The New Stack Podcast

Rare is the DevOps team that has the bandwidth to manually parse through and prioritize what needs to be fixed among what can number millions of application-error alerts. This includes distinguishing between minor glitches and those errors that can bring to a screeching halt an organization’s capacity to meet its customers’ needs and expectations.

A viable error-monitoring system should, ideally, automate the communication of error data in a way that indicates what must be done to make a fix.

A system might be able to signal every single error, perhaps totaling millions of alerts.

The error alerts users receive must be “actionable,” Ben Vinegar, vice president of engineering, for Sentry, said. “That’s a really hard problem,” Vinegar 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 Deepak Singh, Amazon Web Services’ vice president for containers and open source, and Peder Ulander, AWS general manager for open source, about the company’s recently released Bottlerocket Linux distribution for the cloud.

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

Twenty years ago, Dries Buytaert founded Drupal right at the dot-com bust. Then in 2008, at the start of the so-called Great Recession, he started Acquia, a digital experience platform for Drupal sites. Some would say those are unlucky times to start businesses. Not Buytaert. He’s convinced well-loved free and open source software or FOSS is recession-proof. And that’s what this episode of The New Stack Makers dives into.

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 Sebastien Goasguen, co-founder and chief product officer, TriggerMesh, about how to build applications from serverless functions that span multiple clouds, using the company’s software.

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

We spoke with Goasguen about the role that TriggerMesh plays for GitLab and enterprise customers. Last month, TriggerMesh released the Cloud Native Integration Platform as well as the AWS Event Sources for OpenShift, timing the release with the virtual Red Hat Summit. With the latter offering, TriggerMesh brings Amazon EventBridge-like functionality to the OpenShift ecosystem allowing developers to trigger functions across clouds and legacy data centers. TriggerMesh users can now link events from anywhere to Red Hat OpenShift workloads.

“Serverless is not just function-as-a-service. It’s not just functions. It’s actually an integration problem. We call TriggerMesh a cloud-native integration platform: We compose cloud services together, glue them together thanks to an event-driven architecture,” Goasguen said.

Then, later in the podcast, we discuss the top podcasts and news stories from the site, including an interview with agile expert Emily Webber on remote work, how serverless can help embed security into the development process, the idea of offering databases as a serverless service, and the importance of standards in serverless adoption.

What is remote-first? In normal times, it’s an organization that is built in such a way that anyone can go remote if necessary.

“Whether or not you want to allow your employees to go remote, you should have the processes in place to be able to just-in-case because you see transportation problems loom all over the world, weather problems all over the world, sick children at home. There were all kinds of reasons why a business should be putting remote processes into place,” said Lisette Sutherland on this episode of The New Stack Makers.

For Sutherland, founder of Collaboration Superpowers remote team workshops, longtime remote work podcast host, and author of A Handbook on Working Remotely — Successfully — for Individuals, Teams, and Managers, we’ve been technologically ready for a remote-first world for about five years now. And she says there’s always been logic in factoring a remote-first mindset into your business continuity planning. Plus, giving the option of remote work often makes for a much more inclusive workplace that in turn empowers a business to hire the best candidate no matter where they live.

With remote work, “people can hire people who love what they do, rather than people who are just doing their job,” Sutherland said.

How do we promote diversity and inclusion from the comfort of our homes? How do we recreate those important hallway moments within a virtual environment? How do we continue to consider the consequences of what we’re building? We begin to answer these questions and more in this episode of The New Stack Makers, where we interview Emily Webber, independent agile delivery and digital transformation consultant, coach and trainer, and author of the book Building Successful Communities of Practice.

Webber, like everyone The New Stack is interviewing as of late, was calling in via Zoom from her home office. Usually, she’d be working between her clients’ offices in London and in India. Even for someone who has built part of her brand on remote meet-ups, nothing about this is business as usual.

Webber is based in London, where, in normal times, it’s completely common to see people eating lunch at their desks or even while walking back to work from the takeaway shop. But at her client in India, they all take breaks and share meals together in the canteen. There she’s not only experienced a huge leveling up in terms of cuisine, but she’s witnessed the innovation that comes from those chance encounters around the hallway, cafeteria, and water cooler.

Webber has borrowed Etsy’s John Goulah’s term “assisted serendipity” and applied it to our temporarily remote-first world. This can be using a Slack app like Donut or Shuffl to facilitate random coffee pairings. Or host remote coffees or happy hours. It may be assisted, but it is an efficient way of crossing cross-departmental silos, as well as to fight isolation during these trying times.

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 Joe Duffy, Founder and CEO of Pulumi, and Sophia Parafina, Pulumi’s technical marketing manager. In this convo, we delve into the recent Pulumi 2.0 release, which allows teams to reuse code, apply policies and do integration testing of infrastructure the same way they do for application development, a concept known as “architecture as code.”

TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

What is the role that the data plane plays in a Kubernetes ecosystem? This was the theme for our latest (virtual) pancake breakfast and panel discussion, sponsored by DataStax, the keeper of the open source Cassandra database.

Last month, Datastax released a Kubernetes operator, so that the NoSQL database can be more easily installed, managed, and updated in Kubernetes container-based infrastructure.

The Panelists for this discussion:

Kathryn Erickson, DataStax senior director of partnerships.

Janakiram MSV, principal analyst of Janakiram & Associates.

Aaron Ploetz, Target NoSQL lead engineer.

Sam Ramji, DataStax chief strategy officer.

Alex Williams, publisher for The New Stack served as moderator for this panel, with the help of TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

in 2015, Ramji worked at Google and oversaw the business development around its then-newly open source project, Kubernetes, which was based on its internal container orchestrator, the Borg. The Borg provides Google a single control pane for dynamically managing all its many containerized workloads, and its scale-out database, Spanner, offered the same for the data plane.

“The marriage of those two things made compute and data so universally addressable so easy to access that you could do just about anything that you could imagine,” Ramji explained.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with Glitch’s CEO Anil Dash and James Turnbull, vice president of engineering, about how Glitch could help developers remove much of the pain associated with installing and accessing application code and how it serves as an extension of GitHub.

Glitch, which was originally called Gomix created under the Fog Creek Software umbrella — along with Stack Overflow and Trello — has served as the platform for over five million apps, according to Dash.

Glitch can potentially take some of the pain out of application development since developers can begin working directly on abstraction layers while “taking away the the kind of boring, repeatable part of being a developer,” Dash said, who estimates about 80% of all code written is identical elsewhere. “Glitch provides people with a platform they can build on top of it without having to worry about installing this dependency or worrying about how this thing works,” Dash said. “That’s the way that a lot of the world has been moving and how the abstraction layer is moving further up the stack.”

TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) framework, serves as a good case study, Dash said. “Frankly, when TensorFlow first came out, I had tried to get it running on my dev environment and gave up after several hours of frustration — which made me feel dumb and was probably not their intended goal,” Dash said. Now, for access to the JavaScript framework for TensorFlow, Google has embedded examples of the code for TensorFlow with Glitch, similar to how YouTube code is embedded for video. “So, where you would embed a YouTube video, we’ve got an app running instead,” Dash said. “And it’s showing you how to build a model around your ML libraries and how to actually get up and running.”

For those seeking just to study how certain code and apps work, Glitch can “make it really easy for folks who are like journalists to go: ‘okay, I don’t really understand how this AWS thing works, but I’ve got an example of someone using this Python app to to map all this data together,’” Turnbull said. “I can create a visualization from that. And I think that’s an example of a strong use case framework-wise.”

Ultimately, for the developer, the creative — or for many — the fun part of development work could potentially be more accessible. Applications are “built on top of the scaffold,” Dash said. “I think what we’re seeing here is that we can provide that abstraction layer and we can take away the the kind of boring, repeatable part of being a developer,” Dash said. “We can provide people with a platform that they can take and build on top of it without having to worry about things like ‘I need to install this dependency or I need to worry about how this thing works, or I need to set up this framework or, or this template.'”

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 The New Stack correspondent Jennifer Riggins about all of the excellent reporting she and others on the TNS team have been doing recently on the effects that COVID-19 is having on the tech industry.

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

For this episode, we wanted to look not only discuss the changing patterns in network traffic that the global COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, due to factors such people staying at home and working from home, and the sudden acceleration of e-learning. As Riggins writes in a recent post:

For a lot of tech and infrastructure teams, they not only are going through the stress of the collective trauma we’re sharing in, but they are struggling to keep up with ever-scaling, extreme strains on their systems. Simply put, no one could have predicted this uptick.

One big theme that kept popping up was “resiliency,” not only from an individual psychological perspective, as well from organizational and systems views as well.

Here are some of the other posts we discussed:

The Network Impact of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic: How has the worldwide pandemic stressed our networks? In multiple ways, according to this report from our London correspondent Mary Branscombe. Internet traffic is generally 25% to 30% higher than usual. You can also see the change in where people are connecting from; usage is up in residential areas but visibly down in downtown San Francisco, downtown San Jose and especially the Cupertino and Mountain View neighborhoods where Apple and Google have their campuses.

U.S. Unemployment Surge Highlights Dire Need for COBOL Skills: One of the surprise stories coming from the global pandemic has been the dire need for COBOL developers. Who would have seen that one coming? New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is now asking for volunteers with COBOL skills. New Jersey’s 40-year-old mainframe benefits system was besieged by a 1,600% increase in usage, as over 371,000 people have filed claims in the past month.

Keep Your Endpoints Secure During the COVID-19 Pandemic: We are also seeing more reports of security breaches indirectly due to the spreading virus. In this contributed post from CalSoft’s Sagar Nangare, he notes that People are scared and hungry for more information around events like COVID-19. In panic mode, they surf the internet, visit fake pages, and fall prey to phishing scams. Also, endpoints for remote access have increased due to remote working, increasing surface areas for cybercriminals to target.

How Kubernetes Prepared 8×8 for a 50x Spike in Videoconferencing Usage: The New Stack spoke to 8×8, a cloud communications and video collaboration provider to learn how the company phased in remote-by-default, and how it is creating systems and team resiliency during a 50-fold increase in traffic over less than a month. One answer? Kubernetes.

Chaos, Hugs and Interruptions: Dev Folks Work from Home with Kids: Working at home is nothing new to the cloud native computing community, which has always been about the distributing workloads. But adding children, who all of sudden were home full time as well when the schools closed, adds another stress to already frazzled IT pros. Here are some tips on getting by.

SaltStack’s CTO on Pandemics, the End of Empires and Software’s Future: Here’s an interview with Thomas S. Hatch, founder and Chief Technology Officer of SaltStack where he discusses how software engineers’ lives have changed (or not), the folly of forcing workers to come to the office when they really do not need to and his observations of network infrastructure saturation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.