The New Stack Makers

This is the classic security problem Gareth Rushgrove, director of product management at Snyk, pointed to during his conversation with The New Stack founder and publisher Alex Williams at KubeCon's Cloud Native Security Day. Snyk is a Software-as-a-Service dedicated to helping organizations flag and fix vulnerabilities in their open source, third-party dependencies.

The New Stack Editor in Chief Alex Williams sat down at last month’s Kubecon to talk about telco’s cloud-native future with Heather Kirksey, VP of community and ecosystems at OPNFV, and Taylor Carpenter, partner and founder of Vulk Coop design and development cooperative. The different collaborative, telecom-focused Linux Foundation and CNCF working groups that Kirksey and Carpenter are a part of have witnessed — and sometimes driven — telco’s move over the last five years from monolithic hardware appliances toward what’s now known as the cloud.

Deploying and managing Kubernetes infrastructure may be the most challenging aspect of developing and delivering cloud-native applications. We will discuss leveraging a purpose-built appliance that provides a production-ready Kubernetes platform that also supports existing VMware virtualized applications in hybrid (private and public cloud) deployments. This approach provides rapid results to quickly stand up the environment as well as automated Lifecycle Management of the entire stack to enable organizations to securely and non-disruptively stay up-to-date and secure with their Kubernetes and vSphere clusters. We will discuss what is available today from Dell Technologies Cloud with PKS on VCF on VxRail as well as the roadmap forward for next year and beyond with Project Pacific and Tanzu Mission control.

Janakiram MSV is one of the few analysts and writers who is also a certified member of the Kubernetes community. He is able to bring into his writing an analysis that details the issues that an everyday users and developers face. He is also a regular contributor to The New Stack, on Kubernetes and other technologies.  In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, Janakiram discusses why developer happiness is such a challenge, the new role of the configurator and the issues that are coming as Kubernetes matures and isolation becomes a larger issue. He also discusses multi-tenancy and challenges to come as users adopt services and face security risks with less defined cluster isolation.

This podcast is sponsored by InfluxData. In this week’s The New Stack Makers podcast interview in advance of AWS re:Invent, The New Stack Founder and Publisher Alex Williams caught up with InfluxData Vice President of Product Tim Hall to discuss why time-series databases are gaining in popularity with developers and how they differ from other databases.

Oracle continues to grow its global cloud presence. At KubeCon, the company announced its global expansion along with Kafka streaming, an API gateway, and data logging capabilities.

Service meshes, Istio and the underling architectures — fine topics to discuss over a short stack with The New Stack. At Kubecon + Cloud NativeCon in San Diego, We explore the scaling of application architectures and how business objectives fit with approaches, team development and workflows that come with service mesh technologies.

Guests: Carlisia Campos, Tom Spoonemore, and Efri Nattel-Shay Velero is an open source project that provides backup, restore and migrating capabilities for Kubernetes.  Originally developed by Heptio and known as Ark, Velero is supported by Dell's PowerProtect, allowing users to back up their Kubernetes clusters. In an interview at KubeCon, The New Stack discussed Velero  with VMware's Carlisia Campos, a maintainer for Velero and member of the VMware technical staff; Tom Spoonemore, VMware's cloud native apps director and Dell's Efri Nattel-Shay, director of product management.

The idea is to empower all DevOps' stakeholders with better access to continuous integration (CI)/continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. Your organization also very likely relies on Jenkins as the backbone for the production pipeline with a reliance on Git to share and collaborate. However, the problem has long been that  Jenkins is notoriously hard to implement and use for many organizations. The added complexities of shifting to cloud native and Kubernetes platforms have further compounded the difficulties — but this new age of Jenkins and cloud native deployments have also set the stage for the creation of CloudBees' open source Jenkins X. CloudBees created Jenkins X mainly to help facilitate and automate CD pipelines to Kubernetes and cloud native environments. The idea is also to allow Jenkins X to make it easier to develop and deploy cloud native applications to Kubernetes without having to learn the intricacies of the orchestrator. Jenkins X is also one of four projects of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), which also includes  Jenkins, Spinnaker and Tekton. CloudBees says it is also continuing to try and improve Jenkins X, by simplify how developers and all DevOps stakeholders work with the tool. To that end, the company has developed its first-ever graphical interface. In this The New Stack Makers podcast recorded during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego last week, CloudBees' Moritz Plassnig, vice president, cloud and Peter Muir, lead architect, spoke with Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack about how CloudBees continues to try to make Jenkins X both more accessible and easier to use.

Guests: Sugu Sougoumarane & Quinton Hoole Google and other tech giants can be hard examples to follow. As organizations rush to scale their infrastructure on a mix of on-premises and cloud environments, especially on Kubernetes, they often struggle when trying to store and analyze data from stateless sources. A lot of the traditional storage databases have not worked at the scale needed, while the early cloud services, such as AWS and Google, developed their own storage environments internally. “Kubernetes was very much focused initially on the stateless workloads and didn't do a very good job, to be perfectly honest, of providing any kind of support for storage, other than to the extent that you could connect to an existing public cloud provider,” Quinton Hoole, technical vice president of Huawei’s Futurewei Technologies, said. “I think that's evolved a lot over the last several years, as there are many different cloud native database [options]. People are starting to do serious stateful workloads in the cloud and in Kubernetes, in particular.” In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, Sugu Sougoumarane, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at PlanetScale, as well as Hoole, discuss what tools and approaches organizations can take to store and manage data from Kubernetes and containers. They also cover how storage and database-management tools are catching up to organizations’ often complex infrastructure needs. However, finding the right tool mix is not easy. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon sponsored this podcast.

Lauren Maffeo studies the emerging threats of artificial intelligence in her work as an analyst for GetApp, a software reviews site under Gartner Research that uses proprietary data to help match software buyers with the best tools for their businesses. In these two episodes of The New Stack Makers, Maffeo provides her perspective on artificial intelligence, its power and the threats it poses when unchecked. The top performing companies in the financial markets are using technologies based upon artificial intelligence. These technologies are powerful but can at times prove to pose indirect biases. That can lead to a bank loan getting denied, a passport not issued, a payment getting stopped and a black person getting a longer prison sentence due to the color of their skin.

The threads and threats that come with computer intelligence were apparent to Pamela McCorduck in 1960 as a graduate student in English Literature. Those same threads and threats are apparent today in the biases that can come with black box algorithms and indirect biases that Lauren Maffeo studies in her work as an analyst for GetApp, a software reviews site under Gartner Research that uses proprietary data to help match software buyers with the best tools for their businesses. In these two episodes of The New Stack Makers, McCorduck and Maffeo each provide their perspectives on artificial intelligence, its power and the threats it poses when unchecked.

Docker. You know it. You use it. You might well be confused by it. Is it Docker? Or is it docker? And why has Docker (or docker) taken a back seat to Kubernetes? There are so many questions regarding this technology. But one question that has been on the hearts and minds of many a container administrator is security. You might think that, given the isolated nature of containers, they’d be harmless. On certain levels that is the case. If a container is deployed correctly, it cannot access the deploying ecosystem. In theory. But, as we’ve all discovered in the realm of technology, where there’s a will there’s a way. Although you might fully understand how to deploy a containerized application and scale it out to meet the needs of your company, are you taking the necessary steps to ensure that application, and the hosting environment, is as secure as possible? What can you do? Listen as Jack Wallen discusses these topics with Scott McCarty, principal product manager for containers at Red Hat.

First came agile. Then came DevOps. Except they only came to a few departments, mainly the traditionally IT ones. What's keeping them from reaching the most extreme realms of tech? According to Luke Marsden, CEO and founder of Dotscience, enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is being held back, in part, because the mathematicians and statisticians behind it are stuck in the days of Waterfall — still emailing code back and forth to each other. Basically most enterprise AI and machine learning initiatives are stuck at the gate. On this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Marsden about why.

VMware has certainly seen some changes in its corporate structure during the past few years — but today, VMware’s business moves have been especially relevant for developers. Following its agreement to purchase Pivotal in August, for example, VMware continues to try to adapt its open source contributions and services for the ever-evolving needs of the community, with a greater emphasis on Kubernetes. This means VMware is increasingly engaged in offering and creating the tools and platforms developers need for Kubernetes, as well as for other open source projects.  In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast: Kubernetes, open source, the developer experience and new technologies. VMware’s role during the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference was also discussed. The guests from VMware on hand to discuss these topics were: Bryan Liles, senior staff engineer. Tim Pepper, senior staff engineer. Tasha Drew, product line manager.  All three guests are actively engaged in the open source community, and particularly, in improving the Kubernetes experience for DevOps engineers.