The New Stack Context

This week on The New Stack Context podcast we talk with Pivotal Director of Technical Marketing Dan Baskette and Pivotal Senior Staff Engineer Mark Fisher about Knative, which is a new tool Google and a few other partners such as Pivotal built to help developers build functions on top of Kubernetes. Also joining us in this episode is TNS San Francisco correspondent Alex Handy, who spoke about some of the other news from this week's Google Next 2018 conference.

Knative is an open source software layer which turns Kubernetes into a runtime for serverless functions. Google announced the project and released it on GitHub this week — and it seems to be the news of the week out of Google Next. Baskette contributed a post to the site this week, offering all the technical details of Knative.  The New Stack sponsor Pivotal has provided the eventing model from its own Project Riff to Knative and is building its upcoming Pivotal Function Service on Knative.

Google revealed a range of enhancements to its cloud services, ranging from automated machine learning to a version of the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that can work on-prem. It all shows that Google may finally be getting serious about serving the enterprise market, Handy noted later in the podcast.

This week we spoke with our San Francisco correspondent Alex Handy about containerizing Java applications. The Google Cloud Platform recently released Jib, a new open-source container image builder for Java developers. Google says that Jib “does not require you to write a Dockerfile or have docker installed, and it is directly integrated into [the] Maven and Gradle,” Java build tools. Jib comes with many of the cloud-native build-tool features you’d expect, including incremental builds, a configuration-as-code approach, and reproducible build images for faster deployments and rollbacks.

We spoke with Handy about why you’d even want to run a Java application in a container and the recent updates in Java 10 that aim to reduce the challenges that come with CPU and memory usage when Java runs in a container.

Then, later in the show, we previewed O’Reilly’s open source conference, OSCON, which is back in Portland this year. TNS editor-in-chief Alex Williams and I will be at OSCON next week, attending sessions and talking to folks on the ground. We spoke about what we’re looking forward to at that event. And you can catch our livestream on The New Stack Founder Alex Williams's Twitter feed (@alexwilliams), next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.

For this Context, we talk with two data scientists from Pivotal, who write this week about the pros and cons of using Apache Spark for running data science workloads at scale. Apache Spark is an in-memory data analytics engine that is wildly popular with data scientists because of its speed, scalability and ease-of-use. Plus, it happens to be an ideal workload to run on Kubernetes, the Pivotal team writes.

We spoke with them about the pros and cons of Apache Spark, what data science workloads they’ve been experimenting with lately at Pivotal, and how application architectures are evolving, in general, to better support data storage and processing at scale.

Then, later in the show, we'll go over the highlights from his day at QCon developer conference in New York, including microservices debugging and how the Envoy service mesh is preparing to work with Kafka.

TNS editor-in-chief Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson co-hosted this episode of Context.

Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.

On this week's episode we speak with GridGain CEO Abe Kleinfeld who writes this week on The New Stack about how in-memory computing is helping many organizations solve their speed and scale challenges. In the past three decades Kleinfeld has led several companies through successful liquidity events including three mergers and two IPOs. And since he joined GridGain in 2013 the company has averaged triple-digit annual sales growth and been ranked the second fastest growing private company in Silicon Valley.

GridGain has an open source in-memory computing platform built on Apache Ignite.  In memory computing (IMC) is seeing surging adoption, as Kleinfeld writes on The New Stack this week. IMC technology itself is also evolving. A memory-centric architecture offers greater flexibility and improved ROI for a range of data-intensive use cases. This has the potential to further accelerate the adoption of IMC.

Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.

This week on Context we’re talking with The New Stack correspondent Mark Boyd who writes this week about the business process and cultural decisions that play into building a serverless application architecture.

Serverless computing, including Functions as a Service, is a rapidly evolving technology that is seeing enterprise adoption on par with containers among companies that run their applications in the public cloud. And experts and visionaries in distributed systems believe serverless is the future of application infrastructure.

Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/ at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.

Microsoft announced on Monday that it was acquiring GitHub. And that’s all the Internet could talk about for a few days. TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson wrote a piece for us summarizing the acquisition and some of that initial Internet reaction. And Scott Fulton examined a Plan B for developers who may be nervous about projects pulling out of GitHub and leaving a trail of broken dependencies.

And now that we’ve had some time to sit with it a bit we are starting to understand some of the other, longer term implications that this deal will have for developers.

This week on Context we’re talking with Alexis Richardson, founder and CEO of Weaveworks.  As the originator and leader of the GitOps movement, Alexis has a unique perspective on this. So we’ll talk with him in the first half of the show about the relationship between GitOps and GitHub and what Microsoft could (maybe) do to make life easier for developers in the cloud.

This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we delve into the latest project from our resident hardware hacker, Dr. Torq, offer a summary of last week's ChefConf conference.

Last week, TNS Editor Alex Williams attended ChefConf in Chicago where he hosted a day of podcasting. We’ll hear his top takeaways from that event, including the latest on InSpec, Chef’s compliance automation tool. The company just announced an integration with their its version of Automate - the company’s automation platform. Williams says InSpec is really innovative and could be big for the Chef’s cloud native strategy going forward.

We also spoke with Dr. Torq, who has been writing for us regularly about his Raspberry Pi and machine learning project called Hedley, the robotic skull. This week he’s teaching Hedley how to talk with a combination of Arduino code and a standard, hobby-size servo motor. The goal is to eventually use a pre-recorded audio file to play through a speaker while sending data to the Arduino to move the jaw. And he can now speak into a microphone and the robot’s jaw will follow his voice fairly well.

Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies and at-scale application development, and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.

Joining us this week is TNS guest contributor Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, vice president of product management at Maxta. Sreenivasamurthy wrote a guest post for TNS this week on the differences between software-defined storage (SDS) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). While both solutions “software-define” the infrastructure and abstract storage from the underlying hardware, there are important distinctions, he says. It comes down to how you want to manage your storage. Are you a storage expert? Or do you want more of a hands-off approach to storage?

In the second half of the show, TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson gives us the highlights from OpenStack Summit which took place in Vancouver this week. We discussed Mark Shuttleworth’s controversial keynote comparing OpenStack vendors. There were also a boatload of project and product updates, including two CI/CD projects: AT&T’s Airship and the OpenStack project’s own CI tool, Zuul.

Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we review the week’s hottest news in cloud-native technologies/ at-scale application development and look ahead to topics we expect will gain more attention in coming weeks.

Hacker News and the Twitterverse were alight this week with discussion of Datadog engineer Jason Moiron’s blog post titled “Is Kubernetes Too Complicated?”  This article hints at a Kubernetes backlash afoot, with ongoing concerns about its complexity. We speak with TNS correspondent  Scott Fulton, who has a TNS article summarizing these issues.

In the second half of the show, we’ll talk with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson about his story on TNS about how Facebook keeps its website snappy for billions of users worldwide. There are so many static packages that a page could use that it would be impossible to download them all at once. Yet all the right elements must be downloaded to the browser within a few seconds. We discuss how they’ve solved this problem with machine learning, and the engineering team they’ve built up in New York.

This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we are all about the git open source version control software. Last Friday, TNS correspondent Michelle Gienow has kicked off a series git, with an introduction to git for everyone. This week, she continues that work with an introduction to its most popular online hosted version, GitHub.

She writes, “life as a software developer is much more social and collaborative than the stereotypes would have non-coders believe — at times, even frustratingly so. Thankfully, there is git... to bring collaboration with project team members right back where it belongs: on the command line.”