The New Stack Podcast

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder & EiC Alex Williams sits down with Jeroen Coussement, Co-founder & CEO, Factry to focus on the use of OPC-UA and InfluxDB in industrial settings. Coussement built an open-source OPC-UA server to bring data from and to process control systems as well as demonstrate the value of a time series database by collecting data from industrial control systems, adding further context with additional data (and interpreting the result visually), using this as a basis for optimization.

When working in an industrial IoT context, there are many concerns that one has to keep in mind throughout the software development process. When Coussement built the OPC-UA server and the Node OPC-UA Logger, he emphasised 'flattening out' the schema when building the server, and made Node the language of choice when developing the logger. "You just configure it and it will log the data from your process to InfluxDB. That's basically it in a nutshell. It also provides buffering, because typically you don't want any data loss, so you install that collector on one of your automation servers, where it's as close to the source as possible. There, it will start collecting the data and if there's some kind of network issue, it will buffer the data so when the network comes back online, it will send over the data it has been collecting in the meantime," said Coussement.

There are common perceptions that organizations have about open source — but  these perceptions also vary a lot. This is especially the case when it comes to describing what organizations’ role in open source development should be, as well as the best way to take advantage of this ongoing explosion in open source tools and their availability. (Call it a renaissance, if you will).

What open source means — and what it should mean — is a main topic of this episode of this The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded during the Open Source Summit in San Diego, with the recently released results of the survey the second annual survey “Open Source Programs in the Enterprise.” Dirk Hohndel, vice president, chief open source officer, VMware, discussed his take on the results and what they meant for VMware, which  co-sponsored the survey in partnership with The Linux Foundation’s TODO Group.

The survey results also served to quantify many of the operations Hohndel has made during his work with the open source community. Given that enterprises increasingly describe themselves as software companies, a key consideration is to determine how software's role specific to your organization. Or more specifically,  Hohndel said,  most businesses view software as "key to what they do."

This week, we're recording from TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco, held September 5. Our guest is Haley Daiber, a senior associate at Unusual Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund.

The New Stack has been talking and writing a lot about TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise over the past few months, as a media partner and also a participant. We held a pancake breakfast and podcast panel in the  morning and TNS founder Alex Williams moderated a session in the afternoon. And we were excited about this event because it signals a new excitement and heat in the enterprise software space. This has been evident so far in the keynotes we’ve heard today, at the event: Jason Green from Emergence Capital for example, called this "the golden age of enterprise."  So we spoke with Daiber about what enterprise software looks like from an investor’s perspective.

Then, later in the podcast, we discussed the week's top stories and podcasts, including excellent contributed posts on adopting role-based access control for Kubernetes and migrating to Python 3. We also discuss a new service mesh, and how "punk rock" music from the 1970s resembles open source today.

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder & EiC Alex Williams sits down with Sam Charrington, Founder of This Week in Machine Learning & AI (TWiML & AI). The inaugural TWIMLcon conference takes place October 1st-2nd, 2019 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, California.

TWIMLcon aims to bring a fresh perspective to AI & ML events, growing out of conversations that Charrington had with enterprises that, “Tended to be at a very interesting transition point.” Noting that he heard towards the end of last year that, “Companies kicked off a lot of machine learning proof-of-concept types of projects, they had some initial successes, their data science teams were out evangelising, and some of those proof-of-concepts were starting to mature [...] And so all of a sudden these organizations, they were challenged with the transition from ‘How do I successfully execute an individual machine learning project,’ to ‘How do I become an engine for delivering machine learning at my organization?’” said Charrington.

With containers comes a level of agility never before experienced in the world of business. In seconds, administrators can roll out deployments for a multitude of services. And when those businesses need to scale those containers, they can turn to Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.

But what happens when even a standard container workflow can’t keep up with the ever-growing demand of business? You’d be hard-pressed to find a more efficient means of deploying and scaling a container cluster than that found in Kubernetes. And although that may very well be true, it doesn’t mean the development cycle can’t be improved.

Enter GitOps

GitOps is a method of workflow that was conceptualized by “everyone who successfully did infrastructure-as-code … is the true creator of the concept of GitOps.” (according to Priyanka Sharma, Director of Technical Evangelism at GitLab). However, ask anyone in the know and they will immediately say that Weaveworks wrote the book on this new workflow.

This week we discuss all the news from VMware's annual VMworld conference, held this week in San Francisco, with special guest RackN founder/and CEO Rob Hirschfeld. RackN is  provider of next generation infrastructure automation software for provisioning bare metal, VMs, clouds, and edges.

At the event, VMware announced it’s going all-in on Kubernetes. There were hints the company was going in that direction with its acquisition of Heptio in November, a company founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who were among Kubernetes’ founders. At the show, the company announced that vSphere with Kubernetes in a new alpha offering called Project Pacific. 

Hirschfeld opined that, with this Kubernetes support, VMware is playing defense, given that operations teams using the vSphere platform might be getting requests from their developer counterparts for Kubernetes support.

What became the punk rock genre may be a harbinger of what is in store for the open source movement —  but hopefully not. At any rate, open source’s popularity can certainly be compared to punk rock’s rise. When Linux began to be seen as a powerful and very practical alternative to Unix, and especially, Windows, during the 1990s, the movement then felt very...well, underground.

Trading discs of Linux distros and sharing tips on how to hack “Doom” (okay, the hacks were open source but Doom’s code was obviously wasn’t). But hopefully, open source will take a different path than what became of punk rock, especially for enterprises, as open matures, or to take the punk rock analogy further, become corporate musak.

The punk rock comparison was one a main theme of this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded during VMware World San Francisco, with guests Tom Petrocelli, a research fellow at Amalgam Insights, and Adam Jacob, CEO at The System Initiative and former CTO of Chef Software. They described what the open source movement has become and where it’s heading, and more importantly, what it all means for enterprises.

There's a continued welcome evolution in the role of the developer — from code monkey to creative worker. It's a good way to motivate and retain some of the most in-demand roles, by making the job more creative and less tedious. But truly it's in response to our increasingly complicated and distributed systems. As much of these roles has to be automated as possible to allow developers and other tech roles to focus on more problem solving and systems resiliency.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Jason Yee about two trends surrounding this evolution — the role of the developer evangelist and the role of progressive delivery.

We've already written about the increasing popularity of the developer advocate or evangelist. It's an eclectic role that involves a mix of content marketing and public speaking, documentation writing, and customer support. For Yee, in this role for almost three years at monitoring and analytics service Datadog, it's all about community, helping developers "think about tech in a different way."

This week we spoke with Andreas Grabner, a DevOps Activist at Dynatrace, about why Kubernetes and artificial intelligence (AI) are made for each other.

Grabner wrote a contributed post for us last week, “How AI Solves the Kubernetes Complexity Conundrum” in which he argues that integrating Kubernetes with artificial intelligence and an AIOps culture can make Kubernetes deployments more manageable for IT and DevOps teams. Dynatrace, a sponsor of The New Stack, builds AI-assisted, full stack and completely automated monitoring software for dynamic, web-scale, hybrid cloud ecosystem.

"Kubernetes offers enterprises a valuable new tool for kicking digital transformations and time-to-market timetables into a new gear. But to take full advantage of it, IT and DevOps need to drive a culture shift toward AI and automation; most other existing IT approaches simply do not adequately work or scale in this new world," Grabner wrote in the blog.

Playtech describes itself as the world’s largest online gambling software supplier. It has achieved monumental growth to bolster its leading position in gaming software by largely relying on the creativity of its DevOps teams around the world.

Needless to say, givings its developers and operations teams such freedom could come at a price, as managing the data and input of such as widespread and far-reaching DevOps structure would, for many companies, end in chaos.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Aleksandr Tavgen, technical architect, for Playtech described how the Isle of Man-based company has succeeded in achieving what the company says is “full observability” of Playtech’s operations platform thanks largely to InfluxDB 2.0, Flux and the OpenTracingAPI.