The New Stack Podcast

“Building bridges” and forging partnerships,” at face value, might seem like marketing speak. But put into context, these  concepts can mean a lot. To wit, during a podcast hosted by The New Stack’s Joab Jackson, managing editor, at the Cloud Foundry Summit North America last week in Philadelphia  Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers had a lot to say.  Among other things, he articulated how Cloud Foundry has worked to remove silos and boost collaboration for the development of new cloud-native technologies for the open source community during the past year.Indeed,

Childers explained how the theme of the show is building the future. “That really applies in two ways: it applies, of course, — and I think, we spend a lot of time talking about this — to the contributors that build the Cloud Foundry platform. But it also equally applies to the end users, Because the whole reason why companies like American Airlines or Charles Schwab or Comcast or DICK’S Sporting Goods...are really focused on cloud native platforms,” Childers said.

“They’re really trying to use software as a competitive advantage in the market that’s extremely technology centric now. You know, every markets becomes technology-centric. So, they’re building the futures of their companies using these technologies, using these open source platforms that they can build off of, right? So dual meaning.”

Very early in his career as a student, Andrew Jenkins was studying space dust and other payloads for the U.S. Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics as part of a NASA contract. It was there while working on communication protocols “almost from the physical layer” that he began to shift his attention to the software side.

Monitoring, observability, logging and other capabilities that are increasingly essential for software production pipelines today could have already been put to use over 15 years ago when Jenkins was working for NASA. However, at that time, service meshes had yet to be developed — while Kubernetes, microservices and even DevOps were yet to come as well.

After working as a graduate research assistant developing software for the International Space Station at the University of Colorado Boulder, Jenkins continued to shift “further and further up into the software side of things.” He began to see, after joining F5 Networks in 2013, how platforms could be used for application deliveries of load balancing, security and other tasks for cloud applications.

By the time Aspen Mesh was formed in 2017 as a spinoff from F5, Jenkins had begun to develop true service mesh platforms to manage data traffic as part of a shift to Kubernetes clusters and the service-to-service communications in microservices. In other words, it is possible to say service meshes found Jenkins.

A major theme at Cloud Foundry Summit North America earlier this month in Philadelphia was interoperability and its importance to Cloud Foundry — as the  core functional tests validating Cloud Foundry Application Runtime releases for Project Eirini begin.

Speaking to this during a podcast hosted by The New Stack’s Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, were: Dr. Xiujiao Gao, client lead and cloud engineer at Stark & Wayne; Bernd Krannich, technical lead, Cloud Foundry SAP; and Julian Friedman, Cloud Foundry project lead, IBM.

As part of Cloud Foundry’s continued push to improve interoperability, Eirini was created with this goal in mind for scheduling for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. As Cloud Foundry notes, organizations can choose to adopt Diego/Garden or Kubernetes to orchestrate to application container instances.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZoKCs6r5I0

Machine learning-aided artificial intelligence (AI) might one day be able to eventually emulate the intelligence of hundreds or even thousands of human brains simultaneously, in such a way that human input would be obsolete throughout the software development cycle. In theory, a single system could not only replace a hundred-member DevOps teams, but assume the roles and tasks performed by hundreds of similar-sized DevOps teams.

You could easily imagine, like taxi and truck drivers, the days of the software developer are numbered — except they really are not.As far as thinking outside of the box or finding ways to write elegant and creative code or when chaos occurs, AI is largely lost.

This but only partially explains why machine-learning taught computers may never be able to create art or write poetry to the extend a human can, while the mass replacement of men and women in the software development and operations should thus not happen anytime soon.But what machine learning is already good at, Nick Durkin, field CTO for Harness said during this episode of The New Stack Maker podcast, is assuming a lot of the more data-crunching and mundane tasks in the production and deployment pipelines.

On today’s episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Sean Armstrong, VP of Products at AppNeta, a SaaS company providing actionable, end-to-end network performance monitoring for their customers.  

“The performance of your application,” Armstrong said, “is subject to how well the customer runs their own network & how well the internet between you and your customer is actually working. So you could get blamed for poor performance that’s completely outside of your control, and they use AppNeta to diagnose and troubleshoot those problems.

”With the explosion of SaaS companies and APIs providing building blocks for the modern IT stack, many if not most of its components are outside of their control.  In addition, with the rise of remote working, it’s likely your users are no longer in a central office.  

Traditional monitoring is about making sure that your devices are healthy.  But you simply can’t do that when you don’t own the devices. “You need visibility after your firewall,” he said.

Ransomware and other attacks are becoming increasingly common, as black hats discover how cloud native and other newer platforms can serve as softish targets. With the recently revealed Docker runtime exploit as an example of what can go terribly wrong, the pressure is obviously on security providers to stay ahead of the game — but finding the right solution for this new world of computer protection can mean the difference between a thriving architecture, or in the worst case, a complete shutdown of an organization’s operations.

What to look for in the way of security solutions for cloud native, as well as serverless and more mature platforms was the main subject in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast with Neil Carpenter, a solutions architect for Twistlock, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack.

It is safe to assume that contributing patches and updates to the Linux kernel is something beneficial to do — regardless of what you do or where you are in your career. For some, it might just be a diversion from their lives as a full-time software developer. For others, learning how to design and apply patches can even serve as one of the ways to enter the field of computing, even if you are 16 or are as old as 60. You might have spent the past 10 years backpacking around Asia or working as a golf instructor.

In any case, learning how to contribute means you will be furthering the continued expansion of Linux, as well to that common good of the open source community.

During the latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack recorded during the Open Source Leadership Summit, Shuah Khan, a Linux Fellow, at the The Linux Foundation described what it takes to get starred on your journey as a contributor to the Linux kernel.

If you are working in software development on any level, you are invariably part of a collective effort that is having an unprecedented impact on society today  — whether you realize it or not. It is sometimes easy to forget that the underlying infrastructure and code for the apps and software that play a role in so many facets of our life involved, at some point, a human somewhere in the world going through the toil and often pain of writing code — and enjoying those occasional “aha” moments that come with bursts of creativity and just building stuff.

The momentum of the open source movement, the resulting explosion of affordable and available platforms and tools  and the availability of new technologies, including but not limited to cloud-native, Kubernetes and microservices platforms have also played, of course, a major role.

As Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the “New York Times Magazine” and “Wired,” described in this The New Stack Makers podcast and in his book  “Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World,” you, as a software engineer or coder, are taking part in something directly or indirectly that has a far-reaching impact on the world we live in today. Based on interviews with over 200 coders, he also discusses about how his book puts software development into its historical context and addresses some of the problems in today’s industry, such as gender, racial and sexual orientation biases — and what can be done about it.

Things could have gone horribly wrong. Docker was already the de facto standard when Kubernetes adoption was starting to begin. Docker was also backing its own Swarm orchestrator. The need for an industry standard for container runtime was apparent. This lead to the creation and subsequent graduation in February of containerd within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, joining the ranks of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy and CoreDNS.

“It’s containerd not just being creative but its donation of the CNCF was part of answering that call for kind of a stable boring core runtime that would stay underneath Kubernetes and have the right lifecycle support — to not cause those frictions between Kubernetes just wanting a stable layer that just runs containers without anything else,” Phil Estes, a distinguished engineer and CTO for Container and Linux OS Architecture Strategy for the IBM Watson and Cloud Platform division.

Site reliability engineers (SREs) are tightly woven into DevOps today. They also provide a changing and critical role in deployments on cloud native platforms and microservices deployments. But as a job description and function, an SRE position and role is often described  incorrectly — in that way, the definition of an SRE can mean many different things, depending on whom you talk to.

And yet, SREs do share some common responsibilities in DevOps, especially in cloud native environments where the roles of development and operations are often very different compared to those for traditional monolithic and on-premise  infrastructures.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst,  expressed this truism: “One thing I would characterize most SREs by are that they are great with writing automation and scripts and using the tools themselves to do something custom In their environment.