The New Stack Podcast

In this, The New Stack Analyst podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder, and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard, Jennifer Strejevitch, site reliability engineer for Condé Nast speaks about her experiences and observations at the front lines of the publishing company infrastructure-related challenges and successes.

Condé Nast is one of the most well recognized media brands in the world, with a range of stand-out titles that include “Wired,” “The New Yorker” and “Vanity Fair.” The publishing giant also represents a case study of how a large multinational company was able to shift its entire international web and data operations to a homogenous Kubernetes infrastructure it built and now manages with open source tools.

Indeed, during the past five years, Condé Nast has been able, build a single underlying platform consisting of several dozen websites spread out around the world, including Russia and China in addition to the U.S. and Europe. Its web presence now hosts more than 300 million digital unique users per month and 570 article views every second.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, our Publisher Alex Williams sits down with Raj Dutt, CEO and co-founder Grafana Labs, provider of the open source observability platform Grafana. They’re talking about creating a more seamless transition among observability, tracing, metrics and logs, across different data types and open source projects.

Observability and distributed tracing are intrinsically linked to reliability of increasingly distributed systems. Observability-driven development uses data and tooling to observe the state and behavior of a system to learn more about its patterns for weaknesses. Distributed tracing provides the metrics and logs that allow for diving into individual requests and to get closer to the problem. In this powerful pairing, observability happens at the event level, which drives your questions, and tracing happens at the request level, which helps answer them.

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 Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb.io, the observability platform vendor, about the company’s pricing changes brought on by COVID-19 and more broadly how observability practices and tools are changing as more companies make the move to the cloud.

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

Honeycomb this week changed its pricing structure to reflect the cost realities for businesses and the long term effect of COVID-19. The company also recently released the results of a survey that shows half of the developers surveyed aren’t using observability currently, but 75% plan to do so in the next two years. And in April the company released an open source collector for OpenTracing that allows teams to import telemetry data from open source projects into any observability platform, including their own but also their competitors.

Yen said of the pricing changes:

Our old pricing was, you bought a certain amount of storage and gigabytes and paid for a certain amount of data ingest, also in gigabytes, over a period of time. We felt like that was a little bit harder for people to map to their existing workflows, harder for them to predict. So we shifted to an events-per-month ingest model, one axis, one way to scale your usage.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder, and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, Keith Mokris, head of product marketing, Prisma Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, and Mark Rauchwarter, cloud and infrastructure security for Accenture Security, discuss the key talking points of the Prisma Cloud Native Security Summit and what the results of the survey mean for the DevOps community.

Join Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks June 24 at 9:00 AM PDT at The State of Cloud Native Security virtual summit for a full discussion of the “The State of Cloud Native Security” report and other topics relevant to your organization’s digital journey. The summit will feature a panel session hosted by The New Stack’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams, with security thought leaders from AWS, Accenture, and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.

Bloomberg’s involvement as a financial information leader with the OpenAPI Initiative and the open source community is built on wider aspirations than it is about choosing the right tools to grow its business. The stakes are especially high in these turbulent times as the ravages of COVID-19 continue to take its toll, already wiping out large swaths of the economy .

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with two open source leaders from Bloomberg:

Richard Norton, head of the data license engineering group.

Kevin Fleming, head of open source community engagement and member of Bloomber’s CTO office.

Bloomberg’s collaboration and backing of OpenAPI as well, its involvement with open source and what this means for the financial sector are discussed.

From the outset, APIs are seen as a core underpinning of what Bloomberg offers with, of course, its famous Bloomberg terminals. The data and analytics Bloomberg provides its financial institution and other customers — which might include data feeds for futures or commodities — allows for key decisions to be made, often affecting world capital markets.

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 Peter Zaitsev, CEO of the open source database software and services company Percona,. This week, Percona held its own virtual 24 hour virtual conference, Percona Live Online, where open source, databases and cloud native computing were all discussed. So we grilled Zaitsev about how traditional SQL databases operate in a cloud native world, as well as about Percona’s newly announced performance and optimization package for MongoDB.

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

Thanks to the COVID-19 global pandemic, many IT systems are facing unprecedented workloads, reaching levels of usage on a daily basis that usually only happen on the busiest days of the year. The good news is that the cloud native approach has been rapidly gaining popularity with businesses large and small to help meet these sudden demands. And proper security precautions must be built into these emerging cloud native systems.

Applying principles of cloud native security to the enterprise was the chief topic of discussion for our panel of experts in this virtual panel. Panelists were:

Cheryl Hung, Director of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Carla Arend, Senior Program Director, Infrastructure Software, IDC.

John Morello, Palo Alto Networks Vice President of Product, Prisma Cloud.

Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted the discussion.

Certainly, operations have changed for most of us due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic. But this can be a good opportunity for an organization to rethink how they approach business continuing and resiliency, Arend noted. Those who were on the digital journey are getting much better through this crisis than those just starting. Now is a great time to focus on digital innovation.

Indeed, if anything, innovation is just accelerating in this time, Morello agreed. Without having the ability to interact in person, the tools that enable digital transformation — Kubernetes, containers — helps people operate more efficiently.

There’s no doubt we are in weird times. There are a lot of stressors, but the majority of the tech community has more opportunities than ever to do what we do working from home. Just last week Google and Twitter announced that employees can work from home for the rest of the year or even indefinitely. For The New Stack Publisher Alex Williams, there’s one resounding reason why — the internet is awesome. And what’s driving much of that awesomeness right now is no doubt Kubernetes and its highly distributed community.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Williams sits down, over Zoom, with two grounded frequent fliers — Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat and co-chair of OKD, Red Hat’s distribution of Kubernetes, and Paris Pittman, developer relations program manager at Google and a leader in CNCF’s Kubernetes contributor strategy. They spoke fresh off of running a particularly successful, inclusive — and very big — Red Hat Summit.

“Now, because it’s virtual, there’s no reason for them not to participate. And so we saw like this phenomenal exponential growth of people coming and participating at Red Hat,” Mueller said.

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 Tina Nolte, vice president of product, for Kubernetes management service Spectro Cloud, about why we shouldn’t think of containers/Kubernetes as just another form of virtualization.

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

Nolte recently wrote a popular post for us on why we shouldn’t think of containers and Kubernetes as just another form of virtualization — that it opens up a whole new way to think about application development and deployment. So we wanted to find out more about this concept.

“Kubernetes is really about that middle area between infrastructure and application. So the applications themselves are enabled to be differently architected because of that operational PaaS layer if you will,” she explained. “It’s not just a lift-and-shift of old apps into new infrastructure.”

Focusing too much on the infrastructure side of Kubernetes ultimately misses its true value, an insight Nolte gleaned, in part, from working for a well-regarded OpenStack-based start-up, Nebula, that ultimately shuttered.

The hype around Kubernetes has created many repercussions in the IT industry — while not all of the effects have been net positive for many organizations and DevOps teams. Infrastructure management is a prime example. Missing too often are security management tools for Kubernetes deployments and infrastructure management. Ultimately, these tools should have the capacity to replace security and IT skills gaps and talent shortages by automating vulnerability detections and fixes, for example.

“Kubernetes is something powerful and impactful, but has too many components and moving pieces,” Moe Abdula, vice president of engineering, SaltStack, said. “How do you ensure that you can build an architecture and a system around something like a Kubernetes that is easy to maintain, easy to support, easy to extend?”

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with Abdula and Gareth Greenaway, vice president of engineering, SaltStack, about how and why the infrastructure- and security-management aspects of Kubernetes, as well as infrastructure, have been neglected, what the risks are and what can be done to fix it.