The New Stack Podcast

First released in 1995, Java’s programming language has been a leading developer platform that has become a workhorse for hundreds of enterprise applications. With each new technology evolution, Java has successfully adapted to change. But even while a recent Java ecosystem study found that more than 70% of Java applications in production environments are running inside a container, there continues to be hurdles the language must overcome to adapt to the cloud-native world.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Simon Ritter, deputy CTO of Azul Systems and Dalia Abo Sheasha, Java developer advocate of JetBrains discuss some of the challenges the language is working to overcome, and share some insight into the new features that developers are requesting. Darryl Taft, news editor of The New Stack hosted this podcast.

The complexity of modern applications requires developers to master a growing array of skills, technologies, and concepts to develop in the cloud. And “what I've seen is that there is a gap in skills, and what it would take to get existing Java applications into the cloud,” said Abo Sheasha.

“What developers really want is to focus on the idea of developing the Java code,” said Ritter. “Having the ability to plug in to different cloud providers, but also the ability to integrate with things like your CI/CD tooling so that you've got continuous integration, continuous deployment built in,” he added.

Getting Java ready for the cloud is a “distributed responsibility across the people – from cloud providers to tooling providers,” said Ritter. “Everyone recognizes that the more folks we have on it, the more minds we have on it, the better outcome we're going to have for the developer’s language,” Abo Sheasha said.

Making developers more efficient and productive is coming into the fold with the introduction of JEP, or JDK Enhancement Proposals - a lightweight approach to add new features in the development of the Java platform itself. “But there's some bigger projects like Project Amber which is all about small changes to the language syntax of Java with the idea of making it more productive by taking some of the boilerplate code out,” Ritter said.

The journey to the next chapter of Java is multi-dimensional. While “most developers are focused on getting the job done, picking up skills for new things is a challenge because it takes time. Many still have the issue of using whichever Java version their company is stuck on,” said Ritter. “It's not because the developers don't want to do it; it’s that they need to convince management that it's worth investing in,” added Abo Sheasha.

Last week, the country of Spain dropped its mandate for residents and visitors to wear masks, to ward off further infections of the Coronavirus. So, for this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon  Europe conference, to be held May 16 - 20th of May in Valencia, Spain, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation dropped its own original mandate that attendees wear masks, a rule that had been in place for its other recent conferences.

This turned out to be the wrong decision, CNCF admitted a week later. A lot of people who already bought tickets were upset at this laxing of the rules for the conference, which could put them in greater danger of contacting the disease.

So the CNCF put the mandate back in place, and offered refunds for those who felt Spain's own decision would put them in harm's way. CNCF will even send you a week's worth of N95 masks if you request them.

So, long story short: bring a mask to KubeCon. And, as always, it is still a requirement to show proof of vaccination and temperature checks will be made as well.

Tricky business running a conference in this time, no?

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we take a look at what to expect from this year's KubeCon EU 2022. Our guests for this podcast are Priyanka Sharma, the executive director of CNCF, and Ricardo Rocha, who is a KubeCon co-chair and computer engineer at CERN. TNS Editor-in-chief Joab Jackson hosted this podcast.

We recorded this podcast prior to the discussion around masks, and at the time, Sharma said that the CNCF based the mask ruling on Spain's own country-wide mandates. "So we are being very cautious with the health requirements for the event," she said.

The conference team is also keeping an eye on Russia's aggressive moves in the Ukraine, though it is unlikely that the chaos will reach all the way to Spain. Still, "this is why it's essential to always have the hybrid option .. [to] have the virtual elements sorted," Sharma said.

As the CNCF flagship conference, KubeCon brings together managers and users of a wide variety of cloud native technologies, including containerd, CoreDNS, Envoy, etcd, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent, Prometheus, Rook, Vitess, Argo, CRI-O, Crossplane, dapr, Dragonfly,  Falco, Flagger, Flux, gRPC, KEDA, SPIFFE, SPIRE, and Thanos, and many many more. Most have been featured on TNS at one time or another.

In this podcast, we also discuss what to expect from the virtual sessions at the conference, what to do in Valencia, the current state of Kubernetes, and we get some unofficial picks from Sharma and Rocha as to what keynotes not miss and what sessions to attend.

"The virtual option is great," Rocha said. "But I think the in-person conferences have have their own value. And there's a lot to be to be gained about meeting people directly and exchanging ideas and going to these events on the side of the conference as well."

Low-code and no-code is becoming increasingly popular in software development, particularly in enterprises that are looking to expand the number of people who can create applications for digital transformation efforts. While in 2020, less than 25% of new apps were developed using no code/low code, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% will utilize this means. Microsoft is one vendor who has been paving the way in this shift by reducing the burden on those in the lines of business and developers in exchange for speed. But what are the potential and best practices for low code/no code software development?

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Apps and Platform at Microsoft discusses what the company is doing in the low-code/no code space with its Power Platform offering, including bringing no code/low-code professionals together to deliver applications.

Joab Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of The New Stack and Darryl Taft, News Editor of The New Stack hosted this podcast.

Developers are often faced with complexity when building and operating long-running processes that involve multiple service calls and require continuous coordination. To solve this challenge, Uber built and introduced Cadence, the open-source solution for workflow orchestration in 2016 that enables developers to directly express complex, long-running business logic as simple code. Since its debut, it continues to find increased traction with developers operating large-scale, microservices-based architectures. More recently, Instaclustr announced support for a hosted version of Cadence.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer at Instaclustr and Emrah Seker, Staff Software Engineer at Uber discuss Cadence, and how it is used by developers to solve various business problems by enabling them to focus on writing code for business logic, without worrying about the complexity of distributed systems.

Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted this podcast, along with co-host Joab Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of The New Stack.

As the tech stack grows, the list of technologies that must be configured in cloud computing environments has grown exponentially and increased the complexity in the IT infrastructure. While every layer of the stack comes with its own implementation of encrypted connectivity, client authentication, authorization and audit, the challenge for developers and DevOps teams to properly set up secure access to hardware, software throughout the organization will continue to grow, making IT environments increasingly vulnerable.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Ben Arent, Developer Relations Manager, Teleport discusses how to address the hardware, software and peopleware complexity that comes from the cloud by using tools like Teleport 9.0 and the company’s first release of Teleport Machine ID.

From cloud security providers to open source, trust has become a staple from which an organization's security is built. But with the rise of cloud-native technologies, the new ways of building applications are challenging the traditional approaches to security. The changing cloud-native landscape is requiring broader security coverage across the technology stack and more contextual awareness of the environment. So how should DevOps and InfoSec teams across commercial businesses and governments rethink their security approach?

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Tom Bossert, president of Trinity Cyber (and former Homeland Security Advisor to two Presidents); Patrick Hylant, client executive of VMware; and Chenxi Wang, managing general partner, Rain Capital discuss how businesses and the U.S. government can adapt to the evolving threat landscape, including new initiatives and lessons that can be applied in this high-risk environment.

Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this podcast. Jim Douglas, CEO of Armory also joined as co-host of this livestream event.

"Many Ukrainians continue working. A very good opportunity is to continue working with them, to buy Ukrainian software products, to engage with people who are working [via] UpWork. Help Ukrainians by giving them the ability to work, to do some paid work," whether still in the country or as refugees abroad. If you take something from this conversation, Anastasiia Voitova's words may be the ones that should stick. After all, Ukraine has a renowned IT workforce, with IT outsourcing among its most important exports.

Voitova, the head of customer solutions and security software engineer at Cossack Labs, just grabbed her laptop and some essentials when she suddenly fled to the mountains last month to "a small village that doesn't even have a name." She doesn't have much with her, but she has more work to do than ever — to meet her clients' increasing demand for cybersecurity defenses and to support the Ukrainian defense effort. Earlier this month, her Ukraine-based team even released a new open source cryptographic framework for data protection, on time, amidst the war.

Voitova was joined in this episode of The New Stack Makers by Oleksii Holub, open source developer, software consultant and GitHub Star, and Denys Dovhan, front-end engineer at Wix. All three of them are globally known open source community contributors and maintainers. And all three had to suddenly relocate from Kyiv this February. This conversation is a reflection into the lives of these three open source community leaders during the first three weeks of the Russian invasion.

This conversation aims to help answer what the open source community and the tech community as a whole can do to support our Ukrainian colleagues and friends. Because open source is a community first and foremost. 

"Open source for me is a very big part of my life. Idon't try to like gain anything out of it, I just code things. If I had a problem, I solve it, and I think to myself, why not share it with other people," Holub said.

He sees open source as an opportunity for influence in this war, but also is acutely aware that his unpaid labor could be used to support the aggression against his country. That's why he added terms of use to his open source projects that use of his code implicitly means you condemn the Russian invasion. This may be controversial in the strict open source licensing world, but the semantics of OSS seem less important to Holub right now.

Of course, when talking about open source, the world's largest code repository GitHub comes up. Whether GitHub should block Russia is an on going OSS debate. On the one hand, many are concerned about further cutting off Russia — which has already restricted access to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — from external news and facts about the ongoing conflict. On the other hand, with the widespread adoption of OSS in Russia, it's reasonable to assume swaths of open source code is directly supporting the invasion or at least supporting the Russian government through income, taxes, and some of the Kremlin's technical stack.

For Dovhan, there's a middle ground. His employer, website builder Wix, has blocked all payments in Russia, but has maintained its freemium offering there. "There is no possibility to pay for your premium website. But you still can make a free one, and that's a possibility for Russians to express themselves, and this is a space for free speech, which is limited in Russia." He proposes that GitHub similarly allows the creation of public repos in Russia, but that it blocks payments and private repos there.

Dovhan continued that "I believe [the] open source community is deeply connected and blocking access for Russian developers, might cause serious issues in infrastructure. Alot of projects are actually made by Russian developers, for example, PostCSS, Nginx, and PostHTML."

These conversations will continue as this war changes the landscape of the tech world as we know it. One thing is for sure, Voitova, Dovhan and Holub have joined the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian software developers in making a routine of work-war balance, doing everything they can, every waking hour of the day.

From cloud security providers to open source, trust has become the foundation from which an organization's security is built. But with the rise of cloud-native technologies such as containers and infrastructure as code (IaC), it has ushered in new ways to build applications and requirements that are challenging the traditional approaches to security. The changing nature of the cloud-native landscape is requiring broader security coverage across the technology stack and more contextual awareness of the environment. But how should teams like Infosec, DevOps rethink their approach to security?

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Guy Eisenkot, co-founder and vice president of product at Bridgecrew, Barak Schoster Goihman, senior director, chief architect at Palo Alto Networks and Ashish Rajan, head of security and compliance at PageUp and producer and host for Cloud Security Podcast preview what’s to come at Palo Alto Network’s Code to Cloud Summit on March 23-24, 2022, including the role of security and trust as it relates to DevOps, cloud service providers, software supply chain, SBOM (Software Bill of materials) and IBOM (Infrastructure Bill of Material),

Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted this podcast.

Kubernetes is great at large-scale systems, but its complexity and transparency has caused higher cloud costs, delays in deployment and developer frustration. As Kubernetes has taken off and workloads continue to move to a containerized environment, optimizing resources is becoming increasingly important. In fact, the recent 2021 Cloud Native Survey revealed that Kubernetes has already crossed the chasm to mainstream with 96 percent of organizations using or evaluating the technology.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Matt Provo, founder and CEO of StormForge, discusses new ways to think about Kubernetes, including resource optimization which can be achieved by empowering developers through automation. He also shared the company’s latest new machine learning-powered multi-dimensional optimization solution, Optimize Live.

Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this podcast.

While Java continues to be the most widely used programming language in the enterprise, how is it faring the emerging cloud native ecosystem? Quite well, observed a panel of Oracle engineers who work the language. In fact, they estimate that they there are more than 50 million Java virtual machines running concurrently in the cloud at present.

In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we discussed the current state of Java with Georges Saab, who is Oracle's vice president of software development, for the Java Platform Group; Donald Smith, Oracle senior director of product management; and Sharat Chander, Oracle senior director of product management. TNS editors Darryl Taft and Joab Jackson hosted the conversation.