The New Stack Podcast

New York City-based Packet offers companies a kind of infrastructure automation service — a way for them to host services and applications directly on bare-metal servers, through Packet’s own network of hard-wired connections. At the last DockerCon, Packet senior vice president for revenue Jacob Smith gave Alex Williams his insights about how he feels services such as his will steer the future look and feel of the Internet as a whole over the next five years.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VK-572OVQfM

New York City-based Packet offers companies a kind of infrastructure automation service — a way for them to host services and applications directly on bare-metal servers, through Packet’s own network of hard-wired connections. At the last DockerCon, Packet senior vice president for revenue Jacob Smith gave Alex Williams his insights about how he feels services such as his will steer the future look and feel of the Internet as a whole over the next five years.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VK-572OVQfM

New York City-based Packet offers companies a kind of infrastructure automation service — a way for them to host services and applications directly on bare-metal servers, through Packet’s own network of hard-wired connections. At the last DockerCon, Packet senior vice president for revenue Jacob Smith gave Alex Williams his insights about how he feels services such as his will steer the future look and feel of the Internet as a whole over the next five years.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VK-572OVQfM

The surge in availability of cloud-based platforms has made it possible, only in recent years, for major employers to devote hundreds of teams to thousands of software issues. No longer does a corporation have to create its own platform. It can adopt a platform that already exists, and build services that work with it.

It’s this philosophy that has enabled Comcast to employ over 1,500 software developers, with 12,000 cloud-native application instances deployed on 9 cloud environments including both private and public cloud infrastructure, according to Greg Otto, Comcast’s Executive Director for Cloud Services.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hRdD_9PLpHo

The surge in availability of cloud-based platforms has made it possible, only in recent years, for major employers to devote hundreds of teams to thousands of software issues. No longer does a corporation have to create its own platform. It can adopt a platform that already exists, and build services that work with it.

It’s this philosophy that has enabled Comcast to employ over 1,500 software developers, with 12,000 cloud-native application instances deployed on 9 cloud environments including both private and public cloud infrastructure, according to Greg Otto, Comcast’s Executive Director for Cloud Services.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hRdD_9PLpHo

The surge in availability of cloud-based platforms has made it possible, only in recent years, for major employers to devote hundreds of teams to thousands of software issues. No longer does a corporation have to create its own platform. It can adopt a platform that already exists, and build services that work with it.

It’s this philosophy that has enabled Comcast to employ over 1,500 software developers, with 12,000 cloud-native application instances deployed on 9 cloud environments including both private and public cloud infrastructure, according to Greg Otto, Comcast’s Executive Director for Cloud Services.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hRdD_9PLpHo

Capital One — where Jagielski presently serves as a senior distinguished technical fellow — can safely adapt its corporate culture to be permissive about using and adapting open source software, without the fear of being charged with violating copyright with its adaptations.

Jagielski’s most eye-opening revelations about the changes that have already happened in open source licensing — in ways we may not have been aware of — involve the legal meaning of “distribution.”  In an earlier age, to use software, you had to copy it — and of course, that’s distribution.  Yet when server-based applications were first being subscribed to by users and utilized through browsers without copying, suddenly it wasn’t distribution any more.

“That’s one of the reasons why the Free Software Foundation created a special version of GPL, called the Affero GPL,” he explained, “specifically designed to handle those cases.  It basically says that redistribution of software — which is when these licenses kick in — even applies if you’re just using the software ‘as-a-Service.’”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WbgcIcNErKg

Capital One — where Jagielski presently serves as a senior distinguished technical fellow — can safely adapt its corporate culture to be permissive about using and adapting open source software, without the fear of being charged with violating copyright with its adaptations.

Jagielski’s most eye-opening revelations about the changes that have already happened in open source licensing — in ways we may not have been aware of — involve the legal meaning of “distribution.”  In an earlier age, to use software, you had to copy it — and of course, that’s distribution.  Yet when server-based applications were first being subscribed to by users and utilized through browsers without copying, suddenly it wasn’t distribution any more.

“That’s one of the reasons why the Free Software Foundation created a special version of GPL, called the Affero GPL,” he explained, “specifically designed to handle those cases.  It basically says that redistribution of software — which is when these licenses kick in — even applies if you’re just using the software ‘as-a-Service.’”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WbgcIcNErKg

Capital One — where Jagielski presently serves as a senior distinguished technical fellow — can safely adapt its corporate culture to be permissive about using and adapting open source software, without the fear of being charged with violating copyright with its adaptations.

Jagielski’s most eye-opening revelations about the changes that have already happened in open source licensing — in ways we may not have been aware of — involve the legal meaning of “distribution.”  In an earlier age, to use software, you had to copy it — and of course, that’s distribution.  Yet when server-based applications were first being subscribed to by users and utilized through browsers without copying, suddenly it wasn’t distribution any more.

“That’s one of the reasons why the Free Software Foundation created a special version of GPL, called the Affero GPL,” he explained, “specifically designed to handle those cases.  It basically says that redistribution of software — which is when these licenses kick in — even applies if you’re just using the software ‘as-a-Service.’”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WbgcIcNErKg

“We developed Cloud Custodian to give us a sort of unified view of, and enforcement of, all the policies that are happening in an AWS public cloud account,” explained Capital One Senior Distinguished Engineer Kapil Thangavelu, in a conversation with Alex Williams from the recent O’Reilly Open Source conference for The New Stack Makers.

Developers, Thangavelu told us, tend to do silly things – for example, leaving whole portions of their databases public.  As Capital One built out its containerization strategy, its engineers found themselves devising scripts for ensuring that these stupid things don’t yield catastrophic results.  But these were case-by-case instances, involving YAML and Python, and soon they needed a way to apply more generic scripts to wider sets of criteria, to enforce policies and apply guardrails as developers wandered into unexplored territories.

Listen now to 'Cloud Custodian and Capital One Ask, What's In Your Amazon Cloud?' — the latest edition of The New Stack Makers.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e2lT2i7zqOM