The New Stack Context

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Serverless computing is getting a hand from an unlikely source: The Java community. Or more specifically, from the Akka distributed messaging toolkit. In many ways, serverless has grown beyond its initial use case of running small batch jobs. The industry has found that in many workloads, such as Web sessions, some sort of state must be maintained, even if only temporarily. To this end, reactive microservices framework provider Lightbend has devised an architecture, called Cloudstate to bring distributed stateful data retention to function-as-a-serverless (FaaS) and other serverless tasks. It is built on Akka clusters, which offers distributed resilient messaging through peer-to-peer communications with agents/sidecars attached to each function. In this episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Jonas Bonér, Akka creator and founder/chief technology officer of Lightbend, about the challenges of bringing state to serverless, reactive microservices frameworks, and Cloudstate itself. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Although WebAssembly was created for bringing advanced programming to the browser, Solo.io’s founder/CEO Idit Levine has been a vocal proponent of using the portable’s fast open source runtime to extend service meshes — citing Solo.io’s own work in offering tools and services to support commercial service mesh operations. In fact, WASM, as its also known, could be used to bring extensibility across a wide variety of cloud native projects, she argues. For this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we ask Levine about the excitement around WebAssembly, its use in the Envoy proxy, and Solo.io’s new proposal for packaging WASM modules in the Open Container Initiative format. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Application and system observability was the focus of the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation‘s Technology Radar end user survey, posted last week. So for this week’s episode of The New Stack Context, we invited Cheryl Hung, CNCF vice president of ecosystem, to discuss these findings. To get an additional industry perspective on observability, we also invited Buddy Brewer, vice president of full-stack observability for New Relic. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

The ideal state of a cloud native shop is to run a development and deployment pipeline that can seamlessly move applications from the developer’s laptop to the data center (or the edge) without any manual intervention. And while there are many tools available to facilitate such automation — Helm, Operators, CI/CD toolchains, GitOps architectures, Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform — all too often edge cases and exceptions still require personal attention, bringing DevOps pipelines to a halt. The missing pieces of the puzzles are a control plane and a unified application model for the control plane to run upon, asserted Phil Prasek, a principal product manager at Upbound, in this latest episode of The New Stack Context podcast. Prasek envisions a time when organizations can build their own customized set of platform services, where developers can draw from a self-serve portal the building blocks they need — be they containerized applications or third-party cloud services, and have the resulting app run uniformly in multiple environments. “Within an enterprise control plane, you can basically have your own abstractions, and then you can publish them,” Prasek said. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Late last month, Rancher Labs donated its popular K3s Kubernetes distribution to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This stripped-down version of Kubernetes has been a quiet hit among cloud native users — many who are deploying to edge environs. So for this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we invited Rancher co-founder Darren Shepherd to discuss what Rancher is seeing in the cloud native ecosystem. Rancher is in the process of being acquired by SUSE and, because the deal is still pending, Darren could not comment but he did chat about K3s, as well as Kubernetes. The New Stack editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Mike Yawn, a senior solution architect at Hazelcast, about the potential of in-memory computing to supercharge microservices and cloud native workloads. The New Stack editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Pratik Wadher, vice president of product development at Intuit, to discuss the company’s experience as a Kubernetes end user, as well as its involvement in the Argo Flux project — a single toolchain for continuous deployment and automated workflows using GitOps. We also share our experiences attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020, held this week “virtually.” The New Stack editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Founder & Publisher Alex Williams, TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

The New Stack has just released an updated eBook on Kubernetes, “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem,” and so this week on The New Stack Context podcast, we’ve invited TNS analyst Lawrence Hecht to discuss some of the analysis he did for this volume. We covered Kubernetes adoption in the cloud, storage and networking concerns and the changing DevOps culture around cloud native computing. At the end of the podcast, we also discuss what to expect from next week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe virtual conference. The New Stack Senior Editor Richard MacManus hosted this episode, with the help of Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor, and Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack.

For this week's episode, we’re talking with Wayne Ariola, chief marketing officer at Tricentis. Tricentis develops DevOps tools for continuous software testing and is a sponsor of The New Stack. Ariola is a frequent contributor to The New Stack on the topics of software quality, agile and continuous testing, test automation and, most recently, robotic process automation (RPA). We’ll spoke with him about how DevOps processes and tools have changed for cloud native architectures and what that means, in particular for software testing. Then later in the show we’ll cover the top stories on The New Stack over the past few weeks, including a new Linux memory management proposal, and our recent coverage of Red Hat’s AnsibleFest.

For this week's episode, we're conversed with Srinath Perera, software architect and vice president of research in the CTO Office of WSO2, about his research on the practical uses of blockchain. WSO2 is a sponsor of The New Stack and it offers an integrated platform for API management, integration, identity and access management, analytics and IoT. And its research is also on the cutting edge of cloud native technology. It is also the company behind the Ballerina cloud native programming language. Perera leads these research efforts and has written recently about serverless technologies and blockchain for us. With blockchain, his team wasn’t sure which use cases are feasible and would also deliver a clear value. So they did a systematic analysis of blockchain technology using the company's Emerging Technology Analysis Canvas (ETAC).

This week we’re talking with Chris Grams, the head of marketing at open source subscription startup, Tidelift. Tidelift offers a managed open source subscription to help companies manage and maintain their dependencies on open source projects. They’re also a sponsor of The New Stack and our partner on a survey we did earlier this year about how developers use open source to build applications in the workplace. We spoke with Grams about how much time do developers spend handling maintenance and security issues related to unmaintained open source dependencies, what is preventing coders from using more open source components, and what the most important factors developers to consider when choosing a new open source project.

This year at its annual user conference –Seattle this year—HashiCorp introduced two new tiers to its Terraform Cloud service, a paid version that isn't the full enterprise version, but one for smaller teams, and another one that covers governance, and cost prediction. Terraform Cloud is like the GitHub to Terraform's git. Terraform, an infrastructure management tool, can be used from a laptop, and HashiCorp offers a free tier on Terraform Cloud, where the CLI commands are translated into API calls. The new Teams tier offers the ability to manage teams, with full RBAC control. and the Governance edition, also paid, has a code framework for enforcing granular rules against infrastructure, and even cost estimation, which provides a prediction of how much a proposed infrastructure will cost to run in the cloud. In our talk, Dadgar explained that the tier addresses a heretofore underserved segment for the rapidly growing company: projects that have blossomed into full-scale apps that need predictable infrastructure. They don’t quite require the governance controls that the enterprises (aka the “Fortune 2000”) do, but they do require coordination. As a Terraform’ed project grows, the company reasons, it will have more contributors, and everything will need tracked and controlled.

This week, we're recording from TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco, held September 5. Our guest is Haley Daiber, a senior associate at Unusual Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund. The New Stack has been talking and writing a lot about TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise over the past few months, as a media partner and also a participant. We held a pancake breakfast and podcast panel in the  morning and TNS founder Alex Williams moderated a session in the afternoon. And we were excited about this event because it signals a new excitement and heat in the enterprise software space. This has been evident so far in the keynotes we’ve heard today, at the event: Jason Green from Emergence Capital for example, called this "the golden age of enterprise."  So we spoke with Daiber about what enterprise software looks like from an investor’s perspective. Then, later in the podcast, we discussed the week's top stories and podcasts, including excellent contributed posts on adopting role-based access control for Kubernetes and migrating to Python 3. We also discuss a new service mesh, and how "punk rock" music from the 1970s resembles open source today.

This week we discuss all the news from VMware's annual VMworld conference, held this week in San Francisco, with special guest RackN founder/and CEO Rob Hirschfeld. RackN is  provider of next generation infrastructure automation software for provisioning bare metal, VMs, clouds, and edges. At the event, VMware announced it’s going all-in on Kubernetes. There were hints the company was going in that direction with its acquisition of Heptio in November, a company founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who were among Kubernetes’ founders. At the show, the company announced that vSphere with Kubernetes in a new alpha offering called Project Pacific.  Hirschfeld opined that, with this Kubernetes support, VMware is playing defense, given that operations teams using the vSphere platform might be getting requests from their developer counterparts for Kubernetes support.

This week we spoke with Andreas Grabner, a DevOps Activist at Dynatrace, about why Kubernetes and artificial intelligence (AI) are made for each other. Grabner wrote a contributed post for us last week, “How AI Solves the Kubernetes Complexity Conundrum” in which he argues that integrating Kubernetes with artificial intelligence and an AIOps culture can make Kubernetes deployments more manageable for IT and DevOps teams. Dynatrace, a sponsor of The New Stack, builds AI-assisted, full stack and completely automated monitoring software for dynamic, web-scale, hybrid cloud ecosystem. "Kubernetes offers enterprises a valuable new tool for kicking digital transformations and time-to-market timetables into a new gear. But to take full advantage of it, IT and DevOps need to drive a culture shift toward AI and automation; most other existing IT approaches simply do not adequately work or scale in this new world," Grabner wrote in the blog.

This week we spoke with Chip Childers, technology chief of staff at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, about the technical and architectural decisions that help define the modern enterprise. Cloud Foundry Foundation is the independent organization that oversees the development and adoption of the Cloud Foundry platform, and it’s a sponsor of The New Stack. More than half of the Fortune 500 uses Cloud Foundry, so the Cloud Foundry Foundation depends on the enterprise using, contributing to, and advancing its open source projects. Childers works closely with developers and CIOs at all of the foundation’s member companies, and so he has a deep understanding of what it is that a modern enterprise needs in order to succeed in today’s rapidly changing technology landscape. In a recent post for The New Stack, he wrote that  “Modern enterprises ... think critically about what they should build themselves and what they should source from somewhere else.”

This week, we talk with Charity Majors, chief technology officer of Honeycomb.io and a pioneer in observability about the three-year anniversary of that movement which has significantly changed how applications are monitored and maintained in the cloud native era. Majors contributed a post that appeared on The New Stack this week in which she takes a closer look at why the observability movement formed and why other approaches and methods fall short. She explained why engineering teams must continue to focus on this approach in order to better understand, debug, and maintain large-scale distributed systems. "When we blew up the monolith into many services, we lost the ability to step through our code with a debugger: it now hops the network. Our tools are still coming to grips with this seismic shift," Majors writes.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and views from the cloud native community. This week, we spoke Luca Mezzalira, chief architect at sports video streaming site DAZN (Da-Zone), about the idea and evolution of microfrontends, or the equivalent of a microservices approach to scaling frontend development. Mezzalira has written and presented talks about his journey to design the company’s scale-out frontend streaming application, one that he calls one of the most challenging architectures he’s ever created. DAZN was dealing with a lot of the same issues that companies with large, monolithic backends face as they tried to quickly, and massively scale. We’ll hear about how his team developed the DAZN microfrontends. If content is king, then distribution is the queen, he reminded us in this lively interview. Then later in the show, we’ll discuss the recent data breach at Capital One due to a “firewall misconfiguration” that allowed a hacker to access data on over 100 million customers in the company’s AWS S3 buckets. As regular readers know, The New Stack has had dozens of posts (most recently) about the dangers of cloud security over the past few years. And they all have the same basic underlying message: even if you use third-party cloud services, security is still your responsibility.

In this week's episode, we’re talking with a couple of VMware folks about a way to optimize continuous deployment with a new technique called continuous verification. Dan Illson, native cloud advocate at VMware cloud services, and Bahubali (Bill) Shetti, director of cloud advocacy at VMware,  wrote on the site this week that many applications are not ready for use at the completion of their deployment pipelines. Post-deployment work to “operationalize” or “harden” services is still fairly common practice and generally slows the overall rate of software delivery. We’ll hear from them about how a practice of continuous verification can help teams deliver software faster. The idea with CV is that it can augment the CI/CD process by moving many of the post-deployment steps into feedback loops within the pipeline. The tools are already there. In fact, any monitoring or security tool that can report on its work by way of an API can be fit into an existing pipeline (depending on how flexible the CI/CD server is at handling APIs, of course), Then later in the podcast, we discuss some of the week's stories and podcasts on the site. We delve into the basics of Robotic Processing Automation, and Kubernetes. We delve into the Unix pipe command, and how it has proved so instrumental to modern computer programming. And we discuss the evolving role of the site reliability engineer.