We're rolling into 2018 with many unanswered questions: Will Meltdown and the Spectre CPU flaws turn our highly-tuned cloud-native applications into performance sludge cakes? How many new JavaScript front-end frameworks will we have to learn this year? And what does 'immutability' actually mean, anyhow? So many questions.

Fortunately, we have all the answers, in this newest edition of The New Stack Context podcast, our weekly roundup and discussion of the hottest news stories about all matters cloud-native and scalable computing. This week, our regular TNS hosts — Editorial Director Libby Clark, Managing Editor Joab Jackson and Publisher/Founder Alex Williams — are joined by Michelle Gienow, a front-end web developer who writes the Code N00b column for The New Stack and covers programming news for us.

We discuss the fallout from the Meltdown/Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, as well as the present state of JavaScript and if it could become the programming language of choice for cloud-native operations.