The New Stack Analysts

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In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, host Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack and co-host Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at CNCF Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), discuss why secrets management is essential for DevOps teams, what the tool landscape is like and why Vault was selected as the top alternative. CNCF Tech Radar contributors and featured guests were Steve Nolen, site reliability engineer, RStudio — which creates open source software for data science, scientific research and technical communication — and Andrea Galbusera, engineering and co-founder, AuthKeys, a SaaS platform provider for managing and auditing servers authorizations and logins.

In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams virtually shared pancakes and syrup with guests to discuss how Apache Cassandra, gRPC and other tools and platforms play a role in managing data on Kubernetes. Mya Pitzeruse, software engineer and OSS contributor from effx; Sam Ramji, chief strategy officer at Datastax; and Tom Offermann, lead software engineer at New Relic were the guests. They offered deep perspectives about the evolution of data management on Kubernetes and the work that remains to be done. Special Guests: Mya Pitzeruse and Sam Ramji.

On the last The New Stack Analysts of the year, the gang got together — remotely, obviously — to reflect on this year. And oh what a year! But for a year in tech, 2020 still had a lot of hits — and some misses. Publisher Alex Williams was joined by Libby Clark, Joab Jackson, Bruce Gain, Stephen Vaughan-Nichols, and Jennifer Riggins. We looked back on the year that saw millions die, no one fly, and a lot of jobs in turmoil. It was also a year that, while many things screeched to a halt, much of the tech industry had to keep going more than ever.

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast. Identity and access management (IAM) was previously relatively straightforward. Often delegated as a low-level management task to the local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) admin, the process of setting permissions for tiered data access was definitely not one of the more challenging security-related duties. However, in today’s highly distributed and relatively complex computing environments, network and associated IAM are exponentially more complex. As application creation and deployment become more distributed, often among multicloud containerized environments, the resulting dependencies, as well as vulnerabilities, continue to proliferate as well, thus widening the scope of potential attack surfaces. How to manage IAM in this context was the main topic of this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendees joined TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams and guests live for the latest “Virtual Pancake & Podcast.” They discussed why IAM has become even more difficult to manage than in the past and offered their perspectives about potential solutions. They also showed how enjoying pancakes — or other variations of breakfast — can make IAM challenges more manageable.

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast. How to manage database storage in cloud native environments continues to be a major challenge for many organizations. Database storage also came to the fore as the issue to explore in the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Tech Radar report. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, host Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack and co-hosts Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Dave Zolotusky, senior staff engineer at Spotify discuss stateless database storage, recent results of the report findings and perspectives from the user community. The podcast guests — who both contributed to the CNCF Tech Radar report and hail from the database storage user community — were Jackie Fong, engineering leader, Kubernetes and developer experience for Ticketmaster, and Mya Pitzeruse, software engineer, OSS contributor, effx. Special Guests: Jackie Fong, PMP, ITIL and Mya Pitzeruse.

Accurics sponsored this podcast. Who doesn’t love hotcakes? And to make them right, you need to wait until the batter starts to bubble up before you flip them. Immutable infrastructure management and related security challenges are also “bubbling up” these days, as many organizations make the shift to cloud native environments, with containerized, serverless and other layers. In this The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams asked served up pancakes with KubeCon attendees who joined him for a “stack” at the “Virtual Pancake Breakfast and Podcast” while they offered their deep perspectives on what is at stake as immutable infrastructure security and other related concerns take hold. The guests joining the virtual breakfast were Om Moolchandani, co-founder and CTO for Accurics, Rosemary Wang, developer advocate for HashiCorp, Krishna Bhagavathula, CTO, for the NBA (who also brought his own L.A. Lakers-branded spatula), Chenxi Wang, Ph.D., managing general partner of Rain Capital, and Priyanka Sharma, general manager, for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Research and experiments conducted at the largest particle physics research center consisting of a 27-km long tunnel, of course, generate massive amounts of data to manage and store. All told, the CERN now manages over 500 petabytes — over half of one exabyte — which in a decade’s time is expected to total 5,000 petabytes, Ricardo Rocha, a staff researcher at the CERN, said. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts, we learn from Rocha how the CERN is adapting as a new accelerator goes online in the next few years with the ability to manage 10x the data it manages now. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted the podcast with co-hosts Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Dave Zolotusky, senior staff engineer at Spotify.

In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as part of The New Stack’s recent coverage of end-use Kubernetes, Michael Lieberman, senior innovation engineer, vice president, of Tokyo-based MUFG, discusses his company’s journey to scale out architectures in a microservice and Kubernetes environment in the world of financial services. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack and Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), hosted the podcast.

In the serverless paradigm, the idea is to abstract away the backend so that developers don’t need to deal with it. That’s all well and good when it comes to servers and complex infrastructure like Kubernetes. But up till now, database systems haven’t typically been a part of the serverless playbook. The assumption has been that developers will build their serverless app and choose a separate database system to connect to it — be it a traditional relational database, a NoSQL system, or even a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). But the popularity of serverless has prompted further innovation in the data market. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, we talked about the latest developments in regard to managing data in a serverless system. My two guests were Evan Weaver, co-founder and chief technology officer of Fauna, and Greg McKeon, a product manager at Cloudflare. Fauna is building a “data API” for serverless apps so that developers don’t even need to touch a database system, while Cloudflare runs a serverless platform called Cloudflare Workers.

Kubernetes is becoming boring and that’s a good thing — it’s what’s on top of Kubernetes that counts. In this The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams asked KubeCon attendees to join him for a short “stack” at our “Virtual Pancake Breakfast and Podcast” to discuss “What’s on your stack?” The podcast featured guest speakers Janakiram MSV, principal analyst, Janakiram & Associates; Priyanka Sharma, general manager, Cloud Native Computing Foundation; Patrick McFadin, chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra and vice president, developer relations, DataStax; and Bill Zajac, regional director of solution engineering, Dynatrace. The group passed the virtual syrup and talked Kubernetes.

A lot of the time, it’s harder to convince your friends and family than a stranger. The first group is usually more decisive and direct with you. The same goes for your work family. When you’re building an internal infrastructure for autonomous teams, it becomes your job to not only provide that technical backbone, but to act as sales and customer support. Nobody said internal developer advocacy would be easier. The sixth episode of The New Stack Analysts End User Series, we talk with Simone Sciarrati, the engineering team lead at Meltwater media intelligence platform about the autonomous engineering culture, molding developer experience, and those tough technological decisions. Our publisher Alex Williams co-hosted this conversation, along with Cheryl Hung from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ken Owens of Mastercard.

Spotify is well known worldwide for its music service. Not so well known is its path to Kubernetes deployment has been a road with many twists and turns. What also may be a surprise to many is that Spotify is a veteran user of Kubernetes and how it owes much of its product-delivery capabilities to its agile DevOps. Indeed, Spotify continues to increasingly rely on a container and microservices infrastructure and cloud native deployments to offer a number of advantages. This allows its DevOps teams to continually improve the overall streaming experience for millions of subscribers. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, as part of The New Stack’s recent coverage of end-use Kubernetes, Jim Haughwout, head of infrastructure and operations, shares Spotify’s cloud native adoption war stories and discusses its past and present Kubernetes challenges. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack; Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF); and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard, all hosted the podcast.

It started simply enough but soon the site needed more than a server to keep things managed. Today, EquityZen runs on Kubernetes and is considering its next moves and, in particular, exploring how containers-as-a-service may serve them. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Andy Snowden, DevOps engineering manager for EquityZen, discusses how he helped the company begin its cloud native journey and the challenges associated with the move. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack; Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard hosted the podcast.

Online storage management company Box was one of the first companies to build on Kubernetes. Initially creating its platform on PHP, Box’s architecture still uses some parts of the PHP architecture. Today, Box serves as a case study of a software platform’s cloud native journey. The company also continues to rely on its legacy infrastructure dating back to the days when PHP ran on Box’s bare metal servers in its data centers. In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Kunal Parmar, director of engineering of Box, discusses the evolution of the cloud content management provider’s cloud native journey with hosts Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack; Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF); and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard.

The Wikimedia Foundation‘s impact on culture and media sharing has had immeasurable benefits on a worldwide scale. As the foundation that manages the fabled Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource and a number of outlets, Wikimedia’s mission is to “to bring free educational content to the world.” All told, Wikipedia alone is available in about 300 different languages with more than 50 million articles on 1.5 billion unique devices a month with 6,000 views a second — with 250,000 engaged editors, said Chase Pettet, senior security architect, Wikimedia Foundation.“Editors are sort of the lifeblood of the movement,” Pettet said. In this, The New Stack Analysts podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering for Mastercard, Pettet discussed Wikimedia’s infrastructure-management challenges, both past and present, and what makes one of the world’s foremost providers of free information tick.

Condé Nast is one of the most well-recognized media brands in the world, with a range of stand-out titles that include “Wired,” “The New Yorker” and “Vanity Fair.” The publishing giant also represents a case study of how a large multinational company was able to shift its entire international web and data operations to a homogeneous Kubernetes infrastructure it built and now manages with open source tools. During the past five years, Condé Nast has built a single underlying platform consisting of several dozen websites spread out around the world, including Russia, China, the U.S. and Europe. Its web presence now hosts more than 300 million unique users per month and 570 article views every second. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Jennifer Strejevitch, site reliability engineer for Condé Nast, speaks about her experiences and observations at the front lines of the publishing company’s infrastructure-related challenges and successes. This show was hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard, our guest.

Thanks to the COVID-19 global pandemic, many IT systems are facing unprecedented workloads, reaching levels of usage on a daily basis that usually only happen on the busiest days of the year. The good news is that the cloud native approach has been rapidly gaining popularity with businesses large and small to help meet these sudden demands. And proper security precautions must be built into these emerging cloud native systems. Applying principles of cloud native security to the enterprise was the chief topic of discussion for our panel of experts in this virtual panel. Panelists were: Cheryl Hung, Director of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Carla Arend, Senior Program Director, Infrastructure Software, IDC. John Morello, Palo Alto Networks Vice President of Product, Prisma Cloud. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted the discussion. Certainly, operations have changed for most of us due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic. But this can be a good opportunity for an organization to rethink how they approach business continuing and resiliency, Arend noted. Those who were on the digital journey are getting much better through this crisis than those just starting. Now is a great time to focus on digital innovation. Indeed, if anything, innovation is just accelerating in this time, Morello agreed. Without having the ability to interact in person, the tools that enable digital transformation — Kubernetes, containers — helps people operate more efficiently.

What is the role that the data plane plays in a Kubernetes ecosystem? This was the theme for our latest (virtual) pancake breakfast and panel discussion, sponsored by DataStax, the keeper of the open source Cassandra database, captured in this latest episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast. Last month, Datastax released a Kubernetes operator, so that the NoSQL database can be more easily installed, managed, and updated in Kubernetes container-based infrastructure. The Panelists for this discussion: Kathryn Erickson, DataStax senior director of partnerships. Janakiram MSV, principal analyst of Janakiram & Associates. Aaron Ploetz, Target NoSQL lead engineer. Sam Ramji, DataStax chief strategy officer.

Service mesh technologies have emerged as a reliable way to manage observability, security and traffic management in microservices environments, typically with the use of Kubernetes for container orchestration. Specific use cases and needs for service meshes also vary. The New Stack recently completed a survey about service mesh use cases. While one third of those surveyed said their organizations already use service meshes to control traffic between microservices and Kubernetes environments, adoption rates and use varied significantly among the respondents. Sixteen percent of respondents said that their organization broadly uses service mesh in production environments and 17% said service meshes have limited use in production environments, for example. In this latest episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Lee Calcote, an analyst and founder of service mesh provider Layer5, and Brian “Redbeard” Harrington, a principal product manager for OpenShift service mesh at Red Hat, discussed the many nuances of what the survey numbers really mean.