The New Stack Makers

It remains a fact that most enterprises do not retain their own software developers.  Indeed, there are major institutions today whose IT operations leaders have never actually met the people who wrote their software, or know whether they’re still alive.  And throughout the Southeast Asian region, software developers are often hired on contract, produce their work in one lump sum, and wait to get paid once it’s installed, tested, and approved.  There, the benefactors don’t expect to need that software to be replaced for at least another five years, in some cases as high as 15 years. Some IT ops professionals perceive the idea of software development automation with daily release cycles as foreign a concept to their own way of work as, say, replacing their manufacturing lines with molecular manipulators that could produce fully functional bulldozers out of compressed peat moss.  DevOps may be an indicator of the directions that institutions and enterprises must evolve to stay relevant in the long term, but how many iterations of change will they require before they can declare themselves, technically speaking, “there?”

The trouble CVE-2018-1002105 began to cause for Rancher, as well as the Kubernetes community, started a couple of years ago, long before it became public earlier this month. In Rancher’s case, users were already complaining about mysterious error messages and set up failures they were experiencing in 2016 with the release of Rancher 1.6 and Amazon’s ALB. More recently, the community began to experience similar problems in August with Rancher 2.1. “It was a pretty low risk vulnerability in the sense of it was very likely that there were other protections in place that will protect you from getting to it, but overall, the experience for us was really amazing working with the rest of the Kubernetes community to identify it, get it pushed out, get patches pushed to everyone and things worked the way they’re supposed to,” Shannon Williams, co-founder and vice president, of sales, said. We identified it. It was kind of kept quiet until the fixed that were pushed out, and then everyone had the ability to patch really quickly last week.” Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PxcCUj262go

It wasn’t that long ago when deploying massive-scale projects to the cloud meant largely creating the underlying infrastructure to make the migration from scratch. This reinventing the wheel-like gargantuan task is what Twitter software engineers certainly had to do. But as they figured out how to scale the social media network from Twitter’s days as a fledging startup to handle today’s 300 million regular users today, they also, almost by accident it seems, created the basis for the first service mesh Linkerd. As William Morgan, now CEO of Buoyant,  the creator and primary sponsor of Linkerd, told Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, during a recent podcast: “And the most amazing thing about this migration was it actually worked,” Morgan said, referring to his Twitter days. “So, it was there I think, for a company to be like, ‘okay we’re rebuilding everything from scratch for that actually to succeed.’ But somehow, we managed to succeed.”

We’re moving beyond the idea that every company is a software company, said Ravi Mayuram, Senior Vice President of Engineering and CTO of Couchbase. “Now every company is a data company.” The Couchbase data platform is a unique NoSQL Engagement database, designed for using data to connect customers, employees, and machines.  The goal is to engage customers through exceptional digital experiences, which is rapidly becoming a key differentiator in business across all industries.   To create these experiences, enterprises need to leverage data in an agile, responsive, and scalable manner.  Enter Couchbase’s NoSQL Engagement platform, which Mayuram describes as distributed database that combines the noSQL concepts but adds SQL back into the mix. The whole platform is orchestrated with Kubernetes.

The concept of business transition is so synonymous with Salesforce that a Google search for both phrases will automatically omit one phrase as being superfluous.  So it will come as an absolute shock to perhaps several of our readers that Salesforce finds itself just as much a journeyman to the concept of the “DevOps transition” as any corporation on the planet. “If it was three or four teams, we could have the build/test/deploy [pattern] easily,” said Byron Vonthal, product manager for CI/CD in the IT Department of Salesforce, in a wide-ranging interview for The New Stack Makers.  “But with 65 teams, it’s hard to get everybody moving at the exact same pace.  There are some teams that do this really well.  They’ve got the build/test/deploy down.  There are some teams that only have the build down, and that isn’t even incorporating their tests into the process.”

Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recently spoke with Ashish Motivala from Snowflake Computing and Clement Pang from VMware who are also committee members for the FoundationDB Summit. They described FoundationDB’s history and new improvements it offers for organizations seeking to scale their databases in multi-cloud environments and across different geographical sectors by using the open source alternative. The open source FoundationDB data store “falls in the genre of key-value stores or key-value databases so to speak,” said Snowflake Computing's Ashish Motivala. “And of the differences between FoundationDB and the plethora of other databases value stores out there is that it provides ACID compliance, which means it provides all transactional support unlike a lot of other databases,” Motivala said. “The other thing that it provides is a level of reliability that I haven’t seen in other databases in the past. And these two things really, for me, define what FoundationDB is.”

DevOps, as any successful practitioner will tell you, involves deciding which processes in your organization are worth standardizing, and bringing software developers and IT operators together to work to automate them.  When a company is making a strategic effort to shift the infrastructure hosting burden away from IT operations and toward the public cloud, it’s not always clear whether those infrastructural processes are due to be perpetuated or expunged. “They are two different tracks that are in the midst of converging,” explained Naggi Asmar, vice president of engineering at customer experience platform provider Medallia, where the DevOps journey and the cloud journey are happening in parallel. “We were down the path using not necessarily cloud-native solutions for our DevOps.  Then a recent transition is for us to move to a more cloud-native infrastructure and development model.  So we still are in the middle of that transition.”

It is certainly well known how Kubernetes and microservices can offer organizations unapparelled opportunities in agility, speed to deployment, resource savings and other advantages — but harnessing this power can be a difficult, especially when moving to multi-cloud environments. The challenges associated with helping organizations make the jump to the cloud has served as a main theme of Portworx’s narrative as a company, culminating in the release this week of PX-Enterprise 2.0, a cloud native storage and data management solution geared for containers. This was the main during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, hosted with Gou Rao, co-founder and CTO, of Portworx. The release of PX-Enterprise 2.0 also culminates with the updates PX-Motion and PX-Central. As its name suggest, PX-Enterprise 2.0 is designed to facilitate data movement across and between a multi- and hybrid-cloud scenario, Rao said. “The goal is to compliment Kubernetes, by laying out a design pattern in how you manage and orchestrate multi-cloud applications,” Rao said. PX- Motion will allow you to do that across multiple Kubernetes clusters, even between different cloud providers.”

Open source software has taken new and exciting directions since the early days when collaboration and sharing source code was first introduced a few decades ago. Whether or not the original spirit of the free software movement has been maintained or not is a subject of debate, open source has evolved to underpin computing today, ranging from the Linux operating systems of most servers to Kubernetes and the cloud. Before open open source reached its mainstream status of today, there were some amazing things that happened, as well as some bumps and even wars that took place. These and other open source-related themes were discussed during a podcast with Danese Cooper, vice president, special initiatives for NearForm, a long-time member of the Apache Software Foundation and an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI); and Umur Cubukcu, CEO and co-founder of Citus Data. In addition to the past and present trials and tribulations of the open source movement, they also discussed what lies ahead.

Ant Financial, a spinoff from Alipay of  China search engine giant Alibaba, offers credit card payment and financial services at scale in a country whose population is 1.4 billion, as well as to consumers worldwide.  Zhengyu He, head of systems engineering at Ant Financial, described what it has taken to bring monolithic and outdated systems to meet today’s computing challenges at scale during a podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai. Before Ant Financial was founded in 2014, Alipay had already begun to offer credit card payment services to consumers. “At that moment, China was not a really developed country and  we didn’t really have..sophisticated credit card systems,” He said, who worked at Google as a software engineer for over six years. “Ant Financial took the responsibility of actually building the national scale payment systems...And this is actually one of the greatest inventions I would say, in the last couple of years in China — so it’s like what we now call a cashless society." Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rmL_oxsMZuM

Machine learning (ML) should have a profound effect on many facets of our lives in the future, from self-driving cars and trucks to utility grid management. As artificial intelligence (AI) engineers and data scientists develop advanced systems based on neural networks and other technologies designed to teach machines to learn and act in ways similar to the human brain, workflows that integrate all facets of the underlying software development and deployments for ML applications will play an obvious and critical role. To that end, David Aronchick, Co-Founder of Kubeflow, described how Kubeflow can make setting up machine learning software production pipelines easier, during a podcast, Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/pdkXhXmJoK8

The whole point of the movement-within-a-movement that Utsav Sanghani, Senior Product Manager for Desktop and AppDev Security for code security platform provider Synopsys, calls “DevSecOps,” is to engage information security professionals in the task of automating enterprise processes.  That engagement requires a shared understanding among all departments of the infrastructure with which applications and critical functions are being hosted. That knowledge is cast to the wind, suggested Sanghani in an interview for The New Stack Makers, when an organization opts to host its applications on a cloud-native platform, and then attempt to leverage DevSecOps to secure it. “Let’s assume that your production builds are happening in the cloud,” said Sanghani.  “You’re working for a big financial institution.  As part of your production builds, you’re running scans using market-leading tools like, let’s say, Synopsys’ Coverity.  As part of that, if at any point something were to leak out that this application has a high-security CSRF issue with it, that’s going to be a PR nightmare for that big financial institution.

Ride-sharing firm Lyft will continue to rely heavily in Kubernetes and microservices platforms in the race to offer mobility solutions that should eventually include AI-piloted cars in the very near future. This was a key point Vicki Cheung, engineering manager at Lyft,  told Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, hosted during a podcast recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Shanghai. After serving as head of engineering at OpenAI, a non-profit AI research group Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk co-founded; Cheung joined Lyft after it had attempted to make the switch to a container-based stack a few years prior. This was “when like it was really, the hype was building up and everyone is trying to make the switch but before Kubernetes was a thing,” Cheung said. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PZ3T-UEzdRs

Software will likely continue to underpin advances in tech throughout the indefinite future, especially as artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies begin to have a direct influence on new stack development. But the very male-dominated world of software development can also stand to benefit from new concepts and industries beyond the traditional realm of tech. The fashion industry is a perfect example, says Charmmie Hendon, who very recently transitioned into a key marketing role as the Special Projects Manager at Serverless Inc.  after joining the company as an Executive Assistant. How Hendon has successfully convinced the decision makers at Serverless of the many lessons the fashion industry can offer was one of the themes of Hendon’s conversation during a podcast Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, hosted at ServerlessConf 2018. “Fashion is a lot faster in terms of tech, if you would believe it or not — they’re pushing product every three months. So, when you’re pushing product every three months, there’s a level of insanity or level of do or die, jumping off the cliff a lot of times just getting it done,” Hendon said. “So, coming to tech, this was the right speed for me. I was like, ‘okay, I’m not pushing product every three months,’ and I actually get to take a breath and think about what we’re doing here.” Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5tqiWuHqAy8

In the telecommunications industry, the level of manual labor involved in maintaining large and complex applications at scale on a traditional software architecture has become untenable. In an effort to avoid costly service outages, system administrators are frequently up all night monitoring dashboards for spikes in activity that may signal trouble, said Sana Tariq, a senior architect of Exchange-to-Exchange (E2E) service orchestration at Canadian telecommunications service provider Telus. “I don’t think that should exist anymore, the staying up all night,” Tariq said in a livestream and podcast with The New Stack at Open Source Summit held in Vancouver, B.C. this past August. “We need to advance to the point where we trust the algorithms to act on our behalf.”