The New Stack Context

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and views from the cloud native community. This week, we spoke Luca Mezzalira, chief architect at sports video streaming site DAZN (Da-Zone), about the idea and evolution of microfrontends, or the equivalent of a microservices approach to scaling frontend development.

Mezzalira has written and presented talks about his journey to design the company’s scale-out frontend streaming application, one that he calls one of the most challenging architectures he’s ever created. DAZN was dealing with a lot of the same issues that companies with large, monolithic backends face as they tried to quickly, and massively scale. We’ll hear about how his team developed the DAZN microfrontends. If content is king, then distribution is the queen, he reminded us in this lively interview.

Then later in the show, we’ll discuss the recent data breach at Capital One due to a “firewall misconfiguration” that allowed a hacker to access data on over 100 million customers in the company’s AWS S3 buckets. As regular readers know, The New Stack has had dozens of posts (most recently) about the dangers of cloud security over the past few years. And they all have the same basic underlying message: even if you use third-party cloud services, security is still your responsibility.

In this week's episode, we’re talking with a couple of VMware folks about a way to optimize continuous deployment with a new technique called continuous verification.

Dan Illson, native cloud advocate at VMware cloud services, and Bahubali (Bill) Shetti, director of cloud advocacy at VMware,  wrote on the site this week that many applications are not ready for use at the completion of their deployment pipelines.

Post-deployment work to “operationalize” or “harden” services is still fairly common practice and generally slows the overall rate of software delivery. We’ll hear from them about how a practice of continuous verification can help teams deliver software faster. The idea with CV is that it can augment the CI/CD process by moving many of the post-deployment steps into feedback loops within the pipeline. The tools are already there. In fact, any monitoring or security tool that can report on its work by way of an API can be fit into an existing pipeline (depending on how flexible the CI/CD server is at handling APIs, of course),

Then later in the podcast, we discuss some of the week's stories and podcasts on the site. We delve into the basics of Robotic Processing Automation, and Kubernetes. We delve into the Unix pipe command, and how it has proved so instrumental to modern computer programming. And we discuss the evolving role of the site reliability engineer.

This week's episode was recorded (mostly) live from O'Reilly's flagship open source conference, OSCON 2019, held this week in The New Stack's home base of Portland, Oregon.

Our special guest for this episode was Thomas Grassl, who is a vice president, and global head of developer relations and community at the enterprise and software services delivery company SAP. One may not initially think of SAP and open source together but in fact the company has had a hand open source projects for decades now, including Cloud Foundry, Eclipse and many more. The company is the second largest contributor to Java, after Oracle itself. "To understand these projects, you need to have an active engagement in," he said.

We also discussed SAP 's own Open Source Programming Office, which has spawned its own project, including CLA Assistant, an effort to handle contributing licensing agreements after the company itself found no rational process to manage them. This opened the conversation about the ongoing tension between open source projects and the giant cloud providers about licensing and fairness. We also chatted about about SAP's involvement in the Open Data Initiative with other enterprise giants such as Adobe and Microsoft. "It's very much a customer-driven initiative," Grassl said. "You have data you need to combine between different vendors. This is definitely one of the big hurdles that a lot of customers have."

This week, we discuss the use of the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to improve container monitoring.

For this discussion we are joined by  Daniella Pontes, who is the senior manager of product marketing at InfluxData and Luca Deri, founder of the ntop network monitoring tool. Deri and InfluxData have partnered to produce a container monitoring tool, based on eBPF, ntop and the Influx DB time-series database system.

Pontes and Deri wrote about this new project in a recent post for TNS, "IT Monitoring in the Era of Containers: Tapping into eBPF Observability." In the world of containers and microservices, they write, monitoring services from the outside only doesn’t work. Instead, IT teams should read system metrics directly to gain insight into the activities inside and between the containers themselves. eBPF is one way to get system information about the workload running on the container.

This week, we catch up with The New Stack founder and Publisher Alex Williams to learn about his trip to Shanghai, China, to attend the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2019.

In this chat, we discussed the ongoing trade issues between China and the U.S., and how they effect Asian companies such as Huawei, and well as efforts of the Linux Foundation to unify the efforts to build an open source community that spans the globe. We also discuss two keynote talks that were given, by Linux founder Linus Torvalds, and the chief maintainer of the older Linux kernels Greg Kroah-Hartman, about open source communities and the need for better vulnerability management, respectively.

Then later, in the show, we discuss with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson a conference that he attended last week, Redis Day New York. There the company unveiled its new timeseries database configuration, as well as some exciting new benchmarks, showing the database as capable of executing 200 million operations per second.

Today we’re talking with Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, about how and why to use managed services from a cloud provider such as AWS.

Epsagon is a sponsor of The New Stack that provides automated observability and cost management for serverless applications using distributed tracing and AI technologies. He wrote a post for us this week on the evolution of managed services such as AWS Fargate and Amazon EKS, the tradeoffs and benefits of using them and his tips for how to choose a managed service.

Then later in the show, we discuss the latest news from EnterpriseDB's Postgres Vision, JFrog's swampUp, and QCON New York conferences, as well as our top podcast pick from the week, an interview with Gitlab's Ashish Kuthiala about the changing role of CI/CD.

This week, we spoke with Jonas Bonér, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of real-time system provider  Lightbend, about some experimental work his company is doing to create a serverless interface for general purpose, stateful applications. Jonas gave a talk at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon in Barcelona last month called “Serverless is Interesting but FaaS is Not Enough”  that addressed this topic.

And back in February on The New Stack, Bonér wrote a contributed piece calling for the creation of the next generation of serverless technology, what he’s also calling “serverless 2.0” or stateful serverless. "The programming model for serverless is still mainly limited to stateless functions — the so-called Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) model — which limits the range of use-cases supported," he wrote in that post.

In this podcast, we discuss the “serverless 2.0” movement brewing from OpenFaaS and other open source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

We also chatted about the definitions that the cloud native community is settling in on that next phase is for serverless, and what that should constitute serverless 2.0.

Then in the second half of the show, we’ll discuss our top podcast and stories for the week.

How is the open source Kubernetes container orchestration engine actually used out in the wild? Does it drive large clusters for service providers to run multi-tenant apps? Or are its clusters small, fit for managing the lifecycle of a single app? Rob Hirschfeld, CEO of bare metal infrastructure management company RackN, did his own informal Twitter survey to find some answers, and got a wealth of answers, which he summarized in a blog post for The New Stack.

On this episode of the The New Stack Context, a weekly wrap-up podcast of news and views in the cloud native computing community,  we talk with Hirschfeld about his survey, and what the future may hold for Kubernetes.

"As Kubernetes emerges as the de facto management platform, we are still figuring out what that means. The challenge is that it exists in a gray zone between a specialized application platform and general purpose infrastructure abstraction. I wanted to understand if one set of use-cases was more common," he wrote.

In the second half of the show, we talk with our Oakland technology news correspondent T.C. Currie about her recent podcast interview with Zack Butcher, a founding engineer at Tetrate.

This week, we come live from the the Monitorama conference, held this week in Portland, where we spoke with Liz Fong Jones, developer advocate at observability service provider Honeycomb.io and Quintessence Anx, developer advocate, at troubleshooting firm Logz.io. Then later we discuss some of the other news items and podcasts from the week.

With Jones and Anx, we discussed the culture of burnout in the IT industry and how companies can better consider the humans who design and run their systems. We also discussed our takeaways from the conference itself. Then later in the show, show host Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at The New Stack, discusses the top news from the site with Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor. We discuss the update to Honeycomb.io's observability platform, and Palo Alto Networks intended purchase of container security provider Twistlock and serverless security provider PureSec. Oh, also we discuss Pivotal's new Spring-based OpenJDK distribution, and alarming new research on "deepfake" videos.

This week on The New Stack Context podcast we discuss how the enterprise can deploy microservices, with two authors of the recently published book, "Microservices for the Enterprise: Designing, Developing, and Deploying." Kasun Indrasiri is the director of integration architecture, for WSO2 — a sponsor of The New Stack  — and Prabath Siriwardena, vice president of security architecture for WSO2.

The book delves into the key challenges and solutions around building microservices in a vendor-neutral way. Microservice fundamentals are explained via use cases from the enterprise software architecture. The book covers integrating microservice and eliminating the central Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), selecting the best Inter-service communication technique for your service, API Management and Governance of microservices and much more. In the podcast, we discussed the challenges of bring microservices to the enterprise, with the authors offering many practical tips.In the second half of the podcast, we discuss the some of the posts this week from the site, including the latest Docker vulnerability, as well as a step-by-step tutorial on using WSO2's Ballerina programming language with Amazon Web Services' Lambda serverless service.

We also wrap up some leftover news from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019, which was held in Barcelona earlier this month. We also discuss a recent podcast with Maddie Patrichi, senior software developer for Oracle, and Gregg Altschul, co-founder and CTO, for Autom8.Network, who chat about new services and tools continue to emerge for cloud native deployments.