The New Stack Makers

On today’s episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams sat down for a discussion with Stoplight.io's Lead Community Engineer Taylor Barnett recorded live from OSCON 2018, held in Portland earlier this year. Starting off the conversation, Williams brought up the topic of service meshes, to which Barnett quickly noted, "A lot of places aren't even there yet. They're still in the getting started phases, now that we've been talking about microservices for a few years and how to grow that. There's a lot of tooling still to be built out there."

Cloud native isn’t limited to containers and microservices orchestration. This was the main conclusion the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) reached when it set out this year to re-define the term “cloud native,” said Justin Garrison, co-author of the book Cloud Native Infrastructure, who was involved in the CNCF’s lengthy process. Under the new definition, CNCF recognizes that cloud native is not just a set of technologies to adopt, but that it also reflects a change in an organization’s structure and processes. “Technology is not the point. The point is business value and that may be about speed of deployment and speed of shipping function,” Liz Rice, technology evangelist at Aqua Security and co-chair of the CNCF’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event, said. “You need all the processes and the team structure and everything else around it.”

On today’s episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams sat down with Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Brendan Burns at a lively afterparty from this year's Portland-based OSCON 2018. To begin the conversation, Williams inquired as to the time before OSCON, before Kubernetes--Specifically, where was Burns, and what had he been working on? While working with Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie at Google, Burns noted that Docker and containers, "Really changed the game," and that, "Orchestration was where we needed to go, but it had to be open source. It had to be a community. We had to build it out in the public, out in the open. The thing that we open sourced five years ago was a tiny, tiny shell of what it has become."

On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder & Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams was live from ServerlessConf 2018. Williams sat down with Linda Nichols, Cloud Enablement Leader at Cloudreach, and Emily Young, Cloudreach Cloud Software Engineer to discuss not only ServerlssConf, but hiring practices, how companies utilise functions, and more. Launching the discussion was a conversation surrounding the way in which Young has brought "server-full" technology into her home by purchasing 500 punchcards from Los Alamos National Laboratory, having an interest in vintage computing, mainframes, and servers. "It's really interesting being on both sides of it, watching the invention of computers, [...] where a computer took up an entire room and now we have these functions, we don't even worry about what the computer is. We just upload little punchcards to the cloud and get back output from AWS or Google Cloud." Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XNWdqXlkU-Q

The microservices philosophy and architectural approach have existed for a while in the form of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). A new set of sophisticated tooling makes this elegant architecture practical to deliver. The number of services, and their ephemeral nature, makes it virtually impossible to secure the environment using the tools and manually-driven processes of the past. “It really forces you to change the approach that you take for security from human-designed and maintained with a lot of direct manipulation to a much higher degree of automation,” John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, said. A new breed of security tools can understand and model an application’s typical traffic patterns, develop a reference model that reflects that known good state, and search for anomalies that violate that model. At the same time, new patterns and practices for developers, operations and security teams help integrate that security knowledge from the very beginning of the application development lifecycle.

Rust has been growing and becoming a more commonly used tool in systems infrastructure. On this episode of The New Stack Makers recorded live at OSCON, we caught up with Nathan Stocks, Engineering Manager for Git Infrastructure at GitHub. He told us just why GitHub has been using Rust to help run its Git infrastructure. He's a big fan of the language, and while GitHub uses it for some projects, he was quick to point out that he can only describe how he uses the language, not how GitHub treats it as a formal tool. "Rust was a personal project by a Mozilla employee. Mozilla picked it up as an official sponsor in 2009, in May 2015, Rust 1.0 arrived. Rust is a really young systems language," said Stocks. "i do teach Rust. I love Rust. I think it's the future. As a systems language it's competing with C and C++, so we're looking at low level languages, compiled, statically typed. Rust gives you a whole bunch of new, modern features, and makes it so that systems programmers can have nice things too." Watch on Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/thenewstack/1nAKEQnwRWoKL

The Internet of Things is slowly working its way into our lives, to the point where we'll just call them Things. With so many software projects, open source tools, and hardware devices out there, it can be tough to even make the distinction between a modern sprinkler system and one that is Internet enabled: non-Internet enabled devices are becoming increasingly less common from hardware vendors across many verticals, from farming to utilities, to transport. Zach Supalla, CEO of Particle, has built a company around redefining what it means to be an IoT platform. While many companies offer a software management layer, or a set of hardware platforms upon which to build, Particle offers the entire retinue of needed assets, from microcontrollers with wireless chipsets, to a device operating system, to a cloud service provider, to development tools.

Serverless has grown to become more than just Amazon Lambdas. Today, there are dozens of implementations, from inside the clouds, to those that are designed to run inside a datacenter, to those that run in Kubernetes. That last batch is where the most interest has coagulated over the past year, and now even more so with the announcement of Knative as a project designed to smooth the Serveless experience on Kubernetes. Streamed live at Serverlessconf in San Francisco, this past week, we caught up with Soam Vasani, the creator of Fission.io, a serverless framework for Kubernetes. He began the project in late 2016, and said that it has become a popular Function-as-a-Service system for Kubernetes users. The project was created at Platform9 to help make their customers more productive on the very first day they installed their own Kubernetes cluster. "You can build functions the same way you do, for example, on AWS Lambda, but you can run them anywhere on any Kubernetes cluster," said Vasani. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YoIu611OQlM

Advertising and white papers may make AI seem like a pie in the sky proposition, with easy analysis, deep insights, and fair algorithms available everywhere. The reality, however, is that AI can expose an even darker side of our own humanity, acting as more of a mirror than as sky-pie. We saw this when Microsoft put an AI driven bot up on Twitter, only to have it spout racist statements shortly there-after. Camille Eddy, currently a student pursuing a mechanical engineering bachelors degree at Boise State, already has a long career as a high-tech robotics intern at places like Alphabet and HP. She's currently interning at nVidia, in fact, when she's not out on the speaking circuit. We caught up with Camille for a livestream at OSCON, where she presented a session on the topic of recognizing cultural bias in AI. Watch on Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/thenewstack/1OwxWWbbbPRxQ

Brandon Shibley is the VP of innovation at Toradex, a company that makes ARM-based System on Modules (SoM), which are different from Single Board Computers. While SBC comes with all components soldered onto the board, SoM offers different components as modules allowing for more flexibility and upgradability. SoM are used in specialized markets such as industrial automation, test and measurement, digital signage, automotive, medical, and more. SoM brings IoT capabilities to supercars, medical equipment and so on. Toradex SoM powers the world’s fastest hyper electric car Rimac Concept One, which uses Apalis iMX6. “We focus on providing industrial grade hardware solutions with long lifecycle support. We also provide software support for these System on Modules,” said Shibley. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6ApLG7Vd9rk

We caught up with Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate at Google, and Nate Taggart, CEO of Stackery, at a recent Serverless users group meetup. The pair were delivering a fire side chat on the state of serverless, and had keen insight not just into how this new technology fits into current applications, but how it fits in with the entire history of computing. "I think serverless is high in the hype-cycle right now. We've reached peak mania over the potential. It's always a panacea. This technology feels new when in reality it's probably just a new version of the same old thing we do. There's this cycle we go through of abstract away, then take back control," said Taggart.

Jim Rose, CEO of CircleCI joins TC Currie to talk about maintaining corporate culture in a distributed environment. Having over 140 team members in twenty-seven locations across twelve countries brings more than the usual problems in hiring and retaining talented employees. Their goal, said Rose, is to “make sure that every employee regardless of where they are feels connected and included and sort of dialed into everything that the company is trying to accomplish at any given time.” They have two sets of tools, he said. One layer is the digital tools to make communication possible across multiple channel options: email. Slack, Zoom and GitHub primary among them. The second layer is a set of processes and rituals so that each organization in the company stays connected and is able to broadcast what they're currently working on, the challenges that they're facing, the the gains that they're making and the progress that we're seeing in the market.

One of the biggest contributions of Docker to the IT world has been making it super easy to use containers. A developer can work on their local machine, build the app and run it in production without any complexity, thanks to Docker on the desktop. On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS correspondent Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Gareth Rushgrove, Product Manager, Docker, Inc to talk about the tool. Rushgrove said that his focus is more on developer desktop than on servers and cloud. “I care about individual developer laptop and desktop. We work towards creating the best developer experience for using Docker locally,” Rushgrove said. Recently, Docker announced the new version of Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows that enables a developer to create an app and run it in production under a minute, using templates. Now building and deploying an app is as simple as creating a Microsoft Office document. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4Pa4mdd0mcQ

Christian Posta  is the Chief Architect for Cloud Development at Red Hat, and we caught up with him at OSCON to chat about the next big problem Kubernetes adopters will face once they've gotten their systems containerized. That problem is traffic management, and the Istio Project, which should hit version 1.0 before the end of August, is the planned system for handling it all. Posta lays out the problem and how Istio solves it; "The context of traffic management is really more about doing deployments and reducing the risk of bringing code changes to production. I've worked for big banks, I've worked for big companies where we would release code once a quarter. Every three months we'd have everyone come in Friday night, stay until Sunday night and do a big bang release of everything.We would take a new version of the code, push it to production, and it would be live," said Posta.

Cloud economist, Corey Quinn, said that "Day to day, I solve one problem: I fix the AWS bill. There's a few things it tends to break down into; data transfer and figuring out region arbitrage," said Quinn. In his work, he sees a great many enterprise cloud environments and has some insight into what problems still face microservices adoption in big businesses. "People with an engineering background tend to have a natural bias where we focus on the tooling and the how.  For example, there's been a 30 or 40 year war going on about vi versus emacs, and there's still no clear winner. Some people say vi is the answer, other people are just wrong. So there's this natural tendency to get into how work gets done, almost to the point where it occludes what the work is. You see elements of this periodically arising these days with the microservices revolution. People are now starting to frantically cargo cult around what they see at conference talks, on bus advertisements, who knows where. They're starting to twist a sort of technology that is aimed at solving political and cultural problems and trying to use it in ways that are inappropriate. You can build a fantastic torque wrench, doesn't help you put the nail in any more effectively unless you hold it very wrong," said Quinn.