The New Stack Analysts

We learned a lot about our readers upon completion of our reader’s survey at the end of last year. According to those who responded to the SurveyMonkey questionnaire, working mostly in development and/or DevOps or operations, the trends and topics you are especially interested in include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) on Kubernetes or serverless in cloud native environments.  DevOps, as well as security, of course also play a big role as data is processed, managed and stored in new and exciting ways.

It was with these topics in mind that  Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack, hosted the podcast, along with Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor, hosted the last TNS podcast of 2018. The guests were Dillon Erb, CEO of Paperspace, which offers solutions for ML and AI deployments on the cloud, and Chenxi Wang, managing director of venture capital firm Rain Capital, with an emphasis on next-generation security solutions.

Functions as a Service (FaaS), and especially, serverless are major buzzwords today, but beneath the hype, they offer tremendous resource-savings and scaling opportunities. But as organizations make the shift from monolithic-centric platforms as they rely on FaaS to, for example, scale to cloud native environments,  the concepts and promise of what are on offer can also make it easy to forget what is involved to make the jump on a hands-on and practical level. In other words, great things await your organization as it makes the transition, but getting there will require a lot of work — for what usually is a huge payoff as FaaS and cloud providers assume much of the heavy lifting for server management and other infrastructure-related tasks.

During a panel discussion hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, and Joab Jackson, managing editor, of The New Stack;  at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, a panel of FaaS and serverless experts were on hand to discuss their down-in-the-trenches experiences and ideas about what implementing FaaS and relying on cloud providers is really like. The panel members included:

- Ara (Araceli) Pulido, Kubernetes engineering manager, Bitnami;

- Chad Arimura, vice president, serverless advocacy, Oracle and former CEO and cofounder of Iron.io;

- Christopher Woods, research software engineer, University of Bristol;

- Tom Petrocelli, analyst, Amalgam Insights

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UPf8sCKNb4E

The advent of service meshes can be traced back to Linkerd, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project. Now, as Linkerd’s adoption curve continues to accelerate, a number of other options have emerged that allow for the management and scaling of an often vast network of microservices and the applications within them.  Istio, of course, is among the leading alternatives.

The state of Istio and services meshes was the main topic during a panel discussion for this podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, and Joab Jackson, managing editing, of The New Stack;  at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018.

The attendees, who were also treated to a pancake breakfast during the event, were able to ask questions about service meshes and Istio to the panel of subject matter experts consisting of:

- Jason McGee, IBM fellow, vice president, CTO, IBM Cloud Platform;

- Ken Owens, vice president, digital native architecture, Mastercard;

- Jennifer Lin, director of product management, Google Cloud;

- Simon Richard, analyst, Gartner;

- Pere Monclus, vice president and CTO network and security BU, VMware.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx7iGgwU9DY

It would have been difficult to predict the magnitude of open source’s role in today’s platforms and the explosion of choice on offer in today’s computing world thanks to its massive adoption.  On the industry side, IBM’s purchase of Linux giant Red Hat this year for an astounding $34 billion has come as an even bigger surprise.

The state of open source in 2018, and especially, the IBM's Red Hat purchase, were discussed during a podcast with Rachel Stephens, an analyst with of RedMonk, and Michael Coté, director, marketing, at Pivotal Software, hosted by Libby Clark, editorial director, and Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack.

Indeed, 2018 is even being touted at the “year of open source” in many circles, Stephens said. “The mega acquisitions and just tends to really validate open-source as the method of building in the future and as a viable approach for building your stack. And I think, at the same time, we contrast that with some kind of clouds on the horizon in terms of the growing tension between an ability to run an open source business in the face of cloud providers.”

Red Hat’s acquisition by IBM has been the biggest story of the year, dwarfing Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. But the acquisition has been notable for many reasons, one of them is that this is 3rd largest IT acquisition after Broadcom and Dell-EMC.

New Stack Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Alex Williams sat down with Lauren Cooney, Founder & CEO, Spark Labs, Tyler Jewell, CEO, WSO2 and Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF CTO/COO, to discuss the repercussions of this acquisition.

The core points discussed included the impact on the market, the impact on open source contribution made by Red Hat, the impact on the culture within Red Hat and the possible clash between the product teams of both companies fighting over the same client. But when companies bring two different cultures together, things could go wrong.

Successful cloud native deployments largely hinge on DevOps’ ability to break down silos and other inter-organizational barriers by directly engaging all stakeholders, including business teams, developers, operations and other otherwise separate groups throughout the entire process. But aside from the general description, DevOps can mean a lot of different things to many different people.

In some extreme cases, DevOps’ role in cloud native development and operations might just represent a job ticket for some organizations, such as when a developer discovers a security vulnerability in an application’s code in a cloud native deployment. He or she then merely delegates fixing the security hole to an on-staff security staff while their responsibility ends there.

What Cloud Native DevOps really means, as well as its future, was a main theme of this podcast, hosted by The New Stack Editor-In-Chief Alex Williams during The New Stack pancake breakfast held during Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2018. Devin Davis, vice president, marketing, for the Cloud Foundry Foundation, served as the co-host. The panel consisted of the following guests:

Abby Kearns, executive director, the Cloud Foundry Foundation;

Chisara Nwabara, technical program manager, Pivotal software;

Dieu Cao, director of product management, Pivotal software;

Frederic Lardinois, analyst and journalist, TechCrunch;

Julian Friedman, the Cloud Foundry project lead, IBM.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QXL0urTSN88

The divide continues to grow between people developing serverless technologies and those in DevOps roles building, deploying, and managing Kubernetes. "Questions about serverless approaches and Kubernetes don't really come up with developers," said Timirah James, a developer advocate with Cloudinary on today’s episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

James joined TNS founder Alex Williams and Analyst/Co-Host Klint Finley, contributor at WIRED, to discuss how organizations and developers both can help bridge this gap.

Detailing her experience at Notre Dame University in Belmont, California, James noted that, "If you're pursuing education in this field and trying to go to college for it, if you're trying to go to college for anything, you want to make sure you're attending an institution that has a network, community, and foundation around what you're studying. Especially something as niche as Computer Science."

Anne Currie Chief Strategist, Container Solutions, has been thinking about some of the deeper questions the software industry poses. These questions aren't just about interconnected systems, and the repercussions of everyone having access to the Internet. Rather, they're about the moral and ethical obligations faced by software developers. Are developers responsible for the things done with their software? In a recent StackOverflow survey, most developers said "No."

"My job is to go out and talk to a load of people about what they're doing. I go out and talk to a lot of industry, enterprise folks, building thigns, finding out what's happening. What's become clear is that over the past couple of years we have enormously increased the speed with which we can get products to market and ideas to market by three orders of magnitude. It's actually quite astonishing. When people start to use the new DevOps technologies and cloud all together, and CI/CD, and everything that's coming through at the moment in DevOps, they're aim is to get ideas from basically developers typing into a keyboard out to customers incredibly fast. It's more like fifteen minutes as opposed to six months. Three years ago it was six months. Now it's fifteen minutes if you're really advanced with using DevOps technology, which, eventually, all of us will be," said Currie.

Blockchain has finally gotten over the Wall Street hump. Now that BitCoin and Ethereum are essentially old news, the actual technology behind these commodities is beginning to trickle into real world enterprise applications. Blockchain, it seems, has many useful use cases out there in the business world, and with the help of the Linux Foundation and IBM, enterprises can now take advantage of the open source Hyperledger implementation of blockchain technology.

On today's episode of The New Stack Analysts recorded live at OSCON 2018, Klint Finley, Reporter with Wired and the author of the Wired Guide to Blockchain, said that he had a few real and hypothetical use cases the piece he wrote a few months ago. One of those use cases was that of, "Blockchain feels like the thing that is the most hard to parse the value out of the hype. With cloud computing it was clearly an enormously hyped concept, but there were use cases and benefits. With big data it was coming out of actual real use cases at places like Google and Yahoo! With the Internet of Things, that's probably the least well established of those at this point, but there are still established use cases for that. With Blockchain it feels really preliminary," said Finley.

Serverless computing and functions as a service are both growing in appeal for enterprises, but there are still many questions about how they fit into a standard business environment. For a start, how do you manage your dependencies in a serverless environment? How are applications, themselves, tracked and managed over time? And how do the various serverless and fucntions-as-a-service offerings handle in real world enterprise use cases?

To find the answers to these questions and more, we sat down with Mike Roberts, partner at Symphonia.io and Austen Collins, Founder and CEO of Serverless, Inc. Together, they've got front row seats into how business application developers and administrators are utilizing serverless technologies today. One of the big topics of discussion, however, still focuses on where these functions will live: in the cloud, or in Kubernetes?