The New Stack Podcast

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie chats with Camille Eddy, whose interest in Explainable AI (XAI) started during an internship on advanced robotics at Hewlett Packard.  It’s also where she became concerned about the effect of the lack of diversity in social robots.

Her talk “Recognizing Cultural Bias in AI,” given at the 2018 Open Source Conference started with this question:  “How could something as unchanging as the color of a person’s skin prevent them from being able to enjoy any product I create.”

When we think about how we live and going around interacting with technology, Eddy said, we don’t always think of the interactions of other people. For example, the famous epic fail of a hand soap dispenser at Facebook HQ not dispensing soap to a black hand because it hadn’t been calibrated to see that skin color.

Are you simply "monitoring" your application or have you graduated, as some may imply, to "observability"? Is "observability" actually the evolutionary successor to "monitoring", or is it merely a rebranding of nomenclature? And how has monitoring (or observability) changed in this new world of microservices and serverless architectures?

This week on The New Stack Makers, Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, is joined by co-host Bradley Rydzewski, co-founder at Drone.io, and guest JD Trask, co-founder & CEO of Raygun, to discuss the continuing evolution of application performance management (APM) beyond changing terminology - though they touch on that a little bit too.

According to Trask, one of the primary changes that has occurred in the world of APM has been the amount of available compute and the resulting capabilities available to APM users.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with Pablo Santos, chief engineer of Plastic SCM, a company he founded in 2005, just before the tech explosion that gave us Git, GitHub, Dropbox, and, lest we forget, the iPhone.

In many ways, Santos was ahead of his time. At a time when companies like Microsoft released software updates every two years, his design of a software system that updated three or four times a week was so revolutionary, they had to hide it from their corporate clients, by providing branded updates once a year. Once the industry started moving toward continuous delivery, or at least a 'delivery-more-often' model, the company's customers wanted to know how Plastics accomplished such magic.  So the company bundled its software into a proprietary platform.

PlasticSCM benefited greatly from Git’s popularity, acknowledged Santos.

Edith Harbaugh is CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly.  The company provides feature flagging for CI/CD pipelines and currently serves 100 billion features a day.  She’s the c0-host of a podcast covering software trends called To Be Continuous, a sponsor of the Test in Production Meetup, and also one of this year’s winner of the Top Women in Cloud Innovation award.

“We didn’t create feature flags,” she said. “We just made them easy and enable the workflow around it.”

Deployment is pushing coding out to production servers and release. Feature flags separate deployment into pieces and allow you to have very fine-grained control.  At its most simple, you can release a feature into production, but it has a kills switch so you can instantly roll back.

One of the biggest concerns when deploying at scale is knowing whether your organization will be ready to effectively monitor what is not working, as well as being able to detect problem areas before they begin to cause real pain. As organizations begin to deploy to cloud native platforms, making sure that monitoring capabilities can make the shift is an ever greater concerns for many.

What can be done to conquer the fears associated with monitoring for cloud native, as well as deployments for on-premise platforms, were among the subjects discussed during a podcast with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder and CEO of Raygun, and Chris Johnson co-founder and CTO of Hyperfish, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack.

The state of open source over the course of the past few decades has certainly changed. But IBM”s purchase of Red Hat and the evolution of service-oriented business models that have emerged more recent]y not withstanding, open source’s original spirit of sharing remains intact — while the extent to which that is the case remains a subject of debate.

What open source really means today and how it has evolved were major themes of a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Seattle.

Among the open source thought leaders on hand to offer their observations were:

- Alex Ellis, Senior Staff Engineer (open source), VMware;

- Jason Dobies, Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat;

- Ed Warnicke, Distinguished Consulting Engineer, Cisco Systems and Technical Steering Committee chair, FD.io

- Heather Kirksey, Vice President, Community and Ecosystem, The Linux Foundation

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hGrgzUz-Rfg

The IT industry’s collective shift to cloud native remains, amid the hype, in the early stages. While among those organizations that have made the jump, the need to find the right tools to untangle the enormous complexity involved becomes immediately — and painfully — obvious. The emergence of service meshes to help make sense of it all are thus increasingly seen by DevOps teams as essential tool, instead of just another tool on the long list of nice-to-have options on offer today for Kubernetes and microservices.

Often described as GitOps, another key enabler for cloud native is empowering developers with the ability to easily, quickly, and ideally, seamlessly make updates to code running on Kubernetes and microservices far to the left in the production pipeline.

Monitoring and observability throughout the process, are of course, essential.

These and other themes were discussing during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Seattle with Alexis Richardson, CEO of Weaveworks and Andrew Clay Shafer, senior director of technology at Pivotal.

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

The road to streamlining CI/CD through DevOps in the shift to cloud native is hard — and can be fraught with peril. That, of course, is the challenge — while the potential rewards are significant, indeed.

Automating all of that (an essential part of DevOps) set the stage for Jenkins to help streamline CI/CD processes, which represents another subset challenge. While remaining essential for many organizations’ development processes, Jenkins is notoriously difficult to master and manage, especially as projects are scaled. (This actually spells opportunities for those who can serve as in-house Jenkins experts of sorts, but such a specialty, in many ways, goes against the spirit of DevOps.)

Now, as we enter the world of Cloud Native, extending Jenkins to new platforms, as well as CI/CD processes that may have worked reasonably well for monolithic deployments in the past, adds yet another technical challenge. Thus enters the utility of Jenkins X, which serves as tool to help standardize how to integrate CI and CD and Kubernetes. The idea is also to allow organizations to use their own source code while CloudBees’ Jenkins X automates the process as it is ported to cloud native environments.

As part of “The New Stack Guide to Cloud Native DevOps” ebook podcast series, some of CloudBees’ key team members were on hand to discuss how Jenkins X, CI/CD and DevOps all elegantly fit together in today’s cloud native world.

It’s great being a developer these days considering, among other things, the tremendous opportunities on offer in the cloud native space. But the race to get there when deploying code and applications can be, of course, fraught with challenges. Among them are how organizations are often forced to rethink the development and operations roles. Also, many developers are sometimes challenged by lacking the tools needed to port code they create with the high-powered languages they have mastered to the cloud, whether for Kubernetes, microservices or serverless platforms.

As part of our upcoming EBook 'The New Stack Guide to Cloud Native DevOps' podcast series, Luke Hoban, CTO of Pulumi, spoke about, among other things, how to better unify dev and ops with general purpose programming languages and tools on offer to help make that happen.

Wendy Pfeiffer routinely lands on the “most powerful women in tech” lists, and is currently CIO of Nutanix.  The cloud provider lets enterprise companies create a hybrid cloud environment, allowing workloads to be run across public and private clouds, using whichever infrastructure that makes the most sense technologically. 

Traditionally, on-premise stacks can be heavily fire-walled, but scaling is usually neither easy nor cost effective.  In the public cloud, they can scale with a more flexible operating system and take advantage of seemingly infinite capacity.

Nutanix pioneered  hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology, which is an operating system that addresses all of the technology stack layers (storage, compute, area networking).  On HCI, as workloads dynamically have access to each of the stack layers as they run

HCI allows a company to build out infrastructure knowing they will be able to scale each layer as needed, creating the scalability of a public cloud while keeping most of their infrastructure on premise.