The New Stack Analysts

The Wikimedia Foundation‘s impact on culture and media sharing has had immeasurable benefits on a worldwide scale. As the foundation that manages the fabled Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource and a number of outlets, Wikimedia’s mission is to “to bring free educational content to the world” All told, Wikipedia alone is available in about 300 different languages with more than 50 million articles on 1.5 billion unique devices a month with 6,000 views a second — with 250,000 engaged editors, Chase Pettet, senior security architect, Wikimedia Foundation, said. “Editors are sort of the lifeblood of the movement,” he said. In this, The New Stack Analyst podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder, and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering for Mastercard, Pettet discussed Wikimedia’s infrastructure-management challenges, both past and present, and what makes one of the world’s foremost providers of free information tick.

In this, The New Stack Analyst podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder, and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard, Jennifer Strejevitch, site reliability engineer for Condé Nast speaks about her experiences and observations at the front lines of the publishing company infrastructure-related challenges and successes. Condé Nast is one of the most well recognized media brands in the world, with a range of stand-out titles that include “Wired,” “The New Yorker” and “Vanity Fair.” The publishing giant also represents a case study of how a large multinational company was able to shift its entire international web and data operations to a homogenous Kubernetes infrastructure it built and now manages with open source tools. Indeed, during the past five years, Condé Nast has been able, build a single underlying platform consisting of several dozen websites spread out around the world, including Russia and China in addition to the U.S. and Europe. Its web presence now hosts more than 300 million digital unique users per month and 570 article views every second.

In this, The New Stack Analyst podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder, and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard, Pettet discussed Wikimedia’s infrastructure-management challenges, both past and present, and what makes one of the world’s foremost providers of free information tick. The Wikimedia Foundation’s impact on culture and media sharing has had immeasurable benefits on a worldwide scale. As the foundation that manages the fabled Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource and a number of outlets, Wikimedia’s mission is to “to bring free educational content to the world” All told, Wikipedia alone is available in about 300 different languages with 50 million articles and 250,000 engaged editors at any given time on 1.5 billion unique devices a month with 6,000 views a second, Chase Pettet, senior security architect, Wikimedia Foundation, said. “It’s humongous,”

Thanks to the COVID-19 global pandemic, many IT systems are facing unprecedented workloads, reaching levels of usage on a daily basis that usually only happen on the busiest days of the year. The good news is that the cloud native approach has been rapidly gaining popularity with businesses large and small to help meet these sudden demands. And proper security precautions must be built into these emerging cloud native systems. Applying principles of cloud native security to the enterprise was the chief topic of discussion for our panel of experts in this virtual panel. Panelists were: Cheryl Hung, Director of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Carla Arend, Senior Program Director, Infrastructure Software, IDC. John Morello, Palo Alto Networks Vice President of Product, Prisma Cloud. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted the discussion. Certainly, operations have changed for most of us due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic. But this can be a good opportunity for an organization to rethink how they approach business continuing and resiliency, Arend noted. Those who were on the digital journey are getting much better through this crisis than those just starting. Now is a great time to focus on digital innovation. Indeed, if anything, innovation is just accelerating in this time, Morello agreed. Without having the ability to interact in person, the tools that enable digital transformation — Kubernetes, containers — helps people operate more efficiently.

What is the role that the data plane plays in a Kubernetes ecosystem? This was the theme for our latest (virtual) pancake breakfast and panel discussion, sponsored by DataStax, the keeper of the open source Cassandra database. Last month, Datastax released a Kubernetes operator, so that the NoSQL database can be more easily installed, managed, and updated in Kubernetes container-based infrastructure. The Panelists for this discussion: Kathryn Erickson, DataStax senior director of partnerships. Janakiram MSV, principal analyst of Janakiram & Associates. Aaron Ploetz, Target NoSQL lead engineer. Sam Ramji, DataStax chief strategy officer. Alex Williams, publisher for The New Stack served as moderator for this panel, with the help of TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson. in 2015, Ramji worked at Google and oversaw the business development around its then-newly open source project, Kubernetes, which was based on its internal container orchestrator, the Borg. The Borg provides Google a single control pane for dynamically managing all its many containerized workloads, and its scale-out database, Spanner, offered the same for the data plane. “The marriage of those two things made compute and data so universally addressable so easy to access that you could do just about anything that you could imagine,” Ramji explained.

Listen to all of our podcasts here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/ In this, The New Stack Analysts podcast, Lee Calcote, an analyst and founder of Layer5, and Brian “Redbeard” Harrington, a principal product manager for OpenShift service mesh at Red Hat, discussed the many nuances of what the survey numbers really mean. Calcote, for example, notes how traffic management is seen as a key feature among the many different service mesh capabilities, but it’s most useful to advanced users. Speaking about the use of traffic management functionalities, Calcote said: “Folks tend to be a little more advanced as they get into that because they’re at that point they’re actually affecting traffic and then routing requests differently, as opposed to something like just purely observing or getting a ‘read-only’ view in their environment.” Harrington agreed. “I’m happy that Lee kind of pointed out the specific distinction around traffic control, because among the users who I’m talking to that’s the — pun intended — ‘gateway drug,'” Harrington said. Organizations with legacy bare metal environments and “pretty expensive hardware incumbencies” face challenges as they move “move to dynamic environments” and as they “de-prioritize” some legacy hardware, traffic management capabilities service meshes can provide help when making the shift, Harrington said. The survey results and experience in the field also indicate organizations are still mulling the best use cases for service meshes. When asked whether an organization should adopt or how they should begin to rely on service meshes, it is often “irrespective of whether they’re starting on the simpler…or more sophisticated [possibilities] in that spectrum,” Calcote said.”The advice is generally the same which is you should start and adopt a bit at a time a bit of value at a time and what that value is sort of dependent upon what you’re looking for out of mesh,” Calcote said. “But between you getting comfortable with what you’ve deployed and getting the value out of what you’ve deployed, [organizations should] take the next step from there to hopefully at some point leverage all of the functionality of the mesh.”

The New Stack Editor Alex Williams sat down, with Diane Patton, technical marketing engineer at NetApp, Jenny Fong, VP of marketing at Diamanti, and Sriram Subramanian, an analyst at IDC, to learn how Kubernetes has evolved into the preferred infrastructure layer for stateful environments. Listen to this episode of The New Stack Analysts to hear more about where we are heading and how we should be able to handle state in any given situation.

In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, we explore how two Kubernetes Special Interest Groups (SIG) are taking into account all of the various user personas in order to help shape the user experience on Kubernetes. Guests on this episode include: Tasha Drew, co-chair of the Kubernetes Usability SIG and a product line manager for Kubernetes and Project Pacific at VMware. Lei Zhang, co-chair of the Kubernetes Application Delivery SIG and a staff engineer at Alibaba. Emily Omier, The New Stack correspondent and a content strategist for cloud native companies.

Many IT teams begin moving their applications to containers and Kubernetes after their managers mandate the switch. Then in the rush to deploy they may forget, or simply delay, some fundamentals. Only six to 12 months later does integrating security into their CI/CD pipeline becomes a priority. This gradual evolution toward cloud native security best practices is worrisome, but it’s the norm among organizations adopting Kubernetes today. This is what we learned from a panel of cloud native security experts at The New Stack’s pancake and podcast from KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America this week. The New Stack founder and publisher Alex Williams was joined on the panel by: Keith Mokris, product marketing manager, container security at Palo Alto Networks; Maya Kaczorowski, product manager at Google. Santiago Torres-Arias, Ph.D. student at New York University Center for Cyber Security; Sarah Allen, co-chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Security Special Interest Group (SIG); Sean M. Kerner, senior editor at InternetNews.com. Prisma by Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast.

The developer will certainly face new challenges when making the switch to a cloud native platform. The process might include, for example, learning how to add code to Kubernetes clusters or mastering the mechanics of etcd and kubectlis. The power and scaling flexibility a cloud native platform and Kubernetes offer, among other things, are often worth more than developers’ investment in time and resources when adopting these technologies. And yet. What developers are usually more concerned about is the business goals they need to achieve. They will likely care less what the underlying infrastructure is as much as it can be used to create code that might improve their organization’s bottom line, or for a public institution, better meet the needs of a citizen. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts recorded at the 2019 European Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague, The Netherlands, this month where the business needs of developers and the role of the Cloud Foundry community were dicussed — and debated. Hosted by Alex Williams, The New Stack founder and editor-in-chief and co-hosted by Devin Davis, vice president of marketing, Cloud Foundry Foundation, the panelists were: Abby Kearns, executive director, Cloud Foundry Foundation Michael Cote, marketing director, Pivotal Tammy Van Hove, distinguished engineer, IBM Udo Seidel, Tech Writer, Heise iX

Enterprise startups are building the tools that help their customers to create an agile modern enterprise that adapts quickly to market changes. But the enterprise isn’t always open to that change, or even aware of the benefits of that change, said Frederic Lardinois, writer and news editor at TechCrunch, in this episode of The New Stack Analysts recorded at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise held on Sept. 5 in San Francisco. This is a primary challenge for enterprise software companies today. The people and technologies that help enterprise software startups grow was the focus of this recent panel discussion at The New Stack pancake breakfast and podcast at TC Sessions: Enterprise. TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams moderated the discussion, which was sponsored by GitLab. Panelists included: 1. Frederic Lardinois / writer & news editor / TechCrunch 2. Katherine Boyle / Principal / General Catalyst 3. Melissa Pancoast / founder & CEO / The Beans 4. Sameer Patel / former CEO / Kahuna 5. Sid Sijbrandij / co-founder & CEO / GitLab

What became the punk rock genre may be a harbinger of what is in store for the open source movement —  but hopefully not. At any rate, open source’s popularity can certainly be compared to punk rock’s rise. When Linux began to be seen as a powerful and very practical alternative to Unix, and especially, Windows, during the 1990s, the movement then felt very...well, underground. Trading discs of Linux distros and sharing tips on how to hack “Doom” (okay, the hacks were open source but Doom’s code was obviously wasn’t). But hopefully, open source will take a different path than what became of punk rock, especially for enterprises, as open matures, or to take the punk rock analogy further, become corporate musak. The punk rock comparison was one a main theme of this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded during VMware World San Francisco, with guests Tom Petrocelli, a research fellow at Amalgam Insights, and Adam Jacob, CEO at The System Initiative and former CTO of Chef Software. They described what the open source movement has become and where it’s heading, and more importantly, what it all means for enterprises.

It would be a mistake to ignore the immediate impact artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is already having on software development processes and DevOps. While some may see AI and ML as new technologies high on the hype cycle with overall marginal influences — even though they have been available for years — many organizations are already taking advantage of how they can automate many tasks during the development process. This includes their role in performing more mundane and time-consuming tasks that developers, as well as operations staffers, would prefer not to do by letting the machine take over. During this The New Stack Analysts podcast, two DevOps and development process experts spoke about AI’s and ML’s effects on DevOps and the state of algorithm development today and it impact on IT operations today: Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst, Amalgam Insights, and Bola Rotibi, Research Director, Software Development, CCS Insight. This roundtable was hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack. Already, AI and ML are affecting DevOps workflows have provided “an amazing access to computing and processing” over the past few years, Park said. They have provided DevOps with the ability to test a wide variety of algorithmic strategies, as well as provide storage and data-management capabilities to handle the processing, the testing and benefits associated with machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Just four years ago, industry analysts were wary of running production workloads in containers, but certainly the industry got over that fast. Numbers around Docker and Kubernetes adoption vary broadly, but it's safe to say that well over half of Fortune 100 companies have embraced containers. In this episode of The New Stack Analysts, our Editor in Chief Alex Williams sits down with Briana Frank, director of product management at IBM, and James Ford, independent technical strategy advisor, to reflect on the origins of containers, how Kubernetes and Docker began, and how adoption has grown so fast in only a few years. Frank said the impetus behind rapid container adoption came from Docker allowing everyone to get started quickly and simply —  about ten minutes. For her, this accessibility is a continued source of inspiration when she's creating demos and Getting Started tutorials, as this ease of use accelerates innovation. “We can attribute a lot of the popularity of Kubernetes today to the Docker beginnings,” she said.

You put three journalists from leading tech news outlets in a podcast room with the founder and editor in chief of the media outlet of record for the development and DevOps community. One could guess they would have rather opinionated thoughts to share and more than enough background based on an incessant curiosity — or arguably — an obsessional drive to uncover and analyze the truth beneath the marketing-laden facades of the cloud native software development industry today. In fact, all of the above aptly describes the theme and atmosphere of a podcast meeting featuring most of the press corps members attending the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in Barcelona in May.Speaking with Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack, the podcast guests included: Frederic Lardinois, a writer and news editor for TechCrunch; Ron Miller, an enterprise reporter for TechCrunch; Sean Michael Kerner, senior Editor for InternetNews.com Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H_Ej3OCK5k