The New Stack Podcast

One of the themes of the Cloud Foundry Summit series has always been to help reinforce the strong sense of community among those who take part in the open source movement. In this way, the recently held Cloud Foundry Summit EU in September lived up to its mission. Among those on hand at the conference whose jobs are to initiate and educate organizations, about open source and the Cloud Foundry, as well as to include more individuals in the movement, were Ivana Scott, business operations manager, EngineerBetter and Sara Lenz, sales and account Manager, anynines. They were the guests on The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at Cloud Foundry Summit EU, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack. Both Lenz and Scott are particularly well-positioned to offer a fresh perspective on how to grow the community through education.

Scott first became involved in the open source community in in 2007 when she joined training provider in London. There, she was  part of the events team, and was involved in organizing events, training courses, conference and meetups, while devoting a “huge amount”  of effort to support open source communities. She then became directly involved in the Cloud Foundry community after joining EngineerBetter in 2018.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CZ45-j2e_eY

A question that may come to mind for those managing enterprise workloads is: What is Trident? This is the main question that George Tehrani, Director of Product Management, Open Ecosystem answered on this episode of The New Stack Makers, hosted by TNS founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams.


"By and large, any workload of importance to the enterprise needs some sort of persistence. So what Trident is, is an open source storage orchestrator that NetApp developed and continues to maintain. It greatly simplifies the creation, management, and consumption of persistent storage for enterprise workloads in Kubernetes, as well as the other major distributions of Kubernetes such as OpenShift."

Three years ago, Lukas Lehmann, head of cloud services, Swisscom described how his organization at that time was largely client-server dependant. In order to achieve its goals as both Switzerland’s largest telecom and as an IT provider, it became apparent that the Swiss firm had to find ways to scale across its entire operations in a way that remained consistent and robust.

In this podcast from Cloud Foundry Summit EU hosted by Hosted by Alex Williams, The New Stack founder and editor-in-chief, Lukas Lehmann, head of cloud services, Swisscom discussed his organization was able to scale to achieve its shift to at-scale application development goals across cloud environments thanks largely to partnership with Cloud Foundry.  Stefan Voegele, expert middleware engineer, for insurance provider Swiss Re, was also on hand to discuss how his firm uses Swisscom’s platform as a service (PaaS) in its shift to a cloud environment.

“Helping our customers and ourselves make a digital transformation is key to us,” Lehmann said. “That is why such a platform [as Cloud Foundry’s] and being involved in such an ecosystem is very important for us.”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/42mNdpu_6wc

Alex Delgado, a security engineer at the Gremlin chaos testing service, points to the disconnect many enterprises have. It’s not that the developers aren’t building with the newest technologies like Kubernetes and microservices. It’s just that security and compliance haven’t even heard of these things. And it's increasing risk.

“You can’t secure something that you don’t know how it works,” he said, on this episode of The New Stack Makers, where Delgado reflects on his past at a security and defense enterprise and his present at scale-up Gremlin. He began his career in customer support and then remediation of customer concerns. That put him in an interesting but often frustrating position as he moved into security, which had him throwing code over the wall that was released maybe three months down the line.

For this week's episode, we’re talking with Wayne Ariola, chief marketing officer at Tricentis. Tricentis develops DevOps tools for continuous software testing and is a sponsor of The New Stack. Ariola is a frequent contributor to The New Stack on the topics of software quality, agile and continuous testing, test automation and, most recently, robotic process automation (RPA). We’ll spoke with him about how DevOps processes and tools have changed for cloud native architectures and what that means, in particular for software testing.

Then later in the show we’ll cover the top stories on The New Stack over the past few weeks, including a new Linux memory management proposal, and our recent coverage of Red Hat’s AnsibleFest.

Automating security is now more of an issue as attack surfaces become more expansive and change. We sat down at GitLab Commit Brooklyn with Shamiq Islam, Head of Application, Blockchain, and Infrastructure Security at Coinbase and Philippe Lafoucrière, Distinguished Engineer at GitLab to discuss all things security automation and why today’s enterprises should look into automating their security and closing the software development life cycle loop.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JfZ-SoBRFkU

All things continuous integration, continuous delivery, the GitLab experience in new environments, and even mainframes were the topics of discussion taking place at GitLab Commit during an interview TNS founder & Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams had with Eddie Zaneski, Developer Relations Manager at DigitalOcean, Kyle Persohn, Senior Engineer at Northwestern Mutual, and Sean Corkum, Senior Software Engineer at Northwestern Mutual.

Launching the discussion was the topic of CI/CD in an organization. Specifically, how organizations can get their teams involved with and building out CI/CD.

"It has to be ingrained in the culture of the team to really take full advantage of everything that you can get from that. Making sure you're building fast, failing fast, and everyone understands and is totally on board like, 'Yeah, this is the right way that we should go,'" said Corkum.

For this week's episode, we're conversed with Srinath Perera, software architect and vice president of research in the CTO Office of WSO2, about his research on the practical uses of blockchain.

WSO2 is a sponsor of The New Stack and it offers an integrated platform for API management, integration, identity and access management, analytics and IoT. And its research is also on the cutting edge of cloud native technology. It is also the company behind the Ballerina cloud native programming language.

Perera leads these research efforts and has written recently about serverless technologies and blockchain for us. With blockchain, his team wasn’t sure which use cases are feasible and would also deliver a clear value. So they did a systematic analysis of blockchain technology using the company's Emerging Technology Analysis Canvas (ETAC).

It is certainly never easy to port existing software production pipelines and operations to a cloud native or, more typically, to a mix and match of cloud, bare metal and on-premises server environments. This assumption certainly held true for the situation T-Mobile was in during its digital journey . But while T-Mobile’s operations are on a gargantuan scale of magnitude compared to most organizations, T-Mobile succeeded by applying many of the same practices any organization needs to rely on, whether for a 10-person shop or if the company is Google. This includes an increasing reliance on GitOps for version control (VC) and repository functions but also as a way to combine all data access and functions into a single source to help manage the enormous complexity of multi-cloud and server environments, including, of course, Kubernetes deployments.

One of T-Mobile’s main goals was moving “a lot of those pieces out of the traditional location where they might be in a database of inside of a certain system of record, and a service registry and more into a repository. So,  we're able to recreate things on the go to manage our user base in a more dynamic fashion,” Philip Marc Schwartz, principle engineer, software, T-Mobile, said. “It's been an eye-opening experience to be able to work through the problems that you see with those systems as you're trying to get them working. And it's very interesting to see those problems solved where you can really work on them in a finite level.”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yT5zogF_NT0

"Cloud Foundry is a project that predates Kubernetes, and as container orchestration has evolved, we have started seeing more microservice components built into Cloud Foundry that were used as a way to containerize to some extent. This speaks to the history of project Eirini and project Quarks," said TNS founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams during a live interview recorded at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe, where he was joined by Jennifer Spinney, Staff Software Engineer at Pivotal, and Vlad Iovanov, Technical Lead at Cloud Foundry SUSE.

Spinney went on to explain, "So, Cloud Foundry traditionally has this component called Diego, which is actually a rewrite of the old way that containers used to be run in Cloud Foundry via these DEAs, we replaced that with Diego when we did that we introduced this hard boundary between the API of CF and the back end that schedules containers and schedules your actual app workloads. So then when Kubernetes started picking up steam, because we have this hard boundary now between the Cloud Foundry API and the back end that's actually scheduling jobs, we could look at swapping out Diego with just Kubernetes because it's kind of doing the same thing. Back when we started Diego, Kubernetes wasn't fully there yet, there was still a lot of maturing to do. Now I think we're seeing Kubernetes becoming way more mature, and it's much more possible to just drop in Kubernetes instead of Diego."