The New Stack 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.

This week, from a snowy Portland Oregon, we spoke with Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS. Ellis has hired on to VMware to work full time on the OpenFaaS serverless software, as part of VMware’s new Open Source Technology Center. Until now, Ellis has been working on OpenFaaS in his spare time while holding down a day job as an application developer at ADP. We spoke with him about why he made the decision to join VMware and what it means for the OpenFaaS community.

We also discuss Chef’s latest update to its security compliance and automation tool InSpec, and spoke with The New Stack Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams about a three-part New Stack Makers podcast series we just wrapped up with HPE that focuses on some of the challenges enterprise IT and developers have in moving to new cloud native architectures.

The New Stack Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this week's edition of Context, along with The New Stack Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

Hello, welcome to The New Stack Context 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 we were busy reporting from events in New York, starting with Oracle’s Cloud Day event on Monday where he brought us an update on the cloud provider’s autonomous services. On Tuesday he also attended InfluxDays, a time series data and application conference, and he’ll give us the highlights from that event as well.

This week we are still talking about the CoreOS acquisition by Red Hat last week. TNS contributor Scott M. Fulton had the chance to talk with CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi and  Red Hat’s vice president for OpenShift Ashesh Badani, for a story on TNS. He got the lowdown on what “may” happen to products like Tectonic and Container Linux now that they’re part of Red Hat’s portfolio.  “May” being the keyword here.

The New Stack also launched a free ebook this week on Kubernetes Deployment and Security Patterns which helps ops teams evaluate Kubernetes based on their organizations’ needs and how they manage workloads. The size of your organization and the number of containers you deploy really determine the challenges you face with a Kubernetes deployment, for example. We’ll dive into some of the data and share what we learned.

Download our latest EBook, Kubernetes Deployment and Security Patterns free of charge at: https://thenewstack.io/ebooks/kubernetes/kubernetes-deployment-and-security-patterns/

This week on The New Stack Context weekly news wrap podcast, we talk with TNS European correspondent Mark Boyd about his fascinating story on how serverless architectures are turning developers into accountants. Or, at least, making cost a central consideration of how applications are designed.

We also chat about the recently announced acquisition of CoreOS by enterprise Linux giant Red Hat. We talk about Red Hat's acquisition strategy, how CoreOS' container focus fits into Red Hat's open source enterprise software stack, what the deal means for Docker, and, most importantly, the fate of Brian Redbeard's beard.

TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode and was joined by TNS founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

This week on The New Stack Context weekly newswrap podcast, we talk with with TNS San Francisco correspondent Alex Handy about a fascinating story he wrote on a startup in Israel called Codota that’s applied machine-learning to the concept of pair programming. It's developing a coding tool that would essentially substitute a machine for one of the two developers in a pair-programming team. The software is using machine-learning to augment and complement the abilities of the developer.

We also discussed BeyondCorp, which is Google’s approach to enterprise security. The company has ditched VPNs in favor of the concept of “zero-trust” or “perimeter-less” security. Our recent article about BeyondCorp has seen a lively discussion on Hacker News.

TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode and was joined by TNS founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

This week on the New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Jenny Gao, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, about the suitability of serverless technologies to the enterprise.  We explore the future of serverless and whether it’s feasible, or maybe even likely, for companies to just skip over containers altogether and go directly to a serverless architecture.

We also talk about the evolution of “instant operations” in the form of voice commands. Can ops teams run their day-to-day duties, coordinate incident response and receive status updates using a Siri-like virtual assistant? PagerDuty thinks so and they have a name for this next wave of digital operations: “VoiceOps.”

TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, and was joined by TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

We're rolling into 2018 with many unanswered questions: Will Meltdown and the Spectre CPU flaws turn our highly-tuned cloud-native applications into performance sludge cakes? How many new JavaScript front-end frameworks will we have to learn this year? And what does 'immutability' actually mean, anyhow? So many questions.

Fortunately, we have all the answers, in this newest edition of The New Stack Context podcast, our weekly roundup and discussion of the hottest news stories about all matters cloud-native and scalable computing. This week, our regular TNS hosts — Editorial Director Libby Clark, Managing Editor Joab Jackson and Publisher/Founder Alex Williams — are joined by Michelle Gienow, a front-end web developer who writes the Code N00b column for The New Stack and covers programming news for us.

We discuss the fallout from the Meltdown/Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, as well as the present state of JavaScript and if it could become the programming language of choice for cloud-native operations.

There is no “normal” for a microservices environment. And if a groundbreaking November 2016 white paper, produced by a team of six researchers from the University of Messina, the U.K.’s Newcastle University, and IBM Research, is to be taken at face value, perhaps such a state of equilibrium may never be attained. Every data center, the researchers write, has unique operating requirements. Once microservices are deployed there, the configurations they require become not only unique, but baked into their respective systems.

“Moreover, these microservices have both control and dataflow dependencies,” the white paper reads. “The challenges exist in dealing with heterogeneous configurations of microservices and cloud datacenter resources driven by heterogeneous performance requirements. . . the mapping of microservices to datacenters demands selecting bespoke configurations from an abundance of possibilities, 5 which is impossible to resolve manually.”

So if your job is to monitor the behavior of your data center’s microservices environment using an applications performance management (APM) platform, what is it that you’re looking for? When will you know if the behavior of certain services, or the system as a whole, is out of the ordinary? And once you’ve determined what “ordinary” is, for the place and time where you work, how long do you expect that to remain the case before it changes completely?

“With an APM system, in practice, it’s a Web app. So a request comes from an end user, it travels over the open Internet, it hits some servers, and then it’s fed through to a database, where a record is updated and the request returns a response, which follows the same path back to the user,” explained Alexis Richardson, the CEO of WeaveWorks, in an interview with The New Stack for an edition of the Context podcast.

“In a cloud-native system, the architecture is not particularly so simple,” Richardson continued. “Maybe fifty microservices cooperate and deliver one response to one end user. That’s an extreme example. Or maybe one microservice calls another. So if you drew it as a picture on a board, the request would ping-pong around, like a 1980s Breakout console game, until eventually returning to the user, instead of having a straightforward, up/down, request/response. Tracking all of that is very different than tracking in a typical APM setting.”

WeaveWorks produces a commercial version of the Prometheus monitoring platform, called Cortex. Richardson told us he agrees that any APM platform vendor that says it can academically extend its agent-based monitoring system from a client/server to a microservices model, is stretching things a bit.

“An APM vendor that grew up building support for Web apps, now claiming that it can do the same level of support for any other kind of application, is frankly a pretty hopeful — or maybe hopeless — remark,” he said.

Yet how realistic is such an assessment, given the fact that APM platforms are being extended into microservices, and customers are experiencing some results?

For this edition of The New Stack: Context, produced by Scott Fulton and Luke Lefler, we conducted interviews with:

Alexis Richardson, CEO, WeaveWorks

Loris Degioanni, CEO, Sysdig

Jim Gochee, Chief Product Officer, New Relic

The ideal of a technology ecosystem is that the people who benefit most from it — presumably, the customers — share the fruits of their labor with the producers who maintain this system. Both the suppliers and the demanders benefit each other, and in so doing, exchange roles from time to time. It’s the phenomenon we first saw with the Apple II in the late 1970s — the first community-driven economy devoted to a commercial computing product.

A viable ecosystem relies principally upon the exchange of a kind of common currency: benevolence. This virtue typically thrives in the absence of ill will.

Yet it’s hard for a producer to maintain the right level of benevolence among the members of its ecosystem community, while at the same time defending its own interests against competitors. Just ask Docker. What’s more, contributors become skeptical whenever a company’s self-interests become visible.

Still, such a slip of one’s slip is virtually inevitable. That’s why companies pre-empt their embarrassments by preaching the gospel of platform agnosticism. We’re completely open, says a project like Cloud Foundry or a company like ClusterHQ, to whatever the market decides.

When the market is in control of the ecosystem’s value structure, as Intel founder Gordon Moore discovered, the only way to stay current is to innovate at such a rapid pace as to justify the product’s plummeting market value. In the open source business model, value applies to support. If the value of support declines too much, the business falters. So the objective for each vendor becomes making sure its model is the one being supported — often in lieu of all others. What started out as a Platonic symposium of shared interests becomes a Darwinian scrimmage for survival. As my mother often put it, “To Eat His Own.”

Just ask ClusterHQ. Or, actually, you can’t. It shut its doors in December 2016.

Is a modern IT ecosystem is centered around, and driven by, vendors any more? Or have customers become the ones in charge?

That’s the subject of our first edition of The New Stack: Context for 2017, produced by Scott Fulton and Luke Lefler.. Our guests for this podcast are:

Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation

Alexis Richardson, CEO, WeaveWorks; TOC Chair, Cloud-Native Computing Foundation

Peng Zhao, Founder, Hyper.sh

I would use the term “trump card,” except that I don’t want to jinx anything. VMware holds a very high card in its portfolio of infrastructure resources: its installed base among enterprises. Its existing server virtualization platform is said to hold as high as 80% worldwide market share in terms of current sales. And as we’ve noted here before, some market analysts actually rate VMware as the leader in containerization, simply because its competitors in that space (you may have heard of Docker, for instance) have too few assets to bother examining them.

For a great many enterprises — as one survey reveals, nearly 9 in 10 — the container revolution stops at the boundaries of the virtual machine. In these environments, containers don’t seep into the infrastructure at all. So hyperscale — the type of environment one would need, arguably, to truly deploy applications as microservices — never actually happens there.

If it were up to VMware Chief Technology Strategy Officer Guido Appenzeller, and if architecture were the only factor under consideration, as he stated in an interview for this edition of The New Stack: Context, he would be running containers every day.

“Everybody’s running containers inside of VMs — pretty much everybody I talk to,” said Appenzeller. “I can’t recall a single instance where people are actually running it on bare metal.”

VMware would prefer not to stand in the way. However, it has clearly engineered a pair of options for expanding containerization (if not to hyperscale, then at least beyond a single VM) whose paths are channeled through one of its own principal products: the NSX network virtualization platform.

“I think the changes we will see in infrastructure, and the full automation of infrastructure, will be accelerated because of containerization technology,” admitted VMware VP Paul Fazzone, who heads NSX product management. “If you think about how quickly and easily a developer can spin up tens or hundreds of containers in an environment, and stitch them together into an application, that will push the envelope on how performant and how responsive the infrastructure will need to be.”

Fazzone went on to admit he believes that human beings should not stand in the way of progress here — that as long as barriers do exist to the implementation of containerization as automation tools, developers will find ways around those barriers.

So it isn’t as if VMware is trying to create some artificial barrier to entry, the way a certain other market share leader in a different market segment successfully did, up until the middle of the last decade. Moreover, it’s taking advantage of the natural barricade that already exists, supported by enterprises’ uncertainty around security, compliance, and interoperability. It’s cutting more than one path through that barricade. In an environment where analysts and advisors set the stage, so Docker may not even be a player, which path — if either — will enterprises choose?