The New Stack Context

This week, on The New Stack Context podcast, we talking about how cloud providers are affecting open source companies with Karthik Ramasamy, co-founder and CEO of Streamlio. Streamlio offers cloud native messaging, processing and event storage as a service, powered by Apache Pulsar.

This week, everyone was buzzing about Amazon’s new distribution of Elasticsearch. AWS was careful to say it wasn’t a fork of the project on which the company Elasticsearch runs a lucrative business. But instead justified the move by saying it was too difficult for users of the project to distinguish between the open source code and the proprietary code which the company charges for.

Karthik will talk in the first half of the show with us about this battle between the cloud providers and commercial open source companies and how business models are evolving. He wrote about this very topic a few weeks ago on The New Stack in a post called “2019: The Cloud’s Impact on Open Source.”

Then later in the show, we catch up on all the news from the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit, in Half Moon Bay, California.

This week, in a nod to the RSA Conference that was held this week, we spoke to Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata, about what your Kubernetes security checklist is probably missing.

Bugwadia wrote a post for The New Stack in which he shares the security model Nirmata uses to guide its enterprise customers with Kubernetes adoption. Nirmata is a DevOps platform for containerized application deployments and is a sponsor of The New Stack. In the second half of the show, we review our other podcast and stories for the week, including some of the news coming out of RSA, such as Twistlock’s new release that promises container native security for VMs as well as Scytale’s new SPIFFE-based Service Identity Management tool.

This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we talk about how feature flagging promotes cross-team collaboration and DevOps with Adam Zimman, vice president of product and platform at The New Stack sponsor LaunchDarkly.

As Zimman wrote in a post this week, feature flags are increasingly being used in release management to decouple feature rollout from code deployment. Using feature flags, a new feature can, say, be tested on a small and friendly group of users before it’s rolled out to everybody. But did you know that using feature flags can actually encourage different teams, developers and product managers, for example, to work together more closely?

Then in the second half of the show, we discuss Mary Branscombe’s article this week about some of the issues companies are running into due to the limited Kubernetes support for IPv6 addresses.

This week,  we’re talking with TNS correspondent Mike Melanson about Google’s new Cloud Services Platform. It’s a software offering (now in beta) that links Google’s managed Kubernetes service GKE with its on premises version, GKE on-prem, for enterprises that want to run workloads on premises and in the cloud using the same management environment. Google is following Amazon Web Services (with Outposts) and Microsoft (Azure Stack) in offering a on-premises version of its cloud stack, though Google is the first one to Istio as part of the package.

Later in the podcast, we discuss the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit North America , to be held in Philadelphia on April 2-4, 2019. As you know, Cloud Foundry is a Platform -as-a-Service software designed to make it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Companies such as Allstate, Royal Bank of Canada, and CSAA Insurance Group have all used Cloud Foundry in production settings.

In this week's episode of The New Stack Context, we talk about New Relic’s growth into AI ops with its recent acquisition of SignifAI. Aaron Johnson, SVP of Product Management at New Relic and Guy Fighel, co-founder and former CTO of SignifAI and now the GM, AIOps & VP of Product Engineering at New Relic both shared their vision behind the acquisition and how machine learning can be used to monitor and troubleshoot complex IT systems.

Then later in the show we discuss how to get rid of technology debt. Is the answer to stop using open source libraries and frameworks? Robert Lefkowitz, the recently retired Chief Architect of eyewear provider Warby Parker, is advocating that approach, and we'll delve into that.

TNS Editorial Director Libby Clark hosted this show, with the help of Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor and Alex Williams, TNS co-founder and editor-in-chief.

This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Rob Zuber, chief technology officer of CircleCI about what it means for an organization to reach DevOps maturity.

"The good news is the kind of growth we see in DevOps organizations of all kinds is compounded: the more skills and processes teams put in place, the more ready they become to handle the issues of scale and increasing complexity that face them down the road as they grow," Zuber wrote in part 1 of his contributed series on The New Stack. DevOps helps teams get more productive, and then helps them gracefully handle the growth that stems from that productivity. This is what we mean by DevOps maturity."

Later in the show we also discuss news coming from the O'Reilly Software Architecture conference, held in New York this week.

For this week's episode, we speak with Rich Adams, a senior engineer of security and incident response at PagerDuty. A few weeks back, PagerDuty released as open source the documentation for how organizations can set up a process for responding to incidents, including the establishment of a command center and the designation of an incident response leader. The guidelines are based on the company's own standard operating procedures for handling a crisis.

In the second half of the show, we spoke to Kong co-founder Marco Palladino, about the end of what calls "software tribalism," as open source moves the industry to a hybrid world driven by developers, not software stack vendors.

For this week's episode, we speak with Sonya Koptyev, who is the director of evangelism for cloud native security provider Twistlock, which is holding a webinar/conference, Cloud Native Live this Monday, on Jan. 29.

There are a lot of great speakers on this day-long event. In the main keynote, Pivotal’s Dormain Drewitz will share secrets of enterprises who have successfully adopted the best principles of digital transformation. CI/CD expert Brice Fernandes will explain the GitOps model, identifying best practices and tools to use on this emerging practice. Other speakers include Priyanka Sharma, director of cloud native alliances at GitLab and Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

For this week's episode, we're speaking with Emily Freeman, a software engineer and cloud advocate at Microsoft, about the role of developer relations in developer marketing. Freeman wrote on her personal blog late last year about the role of developer relations, otherwise known as devrel, in software engineering. Developer relations roles have become more popular at large enterprises and the major cloud providers. We recently noticed Amazon Web Services advertising a raft of new developer relations openings focused on serverless and the Azure team alone has 15 advocate roles open.  But the position has taken a bit of heat, of late, among a vocal group of Twitter critics. So Emily is here to help clarify what devrel is all about and why you might just want to thank the next one you see.  

In the second half of the show, we’ll review our top stories for the week, including Mary Branscombe’s article this week on HTTP/3.  When HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol, was invented, the needs were pretty clear — to ship Web pages quickly and reliably from servers to end clients, which back in the early 1990s, was always a home computer. As the Web grew and spread onto other platforms, such as mobile devices, and took on new formats, such as streaming video, the packet-switching technology started to hit its limits.

This week on The New Stack Context, our weekly news wrapup podcast, we spoke Paul Dix, founder and chief technology officer of InfluxData, about why time series databases are needed now.

The New Stack sponsor InfluxData launched InfluxDB, an open source time series platform, in 2013. Since then, the software has had millions of downloads, built an expanding list of enterprise customers, and fostered a growing community. InfluxData CMO Mark Herring writes on The New Stack this week that most data is best understood in a time dimension, so the time series space is really just getting started. Paul spoke with us about why this is the case, and also shared some info about the company's new query language for time series data, called Flux, as well.

In the second half of the show, we’ll review our top stories for the week and discuss Exoscale's Container Stack, a conference all about doing DevOps with Kubernetes which will be held in Zurich on Jan. 30-31.