The New Stack Podcast

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Pratik Wadher, vice president of product development at Intuit, to discuss the company’s experience as a Kubernetes end user, as well as its involvement in the Argo Flux project — a single toolchain for continuous deployment and automated workflows using GitOps. We also share our experiences of attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020, held this week “virtually.”

The New Stack editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Publisher Alex Williams, TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

A lot of the time, it’s harder to convince your friends and family than a stranger. The first group is usually more decisive and direct with you. The same goes for your work family. When you’re building an internal infrastructure for autonomous teams, it becomes your job to not only provide that technical backbone, but to act as sales and customer support.

Nobody said internal developer advocacy would be easier.

The sixth episode of The New Stack Analysts End User Series brings together again our Publisher Alex Williams with co-hosts Cheryl Hung from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ken Owens of Mastercard. In this episode they talk with Simone Sciarrati, the engineering team lead at Meltwater media intelligence platform about the autonomous engineering culture, molding developer experience, and those tough technological decisions.

Citrix sponsored this podcast.

It would be an understatement to say 8×8’s ability to offer its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) requires high bandwidth to provide its voice, video and other enterprise-class API solutions. While the company has always sought ways to boost its throughput capabilities, the Coronavirus pandemic has placed huge pressures on the company’s bandwidth needs to both maintain and improve its users’ network experience. Earlier this year, for example, traffic surged by 50-fold in less than one month.

Ultimately, 8×8’s DevOps largely relied on Kubernetes infrastructure and a load balancer and other support that Citrix, an application-delivery solution provider, offered to help manage the unprecedented traffic.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, spoke with Pankaj Gupta, senior director of product marketing, cloud native, DevOps, security, analytics and network, for Citrix and Lance Johnson, director of engineering, cloud R&D, for 8×8. They discussed how Kubernetes and Citrix helped 8×8 achieve and maintain agility while delivering a better customer experience for its collaboration product portfolio during this time of exceptional demand for video and other networking infrastructure capabilities.

The New Stack has just released an updated eBook on Kubernetes, “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem,” and so this week on The New Stack Context podcast, we’ve invited TNS analyst Lawrence Hecht to discuss some of the analysis he did for this volume. We covered Kubernetes adoption in the cloud, storage and networking concerns and the changing DevOps culture around cloud native computing. At the end of the podcast, we also discuss what to expect from next week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe virtual conference.

The New Stack Senior Editor Richard MacManus hosted this episode, with the help of Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor, and Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack.

Spotify is well known worldwide for its music service. Not so well known, is its path to Kubernetes Oz has been a road with many twists and turns.

What also may be a surprise to many is that Spotify is a veteran user of Kubernetes and how it owes much of its product-delivery capabilities to its agile DevOps. Indeed, Spotify continues to increasingly rely on a container and microservices infrastructure and cloud native deployments to offer a number of advantages. This allows its DevOps teams to continually improve the overall streaming experience for millions of subscribers.

In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as part of The New Stack’s recent coverage of end use Kubernetes, Jim Haughwout, head of infrastructure and operations, shares Spotify’s cloud native adoption war stories and discusses its past and present Kubernetes challenges. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack; Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard hosted the podcast.

Aspen Mesh sponsored this podcast.

A key function of what service meshes should increasingly offer is to help DevOps teams have better observability into what events are causing application deployment and management problems. They should also help to determine which team can take appropriate action.

In this final episode of The New Stack Makers three-part podcast series featuring Aspen Mesh, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and correspondent B. Cameron Gain, discuss with invitees how service meshes help DevOps stave off the pain of managing complex cloud native as well as legacy environments and how they can be translated into cost savings. With featured guests Shawn Wormke, vice president and general manager, Aspen Mesh and Tracy Miranda, director of open source community, CloudBees, they also cover what service meshes can — and cannot — do to help meet business goals and what to expect in the future.

GitLab sponsored this podcast.

The developer experience today certainly offers software engineers the freedom to create applications at scale across often highly distributed microservices environments. But with this degree of freedom to create and update deployments at scale, developers are under pressure to deliver faster cadences. They also face security concerns as well as unknowns about the frontend user experience, even once the security and QA teams have properly vetted the code.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, correspondent B. Cameron Gain, speaks with Christopher Lefelhocz, vice president of development at GitLab and Ben Sigelman, CEO and co-founder of Lightstep, about how developers can leverage elasticity and other processes and tools to ensure software remains resilient and secure from the time the code is uploaded to GitLab’s repository and throughout the entire deployment and usage cycle.

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast as part of a series of interviews with Kubernetes end users. Listen to the previous stories about the ups and downs of Box’s Kubernetes journey and what Wikipedia’s infrastructure is like behind the firewall.

It started simply enough but soon the site needed more than a server to keep things managed. Today, EquityZen runs on Kubernetes and is considering its next moves, in particular exploring how container as a service may serve them.

In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Andy Snowden, engineering manager, DevOps, for EquityZen, discusses how he helped the company begin its cloud native journey and the challenges associated with the move. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack; Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard hosted the podcast.

When Snowden joined EquityZen, he immediately began to apply his background managing Kubernetes environments to help solve a chief concern the company had: The reliability of its infrastructure.

“During our initial conversations, they explained to me that ‘hey, we are having these issues and we are having these big site hits where the site will go down’ and that is really bad for our customers. They also asked ‘what have you done in your past that has worked well for you?,’” said Snowden. “And knowing Kubernetes as I knew it, I said this sounds like a really good use case for it and I explained that these are the sort of things I might consider doing.”

Once convinced that a Kubernetes environment would both boost reliability and help the company to better scale its operations, making the shift was, of course, a major undertaking.

TriggerMesh sponsored this podcast.

Cloud native environments and the breadth of tools and platforms developers have at their disposal has made the developers’ experience, and especially, the scale and breadth of applications organizations can deploy today, that much richer. However, today’s cloud native and highly distributed environments typically involve much complexity, while the developer’s role increasingly involves managing applications deployments and integrating the applications they create. A number of tools and processes have emerged to help improve the developer experience, such as serverless environments that help developers concentrate more on their task of creating applications.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, TNS founder and publisher, speaks with Sebastien Goasguen, co-founder, TriggerMesh, about developers’ challenges and the tools and processes of event-driven architectures, including TriggerMesh for AWS EventBridge.

Many developers rely on tools and processes that allow them to spend more time on developing code and less time managing deployments.

“What we’re seeing in a lot of enterprises is that the developers really want to develop, write applications and deploy their apps — they don’t really want to have to deal with the infrastructure and scaling and configuring it,” Goasguen said. “They really want to concentrate on what they’re building, which is the apps.”

TriggerMesh helps to improve the developer experience by bringing to the table what Goasguen describes as an “infrastructure mindset.”

“Developers really want to get their job done and abstract the infrastructure and the difficulties — I think that’s where serverless really arrives,” he explained. “At the heart of serverless, you have events. And that’s where we are.”

Events or event-driven architectures are also increasingly relevant for developers working in cloud native environments. By helping to improve the developer experience with its cloud native integration platform, TriggerMesh supports event-driven architectures for front-end environments. To this end, TriggerMesh is helping DevOps teams bring events from on-premises applications and cloud environments with AWS EventBridge.

TriggerMesh opted to partner with AWS since it is “really evolving the way people are building apps on their cloud using functions.”

“We’ve seen that with Lambda during the last few years, but now they are also tying all those functions and the other services through events,” said Goasguen. “And the entry point for events for AWS is EventBridge.”

A few years back, Kubernetes was in full development and many of its basic concepts were still evolving, so security was not a huge priority. But as K8s deployments have moved into production, more attention is being focused in securing Kubernetes and its workloads. Gadi Naor has been following Kubernetes security from the start. Alcide, the company Naor founded and now serves as CTO, offers an end-to-end Kubernetes security platform.

For this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Naor about a variety of Kubernetes security-related topics. Last week, Naor hosted a Kubernetes security Webinar for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which in addition to offering many helpful hints, discussed in detail the spate of recent vulnerabilities found in Kubernetes. And for The New Stack, he wrote about the problem about configuration drift in Kubernetes, and why it can’t be solved simply through continuous integration tools.

TNS Editorial and Marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.