want to call that organization now) where the things that we refer to as consumerization or departmentalization are actually coming back into the fold as additional bells and whistles are needed by the business groups, and IT can deliver them via DevOps.”

As these technologies mature, Donnie notes, they start becoming more complex to administer and eventually the business groups will want to outsource the management and administration back to IT.

There’s still an expectation that things are built from the ground up, says Tal, but now there’s a “new legacy” being created through the adoption of SaaS applications that are now becoming platforms themselves.

The challenge, Donnie believes, is fragmentation. “There are going to be multiple platforms built around multiple different SaaS providers that are going to be providing their own sets of APIs, their own services on top.”

“One of the big problems is going to be translating all the metaphors across different platforms in a way that isn’t too lossy.”

Tal and Donnie and many others see a better way forward, but also see that the nature of development will surely result in a lot of customizations, disparate workflows and proprietary platforms in the days to come.

At their 2014 Cloud Customer Summit, CenturyLink's Jonathan King, cloud strategy and business development; and David Shacochis, vice president, cloud platforms; joined up with The New Stack Analysts co-hosts Alex Williams before a live audience to record this episode, in which they look back at and explore topics that were first raised in previous episodes.

The reflections begin with Show 2, "The Rise of Microservices in the PaaS World" which was recorded at GlueCon 2014 with Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller, and DigitalOcean's Jeff Lindsay, as well as with Woody Rollins, CEO of AppScale, and The New Stack Analyst co-host Donnie Berkholz.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-17-revisiting-orchestration-paas-and-the-business-of-the-new-stack/

At their 2014 Cloud Customer Summit, CenturyLink VPs Jonathan King (Cloud Strategy & Business Development) and David Shacochis (Cloud Platform) joined up with The New Stack Analysts co-hosts Alex Williams and Donnie Berkholz to record this episode, in which they look back at and explore topics that were first raised in previous episodes.

The reflections begin with Show 2, "The Rise of Microservices in the PaaS World," which was recorded at GlueCon 2014, with Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller, Digital Ocean's Jeff Lindsay, as well as Woody Rollins, CEO of AppScale, and Donnie Berkholz.

"That was an interesting time (May 2014)," Alex recalls, a time to observe "where the market was starting to head, not just for Cloud Foundry or OpenShift, but this whole new breed of homegrown Platforms-as-a-service that we're starting to see now." Alex mentions a couple of examples. "Deis is a Platform-as-a-service that relies heavily on Go and CoreOS. And, Digital Ocean is building out its own Platform-as-a-service that's essentially built on Go."

Jonathan mentions CenturyLink's own journey to the PaaS world with their acquisition of AppFog and its subsequent integration into the native IaaS environment. He elaborates on a central question raised during the podcast: "Is IaaS becoming PaaS; is PaaS becoming IaaS; is there still a distinction?" Jonathan wonders about Alex's and Donnie's current perspectives on this subject.

"The elephant in the room is AWS," asserts Donnie, "adding more and more higher-level services." Customers want more transparency out of the PaaS layers, says Donnie, as well as wanting more exposure and flexibility, "such as being able to compose one's own PaaS on top of an IaaS and pulling in services that are interesting."

Alex suggests that companies such as SalesForce, now taking a "mobile app developer approach" and "looking to bring this generation of developers, or quasi-developers, into the landscape," are leveraging PaaS/SaaS combinations. This new kind of developer may be more comfortable working with drag-and-drop tools than with working at the command line, he says. The evolution toward "this quick-and-easy way to build apps," a trend which The New Stack is seeing and covering, "totally abstracts the infrastructure itself." Alex wonders what these changes will mean for Back-end-as-service, and what existing or future services will actually constitute the back end.

Dave points out that the PaaS layer relies on external services, such as for data storage, and that running a PaaS necessitates having a viable ecosystem strategy, and he finds it interesting how an add-on engine can bind-in and orchestrate external services either at the PaaS layer or at the IaaS layer.

Of "What Comes with API Ubiquity" (Show 6), Alex says the show deals with a concept he has been thinking on for some time: what does it mean to run a new stack business these days?

"We're seeing heavy adoption of SaaS technologies for financial management (by the executive wing)," he offers as an example, saying that CEOs "have to think about data in a whole different context than they did before," and that companies "are having to think much more about these business questions that go with the ecosystems and these platforms."

"An ecosystem should surprise you," says Dave. "There needs to be some ambient creativity in that ecosystem that's coming at your platform and doing things that maybe you didn't envision, sort of the 'wildflower syndrome.'"