The New Stack Podcast

Today, we speak with Cheryl Razzell, director of platform and Live Ops, at Polystream who has a particularly interesting narrative to share in what remains nevertheless a renaissance era in computing. Indeed, the assumption we can make is open source tools, platforms and, especially, talent will underpin how data is processed and managed as we win this war against the pandemic.

As the ravages of COVID-19 continue to take their toll in London, where she is based, and worldwide, Razzell speaks of women in tech, and her career path from tech support to working at Apple, Microsoft, HBSC, DevOps and continuing her high-level IT career tech at Polystream, a 3D content platform provider.

As mentioned above, regardless of whatever happens during the next few weeks and months, open-source development and tools will continue to serve as the foundation for what is yet to come. And during what will be a recovery eventually, organizations that thrive in the future will only do so by continuing to operate as software companies. But, this is just the context — lest we forget — that can often obscure how open source development and tools are only as good as the talents of the people constituting the DevOps teams that make the magic happen.

In this, The New Stack Makers podcast, Bill Mulligan, who plays a key role in helping customers to automate their IT operations with Kubernetes and operators for Loodse, discusses his background — taking him from the University of Wisconsin-Madison via the University of Oxford to his life in Berlin today — and the key role Cloud Native plays in supporting telcos and other Loodse customers.

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 Derek Weeks, vice president at Sonatype, about the results of a new community survey the company just released on DevSecOps that provides some insights on how teams are incorporating automated security tools and how that shift affects company culture and developer happiness.

Sonotype’s Nexus open source governance platform helps more than 1,000 organizations and 10 million software developers simultaneously accelerate innovation and improve application security. This is the seventh year that Sonatype has done this DevSecOps report, and, according to the company, it’s the longest running community survey on this topic. We discuss with Weeks how the practice of DevSecOps changed since the company started doing the survey, and the challenges organizations face in embedding security within their DevOps practices. We also ponder the reasons behind the puzzling finding that those companies with mature DevSecOps actually have more security breaches.

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

Linus Torvalds first released his Git version control software 15 years ago, on April 7, 2005, in an effort to foster a more creative spirit in Linux kernel development. Since then, Git's role in software development has emerged well beyond its roots as a version control system and a software repository. It's become a cornerstone in how software is developed today by distributed teams and open source developers around the world.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with three Git thought leaders who about Git’s roots, its present context and its future. We learned that despite its present-day success, Git's future is not certain.

Guests on this episode are:

Jason Warner, CTO, GitHub.

Cornelia Davis, CTO, Weaveworks.

Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO, GitLab.

For many, the possibilities that Git offers are exciting, both on an individual and macro level when many parties must collaborate on a project, particularly for CI/CD. You can use Git to upload personal pet projects, such whether you want to share a simple code sample or just documentation for something not necessarily related to software. For a large enterprise, developer teams can collaborate on application development concurrently whether they are scattered around the world or separated by only cubicle walls.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Nóva, chief open source advocate at Sysdig, about the progression of the open source world and her perspective examining it through the lens of San Francisco’s COVID-19 lockdown. She calls the book she wrote with Justin Garrison a kind of thesis that looks to predict the infrastructural patterns that could solve a lot of the challenges cloud-native infrastructure teams face.

For more episodes listen here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/

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 a couple of folks from cloud workload protection platform provider Rezilion: CEO Liran Tancman, and Chief Marketing Officer Tal Klein. We discuss how current best practices in security are actually outdated and how they think companies should be approaching security practices in the age of DevOps.

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

Klein wrote a contributed article for TNS on “Why Vulnerability Management Needs a Patch,” where he argues that current best practices and tools around security patching, such as the CVSS system for rating vulnerabilities, are outdated, particularly for modern DevOps shops.

As Klein says in the interview:

When you’ve got vulnerabilities, it’s very tough to figure out which ones to fix first, and the fact is that more and more vulnerabilities are discovered every year. So there’s, there’s a greater amount of things to patch and if you don’t know which ones to patch first, you’re never going to be able to address the full patching needs of your organization. And that’s been a cat and mouse game for a long time.

Then later in the show, we discuss some of our top podcasts and stories of the week. Our sister podcast, The New Stack Makers, posted an interview with DevRel trailblazer (and Coder-Twitter celeb) Cassidy Williams, on building software communities. COVID-19 continues to tear through the IT community, and so we look at the shifting network traffic patterns that have come about from the pandemic, as well as the additional babysitting duties that many IT professionals have to now mix into their daily work from home routines. Finally, we discuss The Eclipse Foundation’s Theia code editor, which has been billed as “a true open source alternative to Visual Studio Code.”

Listen to more episodes here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Daniel Spoonhower, CTO of Lightstep, discussed and described what the “three pillars” concept means for DevOps, how monitoring is different, Lightstep’s evolution in developing observability solutions and a number of other related themes.

Spoonhower — whose experience in developing observability tools traces back to work as a software engineer at Google — makes it clear that a “three pillar” observability solution consisting of metrics, logs, and distributed tracing represents, in fact, separate capabilities.

“I think the thing that we’ve kind of seen is that thinking of those as three different tools that you can just kind of squish together is not really a great solution. I mean, the way that I think about observability is I like to get away from the what the specific tools are, and just say that observability is the thing that helps you connect the effects that you’re seeing — whether that’s performance or user experience, or whatever, connecting those effects back to the causes,” Spoonhower said. “And the thing that happened with deep systems is that it’s not like there are five or 10 potential causes to those problems, but there are thousands or tens of thousands of those things. And so you need a tool to help you find those.”

Listen to more episodes here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/

This episode of The New Stack Makers focuses on more the community and less on the tech side of the tech community — which we think matters now more than ever. Williams has dedicated her career to teaching, mentoring and helping others find the right roles in tech. In fact, she’s written a step-by-step guide on how to get your first job in this industry. This episode dives into how to build the right network

Software Engineer and Developer Advocate Cassidy Williams started this decade looking forward to a year of global travel for React training, workshops, and public speaking gigs. She spent January in Boston, DC, and Austria. February saw her speaking in France and Ireland. Then, suddenly, the small consultancy she worked at went from having overbooked their March to an empty schedule. And the full-time staff was let go.

Listen to All New Stack Podcasts here: https://thenewstack.io/tag/podcast

Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto option for managing containers, while microservices serve as the underlying distributed architecture of Kubernetes clusters. The continued rise of multi-cloud infrastructures is also seen as a conduit for the continued adoption of microservices for Kubernetes deployments for such widely distributed infrastructures. The need to create applications and manage such diverse infrastructures in this rapidly expanding multi-cloud universe.

But, suddenly, the coronavirus worldwide pandemic has turned the world on its head in ways we have yet to fully realize,

In this, The New Stack Makers podcast, Ankur Singla, founder and CEO at software as a service (SaaS) provider Volterra, discusses the profound influences Kubernetes, microservices, multi-cloud environments, and open source have had on computing and IT today — and what their impacts may be in a Covid-19 world.

"Covid-19 throws a big wrench" into everything, Singla said. "The first thing we realized with lots of our large enterprise customers is that corporate networks are becoming a big bottleneck," Singla said. "And in order to reduce the load, many of the enterprises are already looking at how can they quickly migrate their apps from private data centers to the cloud, because the network to the cloud is a lot better than a network to private networks."

The migration to the cloud also involves a "move to SaaS services," Singla said. "SAS services obviously require scale, and more and more of them are going microservices," Singla said.

It is safe to assume that a particular technology or architecture has become mainstream, after surviving an initial hype cycle and becoming uniformly accepted and reliable. A technology associated with cost savings and demonstrably improved efficiencies is also another criterion used to determine whether a particular technology has acquired mainstream status. One can thus arguably assume microservices are on their to achieving mainstream status. "More and more enterprises are migrating to SaaS services, and SaaS is all about scale — and scaling is a lot easier with microservices," Singla said.

Singla began to see the potential of microservices about five years ago when large enterprises largely had adopted microservices. "But it was becoming very clear to me that that would be an architecture paradigm, and increasingly so with serverless — so, then, the paradigm shift was starting to happen. And we thought that was a great opportunity to start a new company that helped solve many of the problems of going mainstream to multiple cloud providers and being able to build highly distributed edge locations...with the convergence of distributed applications and data," Singla said. "And we said, 'it's a great time to start a company to solve the problem of distributed application data. So, that's the background on Volterra."

Feature image by from Pixabay.

Listen to ALL of our shows here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/

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 Kelsey Hightower, a developer advocate at Google, and Ben Sigelman, CEO and co-founder of observability services provider LightStep, about whether or not teams should favor a monolith over a microservices approach when architecting cloud native applications.

Hightower recently tweeted a prediction that “Monolithic applications will be back in style after people discover the drawbacks of distributed monolithic applications.” It was quite a surprise for those who have been advocating the for operational benefits of microservices. Why go back to a monolith?

As Hightower explains in the podcast: “There are a lot of people who have never left a monolith. So there’s really not anything to go back to. So it’s really about the challenges of adopting a microservices architecture. From a design perspective, like very few companies talk about, here’s how we designed our monolith.”

Sigelman, on the other hand, maintained that microservices are necessary for rapid development, which, in turn, is necessary for sustaining a business. “It’s not so much that you should use microservices, it’s more like, if you don’t innovate faster than your competitors, your company will eventually be erased, like, that’s the actual problem. And in order to do that, you need to build a lot of differentiated technology,” he said. Microservices is the most logical approach for maintaining a large software team while still maintaining a competitive velocity of development.

Later in the show, we discuss some of the top TNS podcasts and news posts of the week, including an interview with IBM’s Lin Sun on the importance of the service mesh, as Sysdig’s offer of a distributed, scalable Prometheus, a group of chief technology officers who want to help the U.S. government with the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the hidden vulnerabilities that come with open source security.

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