The New Stack Podcast

Service meshes, Istio and the underling architectures — fine topics to discuss over a short stack with The New Stack. At Kubecon + Cloud NativeCon in San Diego, We explore the scaling of application architectures and how business objectives fit with approaches, team development and workflows that come with service mesh technologies.

Guests: Carlisia Campos, Tom Spoonemore, and Efri Nattel-Shay

Velero is an open source project that provides backup, restore and migrating capabilities for Kubernetes.  Originally developed by Heptio and known as Ark, Velero is supported by Dell's PowerProtect, allowing users to back up their Kubernetes clusters. In an interview at KubeCon, The New Stack discussed Velero  with VMware's Carlisia Campos, a maintainer for Velero and member of the VMware technical staff; Tom Spoonemore, VMware's cloud native apps director and Dell's Efri Nattel-Shay, director of product management.

The idea is to empower all DevOps' stakeholders with better access to continuous integration (CI)/continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. Your organization also very likely relies on Jenkins as the backbone for the production pipeline with a reliance on Git to share and collaborate.

However, the problem has long been that  Jenkins is notoriously hard to implement and use for many organizations. The added complexities of shifting to cloud native and Kubernetes platforms have further compounded the difficulties — but this new age of Jenkins and cloud native deployments have also set the stage for the creation of CloudBees' open source Jenkins X. CloudBees created Jenkins X mainly to help facilitate and automate CD pipelines to Kubernetes and cloud native environments. The idea is also to allow Jenkins X to make it easier to develop and deploy cloud native applications to Kubernetes without having to learn the intricacies of the orchestrator. Jenkins X is also one of four projects of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), which also includes  Jenkins, Spinnaker and Tekton.

CloudBees says it is also continuing to try and improve Jenkins X, by simplify how developers and all DevOps stakeholders work with the tool. To that end, the company has developed its first-ever graphical interface.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast recorded during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego last week, CloudBees' Moritz Plassnig, vice president, cloud and Peter Muir, lead architect, spoke with Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack about how CloudBees continues to try to make Jenkins X both more accessible and easier to use.

Guests: Sugu Sougoumarane & Quinton Hoole

Google and other tech giants can be hard examples to follow. As organizations rush to scale their infrastructure on a mix of on-premises and cloud environments, especially on Kubernetes, they often struggle when trying to store and analyze data from stateless sources. A lot of the traditional storage databases have not worked at the scale needed, while the early cloud services, such as AWS and Google, developed their own storage environments internally.

“Kubernetes was very much focused initially on the stateless workloads and didn't do a very good job, to be perfectly honest, of providing any kind of support for storage, other than to the extent that you could connect to an existing public cloud provider,” Quinton Hoole, technical vice president of Huawei’s Futurewei Technologies, said. “I think that's evolved a lot over the last several years, as there are many different cloud native database [options]. People are starting to do serious stateful workloads in the cloud and in Kubernetes, in particular.”

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, Sugu Sougoumarane, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at PlanetScale, as well as Hoole, discuss what tools and approaches organizations can take to store and manage data from Kubernetes and containers.

They also cover how storage and database-management tools are catching up to organizations’ often complex infrastructure needs. However, finding the right tool mix is not easy.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast.

My how KubeCon (now “KubeCon+CloudNativeCon”) has grown! We remember four years ago, when the conference was held in the second floor of a Seattle hotel, you could take a tour of all the booths within a few minutes. This year, more than 12,000 attendees packed the San Diego Convention Center, dozens of vendor booths span three gigantic rooms. You needed a map just to find one you were looking for. A good number of the companies we met with back in 2016 have grown into full-fledged businesses. And thanks to a sponsorship of Portworx, we were able to dispatch a team of crack reporters to capture many of the product updates that debuted at the show.

On this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we discuss some of these stories as well as the event itself. In this episode, we are joined by Alex Williams, founder and editor-and-chief of The New Stack, as well as TNS correspondent Emily Ormier and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark served as host.

Among the topics we touched upon included the emerging issue of integrating Kubernetes into the enterprise, the ongoing challenge of securing containers, and whether or not the service mesh is ready for production use. We also share our personal highlights from the event, discussing the conference's free daycare for children (thumbs up!) and Kelsey Hightower's bittersweet farewell keynote.

Lauren Maffeo studies the emerging threats of artificial intelligence in her work as an analyst for GetApp, a software reviews site under Gartner Research that uses proprietary data to help match software buyers with the best tools for their businesses.

In these two episodes of The New Stack Makers, Maffeo provides her perspective on artificial intelligence, its power and the threats it poses when unchecked.

The top performing companies in the financial markets are using technologies based upon artificial intelligence. These technologies are powerful but can at times prove to pose indirect biases. That can lead to a bank loan getting denied, a passport not issued, a payment getting stopped and a black person getting a longer prison sentence due to the color of their skin.

Many IT teams begin moving their applications to containers and Kubernetes after their managers mandate the switch. Then in the rush to deploy they may forget, or simply delay, some fundamentals. Only six to 12 months later does integrating security into their CI/CD pipeline becomes a priority.

This gradual evolution toward cloud native security best practices is worrisome, but it’s the norm among organizations adopting Kubernetes today. This is what we learned from a panel of cloud native security experts at The New Stack’s pancake and podcast from KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America this week. The New Stack founder and publisher Alex Williams was joined on the panel by:

Keith Mokris, product marketing manager, container security at Palo Alto Networks; Maya Kaczorowski, product manager at Google.

Santiago Torres-Arias, Ph.D. student at New York University Center for Cyber Security; Sarah Allen, co-chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Security Special Interest Group (SIG); Sean M. Kerner, senior editor at InternetNews.com.

Prisma by Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast.

The threads and threats that come with computer intelligence were apparent to Pamela McCorduck in 1960 as a graduate student in English Literature. Those same threads and threats are apparent today in the biases that can come with black box algorithms and indirect biases that Lauren Maffeo studies in her work as an analyst for GetApp, a software reviews site under Gartner Research that uses proprietary data to help match software buyers with the best tools for their businesses.

In these two episodes of The New Stack Makers, McCorduck and Maffeo each provide their perspectives on artificial intelligence, its power and the threats it poses when unchecked.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a weekly podcast where we discuss the latest news and views from the cloud native community. This week we speak to Joe Fernandes, Red Hat's vice president of product for the company's cloud platforms business unit. We discuss the past year and the future of Kubernetes, as well what to expect next week at the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon conference in San Diego next week. Libby Clark, who is the editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this podcast, along with Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack.

Docker. You know it. You use it. You might well be confused by it. Is it Docker? Or is it docker? And why has Docker (or docker) taken a back seat to Kubernetes? There are so many questions regarding this technology. But one question that has been on the hearts and minds of many a container administrator is security.

You might think that, given the isolated nature of containers, they’d be harmless. On certain levels that is the case. If a container is deployed correctly, it cannot access the deploying ecosystem. In theory. But, as we’ve all discovered in the realm of technology, where there’s a will there’s a way.

Although you might fully understand how to deploy a containerized application and scale it out to meet the needs of your company, are you taking the necessary steps to ensure that application, and the hosting environment, is as secure as possible?

What can you do?

Listen as Jack Wallen discusses these topics with Scott McCarty, principal product manager for containers at Red Hat.