The New Stack Podcast

Container security has always been a concern — especially now in the wake of recent highly publicized vulnerabilities and breaches. But while containers benefit from running in isolated environments and have other advantages compared to traditional application structures, the peculiarities of Kubernetes as an orchestration platform represents additional security concerns. As Kubernetes continues on its rapid path of adoption, the need for a  reliable framework for vulnerability detection and management becomes that much more important.

The vacuum for a definitive audit of the state of Kubernetes security set the stage for publication of the Kubernetes Security Audit Working Group. On hand to discuss the audit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon were Jay Beale, CTO of InGuardians, and Aaron Small, a product manager for Google, who are also both co-leads of the Kubernetes third-party assessment project. They discussed this and how Kubernetes, compared to Docker containers, represents a new, and ultimately, risky world of dependencies during a live recording in San Diego for this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. In this week’s episode, we talk with John Jeremiah, product marketing manager at GitLab, about the GitLab Commit user conference happening on January 14 in San Francisco.

Libby Clark, the editorial and marketing director of The New Stack, hosted this episode, with the help of TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

GitLab, a sponsor of The New Stack, made its name with git-based version control but is now looking to automate and consolidate continuous integration and continuous deployment into a single lifecycle. We attended GitLab’s last Commit event, held in Brooklyn back in September, which gave us a lot of interesting stories around DevOps practices. So we quiz Jeremiah about some of these emerging trends that no doubt we’ll hear more about in San Francisco, including DevSecOps and DataOps.

In this next episode of The New Stack Makers, Editor in Chief Alex Williams sits down with Buddy Brewer to talk about the user experience that New Relic’s customers are working to deliver to their customers. And about how monitoring inside mobile and web apps for end users — including perceived performance and distributed tracing — helps everyone understand just what that experience is.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey discussed the resulting complexities of CD and software delivery management in 2020, as well as the role Jenkins X and CloudBees are expected to play in what should be an especially exciting year for at-scale development.

For many organizations, 2019 was a pivotal year due to the snowball effect of Kubernetes adoption, as both opportunities — and complexities — emerged.

In this, The New Stack Makers podcast episode, Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO of InfluxData, discusses what is in store for 2020 for databases, both on an industry scale and how InfluxData’s development teams hope to rise to today’s challenges. Distributed tracing, serverless “pay as you go” business models, InfluxData’s Flux programming languages for databases and the outlook for stateful database applications in Kubernetes were also under discussion as Dix spoke freely and candidly about the different topics.

This week on The New Stack Context podcast we discuss databases and microservices. We chat with Kyle Davis, Redis Labs' head of developer advocacy and Loris Cro, Redis Labs' developer advocacy manager, about their new e-book, "Redis Microservices for Dummies." We discuss the new requirements for database systems in the the world of microservices, as well as the emergence of data streaming. We also discuss the news of the week with TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson. Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this podcast.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk about all this and more with Susanna Kass, who, after 30 years designing, building and operating data centers, is now the data center advisor for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Program.

For data centers, it all comes down to stopping what Kass refers to as the “dirty cloud,” which sees most data centers depleting energy, land, and water. Data centers need to make a pledge to achieve carbon neutrality for every kilowatt hour that is consumed, be accountable for the phase out of coal, and transition to a carbon-neutral infrastructure by using and generating renewable energy per KW hour consumed by site.

Kass describes this as using “nature-based technological solutions to protect our earth, resources and the environment.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Andrew Tunall, general manager, serverless and emerging cloud services; and Erica Windisch, principal engineer, from New Relic discuss how Lamba and serverless have changed and evolved and how some organizations have benefited.

When the concept of serverless was introduced, Windisch said much time and effort were spent just explaining “to people what serverless was.”

Today, organizations are introducing levels of complexity through their deployments on Lambda and serverless. Examples include distributed applications, Windisch said. “More people are running into these harder things: These sort of use cases with more complex architectures,” Windisch said. “It’s not because serverless is hard — it’s because people are at the maturity level that they can build, so they’re building complex applications in serverless rather than in containers.”

Maxine, the fictional character in Gene Kim’s latest book “The Unicorn Project,” likely shares your plight. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Kim, who is also the author of the seminal and now classic “The Phoenix Project,” discusses Maxine’s daily struggles — and without disclosing spoilers — successes.

Maxine shares the developer’s modern-day angst in this paradoxically open source and DevOps Renaissance. While her plight is fictional, Maxine shows how developers, with management’s backing, can transform an enterprise’s DevOps with its from-the-front-lines fictionalized case study with human drama to spare.

And, of course, it is never easy, whether you are trying to convince management to back you or your team to implement DevOps — or if you are Maxine in “The Unicorn Project.” In the the first third of the book, Maxine is stranded on an island” and “everything requires a ticket — not one ticket but like 30 tickets,” Kim said. “She’s having to pester people to get even license keys or environments,” Kim said.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Williams talks to Pivotal’s Cornelia Davis and Dell Technologies’ William Geller about this journey to bring this majority on-board with Kubernetes, and how to use managed architecture to overcome the often overwhelming complexity of Kubernetes orchestration.

Davis, VP of technology at Pivotal, pointed to MiniKube as one of the major ways to bring those people on board.

“With a simple download and a couple of commands, you’re on your way. You’re going to be pushing apps into Kubernetes. And you’re doing that on your own laptop or maybe they’re doing it with one of the cloud service providers.”

She continued that “And it’s all so easy. It just works.”