The New Stack Podcast

Advertising and white papers may make AI seem like a pie in the sky proposition, with easy analysis, deep insights, and fair algorithms available everywhere. The reality, however, is that AI can expose an even darker side of our own humanity, acting as more of a mirror than as sky-pie. We saw this when Microsoft put an AI driven bot up on Twitter, only to have it spout racist statements shortly there-after.

Camille Eddy, currently a student pursuing a mechanical engineering bachelors degree at Boise State, already has a long career as a high-tech robotics intern at places like Alphabet and HP. She's currently interning at nVidia, in fact, when she's not out on the speaking circuit. We caught up with Camille for a livestream at OSCON, where she presented a session on the topic of recognizing cultural bias in AI.

Watch on Periscope:

https://www.periscope.tv/thenewstack/1OwxWWbbbPRxQ

Brandon Shibley is the VP of innovation at Toradex, a company that makes ARM-based System on Modules (SoM), which are different from Single Board Computers. While SBC comes with all components soldered onto the board, SoM offers different components as modules allowing for more flexibility and upgradability.

SoM are used in specialized markets such as industrial automation, test and measurement, digital signage, automotive, medical, and more. SoM brings IoT capabilities to supercars, medical equipment and so on. Toradex SoM powers the world’s fastest hyper electric car Rimac Concept One, which uses Apalis iMX6.

“We focus on providing industrial grade hardware solutions with long lifecycle support. We also provide software support for these System on Modules,” said Shibley.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6ApLG7Vd9rk

We caught up with Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate at Google, and Nate Taggart, CEO of Stackery, at a recent Serverless users group meetup. The pair were delivering a fire side chat on the state of serverless, and had keen insight not just into how this new technology fits into current applications, but how it fits in with the entire history of computing.

"I think serverless is high in the hype-cycle right now. We've reached peak mania over the potential. It's always a panacea. This technology feels new when in reality it's probably just a new version of the same old thing we do. There's this cycle we go through of abstract away, then take back control," said Taggart.

Jim Rose, CEO of CircleCI joins TC Currie to talk about maintaining corporate culture in a distributed environment. Having over 140 team members in twenty-seven locations across twelve countries brings more than the usual problems in hiring and retaining talented employees.

Their goal, said Rose, is to “make sure that every employee regardless of where they are feels connected and included and sort of dialed into everything that the company is trying to accomplish at any given time.”

They have two sets of tools, he said. One layer is the digital tools to make communication possible across multiple channel options: email. Slack, Zoom and GitHub primary among them. The second layer is a set of processes and rituals so that each organization in the company stays connected and is able to broadcast what they're currently working on, the challenges that they're facing, the the gains that they're making and the progress that we're seeing in the market.

One of the biggest contributions of Docker to the IT world has been making it super easy to use containers. A developer can work on their local machine, build the app and run it in production without any complexity, thanks to Docker on the desktop.

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS correspondent Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Gareth Rushgrove, Product Manager, Docker, Inc to talk about the tool. Rushgrove said that his focus is more on developer desktop than on servers and cloud. “I care about individual developer laptop and desktop. We work towards creating the best developer experience for using Docker locally,” Rushgrove said.

Recently, Docker announced the new version of Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows that enables a developer to create an app and run it in production under a minute, using templates. Now building and deploying an app is as simple as creating a Microsoft Office document.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4Pa4mdd0mcQ

Christian Posta  is the Chief Architect for Cloud Development at Red Hat, and we caught up with him at OSCON to chat about the next big problem Kubernetes adopters will face once they've gotten their systems containerized. That problem is traffic management, and the Istio Project, which should hit version 1.0 before the end of August, is the planned system for handling it all.

Posta lays out the problem and how Istio solves it; "The context of traffic management is really more about doing deployments and reducing the risk of bringing code changes to production. I've worked for big banks, I've worked for big companies where we would release code once a quarter. Every three months we'd have everyone come in Friday night, stay until Sunday night and do a big bang release of everything.We would take a new version of the code, push it to production, and it would be live," said Posta.

Cloud economist, Corey Quinn, said that "Day to day, I solve one problem: I fix the AWS bill. There's a few things it tends to break down into; data transfer and figuring out region arbitrage," said Quinn. In his work, he sees a great many enterprise cloud environments and has some insight into what problems still face microservices adoption in big businesses.

"People with an engineering background tend to have a natural bias where we focus on the tooling and the how.  For example, there's been a 30 or 40 year war going on about vi versus emacs, and there's still no clear winner. Some people say vi is the answer, other people are just wrong. So there's this natural tendency to get into how work gets done, almost to the point where it occludes what the work is. You see elements of this periodically arising these days with the microservices revolution. People are now starting to frantically cargo cult around what they see at conference talks, on bus advertisements, who knows where. They're starting to twist a sort of technology that is aimed at solving political and cultural problems and trying to use it in ways that are inappropriate. You can build a fantastic torque wrench, doesn't help you put the nail in any more effectively unless you hold it very wrong," said Quinn.

The biggest challenge for businesses today is development of software at speed, at scale. For startups, this may be second nature, but for large enterprises, it's the nature of the beast: the bigger the company, the slower it probably moves. For developers inside of these enterprises, it can be easy to feel left behind. As the world moves on to cloud-based AI, IoT, serverless, event-driven streaming servers, the typical enterprise developer with a monolith, database, and an actual datacenter can easily get a feeling of being old and boring.

Grace Andrews, solutions engineer at New Relic, said that most enterprises have the same problem: speed. "The ecosystem is growing so much faster than it ever has before. People are always talking about Docker, containers, microservices, etc. But folks sometimes forget there's still roughly 70% to 80% of the industry that is not yet fully automated. You've got folks on this side having conversations about these containerized ecosystems and environments, and how they need to be able to have both Kubernetes but also some other orchestration tool like a cloud platform... You have all of these things in motion, but you still have people who have physical servers. I think we're meeting this critical convergence point where, whether people are implementing the new techs in their environment, or they're looking at it, everybody is worried about scale and speed. Not only are they worrying about scale and speed, they are worried about getting left behind," said Andrews.

Building software at scale and at velocity requires a great deal of infrastructure, process, and management. While some companies like Facebook and Google may make it seem like CI/CD is easy to build, in reality, both of these companies have spent billions of dollars optimizing their build pipelines and enabling developers to be more productive by removing barriers in the build/test/fix feedback loop.

For the rest of us, there are many ways to help improve a CI/CD process that don't actually require writing your own build system, or spending $1 billion to make PHP compile to C++, as Facebook once did. Instead, there are numerous vendors, open source projects, and CI/CD gurus out there to help your team get from writing code to deploying it to production much faster.

One company aimed at helping solve the CI/CD speed-up problem is Split Software. Adil Aijaz is the CEO and co-founder of Split, and he sat down with us to discuss the current state of agile deployment in the enterprise world.

The Berkeley Packet Filter is ancient history. It was created in 1992 at Lawrence Berkeley Labs as a way better filter and sort network packets. In the early 2000's it was at the heart of the long running SCO versus Linux lawsuit. Today, it's just another raw interface included with Linux. Recently, however, BPF has become a bit of an interesting topic, as it's become a popular replacement for IPTables.

Thomas Graf, CTO and co-founder at Covalent. is also the leader of the Cilium Project. Cilium offers API-aware networking and security for Kubernetes users based on BPF. Graf said that the power of BPF can be tough to utilize in Kubernetes, and so the Cilium Project is aimed at making that easier.

"It's allowing you to translate declarative high level intent such as policy, networking, localizing, all of this high level intent that is described with Kubernetes services. Cilium implements these high level constructs with BPF in a most efficient and secure manner. Its bringing the power of BPF in an easily consumable way, and implementing known Kubernetes interfaces," said Graf.