The New Stack Context

There is a new architecture for front-end web development: JAMStack rethinks the current server-browser architecture, freeing the developer from worrying about fiddling with Apache, Linux or other aspects of backend support.

For this week’s episode of the The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, which offers a JAMstack-based service that allows developers to simply push their code to git in order to update their web site or application. Key to this platform is an open source user interface framework created by Rauch, called Next.js, based on Facebook’s React, but tweaked to make it easier to build user interfaces not only for the developer but even for the designer.

TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

On the benefit of using a managed JAMstack such as Vercel’s (over a traditional LAMP stack), Rauch noted that:

You can deploy to an essentially serverless infrastructure, right? I always tell people that content delivery networks were the OG serverless — because they never required management. They were perfectly delegated. It’s a globally distributed system with no single point of failure. You’re not going to have to worry about Linux and Apache because you can deploy to any distributed global network that can serve essentially markup, JavaScript, CSS and static files. Then obviously to power the API, server rendering and more advanced functionality, the Vercel network gives you serverless functions. So we try to complete the entire JAMstack equation.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Denise Gosnell, chief data officer at Datastax, who is a co-author of the O’Reilly book “A Practitioner’s Guide to Graph Data.” She also graciously wrote a post for us explaining why graph databases are gaining traction in the enterprise.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Graph database systems differ from the standard relational (SQL) kind in that they are engineered to more easily capture the relations across different entities. “When you’re looking at your databases, graph databases allow you to model your data more efficiently by using relationships,” Gosnell said.

You could capture that relationship information through a series of database joins of separate tables, but eventually, the complexity of this approach would make it prohibitive. “When you look at the full end-to-end complexity for using it in an application or maintaining your code, or updating edges, graph databases are going to make that a lot easier for the full lifecycle and maintenance of that application,” she said.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Chris DiBona, director of open source at Google, about Google’s launch of the Open Usage Commons, an independent company to help open source projects better manage their trademarks.

In a blog post, DiBona notes that trademarks sit at the juncture of the rule-of-law and the philosophy of open source. So for this episode, we wanted to find out more about how they interact and how Google is attempting to improve the management of trademarks in an open source way. We also wanted to address the rumors that this organization was created to manage Google’s Istio open source service mesh in lieu of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (DiBona’s answer: no).

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Craig McLuckie, who is the VMware chief of Tanzu development, as well as one of the creators of Kubernetes. We asked him about the importance of the developer for modern business, the value that Kubernetes brings to developers and how VMware’s Tanzu portfolio enables that.

TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Matt Asay, principal from the open source office at Amazon Web Services about his new series of posts on The New Stack that documents the contributors and originators behind many of the most popular open source programs we use every day.

TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

Over the past few weeks, AWS’ Asay has been traveling the open source world — virtually — to write a set of fascinating series on The New Stack that documents the contributors and originators behind many of the most popular open source programs we use every day.

In this series, we’ve met the developers behind more than a dozen projects, including Wireshark, Matplotlab, Curl and many other widely-used tools. The idea with the series is to, in Asay’s words, “shine a spotlight on an array of open source projects (and their founders and/or lead maintainers) that quietly serve behind-the-scenes. In the process, I hope that we’ll gain insight into both why and how these critically important projects have managed to thrive for so long. This, in turn, just might provide useful information on how best to sustain open source projects.”

In this interview, we ask Asay what he has learned speaking with all these creators, about project management and open source itself. We chat about how to join an open source project, and why it is difficult for maintainers to attract more help (and, in some cases, why they may not want contributions at all). Also on the agenda was the importance of open source licensing, how the younger generation of developers think about the idea of “open source,” and the long path it has taken for worldwide acceptance.

“I spent 10 years railing against the Microsoft machine for things with FUD around SUSE and Linux and whatnot. And now I’ve spent just as much time praising Microsoft for the great open source contributions that they make. But people don’t know that history.”

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Eric Sammer, Splunk distinguished engineer, about the IT system monitoring company’s ongoing effort to rename its “white list / black list” and “master/slave” terminology to remove language that perpetuates systemic racism and unconscious bias in tech. Splunk brought together a working group of people from across the organization to develop additional recommendations, guidelines, and procedures to identify and replace biased language and to prevent other instances from happening in the future. We also chatted with Sammer about what has happened since the company he co-founded, event-driven services monitoring provider Rocana, was acquired by Splunk in 2017.

This week in TNS, D2IQ co-founder Tobi Knaup wrote about the growing problem of container sprawl, a by product of more companies running containers in production, and as a result, there is a loss of efficiency on the part of the DevOps teams managing them. https://thenewstack.io/container-sprawl-is-the-new-vm-sprawl/

In this episode, we will speak with Ben Hindman, D2IQ co-founder, and CTO, about this issue of container sprawl, and how it hampers “Day 2 Operations” as D2IQ (formerly Mesosphere) calls it.

We also will discuss the company’s recent Cloud Native Virtual Summit, its recently released KUDO tool https://thenewstack.io/kudo-automates-kubernetes-operators/ , the 6th Anniversary of Kubernetes, and the latest on Mesosphere and the DCOS.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

For this week’s episode, we spoke with Priyanka Sharma, the new general manager for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, about her rich work history and her visions and strategies for moving CNCF forward. Also joining the convo is Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF chief technology officer.

This week, the CNCF announced that Sharma will now lead the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, taking over the role filled by former Executive Director Dan Kohn.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb.io, the observability platform vendor, about the company’s pricing changes brought on by COVID-19 and more broadly how observability practices and tools are changing as more companies make the move to the cloud.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Honeycomb this week changed its pricing structure to reflect the cost realities for businesses and the long term effect of COVID-19. The company also recently released the results of a survey that shows half of the developers surveyed aren’t using observability currently, but 75% plan to do so in the next two years. And in April the company released an open source collector for OpenTracing that allows teams to import telemetry data from open source projects into any observability platform, including their own but also their competitors.

Yen said of the pricing changes:

Our old pricing was, you bought a certain amount of storage and gigabytes and paid for a certain amount of data ingest, also in gigabytes, over a period of time. We felt like that was a little bit harder for people to map to their existing workflows, harder for them to predict. So we shifted to an events-per-month ingest model, one axis, one way to scale your usage.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Peter Zaitsev, CEO of the open source database software and services company Percona,. This week, Percona held its own virtual 24 hour virtual conference, Percona Live Online, where open source, databases and cloud native computing were all discussed. So we grilled Zaitsev about how traditional SQL databases operate in a cloud native world, as well as about Percona’s newly announced performance and optimization package for MongoDB.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.