The New Stack Makers

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with Pablo Santos, chief engineer of Plastic SCM, a company he founded in 2005, just before the tech explosion that gave us Git, GitHub, Dropbox, and, lest we forget, the iPhone. In many ways, Santos was ahead of his time. At a time when companies like Microsoft released software updates every two years, his design of a software system that updated three or four times a week was so revolutionary, they had to hide it from their corporate clients, by providing branded updates once a year. Once the industry started moving toward continuous delivery, or at least a 'delivery-more-often' model, the company's customers wanted to know how Plastics accomplished such magic.  So the company bundled its software into a proprietary platform. PlasticSCM benefited greatly from Git’s popularity, acknowledged Santos.

Edith Harbaugh is CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly.  The company provides feature flagging for CI/CD pipelines and currently serves 100 billion features a day.  She’s the c0-host of a podcast covering software trends called To Be Continuous, a sponsor of the Test in Production Meetup, and also one of this year’s winner of the Top Women in Cloud Innovation award. “We didn’t create feature flags,” she said. “We just made them easy and enable the workflow around it.” Deployment is pushing coding out to production servers and release. Feature flags separate deployment into pieces and allow you to have very fine-grained control.  At its most simple, you can release a feature into production, but it has a kills switch so you can instantly roll back.

One of the biggest concerns when deploying at scale is knowing whether your organization will be ready to effectively monitor what is not working, as well as being able to detect problem areas before they begin to cause real pain. As organizations begin to deploy to cloud native platforms, making sure that monitoring capabilities can make the shift is an ever greater concerns for many. What can be done to conquer the fears associated with monitoring for cloud native, as well as deployments for on-premise platforms, were among the subjects discussed during a podcast with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder and CEO of Raygun, and Chris Johnson co-founder and CTO of Hyperfish, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack.

The state of open source over the course of the past few decades has certainly changed. But IBM”s purchase of Red Hat and the evolution of service-oriented business models that have emerged more recent]y not withstanding, open source’s original spirit of sharing remains intact — while the extent to which that is the case remains a subject of debate. What open source really means today and how it has evolved were major themes of a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Seattle. Among the open source thought leaders on hand to offer their observations were: - Alex Ellis, Senior Staff Engineer (open source), VMware; - Jason Dobies, Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat; - Ed Warnicke, Distinguished Consulting Engineer, Cisco Systems and Technical Steering Committee chair, FD.io - Heather Kirksey, Vice President, Community and Ecosystem, The Linux Foundation Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hGrgzUz-Rfg

The IT industry’s collective shift to cloud native remains, amid the hype, in the early stages. While among those organizations that have made the jump, the need to find the right tools to untangle the enormous complexity involved becomes immediately — and painfully — obvious. The emergence of service meshes to help make sense of it all are thus increasingly seen by DevOps teams as essential tool, instead of just another tool on the long list of nice-to-have options on offer today for Kubernetes and microservices. Often described as GitOps, another key enabler for cloud native is empowering developers with the ability to easily, quickly, and ideally, seamlessly make updates to code running on Kubernetes and microservices far to the left in the production pipeline. Monitoring and observability throughout the process, are of course, essential. These and other themes were discussing during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Seattle with Alexis Richardson, CEO of Weaveworks and Andrew Clay Shafer, senior director of technology at Pivotal. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vPZRkzVKBsU

The road to streamlining CI/CD through DevOps in the shift to cloud native is hard — and can be fraught with peril. That, of course, is the challenge — while the potential rewards are significant, indeed. Automating all of that (an essential part of DevOps) set the stage for Jenkins to help streamline CI/CD processes, which represents another subset challenge. While remaining essential for many organizations’ development processes, Jenkins is notoriously difficult to master and manage, especially as projects are scaled. (This actually spells opportunities for those who can serve as in-house Jenkins experts of sorts, but such a specialty, in many ways, goes against the spirit of DevOps.) Now, as we enter the world of Cloud Native, extending Jenkins to new platforms, as well as CI/CD processes that may have worked reasonably well for monolithic deployments in the past, adds yet another technical challenge. Thus enters the utility of Jenkins X, which serves as tool to help standardize how to integrate CI and CD and Kubernetes. The idea is also to allow organizations to use their own source code while CloudBees’ Jenkins X automates the process as it is ported to cloud native environments. As part of “The New Stack Guide to Cloud Native DevOps” ebook podcast series, some of CloudBees’ key team members were on hand to discuss how Jenkins X, CI/CD and DevOps all elegantly fit together in today’s cloud native world.

It’s great being a developer these days considering, among other things, the tremendous opportunities on offer in the cloud native space. But the race to get there when deploying code and applications can be, of course, fraught with challenges. Among them are how organizations are often forced to rethink the development and operations roles. Also, many developers are sometimes challenged by lacking the tools needed to port code they create with the high-powered languages they have mastered to the cloud, whether for Kubernetes, microservices or serverless platforms. As part of our upcoming EBook 'The New Stack Guide to Cloud Native DevOps' podcast series, Luke Hoban, CTO of Pulumi, spoke about, among other things, how to better unify dev and ops with general purpose programming languages and tools on offer to help make that happen.

Wendy Pfeiffer routinely lands on the “most powerful women in tech” lists, and is currently CIO of Nutanix.  The cloud provider lets enterprise companies create a hybrid cloud environment, allowing workloads to be run across public and private clouds, using whichever infrastructure that makes the most sense technologically.  Traditionally, on-premise stacks can be heavily fire-walled, but scaling is usually neither easy nor cost effective.  In the public cloud, they can scale with a more flexible operating system and take advantage of seemingly infinite capacity. Nutanix pioneered  hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology, which is an operating system that addresses all of the technology stack layers (storage, compute, area networking).  On HCI, as workloads dynamically have access to each of the stack layers as they run HCI allows a company to build out infrastructure knowing they will be able to scale each layer as needed, creating the scalability of a public cloud while keeping most of their infrastructure on premise.

What becomes very apparent when speaking with Rajashree Mandaogane, a software engineer for Rancher, is that she really enjoys coding and software development. While whether developers find their work “fun” or not is important and how much the fun factor counts for success is a subject of debate, Mandaogane does enjoy the work. She has also emerged as one of the key team members in Rancher’s development of its open source Kubernetes management and container orchestration platform. Evidence of Mandaogane’s passion for the job includes continually turning over different solutions for debugging or new features in her mind, even when she is at the gym or just opting to halfway work while watching a rerun of “Friends” at home. As part of The New Stack Makers podcast series featuring developers and engineers who share their down-in-the-trenches stories during this renaissance era in computing, Mandaogane also described, among other things, how her love for programming evolved into a passion for first Docker and containers and then Kubernetes while still an undergraduate at North Carolina State University.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Tom O’Neill, co-founder and CTO of Periscope Data, who is responsible for overseeing the technology vision for the company. Periscope Data is a super fast platform for modern data teams.  “Fastest time to insight” With the explosion of data, O’Neill is tasked with finding the fastest way to make terabytes of data useful to their customers, who are data teams for data teams (data scientists, data analysts, data engineers) who write sQL, python or R. Data scientists are gaining in importance because of the explosion of available data since the advent of mobile devices.  AirBnB is not a hospitality company.  It’s a data company masquerading as a hospitality company.   But the data is only as good as the company’s ability to mine it.  It’s the data engineers that are making decisions in this environment.

Cheryl Hung, director of ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation CNCF, was already intent on working for Google as a young teenager. It was “a cool startup,” Hung said, where it seemed everyone wanted to work, with all kinds of fun and perks — including free food and even on-campus massages. Her career track did indeed take her to Google, where she worked as a software engineer and held other roles for over five years. Now, for the CNCF, she spends a lot of time traveling and helping organizations to learn about how they can take advantage of cloud native platforms. While Google its obvious connection to containers and Kubernetes represent a focal point in Hung’s career, Hung largely spoke of her lifework before and after her stint at the search engine giant during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/AZzJkjGNOdY

One of the first things John-Daniel Trask, co-founder and CEO at Raygun, noticed when he began to develop software was how painstaking it was to figure out what was wrong with the code. Initial error alerts, he created, were done by email. Much came down to just trial and error. “One of the things that we were doing a lot of the time when we were building software was always focusing on how we understood what went wrong and giving ourselves diagnostics,” Trask said during a podcast, hosted by The New Stack correspondents B. Cameron Gain and Simon Bisson. In 2012, after building an SaaS product for crash reporting, “it turned out that a lot people sort of saw the value in that as well,” Trask said. “And so, we’ve really been surfing that wave since.” After launch in 2013, “we’ve ended up with thousands of customers using the crash reporting product,” Trask said.

Priyanka Sharma, director of alliances, GitLab and a member of the governing board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is certainly an example of someone who hails from what she says was a “very unconventional entry into technology.” The end result today is that she is helping to shape the outcome of how organizations better take advantage of DevOps, especially when working on Kubernetes and microservices. Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, spoke with Sharma during a podcast at  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai about her life work and what changes need to take place in DevOps today. However, it was not that long ago when Sharma hardly had access to a PC, much opportunity to learn programming or other computer skills while growing up in a small town in India. "It wasn't like computers were a part of my life — that was not the case,” Sharma said. “I ended up applying to colleges in the US,  and I remember as I was applying I was using a computer for the first time — I didn't even know how to use Microsoft Word.” Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6Kj6ZQGbouc

Software developers have been doing it all wrong — or maybe not, depending on whom you talk to. But at the very least, DevOps and CI/CD represent relatively new practices in computing that will continue to help organizations reap huge benefits as they mature during the coming year. Meanwhile, one way to offer immediate and direct improvements to production pipelines is applying more of an engineering mindset to software development. More specifically, developers need to “engineer our delivery,”  to develop and deliver better code, according to “The Software Defined Delivery Manifesto.” This was the theme of a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted. On hand to discuss with Williams how software development and delivery can and should be transformed were Marc Holmes, chief sales and marketing officer of Pulumi, which offers tools to help streamline software development, and Rod Johnson, founder and CEO of Atomist and one of the authors of “The Software Defined Delivery Manifesto.”

Tracking and managing registries poses obvious challenges for organizations today. But as containers and Kubernetes enter the fray, the task gets that much more harder, given containers’ porous nature, among things. Up-and-coming Harbor is one purported solution as an open source cloud native registry for storing and scanning container images for vulnerabilities. How and why Habor can help address these security concerns for cloud native deployments, as well as how it came to be developed, were among the topics of discussion during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently hosted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai. He was joined by Henry Zhang chief architect, cloud native apps, for open source Harbor, and Paul Dul, vice president of product management, cloud native applications, VMware. “The key thing is the security,” as Harbor, a container image management registry, offers features such as access, control and replication, as well as vulnerability scanning, Zhang said. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MIpTEsRoWyE