The New Stack Podcast

Kubernetes is not everything for everybody, as DevOps teams know. And while Kubernetes  can, of course, offer amazing power- and resource-savings and computing-performance advantages, the platform has also seen its share of controversy, such as during the Docker split in 2016.

Many also have an opinion of what is right — and wrong — about Kubernetes. During this podcast recorded live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona in May, The New Stack posed some of the harder questions about Kubernetes’ past and future to Kubernetes co-founders Tim Hockin, principal SW engineer, Kubernetes, GKE, and Google Cloud, and Craig McLuckie, vice president, VMware. who is one of Kubernetes creators. 

The New Stack also solicited thoughts from Gabe Monroy, partner program manager, Microsoft, who is a lead product manager for containers on Microsoft Azure and described himself as  “one of the most engaged early community members.

”While the Kubernetes creators were certainly happy with the results from the outset, Hockin said its popularity was something “you could never have predicted.”

“In terms of lessons learned, it’s not something you could have planned for, but then again, we could have tried,” Hockin said.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fSb5N_OjJ8A

In this episode of The New Stake Makers, TC Currie is joined by Neha Narkhede, CTO and Co-founder of Confluent and one of the co-creators of Apache Kafka. 

Narkhede has a passion for streaming data, and for the pasNeha Narkhede, CTO of Confluent and one of the developers of Apache Kafkat couple of years has been working on modernizing Apache Kafka to make it cloud native.With over 60% of the the Fortune 100 relying on Apache Kafka, the service has become both popular and entrenched.  But as cloud technology is expanding, some fundamental changes were necessary to make Apache Kafka truly cloud native. Kafka sits above the operation layer and below the application layer in the stack. 

It lives in the data infrastructure layer alongside relational database and/or modern no-SQL databases, and along side data warehouses.  It provides a new foundation for data that can bring data from all those different variety of services in one place so you can consume it at a large scale, she said.

“What we know about enterprises is they want to buy the whole car,” said Narkhede. So they took a year or so to build a cloud-native, fully managed service that developers can use in the public cloud.

Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, containerd ... The list of projects managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is quite extensive, and growing by the month it seems.

But how does the CNCF manage its expansive collection of open source cloud native software projects? How does it decide when a project move from incubation to graduation. Many of these decisions are made by the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). We wanted to find out more about how the TOC operates.

To this end, we invited the TOC chair (and Aqua Security Technology Evangelist) Liz Rice to appear on our newest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, to discuss all things TOC. We invited Eduardo Silva, who is the core developer for one of the CNCF projects, Fluentd, a multi-platform open source log aggregator. 

Silva, who is also a principle engineer for ARM, discussed his experience in agreeing to work with the CNCF. Last month, FluentD had "graduated," within the CNCF, moving up from "incubation status."

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fR491tP8nQ

DevOps has been with us for several years now, and is becoming increasingly entrenched within the enterprise. Yet the speed and elevation that the practice offers can be at odds with an organization's security posture, which ensures that systems have no vulnerabilities and meet compliance — work that can take time to complete. Can a business do both?

To help answer this question, we assembled a panel of experts at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU last month. 

Our guests are: Dirk Herrmann, Principal Product Manager, Red Hat, John Morello, Chief Technology Officer, Twistlock, and Murugiah Souppaya, Computer Scientist, National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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

The creation of Git by the principal developer behind the Linux kernel Linus Torvalds certainly qualified as a stroke of genius. But while Junio Hamano continues to do an excellent job of maintaining open source Git, organizations looking to make the jump to so-called agile development and deployment cycles must look beyond relying on a Git’s core version control and software repository capabilities.

Call it growing pains, if you will — but the next stage in DevOps agility requires much, much more. This especially applies to DevOps teams looking to multiply the cadence of deployments with security embedded at the beginning of the cycle (yes, while easier said than done, it is possible).Getting there requires a rethinking of the traditional software development cycle. This involves doing the necessary so that as soon as code is stored on Git, the code is instantly integrated into the main production pipeline.

How to make the jump past using Git mainly as a software repository for version control was the main subject of conversation with Ashish Kuthiala, director of product marketing, GitLab, for this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference held in Barcelona at the end of May.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA7reJ0y1mY

We want to move fast — that's what agile software development and DevOps is all about — but how do we move fast without sacrificing security? Are we mistaking availability for security? This dichotomy and the challenge of security management has only become more severe as enterprises enable developers to release daily, and distributed systems and sophisticated attacks make it all much more complicated.

Reuven Harrison, CTO and co-founder of Tufin Technologies, talks on The New Stack Makers podcast about what 16 years in enterprise security policy management looks like.

Harrison said this security management has always begun with identifying business processes that enable efficient and effective security. It's just now there are thousands of security venders and hundreds of different tools to address cyber attacks. That's why he argues automation is key, yet security is still lagging in this area.

Why is it every time I'm yelling at self-checkout tills or rolling my eyes at task-based AI, it's always by-default a female voice annoying me? Is that my internal bias against fellow women? Or is it just that I'm frustrated with the beginnings of tech, but all those AI beginners seem to be "feminine?"

These are the thoughts that ran through my head as I was listening to Dr. Charlotte Webb's talk "Designing a Feminist Alexa: An Experiment in Feminist Conversation Design" at Skills Matter London's Beyond Tech conference. And it's what we explored when we spoke, following her talk, on this episode of The New Stack Makers.

Webb is a co-founder of the Feminist Internet, a non-profit organization on a mission to advance internet equalities for women and other marginalized groups through creative and critical practice. The Feminist Internet blends art and design practices, critical thinking, and creative tech development together with pilot projects and soon AI consulting.

Building a simulation of the human heart. Pooling and crunching data from public transportation and other sources from around the world to determine travel distances and times. These are two projects Alfonso Santiago, researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Charlie Davies, co-founder, technology and product director, iGeolise; are actively engaged in building. What they share in common is how they derive immense high-performance computing (HPC) resources on a cloud native platform (which Oracle offers).

Santiago and Davies shared details about how HPC has helped to solve many of their respective projects’ struggles during a The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Joab Jackson, managing editor, during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona. Also on hand was TJ Fontaine, a software engineer and consulting member of technical staff, for Oracle, who offered some context about Oracle’s role in these projects and in HPC on the cloud in general.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niuAVbESM4g

The fact that cloud native and container exploits are becoming more attractive targets for attackers as they grow in popularity is obvious. But as of late, some gaping security holes in both platforms have sparked even greater causes for concern.

To wit, a security hole was recently revealed — with a sure-fire fix lacking at the time when this article was posted — that detailed how an attacker can gain root access to Docker container hosts. The vulnerability, similar in scope to an symlink-race attack, a SUSE security researcher revealed how the present vulnerability is applicable to any host associated with a Docker engine.

Earlier this year, a Docker runtime exploit was revealed that exposed vulnerabilities in  Docker, Kubernetes' and Docker’s runC.

It is always an easy bet to make that other Docker and cloud native vulnerabilities exist that have not yet been publicly revealed. And, needless to say, most attackers anyway are looking for easier doors to open — or, more accurately, doors opened for them — by running very easy-to-run password exploits.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJG7dJdu5U8

During a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack hosted during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in Barcelona in May, Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy was on hand to discuss just what Pulumi does. He articulated how it serves as a popular way to deploy and manage infrastructure in a range of cloud and on-premise environments with a very wide range of programming languages.

Not to say that Duffy’s description of Pulumi is not of interest — I can confirm it is — but what also make this podcast especially interesting is how he put developers’ and operations folks’ relationship with Kubernetes and multi-cloud environments into context.

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