The New Stack Podcast

One of the main  benefits of serverless is the ability to shift server administration- and platform management-related tasks to a third party, allowing for a greater focus on development and deployment. But this freedom can come at a price — relying on serverless also means, for example, giving more control to a third party. Many things for which you are at the mercy of the serverless provider include unexpected downtimes, fluctuating pricing, and ultimately, the inability to benefit from features tailored to your specific needs since you are likely one of thousands of customers. The control of underlying security parameters can also be an issue.

However, with the right tools, it is possible gain visibility and control of runtime security for your serverless data and applications. Ory Segal, CTO and co-founder of serverless security provider PureSec, was on hand to discuss how, during a podcast hosted earlier this month by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, earlier this year at ServerlessConf 2018.

The inherent issue with serverless is that customers do not own the runtime environment since “you are a guest,” Segal said. “Being able to sit there and monitor everything at a very low level..is challenging,” Segal said.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/70G1e1QpiX8

A number of services on offer for Cloud Foundry architectures have emerged, posing new challenges — as well as offering new opportunities — for service providers.

Steffen Zuber and Michael Lieser,  platform engineers for anynines, were on hand to discuss their challenges offering data services for Cloud Foundry platforms during a podcast hosted earlier this month by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack,  during Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2018 in Basel, Switzerland.

Zuber described how their roles have evolved over the past year as platform engineers.

“Last year, we [adopted] DevOps, as we have enabled users to use Cloud Foundry. We have begun to develop data services customers need to for database applications, messaging queues etcetera,” Zuber said. “We focus on the automation to set up these services. So, you have the features from Cloud foundry also for our data services.”

When offering data services with Cloud Foundry, stateless is the operative word, Zuber said.

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

The state of gender diversity has a long way to go before it can reach acceptable levels in tech — as well as in society in general. The positive news is that there is a strong undercurrent of players who are striving to make a difference.

Initiatives created to help bring about positive change was one of the main topics discussed during a podcast hosted earlier this month by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack  during Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2018 in Basel, Switzerland. Jennifer Cloer, founder of and lead consultant for THINKit PR, creator and executive producer for The Chasing Grace Project and co-founder of Wicked Flick Productions;  Swarna Podila, senior director, community, for the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and Steve Greenberg, founder of Resilient Scale, were the podcast guests on hand who spoke about their experiences and projects devoted to improved diversity.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV9jdPx_2JQ

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie talks with Kublr CEO Slava Koltovich about canaries, Kubernetes and operations.

Klotovich, was working in company providing technical services to enterprise clients when Kubernetes hit the scene a few years ago. He saw that most companies who are providing Kubernetes abstraction layers are focused on development, and not so much was being done for operations. Recognizing an opportunity, Kublr was born.

The Kublr products are tuned for the operations environment and for the typical use cases for operations. The teams normally responsible for having applications up and running, for example infrastructure teams and application support groups, have been slower to adopt Kubernetes. Since most open source code comes from developers, not surprisingly, most of the available Kubernetes services are focused on developers. Kublr saw the opportunity to tailor Kubernetes functions for operations.

Cloud Foundry’s BOSH continues to serve many organizations as a missing Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) link for managing deployments throughout the production cycle across multi-cloud environments.

Dr. Nic Williams, CEO of Stark & Wayne, a cloud services consultancy, and Marco Voelz, a developer for software giant SAP, were on hand during Cloud Foundry Summit Europe in Basel last week to discuss during this podcast why BOSH continues to be at the heart of Cloud Foundry with Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack.

BOSH remains a key part of Cloud Foundry's multi-cloud strategy thanks largely to its CPI, which “abstracts all those nitty-gritty infrastructure details from the BOSH code base itself,” Voelz said. In this way, BOSH can run on AWS, Azure, OpenStack or "wherever you like — as long as there’s a CPI for it," Voelz said.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hoXX83tEvdM

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is the CEO and Chief Scientist of DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), and the principal author of the annual State of DevOps Report.  On many occasions, she’s asserted the case that “you are what you measure” — that a company’s capabilities may be either enabled or constrained by the extent to which it is capable of perceiving how it does what it does.  In a recent conversation for The New Stack, I presented Dr. Forsgren with the notion that an organization that automates its processes in a cloud native manner must also measure those processes cloud-natively as well.  In so doing, I suggested, it would create a business that operated under very different principles, since it operates on a platform where measurement has a very different context.

“I think I’ll agree to the point that, when we change our technology stack and applications in order to be cloud native,” the CEO responded, “that will likely change the way we do our work, whether it’s through a direct change because we’ve changed our work, or through the measurements that we now employ to track and evaluate that work.

A major theme among others at the Cloud Foundry Summit Europe in Basel last week was about how to leverage open source architectures while picking and choosing from the best-and-brightest tools to complete a stack.

How to combine the best of both worlds was a major topic during a conversation at the Basel summit between Daniel Hekman, GrapeUp head of enterprise business development, Roman Swoszowski, GrapeUp vice president of cloud R&D, and Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack.

“We see customer often prefer to use open source technologies, open source Cloud Foundry in particular, and of course, they also use other tools around that, so they can build a complete stack around their workloads and around their those applications,” Swoszowski said. “We thought why don’t we package that and make it easier for them them to set up.”

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

“Where do you put your value as a company?” asked Sacha Labourey, CEO of DevOps automation platform maker CloudBees, speaking with The New Stack.  “Where do you think your differentiation will come from?  I’ll be a bit sarcastic here, because I have great regard for the IT Ops people, but a company is not going to become a leader of the market because it’s just ten times better at installing Linux and switches.  A company is going to be ten times better in the market at differentiating features, value, through software.  That comes from the development.”

Here, Labourey represents a very powerful argument:  Too many of the processes that constitute IT operations are undistinguished, providing minimal business value to the company.  Automation absorbs those processes, enabling individuals to be reassigned to more value-intensive roles.  That’s assuming, of course, that their bosses haven’t watched that video where their heads pop into nothingness.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi is Chief Technology Officer of CloudBees, and the originator of the Jenkins automation platform upon which so many development and operations teams both depend. As Kawaguchi told The New Stack, he’s witnessed numerous examples of organic evolutions of automation, where two teams automated their own processes to the extent that the interactions between them get automated as well. In such a circumstance, he acknowledges, the transactions that take place may only exist today because they existed in the past — because that’s the way these jobs were designed to work, back before they became automated.

“I do also wonder, is that an optimal way to do things?” asked Kawaguchi. “If you did the thinking from scratch, do you do automation along the previous organizational boundaries?”

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) last year established a serverless working group to help define serverless technologies and how they fit into a cloud native architecture. One of the first, most common issues the group addressed was the lack of an industry-wide definition for events and the associated metadata.

“Everyone defines an event a little bit differently and they don't really take into account the context of the event,” said Ken Owens, vice president of digital architecture at MasterCard and a member of the CNCF’s serverless working group. “Being able to fire off something and forget about it and hope that it works was a common pattern we used to have. We now have more business logic that's needed around those events to understand more about the context and the success or the failure of those events.”