The New Stack Podcast

A digital transformation requires DevOps — DevOps consists of individual teams that make up the building blocks of a successful digital journey.

This was a major theme of a conversation between Ben Connolly, head of Digital IT at Vodafone; Matty Stratton, DevOps Evangelist at PagerDuty and Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, at the PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco last week.

Vodafone, for example, which is at the early stages of its digital transformation, is relying on DevOps teams to boost its pace of delivery, responsiveness and its ability to innovate, Connolly says.

“We are a fairly very large organization, and are a moving slowly in some places, so we are really keen to change that,” Connolly said. “The focus on DevOps is fundamental to empower our teams and to set our teams up with clear goals.”

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR3f7uDZf_A

On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams sat down for a discussion with tCell Founder and Vice President of Engineering Boris Chen to learn more about the impact of what is now called DevSecOps in today's enterprises. Unifying DevOps and Security and moving towards the trend of DevSecOps is something many engineering teams are embracing as they find themselves not only working across distributed systems, but distributed teams.

Chen's 25 year background is based in enterprise software, with a background in J2E, with his previous role being VP of Engineering at Splunk. Early in his career he did a lot of QA and performance testing, which greatly impacted how he approached developing tCell. "That monitoring aspect seems to be a missing hole in application security in general," said Chen. These observations were how they arrived at tCell, with its architecture built upon inspiration from New Relic and AppDynamics in the APM space. Using agents that are able to plug into the application process, Chen noted, was not feasible in a cloud service, adding that if you plug in an agent to every server in your cloud service, the agent then becomes part of the software.

Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty dropped by the TNS podcast booth to talk about teams with Alex Williams and TC Currie  at the PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco earlier this week.  The theme of the Summit is Ops and Opportunity and Tejada used her keynote to speak about the importance of being team-centric, and trust.  But how do you get there?

When I think about teams and real-time operations, it can often be a mess, said Williams.

“There is often chaos before there is order,” she acknowledged, smiling.  The way we’re working is changing.  The workforce is distributed and need to collaborate and work well together because minutes and seconds count.

Real-time operations is about technology, she said,  but it’s more about helping people get the most out of the time and investment and tools they have to get the best outcome for their customers and their businesses.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Hddo367r5hM

The concept of helping organizations deploy to serverless faster and with fewer resources is straightforward. But underneath the platform Stackery offers, of course, is a lot of heavy-lifting development work that goes into creating the necessary code. The end result is about making serverless more accessible for organizations that might otherwise not have the resources and knowhow in house to make the move.

Besides software engineering skills to help to continue to build on Stackery’s platform, the importance of attracting the right talent is also critical. In this way, the team effort is key, Farrah Campbell,  ecosystem manager at Stackery, told TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams for this podcast sponsored by security platform provider Twistlock.

“What I try to do at Stackery is something not [specific] to technology — it’s more about the team,” Campbell told Williams at Rontoms restaurant in downtown Portland where Stackery is based.

Pulumi CEO and Co-Founder Joe Duffy and his team could have created a new programming language to help developers deploy their applications to multi-cloud environments — but they did not.

“The tech nerd in me would love to go creating a new language,” Duffy, who was previously a long-time Microsoft software engineer and tool developer, said during a live interview with TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams. “I’ve done that a few times before, but it didn’t seem appropriate.”

Instead, the Pulumi cloud native development platform allows developers to use the programming language of their choice for containers, Lambdas and infrastructure on the cloud.

“We figured out a way where you can just write some code in your favorite language and that was sort of a major breakthrough,” Duffy said. “[It was] the initial line in the sand that we drew when we said, ‘we are going to just embrace languages that people know...and make them work.’ I think, for now, existing languages are doing just fine.”

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams was on-site at the New Relic offices in Portland, Oregon for a preview of the FutureStack 2018 conference keynotes and learn more about New Relic's approach to distributed tracing from New Relic SVP of Product Management, Aaron Johnson.

Launching the conversation, Williams dove into New Relic's takeaways from FutureStack: "We can start with our focus on modern. We define modern as: Cloud, containers, microservices, serverless, and DevOps," said Johnson. Highlighting the 'lightning rod' that containers have become, Johnson explained that the creation and option of DevOps combined to create a 'seismic event' when brought together, leading to many companies that were not previously focused on software becoming software companies first, transforming their businesses with these technologies.

With CI/CD becoming more and more the defining competitive edge in the marketplace, the big question is how, exactly, does one accomplish continuous delivery? On this episode of The New Stack Makers, we sat down with Jack Norris, to talk about a big piece of that puzzle. He’s senior vice president at MapR, a company that provides a data fabric layer to the tech stack necessary for continuous delivery.

The concept of a data fabric, which allows data to flow seamlessly across all locations whether its databases or along the edge, is a fundamentally different architecture, Norris said. Back in 2008, when MapR was created, it represented a paradigm shift in thinking about data. Traditionally, the application dictated how the data must be organized and you ended up separate application stacks and data silos.

In today’s world of continuous delivery and speed of application use, data is a big pressure point, said Norris. A data fabric is an alternative to these separate silos.

The fabric contains multiple types of data, supports different types of workloads, stretches across locations globally, and provides easy access to data on premise, in the cloud, or all the way to the edge, he said.

The entire technology industry has aligned behind Kubernetes. Since then, application lifecycle management has become much easier. Before Kubernetes, only the CI half of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) was automated. CD was assembled by hand with scripts, pipelines, metadata and configurations. Kubernetes enables CD automation, and tools like Jenkins X make it simple to deploy on Kubernetes.

“CI/CD should become increasingly like an appliance that just does CI and CD for you. It's not this kind of ninja scripty thing that only experts can figure out,” said James Strachan, chief architect at CloudBees. “Where we're trying to go with Jenkins X is not so much hiding Kubernetes, not so much hiding CI and CD and pipelines, but just automating it.”

Kubernetes remains on track to offer some exciting new themes with the upcoming release of 1.12, while the team-backed process making it all happen continues to evolve as well.

Before Tim Pepper, of the Open Source Technology Center at VMware,  began to lead the effort for the launch of 1.12 scheduled for the end of month, he already had a very solid and hands-on understanding of Kubernetes’ development process in a very hands-on way. Much of what he learned was as a shadow release manager for Josh Berkus, Project Atomic Community lead at Red Hat, who lead the 1.11’s release efforts. Both Pepper and Berkus were on hand at OSCON 2018 for a live interview with TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams.

“The Kubernetes community does a really good job of grooming their contributors, as well as mentoring and training them,” Pepper said. “Specific to the release team, there's actually a process.”

Sometimes, managing the software community can be just as much work as writing the actual software. Paris Pittman, Developer Relations Program Manager, Google, knows this because she's been working to help manage the Kubernetes community for some time now. She said she enjoys the work because the community has a terrific attitude, and is very inviting to newcomers.

"I think that's one of the reasons we as a project have grown so much, is because we have a welcoming community. It's amazing to see how many issues (bugs, not personal issues) we have and deal with, and then still manage to be so welcoming and friendly to people that come to us," said Pittman.