The New Stack Makers

Microservices is the talk of the town these days, even if the term and technology has actually been around for a while now. Why is everyone suddenly interested in microservices architecture? What has changed? To understand microservices, I sat down with Patrick Chanezon, chief developer advocate at Docker at the Open Source Leadership Summit Sonoma, California. Chanezon provided a brief history lesson about the evolution of microservices architecture to explain why everyone is talking about it these days. He said at the end of nineties and early 2000s, developers were structuring their applications into what we call monoliths. Those applications required dedicated, proprietary servers to run. With Java applications, Java App Server was required. With .NET, an IIS server was required. In a monolithic architecture, everything is bundled together. If you want to upgrade or update just one service, the entire app must be updated. Monoliths have their own disadvantages. Most importantly they slow organizations down, who end up spending more resources in managing the infrastructure that runs those apps, instead of investing in the apps themselves. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XXKaI0Xnde0

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams sits down with Chris Aniszczyk, COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Torin Sandall, a Software Engineer at Styra, to discuss how the Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a secure, simple, and compliant way to manage services. "From a CNCF perspective, policy was a missing piece within our cloud native landscape," Aniszczyk explained, discussing why the Foundation on-boarded OPA. Policy's continued evolution within microservices is a point of note, with developers having to think about how they monitor and architect policies themselves. Sandall explained that OPA gives you an engine to enforce policies across environments, which is beneficial to service administrators, platform engineering teams, and those running large authorization platforms such as Netflix's security team. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8uchwoMgfIc

Snyk sees itself as a developer community that does security. There, it's not about hiring security practitioners, but around getting developers to embrace security best practices. On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams sat down with Snyk's CEO Guy Podjarny to discuss the levels of abstraction in today's infrastructures, how those impact developers, and the many ways in which infrastructure impacts how developers work with Kubernetes and AWS. Developers are ultimately those that have to manage and understand what components and libraries are used. "I think it's around drawing lines. So again, you have an app and written code. What is the app? The minimal description is you wrote code, you decorated it with libraries and a container, and moved it on its way." Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/r6p98prQZqY

Service mesh technologies are being used in production just six months after the KubeCon North America keynotes that explored what a service mesh is, and its benefits to both organizations and developers. Many are still attempting to truly grasp what a service mesh offers, particularly as observability and compatibility concerns are raised. Join us on this episode of The New Stack Makers from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to explore the overall management of a service mesh and how it relates to microservices. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/V-khFrbS1S0

Daniel Hekman is head of business development at Grape Up, and while he was in Boston for the recent Cloud Foundry Summit, he's usually to be found in Krakow, Poland. With a bi-continental view of software development challenges, Hekman has unique insight into how businesses can accelerate their IT velocity. "If [businesses] want to differentiate themselves, they need to have something in the market very fast. In the past when they had an idea and it took them nine months to come to the market--which up until recently was still fast--it's too late. They need to be able to go from idea to production in a few weeks. And it is, I would say nowadays, not doable without concepts like microservices and containers that allow you to move at that speed," said Hekman. The Cloud Foundry Summit also focused on the usage of PaaS and devops in governments. "The challenge for the government is creating a feedback fabric regarding their services... Once they solve that feedback loop I think it will be beneficial for our society as a whole," said Hekman. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vamziR8y720

TNS Founder Alex Williams dove into the topic of observability on today's episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recently streamed live from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, Denmark. Joining Williams were Allison Richardet, Software Developer at Asteris, and Brian Brazil, Founder of Robust Perception and one of the main developers of Prometheus. Richardet opened the discussion by noting that oftentimes, getting developers to use observability in their daily process can be a challenge. To help them on-board this practice, she utilizes event grammar for service logging, so developers can bridge the gap between their project. Thus, making service logging available to operations, which allows for easier data querying and use of visualization tools such as Prometheus. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZN1czlowEb4

San Francisco-based Holberton School offers a non-traditional approach to training the full-stack engineers that are in high demand among Silicon Valley tech companies. Its graduates compete with the Ivy League — and win — for positions at Tesla, Apple, Dropbox, IBM, Nvidia and Docker, to name a few. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston, we sat down with Holberton School co-founder Sylvain Kalache to discuss how the tech industry can scale up its talent pool to match the ever-increasing scale of its applications. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/m14dNzUkqko

As technology continues to progress, many enterprises are changing how they build and run software. Companies that are just moving to the cloud are looking ahead now more than ever, adopting not only serverless technologies, but embracing autonomous systems and their self-healing capabilities. Joining TNS Founder Alex Williams on today's episode of The New Stack Makers are Alois Reitbauer, VP Chief Technical Strategist & Head of Innovation Lab at Dynatrace, and Kamala Dasika, Product Marketing Director at Pivotal. Dasika started off the discussion by highlighting how she got involved with Cloud Foundry, starting out when it was being incubated inside of VMware before being spun off into Pivotal. As a part of her work at Pivotal, Dasika went on to explain that, “We got to know a lot about how enterprises run software, build software, and help them speed up the way they are releasing software so they can essentially serve their customers better.” Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/cPXPJr7btDA

As more organizations begin the transition to a container and microservices-based infrastructure, they are maintaining and integrating legacy systems, which pose a security challenge. Some cloud service providers have not kept up with the higher security demands that today's cloud-native architectures demand, leaving IT teams to wonder how to best secure their multi-cloud environment across both legacy and new architectures. On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, Pivotal's Senior Technical Program Manager Molly Crowther explores how Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes work together in conjunction with the open source community to reduce risk for enterprises moving into the cloud, and ensure that projects are focusing on security. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Xqw57DJ3CgQ

For this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie chats with Bridget Kromhout, principal cloud developer advocate at Microsoft, a frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, leader of the DevOpsDays organization globally and the DevOps community at home in Minneapolis. In her recent article: Containers Will Not Fix Your Broken Culture and Other Hard Truths, Kromhout discusses the intersection between microservices and business culture.

On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams was joined by Rahul Kamdar, Director of Product Management and Strategy, T-Mobile Director of IT Development Kris Wilson, and Chandra Sriramoju, T-Mobile Principle Site Reliability Engineer to discuss the ways in which Tibco and T-Mobile are joining forces to utilize CI/CD practices to build out a software architecture capable of handling 5G network speeds, which T-Mobile is launching later this year. Wilson noted that T-Mobile has gone from 15M subscribers to 73M subscribers today, with its middleware application integration stack managed by Sriramoju. Diving into the discussion, Wilson went on to note that when he joined the company nine years previously, T-Mobile had centered much of its infrastructure around its billing system, which later was broken down and transformed over 5-6 years to better serve its customer base. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TXofwKikmIk

On today's episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams explores how Netlify created its content delivery network, the rise of microservices and AWS Lambda, and how working at scale has impacted today's developers and their workflows. Williams was joined for this interview by Matt Biilmann, Netlify CEO & Co-Founder and Chris Bach, Netlify President & Co-Founder during SXSW 2018. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4plzNu4UF64

As the consumption of open source technologies is skyrocketing, one of the biggest yet most underrated challenges are licence companies. Organizations often use a mix of open source technologies that are released under different open source licences. Sometimes these licences are compatible with each other and sometimes not. Additionally, lack of adherence to the licence may lead to legal actions. No one wants to be at the receiving end of the SFC (Software Freedom Conservancy) or the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center). Philippe Ombrédanne, co-founder and CTO of nexB, has dedicated his life to helping organizations to reuse free/libre and open source software, without worrying about licenses. He has been a prolific contributor to many open source projects including Eclipse and Java, but now he has evolved his role within the Open Source community. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/I894SEK2fKQ

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder Alex Williams sat down with Nicole Huesman, Intel Senior Global Marketing Manager & Open Source Advocate to discuss the company's thoughts and process on centring diversity, and explores their efforts with the OpenStack Project, Bitergia, and Project Chaos to bring about better practices and pipelines surrounding gender identity, gender diversity, and inclusivity. Throughout the conversation, Huesman noted that Intel has been working with Bitergia on gender diversity research, but went on to explain that for Intel, this is just the tip of the iceberg. “We took a look at as a member of the community [and asked] how can we work, what part can we play in building inclusive diversity and inclusion across communities?” Huesman also highlighted that while at Open Source Leadership Summit this March, Intel has also been working alongside the Linux Foundation on the CHAOSS Project, tools designed to measure the health of communities with open source projects. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ONVg41O-YyU

"The complexities are a given. That can sum up Kubernetes. It's going to take time to unfold. And here's why in this episode of The New Stack Makers that TNS Founder Alex Williams recorded with Kelsey Hightower and Liz Rice, co-chairs of this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen this coming May 2-4. The cloud native market is driven by the Kubernetes distributions that application architectures require. Each infrastructure has its own Kubernetes distribution. The hardware architectures that the cloud services use then dictates how Kubernetes integrates. It's a matter of conformance that just takes time to resolve. Kubernetes does run on multiple cloud service providers but there is no universal version that acts as a separate control plane for all cloud services. And that is why the APIs will increasingly matter with service arhitectures both in the control planes and in the application integrations. The context of the market is in the schedule, the agenda and the speakers participating in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. The drive is for understanding the pieces that can make continuous development processes possible with tools like Spinnaker and a new generation of serverless architectures that have a corollary and architectural connection to containers but even more as an abstraction than ever before."