The New Stack Podcast

What becomes very apparent when speaking with Rajashree Mandaogane, a software engineer for Rancher, is that she really enjoys coding and software development. While whether developers find their work “fun” or not is important and how much the fun factor counts for success is a subject of debate, Mandaogane does enjoy the work. She has also emerged as one of the key team members in Rancher’s development of its open source Kubernetes management and container orchestration platform. Evidence of Mandaogane’s passion for the job includes continually turning over different solutions for debugging or new features in her mind, even when she is at the gym or just opting to halfway work while watching a rerun of “Friends” at home.

As part of The New Stack Makers podcast series featuring developers and engineers who share their down-in-the-trenches stories during this renaissance era in computing, Mandaogane also described, among other things, how her love for programming evolved into a passion for first Docker and containers and then Kubernetes while still an undergraduate at North Carolina State University.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Tom O’Neill, co-founder and CTO of Periscope Data, who is responsible for overseeing the technology vision for the company. Periscope Data is a super fast platform for modern data teams.  “Fastest time to insight”

With the explosion of data, O’Neill is tasked with finding the fastest way to make terabytes of data useful to their customers, who are data teams for data teams (data scientists, data analysts, data engineers) who write sQL, python or R.

Data scientists are gaining in importance because of the explosion of available data since the advent of mobile devices.  AirBnB is not a hospitality company.  It’s a data company masquerading as a hospitality company.   But the data is only as good as the company’s ability to mine it.  It’s the data engineers that are making decisions in this environment.

Cheryl Hung, director of ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation CNCF, was already intent on working for Google as a young teenager.

It was “a cool startup,” Hung said, where it seemed everyone wanted to work, with all kinds of fun and perks — including free food and even on-campus massages. Her career track did indeed take her to Google, where she worked as a software engineer and held other roles for over five years. Now, for the CNCF, she spends a lot of time traveling and helping organizations to learn about how they can take advantage of cloud native platforms.

While Google its obvious connection to containers and Kubernetes represent a focal point in Hung’s career, Hung largely spoke of her lifework before and after her stint at the search engine giant during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai.

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

One of the first things John-Daniel Trask, co-founder and CEO at Raygun, noticed when he began to develop software was how painstaking it was to figure out what was wrong with the code. Initial error alerts, he created, were done by email. Much came down to just trial and error.

“One of the things that we were doing a lot of the time when we were building software was always focusing on how we understood what went wrong and giving ourselves diagnostics,” Trask said during a podcast, hosted by The New Stack correspondents B. Cameron Gain and Simon Bisson.

In 2012, after building an SaaS product for crash reporting, “it turned out that a lot people sort of saw the value in that as well,” Trask said. “And so, we’ve really been surfing that wave since.” After launch in 2013, “we’ve ended up with thousands of customers using the crash reporting product,” Trask said.

Priyanka Sharma, director of alliances, GitLab and a member of the governing board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is certainly an example of someone who hails from what she says was a “very unconventional entry into technology.” The end result today is that she is helping to shape the outcome of how organizations better take advantage of DevOps, especially when working on Kubernetes and microservices.

Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, spoke with Sharma during a podcast at  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai about her life work and what changes need to take place in DevOps today.

However, it was not that long ago when Sharma hardly had access to a PC, much opportunity to learn programming or other computer skills while growing up in a small town in India. "It wasn't like computers were a part of my life — that was not the case,” Sharma said. “I ended up applying to colleges in the US,  and I remember as I was applying I was using a computer for the first time — I didn't even know how to use Microsoft Word.”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6Kj6ZQGbouc

Software developers have been doing it all wrong — or maybe not, depending on whom you talk to. But at the very least, DevOps and CI/CD represent relatively new practices in computing that will continue to help organizations reap huge benefits as they mature during the coming year.

Meanwhile, one way to offer immediate and direct improvements to production pipelines is applying more of an engineering mindset to software development. More specifically, developers need to “engineer our delivery,”  to develop and deliver better code, according to “The Software Defined Delivery Manifesto.”

This was the theme of a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted. On hand to discuss with Williams how software development and delivery can and should be transformed were Marc Holmes, chief sales and marketing officer of Pulumi, which offers tools to help streamline software development, and Rod Johnson, founder and CEO of Atomist and one of the authors of “The Software Defined Delivery Manifesto.”

Tracking and managing registries poses obvious challenges for organizations today. But as containers and Kubernetes enter the fray, the task gets that much more harder, given containers’ porous nature, among things.

Up-and-coming Harbor is one purported solution as an open source cloud native registry for storing and scanning container images for vulnerabilities.

How and why Habor can help address these security concerns for cloud native deployments, as well as how it came to be developed, were among the topics of discussion during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai. He was joined by Henry Zhang chief architect, cloud native apps, for open source Harbor, and Paul Dul, vice president of product management, cloud native applications, VMware.

“The key thing is the security,” as Harbor, a container image management registry, offers features such as access, control and replication, as well as vulnerability scanning, Zhang said.

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

Mentoring is a quintessential element for career advancement in the community, as teaching and helping to hone talent serve as a major contribution in the software development industry. Mentorships as way to boost contributions to Kubernetes is a case in point. In many respects, the future of Kubernetes depends on active members in the community.

On hand to discuss the essential role mentoring plays in Kubernetes’ growth, Libby Clark, editorial director at The New Stack, hosted a podcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Seattle. Her guests included:

Paris Pittman,  a developer relations program manager at Google Cloud who is also a coach at and subproject owner of special interest group Contributor Experience. “Contributor Experience is literally what it is: the experience of our upstream contributors,”  Pittman said. “And one of the subprojects that I do own is mentoring.”

Tim Pepper, a senior staff engineer at VMware’s open source technology center. Pepper has been involved in Contributor Experience as well and his aim is to do “anything I can to help make it easier for new folks coming on board.” He is also one of the chairs of the Kubernetes SIG release, and as part of that, “we try to really practice the cycle of mentorship,” Pepper said.

Nikhita Raghunath, a freelance software engineer originally from India who just over two years ago “did not even know what Kubernetes was,” before securing an internship at  Google Summer of Code last year. Today,  Raghunath helps run the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy Internship programs.

The public discussion of DevOps as a movement empowering organizations to encourage collaboration between IT departments in order to enable automation and expedite business objectives, will have subdued in five years’ time, and probably well earlier.  This according to Keith Pleas, DevOps Architecture Senior Manager for globally respected IT consulting firm Accenture, in an interview at DevOps World 2018 in San Francisco for The New Stack Makers.

Everybody would like to be the “miracle worker” in the IT operations side of the organization that saves the day and sees projects through on time, Pleas acknowledged.  “But the challenge is, technology is moving against that.

“‘Continuous’ implies what?  Automation,” he continued.  “The automation is coming for the automation.  In the next one, two, three, five, ten years, DevOps will be configuration settings, and that’ll be about it.”

The number of available options for application deployments and maintenance, whether on on-premise or in cloud environments, spells great opportunities. But as microservices, Kubernetes serverless platforms and other options are thrown into the mix, issues of how to manage the enormous complexity involved obviously emerges. A key concern for DevOps, among others, is creating best practices and processes for backups and disaster recovery (DR) in this context.

During a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack, hosted; Gou Rao, co-founder and CTO of Portworx, gave an overview of the complexities involved, as well as emerging DR and backup practices.

“People are still more in learning mode. Now, people have deployed their applications and they’re dealing with real-world problems operationally, and  not necessarily issues, but best practices about ‘how do I do this?’” Rao said.