The New Stack Makers

Isaac Mosquera, CTO & co-founder at Armory.io sat down to talk testing mircorservices in production with The New Stack San Francisco Correspondent TC Currie as part of The New Stack’s series on Microservices.   Within Armory platform platform is a product called Canary which is one tool to help test microservices in production.  The name comes from the traditional  miners’ practice of taking a canary with them into coal mines.  When mined, coal can release an odorless toxic gas that would kill miners where they stood.  The canary became an early warning system.  If the canary died, the miners booked it out of there.   Similarly, Canary, launches a small bit of code into production to see how it effects the system as a whole, and discover is this element introducing a lot more risk into the production environment. “That’s a lot cheaper way to do it than set up manual QA testing to assess the risk,” Mosquera said.

Back at the end of March, the CNCF accepted a new sandbox project for identity management. The project is called SPIFFE, which stands for  Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone. It's being supported by Amazon, Google and Red Hat, but at the center of the project is Scytale, a startup founded specifically for SPIFFE. Scytale and SPIFFE are the brainchild of Sunil James, who's been in the software industry since the turn of the century. With a resume that dates all the way back to one of the first companies to offer security bug bounties, and time at both Amazon and Google, James has a long view of some of the pain points that have been experienced by teams moving their enterprise environments into rapidly scalable, cloud-based infrastructure.

When TNS Founder Alex Williams met with Ben Golub and Solomon Hykes at the Doug Fir in Portland, it was 2013 and OSCON was buzzing. Golub had found a home with Docker as CEO, following a successful run leading Gluster, the storage company that sold to Red Hat. Today, Golub is now the interim CEO at Storj and Hykes just a few weeks ago left Docker.  Their departures are a discussion for another day. But they were leading in opening the market and since 2013, we do know, that containers have been widely adopted. The question now is about application-oriented architectures and the resources that they run on in an ever distributed manner. That is a topic that transcends discussions about containers and into topics that orient on application infrastructure and the influence of data architectures for building new predictive-modeling systems.

Naveed Anwar, Managing Vice President of Global Platform, Strategic Partnerships, Integrations & Developer Community at Capital One said at SXSW that the core strength of technology architecture comes with the first building block and that’s the development of a great team. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Anwar discusses who Capital One hires, what they are looking for and how teams at Capital One execute on projects. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/02ECl37ZUsg

For microservices environments, data can be tricky. In a system where everything is designed to be highly ephemeral, scalable, and temporary, data storage doesn't fit into any of those categories. Stateful applications require stable data platforms that don't vanish when traffic goes down, or get overwhelmed when a site is overloaded. Because of this square-peg-round-hole problem, a lot of DevOps practitioners can find themselves caught behind the weight of the data. It can drag down an agile process, creating large gaps in release cycles as teams wait for DBAs to adjust the store by hand, or to update the schema to accommodate an application change.

John Daniel “JD” Trask has been making software for 25 years. Along the way, he has learned a lot about software architecture and what matters if you really want it to work. Raygun is the company he co-founded, which has gained interest in the software development community for its error monitoring capabilities. It is now introducing Raygun APM as new entrant into the application performance monitoring market competing with the likes of giants like New Relic. In this episode of  The New Stack Makers,  Trask talks about what it takes to develop great software and provides a demonstration of the company's APM service, a platform designed to detect, diagnose and resolve errors for software developers. It offer one centralized tool to detect, diagnose and resolve errors and performance problems no matter where they occur or what the cause, according to a Raygun post about the new service. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UyfHI7m_4Zo

Rob Lalonde is vice president and general manager for Navops at the Univa Corporation. Rob and TNS Founder Alex Williams had a conversation at the Open Source Leadership conference in Sonoma, Ca. We talked quite a bit about Project Tortuga, which Susan Hall, writing for The New Stack, explained this way: It’s a general-purpose cluster- and cloud-management framework with applications including high-performance computing (HPC), Big Data frameworks, Kubernetes and scale-out machine learning/deep learning environments. Univa is an established company in the high computing performance (HPC) space. Navops is a connector of sorts to the HPC world. The connections are forming with cloud services and the story about how Kubernetes fits with scaled out architectures managing HPC workloads. Tortuga is a general purpose cluster-and cloud-management framework that automates the deployment of clusters in local on-premise, cloud and hybrid-cloud configurations through repeatable templates. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/9QCBE99PGRM

Billions of clock speeds run on an edge processor in between network packets, said Chris Sachs, founder of Swim.ai in this episode of The New Stack Makers. The capacity is seemingly timeless. The cloud isn’t meant for processing and analyzing data from nodes in real-time. The data that is processed at the edge from a node requires a fundamental different approach. Swim.ai’s platform uses software that treats every node as a digital twin. These “actors” are configured as a software kernel, fully configured. They maximize the process clock speeds to use every network packet and CPU cycle to its advantage. It is fully self-contained, a raw compute platform that looks at data from the nodes on the edge. Swim.ai does real-time data processing by implementing an actor framework that all have their own state -- just enough to maximize all those clock speeds and analyzing it with neural networks that work across intersections, said Swim.ai’s Simon Crosby, who also joined us for the interview. The capability to process data at the edge allows to create learning environments such as with predicting traffic in a city like Palo Alto, which Sachs and Crosby discuss in particular in this podcast and demonstration. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gslqyzZSTt0

Justin Johnson is development director at StackPath and our guest on this latest episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at the Open Source Leadership Summit in March. StackPath acquired companies in the CDN, software and security market to manage deployment of content and applications across its infrastructure. Positioning itself as a security as a service, StackPath is using open source technologies to interconnect the different products it has acquired into one single platform. Customers write code to the StackPath APIs, which then manage the content and applications across its distributed network, as opposed to one big data center, or one big pipe. The longer the distance traveled to the user, the more latency. The limits of livestreaming lies in the distance large files have to travel to the user. There are different types of workloads that require different networks. For example, Microsoft works with StackPath to update Xbox machines. To do so efficiently requires an infrastructure that can distribute the load as close as possible to the device, Johnson said. It's that last mile that is the biggest challenge. Coming up, The New Stack will be live at Cloud Foundry Summit, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, OpenStack Summit and ChefConf. We’ll be podcasting, hosting pancake breakfasts and spending a lot of time talking with people. Thanks to all our sponsors who make our work possible here at The New Stack. Chef, Cloud Foundry, KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, Microsoft and OpenStack are sponsors of The New Stack.

Tracing, logging, monitoring are all getting re-invented with the advent of container-native environments, said Evan Powell on this episode of The New Stack Makers. The force of re-invention is also running through the storage and management layers with new thinking about the concept of container storage. Powell is CEO of MayaData, formerly CloudByte. MayaData is behind OpenEBS, an open source container storage environment that allows every workload and storage team to have its own controller. The company has about 75 engineers, mostly out of Bangalore, India. MayaData has a similar strategy to companies like MongoDB, which fostered an open source project and with that as its base built a commercial SaaS platform. MayaOnline is a free platform that gives developers a view into their OpenEBS or Kubernetes stateful workload environments. MayaOnline gives developers views into how systems are behaving. For Maya, the service can see the clickstreams, giving a view into how developers are using the service. A SaaS platform to manage OpenEBS is in development.

Today on the New Stack Analysts we have a combined package of two interviews I recently did with Daniel Bryant and Matt Chotin. Bryant is one of the people The New Stack looks to for his insightful analysis. He is an independent consultant, speaker and writer. Chotin is a well-respected technologist who works as senior director of developer initiatives at AppDynamics, where he is responsible for leading AppDynamics "products to better support developers in improving improving performance and achieving business outcomes." Our topic of discussion for this podcast: When discussing microservices, how would you characterize the state of the market? The wave of development interest in containers is growing as financial investment also grows. We first discuss the state of the market with Bryant, followed by Chotin who talked to the overall maturity of the users who are developing microservices. More microservices means a lot more containers in all stages of development, deployment and management. That ultimately is great news for the developer tool community. People are building continuous delivery models based on DevOps practices delivered across any thinkable possible infrastructure. It’s these DevOps practices that will remain largely cultural as the board room transfixes on digital transformation and uses that paradigm as the basis for spending over time.

Beyond the hugs, open source contributions have considerable benefit. The return is in how open source contributions are valued. There’s a ratio really that can be used. It derives from the amount of people who find value in the open source project in comparison to the revenues and overall value the open source company receives from community interaction, says Sensu's Matthew Broberg in this episode of The New Stack Makers. Broberg, vice president of community at Sensu, has a humanistic and business perspective that defines his views about the way community management provides value back to the business and the individuals who are consuming open source. Overall contributions and open source users who find value in the platform does not always mean these individuals will use the commercial version of the monitoring platform that Sensu offers. But if a percentage of those open source users are using the Sensu product then that’s a healthy sign.

In advance of the premiere screening for The Chasing Grace Project's first episode, Eighty Twenty, at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon, The New Stack Founder Alex Williams discussed diversity in open source with the film's executive producer, Jennifer Cloer. They were also joined by three of the women involved with the film, Nithya Ruff, senior director of open source at Comcast, Abby Kearns, executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and Lauren Cooney, founder and CEO at Spark Labs. For more information on the film, visit https://www.chasinggracefilm.com/

In this interview recorded at the Open Source Leadership Summit, Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and The New Stack’s Founder Alex Williams discussed how Microsoft builds on and contributes to open source for Azure’s AI and machine learning. As Russinovich – who had just given a keynote suggesting that AI owes its current strength to the combination of open source and the cloud – explained, “Fundamentally a lot of AI, machine learning and analytics is built on top of open source and it's a key part of our strategy to build with and use that open source, as well as to contribute back and to add to open source.” Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oCeAq7I0Ofc

FOSSA is an open-source software company that helps companies manage open-source dependencies with an emphasis on automated license compliance, said Kevin Wang, founder and CEO of FOSSA in this episode of The New Stack Makers from the Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma earlier this month. Wang arrived to our TNS Makers livestream studio in the big white conference tent at the Fairmont Hotel with cards on a binder ring titled “The State of Open Source Licensing.” We went through the cards to review what FOSSA has found in the span of the year building the company’s extensive knowledge base. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/AUnHE9hnh80