The New Stack Podcast

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In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with IBM’s Lin Sun, whose official title is a senior technical staff member and “master inventor” for a comprehensive overview on what service meshes are for those not completely familiar with the topic, may have some familiarity and want to know more or want to also know more about emerging use cases.

Sun’s expertise in service meshes largely draws upon her role as an Istio project maintainer and is also on the Istio Steering Committee and Technical Oversight Committee.

Sun’s IBM title as “master inventor” may sound unusual or even arguably pretentious for some, or even “really cool,” as Sun describes it. But at IBM, the status as “master inventor” represents specific merits those who hold the title must first attain.

“‘Master inventor’ is a title for someone who demonstrates the mastery of the IBM inventor process and is able to mentor other people to be successful in the invention process, and to be able to be productive yourself,” Sun said. Among the other requirements, a “master inventor” must also first file about a dozen patents and to have at least one issued patent, Sun said. You must also have worked with a ‘review board to reveal any incoming patent disclosures on behalf of IBM

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There’s a common misconception that the individual consumer’s actions will dramatically affect climate change. That we should recycle more and avoid plastic straws and bottles. These are nice-to-haves, but they don’t make an impact on the systemic contamination of industries like agriculture, travel, and, yes, tech. On the other hand, when scandal strikes tech, we point blame at the top, and we don’t drill down into the individual responsibility. What we found with the Volkswagen emissions scandal is that even the person who writes the code can be culpable.

If we each bear some individual responsibility in the code we release, is there power in the green developer? In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sit down with Microsoft Green Cloud Advocacy Lead Asim Hussain to talk about what a green developer is. And we try to uncover what does that actually look like for a web developer, a machine learning engineer, a DevOps person, or a department with a huge fleet of Internet of Things fleet devices.

Hussain says to start it’s not about a lack of motivation.

“They care, they want to do something. And one of the questions I get asked a lot is from developers and all kinds of developers working on all different aspects of applications are, What can I do now?”

Hussain said that then they end up only focusing on their own role when they should be looking at things end to end.

He continued that “I used to think full stack meant like a website to a database. And now I understand full stack means like, from user behavior to how electricity is bought and sold on a grid.”

In fact, Hussain predicts a whole new role emerges: sustainable software engineer. Or even better a multi-department team that looks to piece together the full software development lifecycle, from sourcing hardware materials to powering data centers to the deprecation of the tools and devices.

This can start with just ardent, cross-functional green-conscious volunteers who make themselves know in an organization and who try to piece together this lifecycle. That’s how it started with Microsoft, growing into a 2,000-person green team.

Where do you get started? Hussain says to start by examining the carbon efficiency and the carbon intensity of your application. Hussain points to little moves that have a big impact like choosing when to run your workloads, which “depending upon the renewable mix and the energy grid, you can, just by changing when you run a workload, you can reduce the carbon emissions by 48 percent per application.”

And don’t just assume this is for the most modern microservices, he says this can even be more impactful when you are running certain jobs on legacy applications.

Hussain continues to talk about the creation of a green public agreement. He also offers Microsoft’s sustainability calculator which allows you to start to measure because, as we’ve learned with the agile movement, you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

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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 Liran Tal, a developer advocate at container security platform provider Snyk and a member of the Node.js security working group, about who should own security in the DevOps process — the security team or the development?

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

Tal wrote an article for us recently, “‘DevSecOps Insights 2020’: Who Really Owns Security in DevOps,”which summarized the results of a survey the company carried out covering security, development and operations. The post included a couple of surprising survey results, namely that only 14% of respondents reported that they test for known vulnerabilities in container images, and 38% of respondents don’t integrate automated security scanning into their DevOps pipeline.

As Tal writes in the post:

When that many respondents agree security is a major concern when trying to deliver software quickly, it means we need to scale up security to enable fast delivery of security fixes. The key to doing that is developers, as they ultimately fix security issues in an application’s source code.

We also get Tal’s views on incorporating security into the a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), the need for development speed, as well as his thoughts on the recent purchase of npm by GitHub.

Then, later in the show, we discuss some of the top podcasts and news stories from the site. An episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast provides fodder for discussing service mesh adoption. Also on the agenda: Frustrations mount over Python 3 migrations; Project Calico offers a faster data plane with the help of eBPF; and an excellent side-by-side comparison offered by StackRox’s Karen Bruner of the managed Kubernetes offerings from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Last week we wrote about how a true DevOps transformation doesn’t just focus on developers and operations but looks to unclog cross-organizational bottlenecks. One of those areas often overlooked — the one with so much of that coveted rapid feedback — is support. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Michael Shelton, VP of global customer support at NinjaRMM, about closing the cultural distance to reach support teams to drive the post-customer experience.

When Shelton joined NinjaRMM five years ago, it was still a tiny team working on the then new remote monitoring and management platform. They didn’t have a support team yet — everyone was support. He admitted that back in the day they had a lot of bugs, but they used that to broach stronger customer relationships.

Shelton said they built an ethos that continues today, talking to customers like partners and, sometimes even therapists:

“You’re not wrong. Sounds like you’re having a really tough time. And sounds like we’re part of the cause of that. Let’s work together to figure out what the solution is.”

The NinjaRMM team realized they could use the close relationship between support and the customer to drive the product. What do the customers love? What are they super frustrated about? What are their use cases?

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Prisma, from Palo Alto Networks, sponsored this podcast, following its Cloud Native Security Live, 2020 Virtual Summit held Feb. 11, 2020.

The adoption of “immutable infrastructure” has emerged as a viable way to improve DevOps processes and culture. By introducing more of a standardization in application deployment and management, immutable infrastructure helps, among other things, to foster a better collaborative environment among developers, operations, security team and other stakeholders.

“Immutable infrastructure gives you the ability to have a consistent environment, across your entire fleet of systems, which gives you a simpler and more predictable deployment,” Mike Liedike, manager, Deloitte Consulting’s Innovations and Platforms team, said. “It allows you to do the testing more consistently and promote your environments from development to test to prod.”

In other words, the adoption of immutable infrastructure is often a hallmark of a highly functional DevOps.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at Palo Alto Networks’ studio in Santa Clara, CA, Liedike offers further insight and analysis of what the adoption of an immutable infrastructure can mean for your organization.

A good starting point to describe how immutable infrastructure works is by first detailing how it does not work — or more specifically, what “mutable” infrastructure is and how it differs compared to immutable infrastructure. Using the example of Apache servers, Liedike noted how admins might upgrade the servers by installing the latest version of the Web server software with configuration-management tools. The problem, Liedike said, is that “across 1,000 instances, you have a lot of room for error and inconsistency.” “With immutable infrastructure, instead of doing those changes in place, you would actually build a new server, with all the upgrades already in place, and then deploy your systems and decommission the old ones,” Liedike said.

Sponsor Note

Listen to all of The New Stack podcasts 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. This week we spoke with Mohan Raj, IT senior manager of the CloudOne developer experience at NetApp. Over the past two years, he has been building a DevOps platform at NetApp that provides cloud services, automation, and CI/CD release models for the company’s application development teams that need to build cloud native applications — using NetApps own tools.

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

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

In this, The New Stack Analysts podcast, Lee Calcote, an analyst and founder of Layer5, and Brian “Redbeard” Harrington, a principal product manager for OpenShift service mesh at Red Hat, discussed the many nuances of what the survey numbers really mean.

Calcote, for example, notes how traffic management is seen as a key feature among the many different service mesh capabilities, but it’s most useful to advanced users. Speaking about the use of traffic management functionalities, Calcote said: “Folks tend to be a little more advanced as they get into that because they’re at that point they’re actually affecting traffic and then routing requests differently, as opposed to something like just purely observing or getting a ‘read-only’ view in their environment.”

Harrington agreed. “I’m happy that Lee kind of pointed out the specific distinction around traffic control, because among the users who I’m talking to that’s the — pun intended — ‘gateway drug,'” Harrington said. Organizations with legacy bare metal environments and “pretty expensive hardware incumbencies” face challenges as they move “move to dynamic environments” and as they “de-prioritize” some legacy hardware, traffic management capabilities service meshes can provide help when making the shift, Harrington said.

The survey results and experience in the field also indicate organizations are still mulling the best use cases for service meshes. When asked whether an organization should adopt or how they should begin to rely on service meshes, it is often “irrespective of whether they’re starting on the simpler…or more sophisticated [possibilities] in that spectrum,” Calcote said.”The advice is generally the same which is you should start and adopt a bit at a time a bit of value at a time and what that value is sort of dependent upon what you’re looking for out of mesh,” Calcote said. “But between you getting comfortable with what you’ve deployed and getting the value out of what you’ve deployed, [organizations should] take the next step from there to hopefully at some point leverage all of the functionality of the mesh.”

For the full video go here: https://youtu.be/honVx93d9aM

As Nicole Hubbard, a developer advocate for HashiCorp observed, customers constantly face difficulties when trying to secure the communication between their services running inside of a Kubernetes cluster. The dilemma often involves trying to figure out how to lock down communications between the applications inside and outside clusters or with apps between clusters, Hubbard said.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers video recorded live at Palo Alto Networks’ studio in Santa Clara, CA, Hubbard shows how Consul Connect with Envoy can help to securely maintain data communication between different Kubernetes and microservices environments.

Hubbard describes, among other things, Consul Connects features and functions as a “one-on-one level intro to Consul.” The end result is that Consul Connect with Envoy secures communications between Kubernetes clusters, as well as different data sources.

“If you look at the different ways you can run applications, you can run them everywhere between mainframes, your own hardware in your own data centers, virtual machines or even as far as containers and functions that are serverless. But the one thing that’s common between all of these is the network. You have to secure the communication between all the different services, no matter where they’re running,” Hubbard said. “But as you grow and you start to break these out into microservices, you run into the problem of how does ‘a’ talk to ‘b’ and how do I find where ‘b’ is.”

Hubbard described how some bank partners can have as many as 4,000 services “that won’t scale with VLANs or firewall rules, without an extremely high operational overhead.” Hubbard described how within a service mesh, there is a control plane and the data plane, while “the control plane for us is Consul.” “And what Consul is responsible for is defining the roles, defining and tracking what services are available as well as provisioning that information to the data plane so that the data plane knows how to move traffic around,” Hubbard said. “The data plane is basically a pluggable proxy that receives this information from the control plane and uses it to route data correctly to the correct place.”

For more insight from security thought leaders, Cloud Native Security Live, 2020 Virtual Summit is your opportunity to learn from the experience and expertise of developers, DevOps pros and IT leaders who all have so much at stake in container technologies and DevSecOps. Hosted by Prisma, from Palo Alto Networks, in partnership with The New Stack, you can still virtually attend this event held Feb. 11, 2020, for a full day of discussions about cloud native security — brought to you online wherever you may be.

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Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week we spoke with Rob Skillington, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Chronosphere, a monitoring company that came out of stealth late last year and is built around the open source metrics platform, M3, which Skillington and Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao helped develop at Uber.

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

The New Stack Editor Alex Williams sat down, with Diane Patton, technical marketing engineer at NetApp, Jenny Fong, VP of marketing at Diamanti, and Sriram Subramanian, an analyst at IDC, to learn how Kubernetes has evolved into the preferred infrastructure layer for stateful environments.

Listen to this episode of The New Stack Analysts to hear more about where we are heading and how we should be able to handle state in any given situation.