The New Stack Context

This week we speak to Maria Colgan, Oracle master product manager, to learn about the company's Oracle Autonomous Database. Last month, at Oracle OpenWorld, the company introduced a new free tier to this cloud offering.

Then, for the second half of the show, we discuss three conferences we attended this week, including SpringOne Platform in Austin, TX, Puppetize PDX, and SAP TechEd 2019 in Barcelona.

For this week's episode, we’re talking with Wayne Ariola, chief marketing officer at Tricentis. Tricentis develops DevOps tools for continuous software testing and is a sponsor of The New Stack. Ariola is a frequent contributor to The New Stack on the topics of software quality, agile and continuous testing, test automation and, most recently, robotic process automation (RPA). We’ll spoke with him about how DevOps processes and tools have changed for cloud native architectures and what that means, in particular for software testing.

Then later in the show we’ll cover the top stories on The New Stack over the past few weeks, including a new Linux memory management proposal, and our recent coverage of Red Hat’s AnsibleFest.

For this week's episode, we're conversed with Srinath Perera, software architect and vice president of research in the CTO Office of WSO2, about his research on the practical uses of blockchain.

WSO2 is a sponsor of The New Stack and it offers an integrated platform for API management, integration, identity and access management, analytics and IoT. And its research is also on the cutting edge of cloud native technology. It is also the company behind the Ballerina cloud native programming language.

Perera leads these research efforts and has written recently about serverless technologies and blockchain for us. With blockchain, his team wasn’t sure which use cases are feasible and would also deliver a clear value. So they did a systematic analysis of blockchain technology using the company's Emerging Technology Analysis Canvas (ETAC).

This week we’re talking with Chris Grams, the head of marketing at open source subscription startup, Tidelift.

Tidelift offers a managed open source subscription to help companies manage and maintain their dependencies on open source projects. They’re also a sponsor of The New Stack and our partner on a survey we did earlier this year about how developers use open source to build applications in the workplace.

We spoke with Grams about how much time do developers spend handling maintenance and security issues related to unmaintained open source dependencies, what is preventing coders from using more open source components, and what the most important factors developers to consider when choosing a new open source project.

This year at its annual user conference –Seattle this year—HashiCorp introduced two new tiers to its Terraform Cloud service, a paid version that isn't the full enterprise version, but one for smaller teams, and another one that covers governance, and cost prediction. Terraform Cloud is like the GitHub to Terraform's git. Terraform, an infrastructure management tool, can be used from a laptop, and HashiCorp offers a free tier on Terraform Cloud, where the CLI commands are translated into API calls. The new Teams tier offers the ability to manage teams, with full RBAC control. and the Governance edition, also paid, has a code framework for enforcing granular rules against infrastructure, and even cost estimation, which provides a prediction of how much a proposed infrastructure will cost to run in the cloud.

In our talk, Dadgar explained that the tier addresses a heretofore underserved segment for the rapidly growing company: projects that have blossomed into full-scale apps that need predictable infrastructure. They don’t quite require the governance controls that the enterprises (aka the “Fortune 2000”) do, but they do require coordination. As a Terraform’ed project grows, the company reasons, it will have more contributors, and everything will need tracked and controlled.

This week, we're recording from TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco, held September 5. Our guest is Haley Daiber, a senior associate at Unusual Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund.

The New Stack has been talking and writing a lot about TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise over the past few months, as a media partner and also a participant. We held a pancake breakfast and podcast panel in the  morning and TNS founder Alex Williams moderated a session in the afternoon. And we were excited about this event because it signals a new excitement and heat in the enterprise software space. This has been evident so far in the keynotes we’ve heard today, at the event: Jason Green from Emergence Capital for example, called this "the golden age of enterprise."  So we spoke with Daiber about what enterprise software looks like from an investor’s perspective.

Then, later in the podcast, we discussed the week's top stories and podcasts, including excellent contributed posts on adopting role-based access control for Kubernetes and migrating to Python 3. We also discuss a new service mesh, and how "punk rock" music from the 1970s resembles open source today.

This week we discuss all the news from VMware's annual VMworld conference, held this week in San Francisco, with special guest RackN founder/and CEO Rob Hirschfeld. RackN is  provider of next generation infrastructure automation software for provisioning bare metal, VMs, clouds, and edges.

At the event, VMware announced it’s going all-in on Kubernetes. There were hints the company was going in that direction with its acquisition of Heptio in November, a company founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who were among Kubernetes’ founders. At the show, the company announced that vSphere with Kubernetes in a new alpha offering called Project Pacific. 

Hirschfeld opined that, with this Kubernetes support, VMware is playing defense, given that operations teams using the vSphere platform might be getting requests from their developer counterparts for Kubernetes support.

This week we spoke with Andreas Grabner, a DevOps Activist at Dynatrace, about why Kubernetes and artificial intelligence (AI) are made for each other.

Grabner wrote a contributed post for us last week, “How AI Solves the Kubernetes Complexity Conundrum” in which he argues that integrating Kubernetes with artificial intelligence and an AIOps culture can make Kubernetes deployments more manageable for IT and DevOps teams. Dynatrace, a sponsor of The New Stack, builds AI-assisted, full stack and completely automated monitoring software for dynamic, web-scale, hybrid cloud ecosystem.

"Kubernetes offers enterprises a valuable new tool for kicking digital transformations and time-to-market timetables into a new gear. But to take full advantage of it, IT and DevOps need to drive a culture shift toward AI and automation; most other existing IT approaches simply do not adequately work or scale in this new world," Grabner wrote in the blog.

This week we spoke with Chip Childers, technology chief of staff at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, about the technical and architectural decisions that help define the modern enterprise. Cloud Foundry Foundation is the independent organization that oversees the development and adoption of the Cloud Foundry platform, and it’s a sponsor of The New Stack.

More than half of the Fortune 500 uses Cloud Foundry, so the Cloud Foundry Foundation depends on the enterprise using, contributing to, and advancing its open source projects. Childers works closely with developers and CIOs at all of the foundation’s member companies, and so he has a deep understanding of what it is that a modern enterprise needs in order to succeed in today’s rapidly changing technology landscape. In a recent post for The New Stack, he wrote that  “Modern enterprises ... think critically about what they should build themselves and what they should source from somewhere else.”

This week, we talk with Charity Majors, chief technology officer of Honeycomb.io and a pioneer in observability about the three-year anniversary of that movement which has significantly changed how applications are monitored and maintained in the cloud native era.

Majors contributed a post that appeared on The New Stack this week in which she takes a closer look at why the observability movement formed and why other approaches and methods fall short. She explained why engineering teams must continue to focus on this approach in order to better understand, debug, and maintain large-scale distributed systems.

"When we blew up the monolith into many services, we lost the ability to step through our code with a debugger: it now hops the network. Our tools are still coming to grips with this seismic shift," Majors writes.