The New Stack Podcast

In this The New Stack Makers livestream podcast recorded ahead of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Founder and Publisher Alex Williams and Managing Editor Joab Jackson hosted a roundtable discussion covering the status of cloud native adoption and its near- and long-term outlook. The guests were Rachel Stephens, an analyst for RedMonk, Steven Vaughan-Nichols, a long-time journalist for ZDNet and well-recognized Linux professional and Katie Gamanji, a cloud platform engineer for American Express and member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee.

Some legacy infrastructures are certainly more difficult to manage than others when organizations make the shift to cloud native. In the case of the heavily regulated financial services industry and the deep legacy infrastructure involved when banks transition to the cloud, challenges inherent in the sector abound. Regulatory and compliance and data-management challenges are also usually amplified when the bank has an especially large international presence.

In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as part of The New Stack’s recent coverage of end-use Kubernetes, Michael Lieberman, senior innovation engineer, vice president, of Tokyo-based MUFG, discusses his company’s journey to scale out architectures in a microservice and Kubernetes environment in the world of financial services. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted the podcast with co-hosts Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Dave Zolotusky, senior staff engineer at Spotify.

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

The idea behind building a logging analysis tool is fairly simple. That is until it’s time to scale across multiple teams and manage it beyond day two. Then things become a bit more complicated. There comes the temptation to build a logging platform because, well, how complicated could it be?

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

Mai Le is Nextdoor’s head of engineering. She and her team knew they had to do something for small businesses suffering in the pandemic. They needed to develop ways to connect them with their local customers and this was especially important for Nextdoor. Social networks have served as hubs for small businesses with Nextdoor standing out more than most.

After her team’s considerable effort, it should have been smooth sailing. But, with only two weeks until launch, Le couldn’t get the new service to work.

In the serverless paradigm, the idea is to abstract away the backend so that developers don’t need to deal with it. That’s all well and good when it comes to servers and complex infrastructure like Kubernetes. But up till now, database systems haven’t typically been a part of the serverless playbook. The assumption has been that developers will build their serverless app and choose a separate database system to connect to it — be it a traditional relational database, a NoSQL system, or even a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solution.

But the popularity of serverless has prompted further innovation in the data market. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, we talked about the latest developments in regards to managing data in a serverless system.

My two guests were Evan Weaver, co-founder and chief technology officer of Fauna, and Greg McKeon, a product manager at Cloudflare. Fauna is building a “data API” for serverless apps so that developers don’t even need to touch a database system, while Cloudflare runs a serverless platform called Cloudflare Workers.

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, with engineers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought.

These are the stories about engineering management and how technology decisions are made for scaling architectures to support the demands of the business.

Pooja Brown is vice president of engineering at Stitch Fix and also one of the founding members of ENG, a peer network of VPs and CTOs from leading SaaS companies. Brown spends most of the discussion talking about the work in developing a modern infrastructure prior to her work at StitchFix.

Brown tells her story in four acts, discussing her work on monoliths and the move to a modern architecture that came with hiring. The developers were hired for their Node.js skills. And, they were quite different than the .Net devs they had once known so well.

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews conducted by our guest host Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart with engineering managers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought.

The challenges engineering leaders face define how technology decisions are made for scaling architectures to support the demands of rapid-growth businesses.

Heckart's first interview is with Adam Wolff, Robinhood’s former vice president of engineering who recalls two years ago when Kubernetes looked so right — and then the difficulties that followed when Wolff mandated the platform's adoption.

Next-generation data stacks and data centers will continue to meet the demands of software developer-led business models. But as new tools and platforms emerge to meet the deployment needs of today and tomorrow to run at scale, the data centers and cloud infrastructures will need to evolve as well.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Shrey Parekh, senior manager of product marketing, and Whitney Satin, director of product marketing, of Cisco’s AppDynamics discuss how data center and cloud environments are changing to accommodate next-generation applications and data stacks. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

Scripting behaviors and habits are hard to break as engineers are often accustomed to their own ways and processes. Meanwhile, the processes team leaders need to take when adopting new CI/CD processes and technologies, include engineering management from the bottom up and mapping people's skill sets and other processes. An example of a CI/CD process used to make the shift includes Harness’ platform that uses machine learning and other technologies to help DevOps engineer teams further their goals.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Tiffany Jachja, evangelist, Harness and Rajsi Rana, senior product manager, Oracle Cloud, discuss scripting, its background and how machine learning, CI/CD and other processes can help guide a shift in engineering culture to make the most of time and resources. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

In this episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Jonas Bonér, Akka creator and founder/chief technology officer of Lightbend, about the challenges of bringing state to serverless, reactive microservices frameworks, and Cloudstate itself. TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.