The New Stack Makers

Mentoring is a quintessential element for career advancement in the community, as teaching and helping to hone talent serve as a major contribution in the software development industry. Mentorships as way to boost contributions to Kubernetes is a case in point. In many respects, the future of Kubernetes depends on active members in the community. On hand to discuss the essential role mentoring plays in Kubernetes’ growth, Libby Clark, editorial director at The New Stack, hosted a podcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Seattle. Her guests included: Paris Pittman,  a developer relations program manager at Google Cloud who is also a coach at and subproject owner of special interest group Contributor Experience. “Contributor Experience is literally what it is: the experience of our upstream contributors,”  Pittman said. “And one of the subprojects that I do own is mentoring.” Tim Pepper, a senior staff engineer at VMware’s open source technology center. Pepper has been involved in Contributor Experience as well and his aim is to do “anything I can to help make it easier for new folks coming on board.” He is also one of the chairs of the Kubernetes SIG release, and as part of that, “we try to really practice the cycle of mentorship,” Pepper said. Nikhita Raghunath, a freelance software engineer originally from India who just over two years ago “did not even know what Kubernetes was,” before securing an internship at  Google Summer of Code last year. Today,  Raghunath helps run the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy Internship programs.

The public discussion of DevOps as a movement empowering organizations to encourage collaboration between IT departments in order to enable automation and expedite business objectives, will have subdued in five years’ time, and probably well earlier.  This according to Keith Pleas, DevOps Architecture Senior Manager for globally respected IT consulting firm Accenture, in an interview at DevOps World 2018 in San Francisco for The New Stack Makers. Everybody would like to be the “miracle worker” in the IT operations side of the organization that saves the day and sees projects through on time, Pleas acknowledged.  “But the challenge is, technology is moving against that. “‘Continuous’ implies what?  Automation,” he continued.  “The automation is coming for the automation.  In the next one, two, three, five, ten years, DevOps will be configuration settings, and that’ll be about it.”

The number of available options for application deployments and maintenance, whether on on-premise or in cloud environments, spells great opportunities. But as microservices, Kubernetes serverless platforms and other options are thrown into the mix, issues of how to manage the enormous complexity involved obviously emerges. A key concern for DevOps, among others, is creating best practices and processes for backups and disaster recovery (DR) in this context. During a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack, hosted; Gou Rao, co-founder and CTO of Portworx, gave an overview of the complexities involved, as well as emerging DR and backup practices. “People are still more in learning mode. Now, people have deployed their applications and they’re dealing with real-world problems operationally, and  not necessarily issues, but best practices about ‘how do I do this?’” Rao said.

For this episode of The New Stack Makers, Dr. Anita Sarma, Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Orgeon State University, joins TC Currie to talk about her recent research on how to increase gender inclusivity in OSS.   Her recent research focuses on Problem Solving Facets in which men and women differ statistically.  She’s the author of  Squashing Inclusivity Bugs in Open Source Software: GenderMag methodology identifies gender bias in software tools to help designers eliminate it. With Open Source Software (OSS) becoming more and more a requirement for job searchers,  it’s critical to become a part of this community.  For example, Sarma said, one technologist told her he’d rather see a GitHub profile than a CV any day of the week. But currently, only about 10% of OSS contributors are women.   We’re no longer talking about whether diversity is a good idea, Sarma said, but how we can make it happen. In her research, she has focused on five ways in which men and women statistically differ in how they problem solve.

The sheer size of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai drawing an estimated 8,000 attendees attests to how the open source movement is both mainstream and plays a key role in software development today. The thousands of attendees also reflect the exploding number of people involved in the open source community worldwide who play a part in this renaissance era of open stack development. The open source community can also sleep easier at night, knowing that they are also playing a role in making the world a better place in a number of ways, benefiting the software community as well as the end users who benefit from new applications that have the potential to induce positive changes in our daily lives. While at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018, Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, had the good fortune of being able to host a podcast with three people involved in exciting open source projects. On hand to discuss their work were: Jared Watts, senior maintainer on the Rook project (hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF); which offers storage architectures for cloud native environments; Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate at CNCF; the now fabled organization fostering growth and helping to sustain container ecosystems; Wei Fu, director of engineering, leading VMware Cloud PKS, a SaaS offering for Kubernetes from VMware. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSv2CMvpeGw

Cloud native architectures require a new approach to security. The cloud native stack doesn’t communicate in the predictable and tightly coupled way that stratified frontend, middleware and backend layers provide. Applications composed of microservices and serverless functions are loosely coupled pieces of code talking to each other in unique, asynchronous ways  — and there are exponentially more of them. “It’s an explosion of complexity,” said Sonya Koptyev, director of evangelism at Twistlock, in this podcast interview at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon last month in Seattle. When managing such complex environments, it can be difficult for operations and security teams to even know which services developers have running on various cloud providers, let alone to identify and remediate a critical vulnerability such as the recent, major privilege escalation vulnerability in Kubernetes that, if left unpatched, allows attackers to take over entire compute nodes. “Once [companies] get past that couple of hundred employee mark they have all sorts of services they’re running that the security team doesn’t know about, and with that you introduce all sorts of vulnerabilities and threats into the environment,” Koptyev said. “The security team can’t secure them because they don’t know about them.” Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4aQ1KJE6Lrs

Organizations will obviously make hard decisions first about why it might make sense for them to makes the jump to the cloud — especially when porting data and infrastructure to a microservices and Kubernetes environments.  Famous use-case scenarios aside, from Netflix to Airbnb, many small- to medium-size organizations stand to benefit in different ways, depending on what they do. Typical concerns and needs organizations look for include compliance, data protection, and especially, how the cloud can specifically further their business goals — which can obviously vary, depending on the organization. Examples of what the cloud and cloud native platforms can do for organizations were the subject of a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack recently hosted with Zara Nanu, CEO at Gapsquare, and Kenny Gorman, CEO of Eventador.  Bob Quillin, vice president, Oracle Cloud developer relations, was also on hand to describe what his customers have been telling him about what they need.

Open source Fluentd has emerged as an open source data collector for massive amounts of log data from often many different sources — in a way that is especially useful for cloud native deployments on Kubernetes. As one of the developers, Eduardo Silva, principal engineer at Arm and part of the Fluentd development team at Treasure Data, described how and why Fluentd’s utility is becoming even more important to keep up with the demands of scaling data in today’s cloud native world. He discussed that and other benefits the data collector offers during a podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai. The main benefit for Fluentd is how any production environment can have access to comprehensive data analysis about applications, whether they are running on standard servers or on distributed systems with Kubernetes, Silva said. This data might include error information, warnings or general information about how an application is running. This information is provided in the form of messages, called logging, about how they are operating. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fgaJKykG_ng

T-Mobile knows a thing or two about how waves of traffic can put a strain on a e-commerce website. At least twice a year its site gets inundated by customers and potential customers — In October each year when the new phones are released, and again in December, this time for the holiday gift-buying season. T-Mobile has relied on container platform for managing its web site for several years now, and Kubernetes has proved to be instrumental in helping the company scale up the site to meet these peak demands, said James Webb, T-Mobile Cloud Foundry platform architect, in an episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon last month in Seattle. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jQBY_wWMLnw

While there are only a few companies using AI in production, it’s certainly where the future lies. In this wide-ranging episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie talks with Ted Dunning, Chief Application Architect at MapR and author, along with Ellen Friedman of the new book AI & Analytics in Production. We all have an image in the back of our minds of computers taking over the world, but the truth for the short-term, said Dunning is that some of the best value for artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be some of the most boring stuff.  AI, at least in the beginning, will replace boring repetitive tasks and mine massive amounts of data in ways not previously imaginable.

Serverless continues to mean different things for different people — but many users and proponents have very solid examples of how and why it works for them. Christopher Woods, research software engineer, at the University of Bristol, is a case in point. Woods said, besides saving money by paying engineers to maintain servers instead of building business logic, serverless allows organizations to shift code faster to the cloud. You also “do not have to think about any of that kind of non-strategic, undifferentiated heavy lifting,” he said. “[Serverless providers offer] the stuff that everybody has to do when you ship an app to the cloud: you have to choose a framework, you have to do find the server, you have to provision that server, you have to get your SSH key..I mean, these are kind of the old ways of doing things,” Woods said. “Maybe it’s going to scale, then what happens when that server goes down? I mean, all of these stuff is not strategic for the organization, so there’s no value to the business for spending time managing servers.” Woods, as well as Shaun Smith, director of product management for serverless at Oracle, and Chad Arimura, vice president of serverless at Oracle, discussed in detail what serverless can offer during a podcast hosted by Alex Williams, TNS founder and editor-in-chief, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPFvXVOeZoI

Bloomberg owes its success in maintaining its status as a financial information and data giant over the past few decades thanks largely to technology. After its creation in 1981 when Bloomberg shortly thereafter became synonymous with the large computer terminals on the desks of Wall Street and financial trading floors around the U.S., the company now describes itself as an information and technology company. With 19,000 employees worldwide, it offers software, financial, media and data services — with data heavily embedded in its DNA. Recently added to its immense data-management structure is a Kubernetes layer, which Bloomberg adopted about three years ago. During a podcast hosted by Joab Jackson, managing editor, and Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018; Steve Bower, data and analytics infrastructure lead at Bloomberg, discussed why and how Bloomberg transitioned its data and infrastructure operations to Kubernetes and a largely cloud native platform and what he learned from making the move.

Serverless adoption is exploding — but what the platform is and how it might be able to help your organization depends on a lot of factors. “Breaking down the word ‘serverless,’ for a lot of people, means almost whatever you want it to mean these days,” Kelsey Hightower, a developer advocate at Google, said during a podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018.  “But I think there is this movement around so many managed services at this point and all of the problems you can solve…that you can now give it a term, a buzzword. So, that means that database now is fully managed and the security part is fully managed over the counter.” In many ways, serverless offerings can often be reduced to the concept of offloading server-management tasks to a third party. “We’re removing that ability or the need to think about the server,”  Hightower said. “So now, you have serverless because many services are eating that world as well.” Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g4jt3klb9M

Originally created by ride-hailing firm Lyft over three years ago, Envoy serves as a network proxy geared for microservice service mesh architectures and was open sourced about two and a half years ago. About a year after Envoy 1.0’s release, Envoy entered into the fray of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubation project. During a podcast hosted Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018; Cheryl J Hung, director of ecosystem at the CNCF, and Matt Klein, senior software engineer at Lyft, discussed how Envoy has benefited as an CNCF project, and consequently, how Envoy’s lifecycle has evolved. They detailed what happens when a CNCF project “graduates” and how users ultimately benefit from the process. “Overall, it’s been a great experience for us — the CNCF has been very helpful for helping us grow the project, not only from events perspective but helping with governance and just all those types of things,” Klein said. “So, Envoy has had a pretty spectacular growth over the last two years since it’s been open sourced and I think just through natural project growth and evolution especially during 2018, it became clear that it was time to look at the graduating criteria.” Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK6Fobid0pI

Lifecycle management can certainly help to address the often enormous complexities of cloud deployments. Among the challenges it can help to overcome, lifecycle management can offer monitoring, deployment and maintenance capabilities across single- or multi-multi-cloud deployments. As more organizations make the shift to container environments on the cloud, lifecycle management adapted for the environment is becoming available as well — and that’s a good thing. The new dynamics associated with container lifecycle management, was the main topic during a podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, with a group of software engineers and product managers from Oracle. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=675Mu2eJmJo