The New Stack Podcast

Jenkins has often been called the “engine of DevOps,” and in recent years through the aid of plug-ins, the hub for a continuous delivery pipeline.  It’s explained as an automation tool, and the principal software component around which an organization’s DevOps strategy may be based.

Yet at its core, it is essentially an automation server.  Its extensive use by IT professionals for data center automation and infrastructure management is significantly under-reported.  Indeed, from the perspective of many data center managers, Jenkins is a movement that they started, and whose uptake by software developers is on account of their persistence.

So Jenkins should be something these two departments of IT have in common with one another.  Is the extension of the annual Jenkins World conference into DevOps World an indication that these groups may finally be seeing eye-to-eye — and in the same conference hall?

One of the most challenging aspects of migrating to a microservice architecture is deciding which pieces of the monolith to break off first into separate services. Architects must understand the business objectives, how the services function and how they will relate to the rest of the whole. Then, the team faces more challenges once services are up and running. Operational complexity increases because each service may have its own languages, toolsets and infrastructure.

To help solve these and other problems that arise when moving to microservices, a new set of commercial monitoring solutions, such as Dynatrace, have emerged on top of existing open source tools like Prometheus. By pulling in data from multiple sources via an API, such monitoring tools can provide a complete view of an application, from its traffic patterns on the network and the database statements it executes, to which container, platform and host a service runs on.

“Once you install Dynatrace, we're monitoring and tracking every single service, process, host, log, and also end user,” said Andreas Grabner, DevOps activist, Dynatrace. “We have a complete live dependency map from your complete environment.”

On today’s episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams sat down for a discussion with Stoplight.io's Lead Community Engineer Taylor Barnett recorded live from OSCON 2018, held in Portland earlier this year.

Starting off the conversation, Williams brought up the topic of service meshes, to which Barnett quickly noted, "A lot of places aren't even there yet. They're still in the getting started phases, now that we've been talking about microservices for a few years and how to grow that. There's a lot of tooling still to be built out there."

Cloud native isn’t limited to containers and microservices orchestration. This was the main conclusion the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) reached when it set out this year to re-define the term “cloud native,” said Justin Garrison, co-author of the book Cloud Native Infrastructure, who was involved in the CNCF’s lengthy process. Under the new definition, CNCF recognizes that cloud native is not just a set of technologies to adopt, but that it also reflects a change in an organization’s structure and processes.

“Technology is not the point. The point is business value and that may be about speed of deployment and speed of shipping function,” Liz Rice, technology evangelist at Aqua Security and co-chair of the CNCF’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event, said. “You need all the processes and the team structure and everything else around it.”

On today’s episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams sat down with Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Brendan Burns at a lively afterparty from this year's Portland-based OSCON 2018.

To begin the conversation, Williams inquired as to the time before OSCON, before Kubernetes--Specifically, where was Burns, and what had he been working on? While working with Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie at Google, Burns noted that Docker and containers, "Really changed the game," and that, "Orchestration was where we needed to go, but it had to be open source. It had to be a community. We had to build it out in the public, out in the open. The thing that we open sourced five years ago was a tiny, tiny shell of what it has become."

On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder & Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams was live from ServerlessConf 2018. Williams sat down with Linda Nichols, Cloud Enablement Leader at Cloudreach, and Emily Young, Cloudreach Cloud Software Engineer to discuss not only ServerlssConf, but hiring practices, how companies utilise functions, and more.

Launching the discussion was a conversation surrounding the way in which Young has brought "server-full" technology into her home by purchasing 500 punchcards from Los Alamos National Laboratory, having an interest in vintage computing, mainframes, and servers. "It's really interesting being on both sides of it, watching the invention of computers, [...] where a computer took up an entire room and now we have these functions, we don't even worry about what the computer is. We just upload little punchcards to the cloud and get back output from AWS or Google Cloud."

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XNWdqXlkU-Q

The microservices philosophy and architectural approach have existed for a while in the form of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). A new set of sophisticated tooling makes this elegant architecture practical to deliver. The number of services, and their ephemeral nature, makes it virtually impossible to secure the environment using the tools and manually-driven processes of the past.

“It really forces you to change the approach that you take for security from human-designed and maintained with a lot of direct manipulation to a much higher degree of automation,” John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, said.

A new breed of security tools can understand and model an application’s typical traffic patterns, develop a reference model that reflects that known good state, and search for anomalies that violate that model. At the same time, new patterns and practices for developers, operations and security teams help integrate that security knowledge from the very beginning of the application development lifecycle.

Rust has been growing and becoming a more commonly used tool in systems infrastructure. On this episode of The New Stack Makers recorded live at OSCON, we caught up with Nathan Stocks, Engineering Manager for Git Infrastructure at GitHub. He told us just why GitHub has been using Rust to help run its Git infrastructure. He's a big fan of the language, and while GitHub uses it for some projects, he was quick to point out that he can only describe how he uses the language, not how GitHub treats it as a formal tool.

"Rust was a personal project by a Mozilla employee. Mozilla picked it up as an official sponsor in 2009, in May 2015, Rust 1.0 arrived. Rust is a really young systems language," said Stocks. "i do teach Rust. I love Rust. I think it's the future. As a systems language it's competing with C and C++, so we're looking at low level languages, compiled, statically typed. Rust gives you a whole bunch of new, modern features, and makes it so that systems programmers can have nice things too."

Watch on Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/thenewstack/1nAKEQnwRWoKL

The Internet of Things is slowly working its way into our lives, to the point where we'll just call them Things. With so many software projects, open source tools, and hardware devices out there, it can be tough to even make the distinction between a modern sprinkler system and one that is Internet enabled: non-Internet enabled devices are becoming increasingly less common from hardware vendors across many verticals, from farming to utilities, to transport.

Zach Supalla, CEO of Particle, has built a company around redefining what it means to be an IoT platform. While many companies offer a software management layer, or a set of hardware platforms upon which to build, Particle offers the entire retinue of needed assets, from microcontrollers with wireless chipsets, to a device operating system, to a cloud service provider, to development tools.

Serverless has grown to become more than just Amazon Lambdas. Today, there are dozens of implementations, from inside the clouds, to those that are designed to run inside a datacenter, to those that run in Kubernetes. That last batch is where the most interest has coagulated over the past year, and now even more so with the announcement of Knative as a project designed to smooth the Serveless experience on Kubernetes.

Streamed live at Serverlessconf in San Francisco, this past week, we caught up with Soam Vasani, the creator of Fission.io, a serverless framework for Kubernetes. He began the project in late 2016, and said that it has become a popular Function-as-a-Service system for Kubernetes users. The project was created at Platform9 to help make their customers more productive on the very first day they installed their own Kubernetes cluster. "You can build functions the same way you do, for example, on AWS Lambda, but you can run them anywhere on any Kubernetes cluster," said Vasani.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YoIu611OQlM