The New Stack Context

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 Tina Nolte, vice president of product, for Kubernetes management service Spectro Cloud, about why we shouldn’t think of containers/Kubernetes as just another form of virtualization.

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

Nolte recently wrote a popular post for us on why we shouldn’t think of containers and Kubernetes as just another form of virtualization — that it opens up a whole new way to think about application development and deployment. So we wanted to find out more about this concept.

“Kubernetes is really about that middle area between infrastructure and application. So the applications themselves are enabled to be differently architected because of that operational PaaS layer if you will,” she explained. “It’s not just a lift-and-shift of old apps into new infrastructure.”

Focusing too much on the infrastructure side of Kubernetes ultimately misses its true value, an insight Nolte gleaned, in part, from working for a well-regarded OpenStack-based start-up, Nebula, that ultimately shuttered.

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 Deepak Singh, Amazon Web Services’ vice president for containers and open source, and Peder Ulander, AWS general manager for open source, about the company’s recently released Bottlerocket Linux distribution for the cloud.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams, 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 Sebastien Goasguen, co-founder and chief product officer, TriggerMesh, about how to build applications from serverless functions that span multiple clouds, using the company’s software.

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

We spoke with Goasguen about the role that TriggerMesh plays for GitLab and enterprise customers. Last month, TriggerMesh released the Cloud Native Integration Platform as well as the AWS Event Sources for OpenShift, timing the release with the virtual Red Hat Summit. With the latter offering, TriggerMesh brings Amazon EventBridge-like functionality to the OpenShift ecosystem allowing developers to trigger functions across clouds and legacy data centers. TriggerMesh users can now link events from anywhere to Red Hat OpenShift workloads.

“Serverless is not just function-as-a-service. It’s not just functions. It’s actually an integration problem. We call TriggerMesh a cloud-native integration platform: We compose cloud services together, glue them together thanks to an event-driven architecture,” Goasguen said.

Then, later in the podcast, we discuss the top podcasts and news stories from the site, including an interview with agile expert Emily Webber on remote work, how serverless can help embed security into the development process, the idea of offering databases as a serverless service, and the importance of standards in serverless adoption.

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 Joe Duffy, Founder and CEO of Pulumi, and Sophia Parafina, Pulumi’s technical marketing manager. In this convo, we delve into the recent Pulumi 2.0 release, which allows teams to reuse code, apply policies and do integration testing of infrastructure the same way they do for application development, a concept known as “architecture as code.”

TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams 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 The New Stack correspondent Jennifer Riggins about all of the excellent reporting she and others on the TNS team have been doing recently on the effects that COVID-19 is having on the tech industry.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

For this episode, we wanted to look not only discuss the changing patterns in network traffic that the global COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, due to factors such people staying at home and working from home, and the sudden acceleration of e-learning. As Riggins writes in a recent post:

For a lot of tech and infrastructure teams, they not only are going through the stress of the collective trauma we’re sharing in, but they are struggling to keep up with ever-scaling, extreme strains on their systems. Simply put, no one could have predicted this uptick.

One big theme that kept popping up was “resiliency,” not only from an individual psychological perspective, as well from organizational and systems views as well.

Here are some of the other posts we discussed:

The Network Impact of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic: How has the worldwide pandemic stressed our networks? In multiple ways, according to this report from our London correspondent Mary Branscombe. Internet traffic is generally 25% to 30% higher than usual. You can also see the change in where people are connecting from; usage is up in residential areas but visibly down in downtown San Francisco, downtown San Jose and especially the Cupertino and Mountain View neighborhoods where Apple and Google have their campuses.

U.S. Unemployment Surge Highlights Dire Need for COBOL Skills: One of the surprise stories coming from the global pandemic has been the dire need for COBOL developers. Who would have seen that one coming? New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is now asking for volunteers with COBOL skills. New Jersey’s 40-year-old mainframe benefits system was besieged by a 1,600% increase in usage, as over 371,000 people have filed claims in the past month.

Keep Your Endpoints Secure During the COVID-19 Pandemic: We are also seeing more reports of security breaches indirectly due to the spreading virus. In this contributed post from CalSoft’s Sagar Nangare, he notes that People are scared and hungry for more information around events like COVID-19. In panic mode, they surf the internet, visit fake pages, and fall prey to phishing scams. Also, endpoints for remote access have increased due to remote working, increasing surface areas for cybercriminals to target.

How Kubernetes Prepared 8×8 for a 50x Spike in Videoconferencing Usage: The New Stack spoke to 8×8, a cloud communications and video collaboration provider to learn how the company phased in remote-by-default, and how it is creating systems and team resiliency during a 50-fold increase in traffic over less than a month. One answer? Kubernetes.

Chaos, Hugs and Interruptions: Dev Folks Work from Home with Kids: Working at home is nothing new to the cloud native computing community, which has always been about the distributing workloads. But adding children, who all of sudden were home full time as well when the schools closed, adds another stress to already frazzled IT pros. Here are some tips on getting by.

SaltStack’s CTO on Pandemics, the End of Empires and Software’s Future: Here’s an interview with Thomas S. Hatch, founder and Chief Technology Officer of SaltStack where he discusses how software engineers’ lives have changed (or not), the folly of forcing workers to come to the office when they really do not need to and his observations of network infrastructure saturation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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 Derek Weeks, vice president at Sonatype, about the results of a new community survey the company just released on DevSecOps that provides some insights on how teams are incorporating automated security tools and how that shift affects company culture and developer happiness.

Sonotype’s Nexus open source governance platform helps more than 1,000 organizations and 10 million software developers simultaneously accelerate innovation and improve application security. This is the seventh year that Sonatype has done this DevSecOps report, and, according to the company, it’s the longest running community survey on this topic. We discuss with Weeks how the practice of DevSecOps changed since the company started doing the survey, and the challenges organizations face in embedding security within their DevOps practices. We also ponder the reasons behind the puzzling finding that those companies with mature DevSecOps actually have more security breaches.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

For more episodes listen here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/

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 a couple of folks from cloud workload protection platform provider Rezilion: CEO Liran Tancman, and Chief Marketing Officer Tal Klein. We discuss how current best practices in security are actually outdated and how they think companies should be approaching security practices in the age of DevOps.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Klein wrote a contributed article for TNS on “Why Vulnerability Management Needs a Patch,” where he argues that current best practices and tools around security patching, such as the CVSS system for rating vulnerabilities, are outdated, particularly for modern DevOps shops.

As Klein says in the interview:

When you’ve got vulnerabilities, it’s very tough to figure out which ones to fix first, and the fact is that more and more vulnerabilities are discovered every year. So there’s, there’s a greater amount of things to patch and if you don’t know which ones to patch first, you’re never going to be able to address the full patching needs of your organization. And that’s been a cat and mouse game for a long time.

Then later in the show, we discuss some of our top podcasts and stories of the week. Our sister podcast, The New Stack Makers, posted an interview with DevRel trailblazer (and Coder-Twitter celeb) Cassidy Williams, on building software communities. COVID-19 continues to tear through the IT community, and so we look at the shifting network traffic patterns that have come about from the pandemic, as well as the additional babysitting duties that many IT professionals have to now mix into their daily work from home routines. Finally, we discuss The Eclipse Foundation’s Theia code editor, which has been billed as “a true open source alternative to Visual Studio Code.”

Listen to ALL of our shows here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/

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 Kelsey Hightower, a developer advocate at Google, and Ben Sigelman, CEO and co-founder of observability services provider LightStep, about whether or not teams should favor a monolith over a microservices approach when architecting cloud native applications.

Hightower recently tweeted a prediction that “Monolithic applications will be back in style after people discover the drawbacks of distributed monolithic applications.” It was quite a surprise for those who have been advocating the for operational benefits of microservices. Why go back to a monolith?

As Hightower explains in the podcast: “There are a lot of people who have never left a monolith. So there’s really not anything to go back to. So it’s really about the challenges of adopting a microservices architecture. From a design perspective, like very few companies talk about, here’s how we designed our monolith.”

Sigelman, on the other hand, maintained that microservices are necessary for rapid development, which, in turn, is necessary for sustaining a business. “It’s not so much that you should use microservices, it’s more like, if you don’t innovate faster than your competitors, your company will eventually be erased, like, that’s the actual problem. And in order to do that, you need to build a lot of differentiated technology,” he said. Microservices is the most logical approach for maintaining a large software team while still maintaining a competitive velocity of development.

Later in the show, we discuss some of the top TNS podcasts and news posts of the week, including an interview with IBM’s Lin Sun on the importance of the service mesh, as Sysdig’s offer of a distributed, scalable Prometheus, a group of chief technology officers who want to help the U.S. government with the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the hidden vulnerabilities that come with open source security.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Listen to more from The New Stack here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts

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 Liran Tal, a developer advocate at container security platform provider Snyk and a member of the Node.js security working group, about who should own security in the DevOps process — the security team or the development?

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Tal wrote an article for us recently, “‘DevSecOps Insights 2020’: Who Really Owns Security in DevOps,”which summarized the results of a survey the company carried out covering security, development and operations. The post included a couple of surprising survey results, namely that only 14% of respondents reported that they test for known vulnerabilities in container images, and 38% of respondents don’t integrate automated security scanning into their DevOps pipeline.

As Tal writes in the post:

When that many respondents agree security is a major concern when trying to deliver software quickly, it means we need to scale up security to enable fast delivery of security fixes. The key to doing that is developers, as they ultimately fix security issues in an application’s source code.

We also get Tal’s views on incorporating security into the a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), the need for development speed, as well as his thoughts on the recent purchase of npm by GitHub.

Then, later in the show, we discuss some of the top podcasts and news stories from the site. An episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast provides fodder for discussing service mesh adoption. Also on the agenda: Frustrations mount over Python 3 migrations; Project Calico offers a faster data plane with the help of eBPF; and an excellent side-by-side comparison offered by StackRox’s Karen Bruner of the managed Kubernetes offerings from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Listen to all of The New Stack podcasts here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week we spoke with Mohan Raj, IT senior manager of the CloudOne developer experience at NetApp. Over the past two years, he has been building a DevOps platform at NetApp that provides cloud services, automation, and CI/CD release models for the company’s application development teams that need to build cloud native applications — using NetApps own tools.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.