The New Stack Podcast

In this, The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams; guest Nanda Vijaydev, distinguished technologist and lead data scientist, HPE, discusses how the concepts of loosely coupled architectures are now playing a part in data-centric applications on Kubernetes. It’s an evolution that has been taking shape, preceded by the use of Kubernetes for microservices development — as opposed to data-centric approaches that have historically been developed on tightly coupled, monolithic architectures.

In my 2021 web development predictions, I identified 2 key trends heading into this year: serverless expanding into a more full-featured platform (for example, stateful apps becoming a reality on serverless), and the continued growth of JavaScript (and especially React). Jamstack is another growth area, although that’s at a much earlier stage. To discuss these and other frontend trends, I spoke to David Cramer, co-founder, and CTO of Sentry, an application monitoring platform. You can hear the full discussion on The New Stack Makers podcast, but in this article, I’ll review the main talking points.

New Relic sponsored this podcast.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Wendy Shepperd, general vice president of engineering, New Relic, describes the challenges of migrating New Relic’s telemetry platform to a cloud native environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Hosted by TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams, Shepperd discussed key lessons learned about New Relic’s shift to AWS, as well as implications for observability following the move.

In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams virtually shared pancakes and syrup with guests to discuss how Apache Cassandra, gRPC and, other tools and platforms play a role in managing data on Kubernetes.

Mya Pitzeruse, software engineer and OSS contributor from effx; Sam Ramji, chief strategy officer at Datastax; and Tom Offermann, a lead software engineer at New Relic were the guests. They offered deep perspectives about the evolution of data management on Kubernetes and the work that remains to be done.

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast.

Infrastructure as code is a movement ready to boom. It’s also emerging as one of the three pillars in cloud security that are bringing DevOps and security together in the evolving DevSecOps market, said Varun Badhwar, senior vice president, Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, in this episode of The New Stack Makers hosted by TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams.

Infrastructure as code is also a major component of the DevOps’ trend to shift left. “Shift left security now means application security, it means software composition analysis and it means infrastructure as code scanning — and all of that now is available for DevOps teams to do in the pipeline,” Badhwar explained.

“And in an ideal situation,” he continued, “you want to tie all of that to the tools that your infosec teams want to use in runtime in production, such that you have one set of policies globally recognized in your enterprise. And you’re working against the same standards — it’s just a matter of fact about where you’re deploying those tools in your lifecycle.”

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, that cover the challenges engineering managers have faced when scaling architectures to support the demands of the business.

Uber. Recall the company in 2017, the management, the scale, and the post by Susan Fowler, who detailed experiences that speak to the hopes and terrible realities at the company. That’s the scenario that faced Donald Sumbry, who now heads reliability engineering at Airbnb in this interview with Heckart. He was not aware of the issues internally at Uber due, he says, to the work and all the technical problems that needed resolving.

"In early 2017, we had the Susan Fowler blog post, and one of the things I remember the most was that some of what was what had happened was actually a surprise to me," Sumbry said, "And I realized that I was so knee-deep in the work that I was doing, that there were so many problems to solve. And we attracted the type of people that just jumped into a problem.

Joining Airbnb, Sumbry brought what he learned at Uber about looking at the big picture. He also learned to avoid the savior complex. Every company is different, no matter how much it may seem that the engineer has seen it all and can solve all the problems.

On the last The New Stack Analysts of the year, the gang got together — remotely, obviously — to reflect on this year. And oh what a year! But for a year in tech, 2020 still had a lot of hits — and some misses.

Publisher Alex Williams was joined by Libby Clark, Joab Jackson, Bruce Gain, Steven Vaughan-Nichols, and Jennifer Riggins. We looked back on the year that saw millions die, no one fly, and a lot of jobs in turmoil. It was also a year that, while many things screeched to a halt, much of the tech industry had to keep going more than ever.

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast.

Kubernetes is certainly evolving, but it will be some time before organizations deploy and run applications seamlessly in cloud native environments without today’s associated challenges of its adoption and maintenance. Amazon Web Services (AWS), of course, is both an early proponent of Kubernetes and a leading provider of cloud native services and support, and has thus been implicitly involved with its changes over the past few years.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, AWS’ Bob Wise, general manager of Kubernetes, and Peder Ulander, head of product marketing for enterprise, developer and open source initiatives, described AWS’ role in Kubernetes and how cloud native plays into the company’s open source strategy. They also discussed how Kubernetes is evolving in the market, including in terms of how customer needs are changing, and why open source technologies are critical to fill in gaps in order for cloud native to realize its full potential.

Alex Williams, founder and publisher of the New Stack, hosted this episode.

New Relic sponsored this podcast.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) OpenTelemetry project was created to help foster the adoption of observability by helping to improve interoperability among the different observability toolsets through a vendor-neutral framework. In this way, OpenTelemetry should help to provide a single set of APIs, libraries, agents and collector services to capture distributed traces, metrics and other information from an application for improved observability.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams, Ben Evans, principal engineer and JVM technologies architect, New Relic, discussed OpenTelemetry and New Relic’s contributions to OpenTelemetry and other open source projects.

The genesis of OpenTelemtry was not to create a technology for its own sake in anticipation of what observability users might need, but to serve as a common framework to meet palpable challenges organizations already face.

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast.

Identity and access management (IAM) was previously relatively straightforward. Often delegated as a low-level management task to the local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) admin, the process of setting permissions for tiered data access was definitely not one of the more challenging security-related duties. However, in today’s highly distributed and relatively complex computing environments, network and associated IAM are exponentially more complex. As application creation and deployment become more distributed, often among multicloud containerized environments, the resulting dependencies, as well as vulnerabilities, continue to proliferate as well, thus widening the scope of potential attack surfaces.

How to manage IAM in this context was the main topic of this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendees joined TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams and guests live for the latest “Virtual Pancake & Podcast.” They discussed why IAM has become even more difficult to manage than in the past and offered their perspectives about potential solutions. They also showed how enjoying pancakes — or other variations of breakfast — can make IAM challenges more manageable.

The event featured Lin Sun, senior technical staff member and Master Inventor, Istio/IBM; Joab Jackson, managing editor, The New Stack and Nathaniel “Q” Quist, senior threat researcher (Public Cloud Security – Unit 42), Palo Alto Networks. Jackson noted how the evolution of IAM has not been conducive to handling the needs of present-day distributed computing. Previously, it was “not exactly a security thing” nor a “developer problem,” and wasn’t even “a security problem, he said.

“[IAM] really almost was a network problem: if a certain individual or a certain process wants to access another process or a resource online, then you have to have the permissions in place to meet all the policy requirements about who can ask for these particular resources,” Jackson said. “And this is an entirely new problem with distributed computing on a massive and widespread scale…it’s almost a mindset, number one, about who can figure out what to do and then how to go about doing it.”