The New Stack Context

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a weekly wrapup of the hottest news in scalable IT development and deployment.  This week we’re talk with Essence Boayue, a full-stack engineer in training at the Holberton School for software engineering, as well as Max Johnson, a former Holberton student who is now a DevOps engineer at conversational AI provider Pypestream. 

Boayue and Johnson have been investigating the meaning of "cloud native DevOps" for The New Stack in a set contributed articles. Boayue's post discusses roles and responsibilities of cloud native DevOps engineers. And check back next Friday to read Johnson's post, to be posted next Friday, on how applications built to run and scale in the cloud need to be managed in a completely new way.

We talk with Boayue and Johnson about their own DevOps journeys, what cloud native DevOps is and some of the roles and responsibilities of DevOps in building and maintaining cloud native applications. We also chat about the approach that Holberton takes in training the next generation of full-stack engineers.

This week on TNS Context, our weekly news wrap-up podcast, we speak with our technology culture reporter David Cassel, who has been filing stories each weekend about the weirder cultural edges of technology and the Internet.  If you've read the story about Jeri Ellsworth’s home-brewed chips, the troubled legacy of ‘God’s Lonely Programmer’ Terry Davis, or the origins of grep, then you've joined Cassel in his travels across the cybersphere.

Then, later in the show, we discuss the general availability of the Kubernetes kubeadm tool, which the creators hope will help standardize the way Kubernetes provisions clusters.

TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, along with TNS Founder Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

This week on Context we talk with Tom Wilkie, VP of product, at Grafana Labs, which just announced a new open source log aggregation tool for Kubernetes called Loki. Unlike other log aggregation tools, instead of indexing the full text of the logs, Loki indexes only the metadata and follows the same service discovery technology as Prometheus.

"A lot of systems don't have that metadata and they're really powerful for finding content in the logs, but finding where those logs came from and when they were generated, maybe what host and what version of the software, that's really where we've put the focus. The same as you can with Prometheus," Wilkie said.

Loki has already grabbed the community's attention, appearing at no. 1 on Hacker News the day after it was annnounced and receiving more than 2,000 stars on GitHub. In this podcast, Wilkie talks with Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, and Libby Clark, editorial director at The New Stack, from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Seattle.

"We think this is super powerful because it's going to be much easier, much more cost effective to run, much easier to operate than Elastic clusters." Wilkie said.

Later in the show, we give our takeaways from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. The New Stack livestreamed our podcasts from the show, held numerous pancake breakfasts and published a lot of news.

This week we’re talking with Joel Speed, a cloud infrastructure engineer at Pusher who’s been helping build its internal Kubernetes platform. Joel wrote a contributed post for us this week about how to solve Kubernetes configuration woes with a custom controller, so we’ll talk to him first about that.

Later in the show, we talk with TNS managing editor Joab Jackson and TNS editor-in-chief Alex Williams about what we’re expecting from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Seattle next week. The New Stack have two pancake breakfasts and a full schedule of podcasts and livestreams, so visit our web site or follow us on Twitter @thenewstack next week for live updates from KubeCon.

This week The New Stack hits the road again, hitting two conferences in Las Vegas. TNS managing editor Joab Jackson calls in from Amazon Web Services' annual user conference, AWS Re:Invent, which brought a plethora of new services and features.

Most notably, the cloud giant introduced two new technologies to further integrate serverless into other cloud-based IT operations, lambda Layers and the Lambda Runtime API. Lambda Layers provides a way to centrally manage code and data so that it can be shared across multiple functions. And the Lambda Runtime API provides a simple interface to use any programming language, or a specific language version, within Lambda. This allows users to bring in other programming languages. Already, partners have developed packages to run code written in Rust, C++, Erlang and even Cobol to run Lambda. And through Layers, companies are offering their monitoring and security services, including Datadog, IOPipe, Epsagon and NodeSource.

Welcome to The New Stack Context podcast where today we will be discussing the release of Semaphore 2.0 tool for continuous delivery on Kubernetes. We’ll also be discussing yet another hot acquisition — this time it’s VMware announcing plans to acquire Heptio from two original Kubernetes creators at Google. Then later in the show we’ll share our top podcast and articles on the site.

Our guest this week is Marko Anastasov, co-founder at Rendered Text, who wrote about the company's Semaphore 2.0 product launch this week on The New Stack. Anastasov explained a bit about how Semaphore works as well as the challenges in integrating CI/CD systems.

In this week's episode we will be discussing the news about IBM acquiring Red Hat for $34 billion, with special guests Ritesh Patel, co-founder at Nirmata, and Benjamin Ball, TNS marketing director and native of Raleigh North Carolina, corporate headquarters of Red Hat. 

Every once in a while, an acquisition comes along with the potential of drastically changing the business landscape. Think back to Oracle buying Sun Microsystems, or, more recently, Microsoft buying GitHub. IBM's purchase of Red Hat could very well be in that category. IBM is buying Red Hat for $34 billion, a 64 percent premium over Red Hats closing price last Friday. This event is significant in several different ways, not to mention that this is the largest software only acquisition till date.

This week on The New Stack Context, our weekly news wrap-up podcast, we take a look at some of the results of a survey we did for our newly-released eBook on serverless technologies.  We also discuss All Things Open, a conference held earlier this week in Raleigh North Carolina, that covered a range of open source technologies.

To discuss our survey, we invited TNS analyst Lawrence Hecht as a guest. The TNS eBook presents the results of  our original research on serverless adoption trends and use cases. It also provides a high-level overview of what organizations should consider as they build, deploy and manage serverless functions and applications.

This week on TNS Context, the editorial team catches up on some events we’ve attended recently. TNS correspondent TC Currie is here to talk about GitHub Universe, which was held this week. We also have TNS Founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams to talk about Cloud Foundry Summit Europe and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson to chat about Node+JS Interactive in Vancouver. Both of those events were held last week.

Last week on the podcast we talked with IBM's Jason McGee about some cloud news at the Cloud foundry conference. But we didn’t get to hear much about what else happened. Williams gives us some of the highlights of what else happened at the show, including some great conversations about the Cloud Foundry BOSH lifecycle management tool. Currie discusses GitHub's first big user conference since since the Microsoft acquisition was announced in June, including all the buzz around the repository's new workflow tool, GitHub Actions. Then later in the show, Jackson will tell us about some of the TNS stories he gathered from Node+JS Interactive.

IBM is building out its portfolio of cloud services in order to offer cloud native capabilities with higher degrees of security and isolation for the enterprise, combined with the user experience of public cloud such as self-service provisioning, pay-as-you-go pricing and elasticity. So this week on Context we talked with Jason McGee, an IBM Fellow, and VP and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform about IBM’s new enterprise cloud services which include the Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment announced this week.

McGee and TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams recorded live from Cloud Foundry Summit in Basel, Switzerland, where TNS hosted a day of podcasting and a pancake breakfast on topics such as BOSH and Kubernetes; integrating data services into Cloud Foundry; the importance of allies in advancing inclusivity; and the work companies and projects in the cloud native space are doing to improve the developer experience.

Then later in the show, TNS managing editor Joab Jackson tells us about some of the top stories on the site this week, including a story by TNS correspondent Susan Hall about Pulsar, a data streaming tool and Kafka alternative that just reached top-level status at the Apache Software Foundation.