The New Stack Podcast

Today, we speak with Ravi Lachman, a technical evangelist for application monitoring platform provider AppDynamics, as part of The New Stack podcast series featuring developers and engineers who share their down-in-the-trenches stories during this renaissance era in computing.

Lachman’s professional life began when he got his foot in the door over 10 years ago at IBM. There, he was paid to take part in its software engineer co-op program while completing his undergraduate studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“I was able to do the testing the high-paid engineers wouldn’t mind doing but they were like ‘just let the intern do it,’” Lachman said. “It was stellar…it was more than beer money.”

Monitoring today’s highly distributed and often immensely complex and decentralized environments requires unprecedented capabilities and reach.

Speaking with Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack during the recently held PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco, SignalFx co-founder and CEO Karthik Rau and the CTO Arijit Mukherji discussed the new age of monitoring and how it has become a core capability in managing infrastructures.

A core capability of effective monitoring consists of meeting the demands of highly distributed applications. “In a traditional enterprise architecture, you have a monolith and it’s running on a single server. There’s a lot of monitoring that you can do locally to understand if instances fail,” Rau said. “Today’s architectures are more and more distributed — you have VMs, you have containers, you have distributed architectures and distributed databases that might be running on tens or hundreds of nodes. And so what’s happening on one instance is not as interesting as what’s happening across the collection of instances since performance matters across an entire service.”

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

With the move from waterfall to agile to continuous delivery, software testing has undergone several necessary transformations, the most important of which is testing automation. For this episode of The New Stack Makers, Steve Hazel, Co-Founder and Principal Architect at Sauce Labs joins TC Currie to talk about the move to automated testing, which Sauce Labs has been at the forefront.

The best advice Hazel has is to aggressively invest in automating your deployment pipeline from start to finish. Watching their customers over the last ten years, he’s seen that companies who have completely automated their pipeline, start to finish, are going much faster than their competitors.

“You should have push button deployment, from ‘I wrote that code on my laptop’ to that code goes into production, fully tested, if there’s a problem detected in production, it gets rolled back, making that 100% automatic, including how you spin up the infrastructure that’s going to run it, absolutely everything.”You just see how much faster origination are moving who are at 100% over the companies that are at 40% or 60% automated. It’s huge.”

Deploying microservices on cloud as well as on-premise environments can offer enormous boosts in computing and agility. But once rolled out, the ability to effectively manage hundreds or even thousands of microservices that run in highly distributed environments becomes critical in order to maintain these ambitious deployments.

Alex Solomon,  CTO and co-founder at digital operations management PagerDuty, should know — Solomon started his career on the ground floor of cloud computing as a software engineer for Amazon.com over 10 years ago in 2006 and is now involved in the cutting edge of microservice deployments on the cloud. He described how cloud computing environments have evolved over the years and the current and emerging challenges associated with event triage, communication, collaboration and other concerns for this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, during the recently held  PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pa3hZ-f2is

A pay-as-you-go pricing model and increased velocity are two well-known effects that serverless technologies have on application delivery. Just as important, but often overlooked, is how serverless affects developer workflows and team dynamics. Rather than focusing entirely on business logic and code, developers take on more responsibility for configuring cloud resources.

“[Serverless] redistributes the responsibility of operations work and in the grand scheme it actually enforces the DevOps model,” Nate Taggart, CEO of Stackery, said. “Serverless is fundamentally DevOps. It’s developers having to iterate over operations work in the same cycle as their development work.”

Serverless adoption doesn’t start with the CTO, Taggart said. Instead, organizations typically adopt serverless because their engineers have started to use AWS Lambda on their own in an effort to ship features faster. The absence of governance can create resiliency and scaling problems for organizations, as individual developers bring their own workflows into a team dynamic. Operations teams quickly lose visibility and control into the application as a whole, and rollbacks and troubleshooting become a concern.

Elon Musk and Tesla's open-sourcing of its code is a symbol of a major next phase of transformation for how we perceive ourselves and society. It touches on the truth of open source software as an example that humans can show that really, they love to debate.

"I think society has to always look for resilience, and build resilience into society. Things that will survive no matter what happens, and will survive even if nobody's watching, even if the boss is missing, even if there's no decision maker. Open and distributed meritocracies have always provided the strongest resilience. When you say how do we build cars, and IoT, and software in general that can stand the test of time, the best thing is to make it open so that anybody can participate and that the participation is based on merit. Not based on ownership, not based on nationality, not based on politics, it's based on the merits of the software. [...] The more open software is, the more it can become the underpinning of something very large," said Mickos.

Iterate quickly and let the product team test out ideas, says Adam Bovill, director of engineering at Turo, the car-sharing service that connects owners with travelers.

"If you can test ten, 15 or 100 ideas quickly and effectively you can find one, two, or ten that are good," said Bovill, adding that as the Turo team is working through ideas, their data science team comes up with different models to understand risk, pricing on vehicles. Turo has two different customers. They have owners, hosts and they put their cars on the platform. They make money when not using their cars. Then there are the people who are traveling who are needing a car. Hosts and owners both have different needs. Turo then uses algorithms to test those needs. New Relic has been used by Turo since its launch in 2012. They use the New Relic APM extensively, with New Relic getting 99 percent of their monitoring.

The term CI/CD can mean many things to many people, sometimes only referring in general terms to software development and deployment. Too often, it is buried in marketing speak, with only vague connotations in relation to CI/CD’s true meaning: as a way to combine continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).

Michael Winser, product management lead for Google’s Cloud Build, described what CI/CD means for Google as well as the term’s meaning for the software industry. He discussed that and the emergence of continuous integration and continuous delivery and their combination during the past decades, for this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recorded in New York last week.

CI and CD are increasingly used interchangeably as software is deployed at scale, Winser said. “The terms get used together because the lines are a little bit blurry depending upon how you’re building your software, what kind of software you’re doing and you might have different processes,” Winser said. “But the way I think about it is ultimately CI is an automated approach towards verification, towards correctness of your software at the time of merging it.”

The role of the site reliability engineer (SRE) has emerged as a key component in new stack development. One part developer, another part operations admin; the SRE is a key player in DevOps teams, tasked with creating applications, following the process through the entire production cycle and then debugging and troubleshooting when things go awry.

Abdullah Siddiqui, an SRE at cloud accounting software provider Xero, described to Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, during the PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco last week, how the dynamics of what he does continues to evolve.

At Xero, the SRE team is largely there, in part, to ensure product development teams have the support they need.

The evolution of distributed tracing has seen many changes over the years. TNS Founder Alex Williams sat down with New Relic Senior Product Manager Vic Soares to discuss where the industry is going and how customers are making the most of distributed tracing in their workflow.

New Relic announced recently that it has made distributed tracing generally available in New Relic APM. "It's geared for folks that have written applications that rely on services oriented architecture, microservices architecture, to help them understand the path the request takes," said Soares. Williams then inquired as to the context of modern application development and distributed tracing, as modern software has become more complex over the years. Soares noted that distributed tracing allows users to be able to see how things flow, where errors are, and where issues impacting latency occur.