The New Stack Podcast

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen in early May, we caught up with Red Hat's newest CTO, Brandon Philips, to discuss the state of CoreOS and containers as a whole. Philips and his team were acquired by Red Hat back in January, and the pairing has focused a good amount of Linux thought leadership onto the Kubernetes project. In Copenhagen, he and Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat, sat down to talk about what it's been like merging the CoreOS and Red Hat teams.

The CoreOS team, and Red Hat overall, has been working closely with the CNCF to expand the capabilities of Kubernetes for enterprise users. One big part of this effort has been the Kubernetes Operators Project, said Philips.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/en4yHnjfi-s

The 20th anniversary of OSCON arrives next month on July 16, 2018, and Portland town can't wait for the geeks to come for a visit. This year continues the O'Reilly effort to move from that long-time practice of language-focus to the story of the past four years thinking more how the developer works every day.

On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams sat down with Rachel Roumeliotis, OSCON Chair and Vice President of Content Strategy at O'Reilly Media. Throughout the discussion, the two discussed what guests can expect at the conference, including what tracks are of note, the technologies behind them, and how open source must continue to bring diversity to its workforce.

The 20th anniversary of OSCON arrives next month on July 16, 2018, and Portland town can't wait for the geeks to come for a visit. This year continues the O'Reilly effort to move from that long-time practice of language-focus to the story of the past four years thinking more how the developer works every day.

On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams sat down with Rachel Roumeliotis, OSCON Chair and Vice President of Content Strategy at O'Reilly Media. Throughout the discussion, the two discussed what guests can expect at the conference, including what tracks are of note, the technologies behind them, and how open source must continue to bring diversity to its workforce.

The buzz at ChefConf, this past week, was all around the Habitat project. This open source project brings a deployment layer to developers, allowing them to package up their applications as just about anything under the sun. Considering that Chef remains a popular path to configuration management and environment configuration, adding this new unified deployment preparation layer brings developers even more exciting ways to automate their continuous integration and deployment processes.

"I describe it, personally, as two things. The first is a packaging system. What you do is, you create a plan file for your application, you write the application first, and then that plan file defines in Bash for Linux and Powershell for Windows how exactly that app should be built, installed, and run. The wonderful thing is that gets packaged into a HART artifact, because we heart you, though it actually means Habitat Artifact. That package can be exported to almost anything. It can be exported into a Docker container. That's by far the most popular exporter that people use," said Nell Shamrell-Harrington, senior development engineer at Chef.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yQRixcCmXc

The buzz at ChefConf, this past week, was all around the Habitat project. This open source project brings a deployment layer to developers, allowing them to package up their applications as just about anything under the sun. Considering that Chef remains a popular path to configuration management and environment configuration, adding this new unified deployment preparation layer brings developers even more exciting ways to automate their continuous integration and deployment processes.

"I describe it, personally, as two things. The first is a packaging system. What you do is, you create a plan file for your application, you write the application first, and then that plan file defines in Bash for Linux and Powershell for Windows how exactly that app should be built, installed, and run. The wonderful thing is that gets packaged into a HART artifact, because we heart you, though it actually means Habitat Artifact. That package can be exported to almost anything. It can be exported into a Docker container. That's by far the most popular exporter that people use," said Nell Shamrell-Harrington, senior development engineer at Chef.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yQRixcCmXc

You're likely running some form of server on AWS right now, somewhere in the world. If so, you're also entrusting your systems to the reliability and stability of the folks at Amazon: that they've thought through their devops practices and have your back when it comes to scaling, outages, and backup. And you'd be correct to place your trust there: Amazon's AWS track record only gets better every year as billions of applications successfully complete their business goals within its confines.

But just how does Amazon maintain such a spectacularly science-fiction sized hardware and software hosting system? The answer is not only devops, it's also Chef. At Chefconf this past week, we sat down with Jonathan Weiss, senior software development manager and Mark Rambow, software development manager, both from Amazon's AWS team. We traced the lines of control and practice inside their company to find just what it is that allows them to not only operate at scale, but to allow everyone else in the world to operate at scale as well.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4iMgvkxT9g

You're likely running some form of server on AWS right now, somewhere in the world. If so, you're also entrusting your systems to the reliability and stability of the folks at Amazon: that they've thought through their devops practices and have your back when it comes to scaling, outages, and backup. And you'd be correct to place your trust there: Amazon's AWS track record only gets better every year as billions of applications successfully complete their business goals within its confines.

But just how does Amazon maintain such a spectacularly science-fiction sized hardware and software hosting system? The answer is not only devops, it's also Chef. At Chefconf this past week, we sat down with Jonathan Weiss, senior software development manager and Mark Rambow, software development manager, both from Amazon's AWS team. We traced the lines of control and practice inside their company to find just what it is that allows them to not only operate at scale, but to allow everyone else in the world to operate at scale as well.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4iMgvkxT9g

When it comes to securing an application deployed on Kubernetes, automation through a CI/CD pipeline is key. Using cloud-native security tools that hook right into Jenkins or your favorite CI/CD tool, enterprise security teams can set policies for developers who are building container images. The pipeline enforces those policies through automated vulnerability scanning of each image during the build process. Developers only deploy images that the security team is confident in because they've been scanned.

“CI/CD automation is key because of the scale,” said Liz Rice, technology evangelist at Aqua Security, in this podcast with The New Stack. “You couldn't possibly manually check all these different images when you're shipping potentially hundreds or thousands of deploys in a day.”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MC3x2CV3ozA

When it comes to securing an application deployed on Kubernetes, automation through a CI/CD pipeline is key. Using cloud-native security tools that hook right into Jenkins or your favorite CI/CD tool, enterprise security teams can set policies for developers who are building container images. The pipeline enforces those policies through automated vulnerability scanning of each image during the build process. Developers only deploy images that the security team is confident in because they've been scanned.

“CI/CD automation is key because of the scale,” said Liz Rice, technology evangelist at Aqua Security, in this podcast with The New Stack. “You couldn't possibly manually check all these different images when you're shipping potentially hundreds or thousands of deploys in a day.”

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MC3x2CV3ozA

Microservices is the talk of the town these days, even if the term and technology has actually been around for a while now. Why is everyone suddenly interested in microservices architecture? What has changed? To understand microservices, I sat down with Patrick Chanezon, chief developer advocate at Docker at the Open Source Leadership Summit Sonoma, California.

Chanezon provided a brief history lesson about the evolution of microservices architecture to explain why everyone is talking about it these days. He said at the end of nineties and early 2000s, developers were structuring their applications into what we call monoliths. Those applications required dedicated, proprietary servers to run. With Java applications, Java App Server was required. With .NET, an IIS server was required.

In a monolithic architecture, everything is bundled together. If you want to upgrade or update just one service, the entire app must be updated. Monoliths have their own disadvantages. Most importantly they slow organizations down, who end up spending more resources in managing the infrastructure that runs those apps, instead of investing in the apps themselves.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XXKaI0Xnde0