The New Stack Podcast

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

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams sits down with Chris Aniszczyk, COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Torin Sandall, a Software Engineer at Styra, to discuss how the Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a secure, simple, and compliant way to manage services.

"From a CNCF perspective, policy was a missing piece within our cloud native landscape," Aniszczyk explained, discussing why the Foundation on-boarded OPA.

Policy's continued evolution within microservices is a point of note, with developers having to think about how they monitor and architect policies themselves. Sandall explained that OPA gives you an engine to enforce policies across environments, which is beneficial to service administrators, platform engineering teams, and those running large authorization platforms such as Netflix's security team.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8uchwoMgfIc

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams sits down with Chris Aniszczyk, COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Torin Sandall, a Software Engineer at Styra, to discuss how the Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a secure, simple, and compliant way to manage services.

"From a CNCF perspective, policy was a missing piece within our cloud native landscape," Aniszczyk explained, discussing why the Foundation on-boarded OPA.

Policy's continued evolution within microservices is a point of note, with developers having to think about how they monitor and architect policies themselves. Sandall explained that OPA gives you an engine to enforce policies across environments, which is beneficial to service administrators, platform engineering teams, and those running large authorization platforms such as Netflix's security team.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8uchwoMgfIc

Snyk sees itself as a developer community that does security. There, it's not about hiring security practitioners, but around getting developers to embrace security best practices. On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams sat down with Snyk's CEO Guy Podjarny to discuss the levels of abstraction in today's infrastructures, how those impact developers, and the many ways in which infrastructure impacts how developers work with Kubernetes and AWS.

Developers are ultimately those that have to manage and understand what components and libraries are used. "I think it's around drawing lines. So again, you have an app and written code. What is the app? The minimal description is you wrote code, you decorated it with libraries and a container, and moved it on its way."

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/r6p98prQZqY

Snyk sees itself as a developer community that does security. There, it's not about hiring security practitioners, but around getting developers to embrace security best practices. On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams sat down with Snyk's CEO Guy Podjarny to discuss the levels of abstraction in today's infrastructures, how those impact developers, and the many ways in which infrastructure impacts how developers work with Kubernetes and AWS.

Developers are ultimately those that have to manage and understand what components and libraries are used. "I think it's around drawing lines. So again, you have an app and written code. What is the app? The minimal description is you wrote code, you decorated it with libraries and a container, and moved it on its way."

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/r6p98prQZqY

Service mesh technologies are being used in production just six months after the KubeCon North America keynotes that explored what a service mesh is, and its benefits to both organizations and developers. Many are still attempting to truly grasp what a service mesh offers, particularly as observability and compatibility concerns are raised.

Join us on this episode of The New Stack Makers from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to explore the overall management of a service mesh and how it relates to microservices.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/V-khFrbS1S0

Service mesh technologies are being used in production just six months after the KubeCon North America keynotes that explored what a service mesh is, and its benefits to both organizations and developers. Many are still attempting to truly grasp what a service mesh offers, particularly as observability and compatibility concerns are raised.

Join us on this episode of The New Stack Makers from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to explore the overall management of a service mesh and how it relates to microservices.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/V-khFrbS1S0

Daniel Hekman is head of business development at Grape Up, and while he was in Boston for the recent Cloud Foundry Summit, he's usually to be found in Krakow, Poland. With a bi-continental view of software development challenges, Hekman has unique insight into how businesses can accelerate their IT velocity.

"If [businesses] want to differentiate themselves, they need to have something in the market very fast. In the past when they had an idea and it took them nine months to come to the market--which up until recently was still fast--it's too late. They need to be able to go from idea to production in a few weeks. And it is, I would say nowadays, not doable without concepts like microservices and containers that allow you to move at that speed," said Hekman.

The Cloud Foundry Summit also focused on the usage of PaaS and devops in governments. "The challenge for the government is creating a feedback fabric regarding their services... Once they solve that feedback loop I think it will be beneficial for our society as a whole," said Hekman.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vamziR8y720

Daniel Hekman is head of business development at Grape Up, and while he was in Boston for the recent Cloud Foundry Summit, he's usually to be found in Krakow, Poland. With a bi-continental view of software development challenges, Hekman has unique insight into how businesses can accelerate their IT velocity.

"If [businesses] want to differentiate themselves, they need to have something in the market very fast. In the past when they had an idea and it took them nine months to come to the market--which up until recently was still fast--it's too late. They need to be able to go from idea to production in a few weeks. And it is, I would say nowadays, not doable without concepts like microservices and containers that allow you to move at that speed," said Hekman.

The Cloud Foundry Summit also focused on the usage of PaaS and devops in governments. "The challenge for the government is creating a feedback fabric regarding their services... Once they solve that feedback loop I think it will be beneficial for our society as a whole," said Hekman.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vamziR8y720

TNS Founder Alex Williams dove into the topic of observability on today's episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recently streamed live from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, Denmark. Joining Williams were Allison Richardet, Software Developer at Asteris, and Brian Brazil, Founder of Robust Perception and one of the main developers of Prometheus.

Richardet opened the discussion by noting that oftentimes, getting developers to use observability in their daily process can be a challenge. To help them on-board this practice, she utilizes event grammar for service logging, so developers can bridge the gap between their project. Thus, making service logging available to operations, which allows for easier data querying and use of visualization tools such as Prometheus.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZN1czlowEb4