The New Stack Podcast

At GitLab Commit, GitLab's first user conference that took place last week in Brooklyn, GitLab announced that it has received 268M in funding, valuing the company at 2.75B dollars. TNS Founder Alex Williams dove into this announcement and many more with GitLab CEO & co-founder Sid Sijbrandij, asking candidly what the next steps are for GitLab after it received that kind of funding.

"We're going to continue what we were doing. This money will enable us to keep hiring people, and keep hiring people to make GitLab more mature in every single aspect. GitLab is incredibly broad, started with version control and CI, but now we go all the way from planning what you want to do to monitoring the results of that. We want to make sure every part of GitLab becomes as good as the best parts," said Sijbrandij.

Once largely reserved for the finance industry, times series databases are increasingly emerging as must-haves for many organizations. A classic SQL database,  for example, is not designed to process thousands or — in many cases — millions of data points per second that a time series database can monitor, track,  analyze and assimilate for forecasting applications for real-time analytics and business intelligence. These applications often include application, server, network  monitoring, for industrial or IoT data.

However, many organizations are faced with the conundrum of not being able to afford investing in the required hardware infrastructure for time series data analysis or most of their operations are cloud-based and they have faced a dearth of viable alternatives. As a solution, InfluxData, a leading data has launched InfluxDB Cloud 2.0, the first serverless time series platform as a service (PaaS).

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO, InfluxData, discussed InfluxDB Cloud 2.0, and how the evolution of time series databases have evolved to create a need for a cloud-based alternative.

This week we’re talking with Chris Grams, the head of marketing at open source subscription startup, Tidelift.

Tidelift offers a managed open source subscription to help companies manage and maintain their dependencies on open source projects. They’re also a sponsor of The New Stack and our partner on a survey we did earlier this year about how developers use open source to build applications in the workplace.

We spoke with Grams about how much time do developers spend handling maintenance and security issues related to unmaintained open source dependencies, what is preventing coders from using more open source components, and what the most important factors developers to consider when choosing a new open source project.

The developer will certainly face new challenges when making the switch to a cloud native platform. The process might include, for example, learning how to add code to Kubernetes clusters or mastering the mechanics of etcd and kubectlis. The power and scaling flexibility a cloud native platform and Kubernetes offer, among other things, are often worth more than developers’ investment in time and resources when adopting these technologies.

And yet.

What developers are usually more concerned about is the business goals they need to achieve. They will likely care less what the underlying infrastructure is as much as it can be used to create code that might improve their organization’s bottom line, or for a public institution, better meet the needs of a citizen.

In this episode of The New Stack Analysts recorded at the 2019 European Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague, The Netherlands, this month where the business needs of developers and the role of the Cloud Foundry community were dicussed — and debated.

Hosted by Alex Williams, The New Stack founder and editor-in-chief and co-hosted by Devin Davis, vice president of marketing, Cloud Foundry Foundation, the panelists were:

Abby Kearns, executive director, Cloud Foundry Foundation

Michael Cote, marketing director, Pivotal

Tammy Van Hove, distinguished engineer, IBM

Udo Seidel, Tech Writer, Heise iX

A question we’re asking a lot is: What is a developer advocate? Often followed by: Which department do you report to? How do you measure your role?

It’s a somewhat old role in the fact that people have been marketing to devs since software started getting sold. It’s a somewhat new role under its name. When Rob Zazueta mentioned he was hired at WeWork to build a developer relations team focused on internal developers first, it surprised me to realize that companies — even ones with massive API programs — aren’t really advocating to their internal developers. This is a shame. This would promote reusable code, shared learnings, and brand advocates that can go out and talk for you.

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sit down with Brian Douglas, developer advocate at Github. This is something he does for both external and internal developers.

When applying for an open award for people that did activism in the Portland tech community, Netlify's Head of Community Perry Eising found himself having to identify outside of his gender identity as a result of the form not having an option for nonbinary people to be recipients of the award. After realising he was getting mixed signals, he decided to ask the company about it directly, "That moment of bravery was just, I didn't know how they were going to respond. I didn't know how clued in they were to having people who were nonbinary as part of their organization, whether they knew what that was, whether they were going to treat me well, whether they were going to laugh at me. Us as underrepresented people in tech, I think there's always that nervousness if we're going to bring up a concern to people who were organizing something, whether they're going to have the knowledge to take that in,  or whether they're going to reject us, or whether they're going to laugh at us," Eising said.

Eising's experience addressing the issue of exclusion with the event organizer in question turned out positive, as they didn't realize their form had been excluding those that were nonbinary. This interaction began a collaboration between Eising and the organization where he volunteered and collaborated with them to make their events more inclusive.

"It's not always like that, you don't always have those experiences where you're welcome when you bring something forward and so I decided that I wanted to respond to this personal event of mine by creating a guide that kind of laid out that experience, of this sort of mismatch of signals you can experience, and give opportunities for people to understand why that was the case but also provide really hands-on solutions for people that are planning, promoting organizing, orchestrating events to be more gender inclusive."

Thus, the Gender Inclusive Events Guide was created.

The user journey evolves at many levels, says Pivotal Software Senior Director of Product Marketing Dormain Drewitz. "There's a couple of different user journeys that are really happening. You've got user journeys at the developer level, you have user journeys at more of the platform, engineering level, and the teams that are operating and building the platforms, and you have user journeys kind of at the business level and what does that mean for lines of business and their whole relationship to software?"

During a podcast with TNS Founder & EiC Alex Williams at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe, Drewitz discussed not only the user journey, but the evolution of the developer persona itself. In particular, how developers can learn from those that came before them.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HeZd6J4TsKc

This year at its annual user conference –Seattle this year—HashiCorp introduced two new tiers to its Terraform Cloud service, a paid version that isn't the full enterprise version, but one for smaller teams, and another one that covers governance, and cost prediction. Terraform Cloud is like the GitHub to Terraform's git. Terraform, an infrastructure management tool, can be used from a laptop, and HashiCorp offers a free tier on Terraform Cloud, where the CLI commands are translated into API calls. The new Teams tier offers the ability to manage teams, with full RBAC control. and the Governance edition, also paid, has a code framework for enforcing granular rules against infrastructure, and even cost estimation, which provides a prediction of how much a proposed infrastructure will cost to run in the cloud.

In our talk, Dadgar explained that the tier addresses a heretofore underserved segment for the rapidly growing company: projects that have blossomed into full-scale apps that need predictable infrastructure. They don’t quite require the governance controls that the enterprises (aka the “Fortune 2000”) do, but they do require coordination. As a Terraform’ed project grows, the company reasons, it will have more contributors, and everything will need tracked and controlled.

Enterprise startups are building the tools that help their customers to create an agile modern enterprise that adapts quickly to market changes. But the enterprise isn’t always open to that change, or even aware of the benefits of that change, said Frederic Lardinois, writer and news editor at TechCrunch, in this episode of The New Stack Analysts recorded at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise held on Sept. 5 in San Francisco. This is a primary challenge for enterprise software companies today.

The people and technologies that help enterprise software startups grow was the focus of this recent panel discussion at The New Stack pancake breakfast and podcast at TC Sessions: Enterprise. TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams moderated the discussion, which was sponsored by GitLab. Panelists included:

1. Frederic Lardinois / writer & news editor / TechCrunch

2. Katherine Boyle / Principal / General Catalyst

3. Melissa Pancoast / founder & CEO / The Beans

4. Sameer Patel / former CEO / Kahuna

5. Sid Sijbrandij / co-founder & CEO / GitLab

Part of the transition to DevOps that comes with cloud native application development, has been a shift in responsibility for storage, away from dedicated specialists towards developers who are increasingly responsible for provisioning the storage for the applications they build.

“People do not want storage to be a complicated task,” said Chris Merz, principal technologist at NetApp. “It is a piece of infrastructure. It should be simple, it should be scalable, it should be self healing. They should follow the same patterns as the systems that DevOps practitioners and cloud native architects are building every day.”

Before Kubernetes, building and operating container-based applications was onerous—it involved manually handling tasks like DNS management, load balancing, scaling and resource monitoring. Now the Kubernetes ecosystem handles all of that—but there needs to be a way to get the same level of automation for storage, Merz said.