The New Stack Podcast

This week, we discuss the use of the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to improve container monitoring.

For this discussion we are joined by  Daniella Pontes, who is the senior manager of product marketing at InfluxData and Luca Deri, founder of the ntop network monitoring tool. Deri and InfluxData have partnered to produce a container monitoring tool, based on eBPF, ntop and the Influx DB time-series database system.

Pontes and Deri wrote about this new project in a recent post for TNS, "IT Monitoring in the Era of Containers: Tapping into eBPF Observability." In the world of containers and microservices, they write, monitoring services from the outside only doesn’t work. Instead, IT teams should read system metrics directly to gain insight into the activities inside and between the containers themselves. eBPF is one way to get system information about the workload running on the container.

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we sit down with Alex Ellis, creator of OpenFaaS, to discuss the latest update to his open source serverless platform, what this new concept "Serverless 2.0" means, and the difficulties of supporting an open source project.

Ellis created OpenFaaS a few years back after wanting to extend the functionality offered by Amazon Web Services' function-as-a-service Lambda to any containerized computing environment, a feature that has since been emulated by other serverless offerings. The idea is that you can package not only your application, but all the supporting libraries and dependencies as well, so they can run as serverless. You are not limited to one cloud provider, or one language runtime.  "I wanted a way to combine my love with Docker with my love of coding," Ellis said.

With serverless 2.0, "you can run any code, whether binary or an HTTP server, anyway you like — your laptop, on premises, on OpenShift, in the cloud," Ellis said.  Kubernetes provides the common substrate.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmBG2X7b1Zg

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) was created to help introduce processes, standards and other support and stewardship for DevOps teams that now face what some say is the Wild West of open source tools and platforms for deployments on Jenkins and coud native platforms. While there have been concerns expressed about potential overlap with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) — a sibling Linux Foundation-managed project — the concept is certainly attractive, especially for those teams that plan to or already rely on Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton for their production pipelines. However, there is one catch: the CDF has yet to release any specifications and primitives after the initiative was announced a few months ago.

During a podcast hosted by Alex Williams, The New Stack founder and editor in chief, questions were put to Dan Lorenc, a software engineer for Google and Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the CDF’s technical oversight committee (TOC) chair and CTO for CloudBees, about the CDF’s immediate plans, as well as what the oversight committee hopes to achieve.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, host Jack Wallen chats with two members of the Docker staff, engineer Christopher Crone and marketing specialist Jim Armstrong, about certain best practices (for both developers and enterprise users) when using Docker containers. Anyone from developers and enterprise users trusted with deploying containers will gain some insight into this agile technology.

Out of the gate, the interview opens with a definition of containers and what makes this rising star technology so crucial to developers and important to businesses. But this isn’t a Wikipedia definition of a container, these definitions come from those who help create the technology charged with deployment of containers. According to Crone, “A container is a technology for isolating applications … you can start by running it on a physical machine or you can otherwise virtualize it … and finally there’s containers where you use kernel notions like namespaces to isolate processes inside the kernel.” Jim Armstrong adds, “Docker … created the tools (such as Docker Desktop) that took the underlying operating system parts … and made those tools easy to use.”

When asked what makes a solid leader in today’s open source communities, the answer often varies depending on who you ask. In this podcast hosted by TNS Podcast Producer Kiran Oliver, the topic of leadership expanded beyond the basic, “What makes for a competent leader in today’s OSS community?” to encompass the ways in which we as a community can and should do to better help underrepresented minorities become leaders in open source.

CNCF Director of Ecosystem Cheryl Hung, Microsoft Director of Open Source Initiatives Ashley McNamara, Aqua Security Technology Evangelist Liz Rice, and Two Sigma Engineer Leah Petersen all started their journeys in open source at different times, with very different goals in mind.

Rice noted that, “For me, I was a developer for a long part of my career doing not open source software. At some point, more and more things, particularly in the infrastructure work and the distributed systems world were being done open source, and it just seemed like a natural progression. I don’t really remember ever making a conscious decision. Suddenly everything I was doing pretty much was in the open.”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vYxkJX2H4Ls

This week, we catch up with The New Stack founder and Publisher Alex Williams to learn about his trip to Shanghai, China, to attend the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2019.

In this chat, we discussed the ongoing trade issues between China and the U.S., and how they effect Asian companies such as Huawei, and well as efforts of the Linux Foundation to unify the efforts to build an open source community that spans the globe. We also discuss two keynote talks that were given, by Linux founder Linus Torvalds, and the chief maintainer of the older Linux kernels Greg Kroah-Hartman, about open source communities and the need for better vulnerability management, respectively.

Then later, in the show, we discuss with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson a conference that he attended last week, Redis Day New York. There the company unveiled its new timeseries database configuration, as well as some exciting new benchmarks, showing the database as capable of executing 200 million operations per second.

Just four years ago, industry analysts were wary of running production workloads in containers, but certainly the industry got over that fast. Numbers around Docker and Kubernetes adoption vary broadly, but it's safe to say that well over half of Fortune 100 companies have embraced containers.

In this episode of The New Stack Analysts, our Editor in Chief Alex Williams sits down with Briana Frank, director of product management at IBM, and James Ford, independent technical strategy advisor, to reflect on the origins of containers, how Kubernetes and Docker began, and how adoption has grown so fast in only a few years.

Frank said the impetus behind rapid container adoption came from Docker allowing everyone to get started quickly and simply —  about ten minutes. For her, this accessibility is a continued source of inspiration when she's creating demos and Getting Started tutorials, as this ease of use accelerates innovation.

“We can attribute a lot of the popularity of Kubernetes today to the Docker beginnings,” she said.

What takes an open source project from a hobby to international codebase that the world’s top companies rely on? How do you balance the wishes of the individual, creative contributor with that of corporate-backed finance and governance? How do you make the open source community a welcoming one?

Open source sustainability and all these questions were on the table when The New Stack Editor in Chief Alex Williams sat down at our first Makers broadcast from Shanghai, China, at the Open Source Summit.

For senior staff engineer at VMWare, Bryan Liles, this sustainability is all about the intersection of different open source projects within broader ecosystems that have a strong balance of governance and motivated community.

Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), says open source sustainability relies on commitment to continue building, supporting and stabilizing core infrastructure and critical libraries for important upstream dependencies. He says the whole purpose of CNCF is that, when organizations recognize there’s open source infrastructure that matters, there is a way to build a community that can financially and publicly support it moving forward.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4ZFlprmD7YA

Today we’re talking with Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, about how and why to use managed services from a cloud provider such as AWS.

Epsagon is a sponsor of The New Stack that provides automated observability and cost management for serverless applications using distributed tracing and AI technologies. He wrote a post for us this week on the evolution of managed services such as AWS Fargate and Amazon EKS, the tradeoffs and benefits of using them and his tips for how to choose a managed service.

Then later in the show, we discuss the latest news from EnterpriseDB's Postgres Vision, JFrog's swampUp, and QCON New York conferences, as well as our top podcast pick from the week, an interview with Gitlab's Ashish Kuthiala about the changing role of CI/CD.

One can reasonably assume container security will undergo many changes in the near term, especially considering the recent widely publicized security breaches (not to mention the ones we do not already know about).

But Maya Kaczorowski, a Google product manager, begs to disagree. When it comes to responsibilities organizations share with cloud and tool providers, Kaczorowski, says the model isn't changing, per se. Instead, “people are becoming less and less worried about the pieces that they don't have to manage, or the pieces that they used to have to manage — but they are no simpler for whatever reason,” Kaczorowski said.

Shared responsibilities, Google’s approach to container security and recently exposed vulnerabilities and other related themes were the subject of a podcast with Kaczorowski, recorded live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona in May.