The New Stack Podcast

Originally created by ride-hailing firm Lyft over three years ago, Envoy serves as a network proxy geared for microservice service mesh architectures and was open sourced about two and a half years ago. About a year after Envoy 1.0’s release, Envoy entered into the fray of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubation project.

During a podcast hosted Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018; Cheryl J Hung, director of ecosystem at the CNCF, and Matt Klein, senior software engineer at Lyft, discussed how Envoy has benefited as an CNCF project, and consequently, how Envoy’s lifecycle has evolved.

They detailed what happens when a CNCF project “graduates” and how users ultimately benefit from the process.

“Overall, it’s been a great experience for us — the CNCF has been very helpful for helping us grow the project, not only from events perspective but helping with governance and just all those types of things,” Klein said. “So, Envoy has had a pretty spectacular growth over the last two years since it’s been open sourced and I think just through natural project growth and evolution especially during 2018, it became clear that it was time to look at the graduating criteria.”

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK6Fobid0pI

Lifecycle management can certainly help to address the often enormous complexities of cloud deployments. Among the challenges it can help to overcome, lifecycle management can offer monitoring, deployment and maintenance capabilities across single- or multi-multi-cloud deployments. As more organizations make the shift to container environments on the cloud, lifecycle management adapted for the environment is becoming available as well — and that’s a good thing.

The new dynamics associated with container lifecycle management, was the main topic during a podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, with a group of software engineers and product managers from Oracle.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=675Mu2eJmJo

It remains a fact that most enterprises do not retain their own software developers.  Indeed, there are major institutions today whose IT operations leaders have never actually met the people who wrote their software, or know whether they’re still alive.  And throughout the Southeast Asian region, software developers are often hired on contract, produce their work in one lump sum, and wait to get paid once it’s installed, tested, and approved.  There, the benefactors don’t expect to need that software to be replaced for at least another five years, in some cases as high as 15 years.

Some IT ops professionals perceive the idea of software development automation with daily release cycles as foreign a concept to their own way of work as, say, replacing their manufacturing lines with molecular manipulators that could produce fully functional bulldozers out of compressed peat moss.  DevOps may be an indicator of the directions that institutions and enterprises must evolve to stay relevant in the long term, but how many iterations of change will they require before they can declare themselves, technically speaking, “there?”

The trouble CVE-2018-1002105 began to cause for Rancher, as well as the Kubernetes community, started a couple of years ago, long before it became public earlier this month.

In Rancher’s case, users were already complaining about mysterious error messages and set up failures they were experiencing in 2016 with the release of Rancher 1.6 and Amazon’s ALB. More recently, the community began to experience similar problems in August with Rancher 2.1.

“It was a pretty low risk vulnerability in the sense of it was very likely that there were other protections in place that will protect you from getting to it, but overall, the experience for us was really amazing working with the rest of the Kubernetes community to identify it, get it pushed out, get patches pushed to everyone and things worked the way they’re supposed to,” Shannon Williams, co-founder and vice president, of sales, said. We identified it. It was kind of kept quiet until the fixed that were pushed out, and then everyone had the ability to patch really quickly last week.”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PxcCUj262go

It wasn’t that long ago when deploying massive-scale projects to the cloud meant largely creating the underlying infrastructure to make the migration from scratch. This reinventing the wheel-like gargantuan task is what Twitter software engineers certainly had to do. But as they figured out how to scale the social media network from Twitter’s days as a fledging startup to handle today’s 300 million regular users today, they also, almost by accident it seems, created the basis for the first service mesh Linkerd. As William Morgan, now CEO of Buoyant,  the creator and primary sponsor of Linkerd, told Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, during a recent podcast:

“And the most amazing thing about this migration was it actually worked,” Morgan said, referring to his Twitter days. “So, it was there I think, for a company to be like, ‘okay we’re rebuilding everything from scratch for that actually to succeed.’ But somehow, we managed to succeed.”

We’re moving beyond the idea that every company is a software company, said Ravi Mayuram, Senior Vice President of Engineering and CTO of Couchbase. “Now every company is a data company.”

The Couchbase data platform is a unique NoSQL Engagement database, designed for using data to connect customers, employees, and machines.  The goal is to engage customers through exceptional digital experiences, which is rapidly becoming a key differentiator in business across all industries.  

To create these experiences, enterprises need to leverage data in an agile, responsive, and scalable manner.  Enter Couchbase’s NoSQL Engagement platform, which Mayuram describes as distributed database that combines the noSQL concepts but adds SQL back into the mix. The whole platform is orchestrated with Kubernetes.

The concept of business transition is so synonymous with Salesforce that a Google search for both phrases will automatically omit one phrase as being superfluous.  So it will come as an absolute shock to perhaps several of our readers that Salesforce finds itself just as much a journeyman to the concept of the “DevOps transition” as any corporation on the planet.

“If it was three or four teams, we could have the build/test/deploy [pattern] easily,” said Byron Vonthal, product manager for CI/CD in the IT Department of Salesforce, in a wide-ranging interview for The New Stack Makers.  “But with 65 teams, it’s hard to get everybody moving at the exact same pace.  There are some teams that do this really well.  They’ve got the build/test/deploy down.  There are some teams that only have the build down, and that isn’t even incorporating their tests into the process.”

Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently spoke with Ashish Motivala from Snowflake Computing and Clement Pang from VMware who are also committee members for the FoundationDB Summit. They described FoundationDB’s history and new improvements it offers for organizations seeking to scale their databases in multi-cloud environments and across different geographical sectors by using the open source alternative.

The open source FoundationDB data store “falls in the genre of key-value stores or key-value databases so to speak,” said Snowflake Computing's Ashish Motivala. “And of the differences between FoundationDB and the plethora of other databases value stores out there is that it provides ACID compliance, which means it provides all transactional support unlike a lot of other databases,” Motivala said. “The other thing that it provides is a level of reliability that I haven’t seen in other databases in the past. And these two things really, for me, define what FoundationDB is.”

DevOps, as any successful practitioner will tell you, involves deciding which processes in your organization are worth standardizing, and bringing software developers and IT operators together to work to automate them.  When a company is making a strategic effort to shift the infrastructure hosting burden away from IT operations and toward the public cloud, it’s not always clear whether those infrastructural processes are due to be perpetuated or expunged.

“They are two different tracks that are in the midst of converging,” explained Naggi Asmar, vice president of engineering at customer experience platform provider Medallia, where the DevOps journey and the cloud journey are happening in parallel.

“We were down the path using not necessarily cloud-native solutions for our DevOps.  Then a recent transition is for us to move to a more cloud-native infrastructure and development model.  So we still are in the middle of that transition.”

It is certainly well known how Kubernetes and microservices can offer organizations unapparelled opportunities in agility, speed to deployment, resource savings and other advantages — but harnessing this power can be a difficult, especially when moving to multi-cloud environments.

The challenges associated with helping organizations make the jump to the cloud has served as a main theme of Portworx’s narrative as a company, culminating in the release this week of PX-Enterprise 2.0, a cloud native storage and data management solution geared for containers.

This was the main during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, hosted with Gou Rao, co-founder and CTO, of Portworx.

The release of PX-Enterprise 2.0 also culminates with the updates PX-Motion and PX-Central.

As its name suggest, PX-Enterprise 2.0 is designed to facilitate data movement across and between a multi- and hybrid-cloud scenario, Rao said. “The goal is to compliment Kubernetes, by laying out a design pattern in how you manage and orchestrate multi-cloud applications,” Rao said. PX- Motion will allow you to do that across multiple Kubernetes clusters, even between different cloud providers.”