The New Stack Podcast

The first 20 years of JavaScript marked the dawn of the Web stack and a new generation of Web developers who had to deal with a community of traditional technologists. They also faced the continuous looming threat of Microsoft explained Allen Wirfs-Brock in a recorded keynote from OpenJS Foundation's virtual conference in June.

Wirfs-Brock was also project editor of the ECMAScript specification from 2008-2015 and wrote the book-sized journal article for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) entitled “JavaScript: The First 20 Years” for the History of Programming Language conference (HOPL), with co-author Brendan Eich, JavaScript’s creator.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, Wirfs-Brock of Wirfs-Brock Associates offers his historical perspective, including JavaScript’s changes during the 25 years after Eich created the language.

“What really happened is what people thought was going to be a minor piece of browser technology — particularly over the last 10 years — has really taken over the world of programming languages,” said Wirfs-Brock. “And so it's quite remarkable.”

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon sponsored this post.

Box was one of the first companies to build on Kubernetes. Initially building its platform on PHP, Box’s architecture still uses some parts of the PHP architecture. Today, Box serves as a case study of a software platform’s cloud native journey that began a few years ago. The company also continues to rely on its legacy infrastructure dating back to the days when PHP ran on Box’s bare metal servers in its data centers.

In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Kunal Parmar, director of engineering, Box, discusses the evolution of the cloud content management provider’s cloud native journey with hosts 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.

Prior to Box’s adoption of Kubernetes, the company sought ways to “create more services outside of the monolith in order to scale efficiently,” Parmar said. One way to do that, he explained, was to shift its legacy monolith applications into microservices.

“For anybody who has [made the shift to Kubernetes], they would know this is a really long and hard journey. And so, in parallel, we have been focusing on adopting Kubernetes for all of the new microservices that we have been building outside of the monolith,” said Parmar. “And today we are at a point where we're actually now looking at also starting to migrate the monolith to run on top of Kubernetes so that we can take advantage of the benefits that Kubernetes brings.”

Open source maintainers have a different set of challenges today. To name just a few, bots help manage overload and emojis are as predominant in open source groups as they are in twenty somethings’ social circles. Meanwhile, maintainers are deeply involved in governance issues like never before.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, TNS founder and publisher, and VMware guests Dawn Foster, director of open source community strategy, Nikhita Raghunath, senior member of technical staff, and Michael Klishin, senior principal software engineer discuss what it is like to be an open source maintainer, to build a community and to be a leader.

There is a new architecture for front-end web development: JAMStack rethinks the current server-browser architecture, freeing the developer from worrying about fiddling with Apache, Linux or other aspects of backend support.

For this week’s episode of the The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, which offers a JAMstack-based service that allows developers to simply push their code to git in order to update their web site or application. Key to this platform is an open source user interface framework created by Rauch, called Next.js, based on Facebook’s React, but tweaked to make it easier to build user interfaces not only for the developer but even for the designer.

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

On the benefit of using a managed JAMstack such as Vercel’s (over a traditional LAMP stack), Rauch noted that:

You can deploy to an essentially serverless infrastructure, right? I always tell people that content delivery networks were the OG serverless — because they never required management. They were perfectly delegated. It’s a globally distributed system with no single point of failure. You’re not going to have to worry about Linux and Apache because you can deploy to any distributed global network that can serve essentially markup, JavaScript, CSS and static files. Then obviously to power the API, server rendering and more advanced functionality, the Vercel network gives you serverless functions. So we try to complete the entire JAMstack equation.

Aspen Mesh sponsored this post.

The adoption of a service mesh is increasingly seen as an essential building block for any organization that has opted to make the shift to a Kubernetes platform. As a service mesh offers observability, connectivity and security checks for microservices management, the underlying capabilities — and development — of Istio is a critical component in its operation, and eventually, standardization.

In the second of The New Stack Makers three-part podcast series featuring Aspen Mesh, correspondent B. Cameron Gain opens the discussion about what service mesh really does and how it is a technology pattern for use with Kubernetes. Joining in the conversation were Zack Butcher, founding engineer, Tetrate and Andrew Jenkins, co-founder and CTO, Aspen Mesh, who also covered how service mesh, and especially Istio, help teams get more out of containers and Kubernetes across the whole application life cycle.

Service mesh helps organizations migrate to cloud native environments by serving as a way to bridge the management gap between on premises datacenter deployments to containerized cloud environments in cloud environments. Once implemented, a service mesh should, if functioning properly, reduce much of the enormous complexity of this process. In fact, for many DevOps team members, the switch to a cloud native environment and Kubernetes cannot be done without service mesh.

Dynatrace sponsored this podcast.

The Kubernetes era has made scaled-out applications on multiple cloud environments a reality. But it has also introduced a tremendous amount of complexity into IT departments.

My guest on this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast is Andreas Grabner from software intelligence platform Dynatrace, who recently noted that “in the enterprise Kubernetes environments I’ve seen, there are billions of interdependencies to account for.” Yes, billions.

Grabner, who describes himself as a “DevOps Activist,” argues that AI technology can tame this otherwise overwhelming Kubernetes complexity. As he put it in a contributed post, “AI-powered observability provides enterprises with a host of new capabilities to better deploy and manage their Kubernetes environments.”

During the podcast, we dig into how AI – and automation in general – is impacting observability in Kubernetes environments. To kick the show off, I asked Grabner to clarify what he means by “AI observability.”

DataStax sponsored this podcast.

About 10 years ago the tech industry rejected the single relational database, and demanded a way to scale — at scale — with distributed systems. This movement saw the birth of React, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Tokyo Cabinet, all to better manage distributed databases.

“All those databases that grew from: ‘Hey, we have a scaled data problem and this single relational database is not solving it.’ And I think that was the first time we really had to solve scale problems and use distributed technology to make it work,” said Patrick McFadin, chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra and vice president of developer relations at DataStax.

McFadin joined colleague Kathryn Erickson, head of strategy and product at DataStax, for this episode of The New Stack Makers. They sat down with founder and Publisher of The New Stack, Alex Williams, to reflect on how the industry has seen a sudden explosion of scale and how that’s now guiding the next steps toward fully self-service architecture.

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 Denise Gosnell, chief data officer at Datastax, who is a co-author of the O’Reilly book “A Practitioner’s Guide to Graph Data.” She also graciously wrote a post for us explaining why graph databases are gaining traction in the enterprise.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Graph database systems differ from the standard relational (SQL) kind in that they are engineered to more easily capture the relations across different entities. “When you’re looking at your databases, graph databases allow you to model your data more efficiently by using relationships,” Gosnell said.

You could capture that relationship information through a series of database joins of separate tables, but eventually, the complexity of this approach would make it prohibitive. “When you look at the full end-to-end complexity for using it in an application or maintaining your code, or updating edges, graph databases are going to make that a lot easier for the full lifecycle and maintenance of that application,” she said.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast.

The New Stack will shortly launch its latest edition of “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem” after the first edition of the ebook was published in 2017. Ahead of its publication, The New Stack was able to speak with Kelsey Hightower, principal developer advocate at Google Cloud, who is likely one of the most recognized voices in the Kubernetes space.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Hightower spoke about his role in Kubernetes since the beginning, his thoughts on the project’s leadership today and the challenges that lay ahead.

During the early days of Kubernetes, there “were no ebooks available” on the subject, Hightower said. The main goal was to help “raise the profile of the people with the job of trying to manage applications."

“I think the whole point was when I was showing Kubernetes off [as] a contributor [and] building things around the ecosystem, my product work at CoreOS — we were all trying to solve problems that we all had in the past,” Hightower said. “We were trying to uplift the community. We were pretty sure that technology was going to be okay over time.”

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast.

Both data and governed access to it play an integral part in our lives. With the freedom to access vast amounts of pervasive data comes the responsibility of ensuring protection is in place. For an organization, data protection is required for a range of access points, including apps, the hosts, the containers and serverless architectures.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, speaks with Darian Jenik, risk product security lead architect for public cloud migration at Refinitiv.

Refinitiv offers financial-related information, data and analysis to 40,000 institutions worldwide. Jenik discusses how Refinitiv uses Prisma Cloud as a foundation for its custom cloud security reporting app. Among the themes covered, he shares his initial security challenges that drove Refinitiv to consider a third-party solution like Prisma Cloud, as well as what drove the need for the innovative new custom app.