The New Stack Analysts

In this end-of-the-year discussion about missions, values and goals, Alex Williams, TNS Founder was joined by Ashley Williams, Services and Ops Engineer at npm, Inc. who has been active in the Node.js and Rust communities, Charity Majors, CEO of Honeycomb, a company that provides “observability for a distributed world,” and TC Currie, TNS San Francisco Correspondent. Topics include hacker culture, preferred perks, what gets lost when pushing employees, what is gained and more.

Following Amazon's many announcements at AWS re:Invent 2017, including its support for Kubernetes in its new EKS offering, many wondered how Amazon is going to position itself within the Kubernetes community, and hows its EKS and Fargate offerings will impact ECS and the Kubernetes community as a whole. Developers noticed that 

Fargate almost negates the need for EKS, which raised questions with our guests on today's episode of The New Stack Analysts, where we were joined by Matt Asay, Head of Developer Ecosystems at Adobe, and Krishnan Subramanian, Founder and Chief Research Advisor, Infrastructure, Application Platforms and DevOps. 

Amazon noted its continued exponential growth of its ECS platform while at re:Invent. “I was surprised to see the numbers. That’s pretty impressive. But if ECS is growing at such a fast rate, why would you want to bring in Kubernetes? That’s a question I’m still trying to answer," said Subramanian.

Last week, at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2017, much of the buzz seemed to be around service meshes, with everyone curious as to why they needed one now that they've installed the Kubernetes open source container orchestration engine. The topic brought a SRO audience to our pancake podcast panel discussion on the topic at the event, which we captured for your listening please on this latest episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast. The event proved to be a popular one, as people packed the room in order to hear more about the technology from our panel, which was moderated by TNS founder Alex Williams: Borys Pierov, National Center for Biotechnology Information, DevOps tech lead William Morgan, Buoyant, CEO Kris Nova, Heptio, advocacy boss Joab Jackson, The New Stack, news editor On this very morning, Buoyant launched Conduit, its next generation service mesh developed specifically for Kubernetes.  It instantly joined the list of emerging service mesh contenders for this nascent market, alongside of Lyft's Envoy, Istio and Buoyant's own Linkerd. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/el6fWr689t0

Should developers need to interact with the Kubernetes open source container orchestration engine at all? That was one of the many intriguing questions we got from the audience during our second pancake podcast, held Thursday, at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Kubecon 2017. We caught it all here on this latest edition of The Stack Analysts podcast. Sponsored by Alcide and Chef, this panel discussion set out to explore the "Evolving Patterns in Kubernetes." Leading the discussion, moderated by TNS founder Alex Williams, were the following panelists: Erica von Buelow, CoreOS software engineer Tasha Drew, Chef product manager for Habitat Jeyappragash "JJ" Jeyakeerthi, Technologist Gadi Naor, Alcide co-founder and chief technology officer Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/G4XJzvuUMiI

On today's episode of The New Stack Analysts, we sat down with Robust Perception Founder Brian Brazil and Frederic Branczyk, engineer at CoreOS to get the latest insights around the recent Prometheus 2.0 release. With new developments in storage and its Time Series Database, Prometheus 2.0 brings new features such as instantaneous backup to users.

On today's episode of The New Stack Analysts, TNS Founder Alex Williams and TNS reporter Swapnil Bhartiya spoke with Josh Bernstein, Vice President of Technology at Dell, and Patrick Chanezon, Member of Technical Staff at Docker. At this year's DockerCon EU conference, Docker announced it will begin support for Kubernetes. While certain projects may benefit from this announcement, developers working on tasks requiring an orchestrator such as Mesos may have found it lacking. For those working with large scale data services, Bernstein explained that Mesos is often the developer tool of choice for big data applications and those running the SMACK stack, emphasising that Kubernetes simplistic nature has yet to address these issues. "I think the announcement here surrounding Docker embracing Kubernetes is a big deal. I think it shows the path forward in the industry and you get broader adoption of the Kubernetes ecosystem as people no longer have to choose between one or the other," said Bernstein. Bernstein noted that Dell announced a Docker to CSI bridge at DockerCon EU as part of the REX-Ray 11 package, focusing on bringing CSI into the Docker ecosystem. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8FfrjkqprtM

“Sometimes the shift to Kubernetes opens the door to re-evaluating a lot of other things that might make it easier to get to CI/CD,” said Craig Martin, the senior vice president for software engineering and consulting firm Kenzan, as part of a panel for this edition of The New Stack Analysts with Alex Williams, “and look at how they work with technologies holistically.  Kubernetes is not the thing that gets them there, but it might be the thing that opens up the door, to get them to think even bigger than they did before.” Martin was joined by Microsoft software engineer and Kubernetes co-lead Michelle Noorali and Google staff developer advocate Kelsey Hightower for a wide-ranging discussion about the key topics on the docket for the upcoming KubeCon and CloudNativeCon events, scheduled for the first week of December in Austin, Texas.  Noorali and Hightower will co-chair this year’s KubeCon.  Listen now to this panel discussion, and get a glimpse of how the leaders of today’s growing Kubernetes community may be taking some time for introspection.

Going into Cloud Foundry Summit in Basel, Switzerland, there were without a doubt questions about Kubo, the Kubernetes on BOSH project developed by Pivotal and Google. At the keynote yesterday, the questions were only fueled by the announcement of Kubo's rebranding to the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime and its packaging with what Cloud Foundry is calling its Application Runtime. Both runtimes run on BOSH, "the underlying open source tool for release engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of distributed systems" that serve as the foundation for Cloud Foundry's platform. The shift to the new runtime discussion also changed the tenor of the conversation for the pancake breakfast The New Stack hosted, sponsored by VMware. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nej2EsJQwyQ

In this episode of The New Stack Analysts, we talk with Tyler Jewell, the new CEO at WSO2 and Kin Lane, the API evangelist who talk about the need for a new thinking of middleware, event-based architectures and the need to rethink the dogma of REST. Is the structure and binding of REST sufficient in a time when data is by its nature unstructured and unbound?

It promises to be the serverless community’s largest get-together to date:  Next October 8 in New York City, for three days, Serverlessconf promises to bring hundreds of cloud-native applications developers together, for in-depth discussions about how the newest concepts in serverless will mesh with the existing developer culture — which is already in flux for other reasons. “Initially, there was this discussion that maybe serverless is ‘No-ops.’  And it turned out to not be true at all,” admitted Peter Sbarski, who leads the Serverlessconf conferences and is vice president of engineering at A Cloud Guru.  Speaking with Alex Williams for this edition of The New Stack Analysts, Sbarski told us, “When you are deploying functions, you are basically building a large distributed system.  It needs to be managed, organized, looked after.  You need to have monitoring, logging.  You need to know what is going on with the functions, with the third-party services that you consume.  How do you even do a release that makes sense?  How do you release dependencies in the right order? So there’s a lot to be explained.  Sbarski gets into this topic and other subjects to be covered during Serverlessconf in New York City, with TNS Founder Alex Williams and our contributing analyst, Krishnan Subramanian, in this latest edition of The New Stack Analysts.

To kick off Open Source Summit 2017, taking place in Los Angeles this week, The New Stack held a special pancake and podcast panel discussion to discuss the intersections of all things hardware and open source.
 For the event, the panel was comprised of Chris Wright, VP & Chief Technologist, Office of Technology at RedHat, Aaron Welch, SVP of Product at Packet, Ashley McNamara, Principal Developer Advocate at Microsoft, Nithya Ruff, Senior Director of Open Source Practice at Comcast & Director of Board of Directors for The Linux Foundation, and Al Gillen, Analyst at IDC. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/moeELYFQzA8

The “eco-” part of the term “ecosystem” has the same root as both “ecology” and “economy.”  It’s hard to build anything that’s designed to be economically self-sustaining, around a core product that’s essentially free. You’ve heard Apcera CEO Derek Collison sound such warnings before.  As readers of The New Stack will recall, Apcera produces a premium container management platform that lets customers deploy applications across clouds. In an InfoWorld interview published last month, Collison turned up the heat, suggesting to Matt Asay that Kubernetes may have value as an ecosystem core only to companies with a direct interest in it, such as Google.  But Google will inevitably improve its Cloud Platform business model around APIs, Collison said, creating efficiencies that steer the customer around Kubernetes.  And when that happens, the lifeline to the Kubernetes ecosystem could get pinched. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/analysts-apcera-ceo-derek-collison-flip-side-kubernetes/

Now that containerization and orchestration platforms have upset the proverbial apple cart with respect to traditional concepts such as endpoint security, what are the points in the modern network that get security treatment, and who’s responsible for them?  “The folks that are doing SRE at scale are a couple of really hyperscale companies,” said Fintan Ryan, an industry analyst at RedMonk, speaking with Alex Williams for the latest edition of The New Stack Analysts. Independent industry analyst Dr. Chenxi Wang, in the same interview, noted that the latest batch of security startups are taking a very different approach to security policy and frameworks than the traditional, endpoint-centric mindset. Hear the complete discussion with Wang and Ryan in 'The Intersection Between Containerization and Security,' the latest edition of The New Stack Analysts with Alex Williams.

In this episode of The New Stack Analysts, TNS Technical Editor Ben Ball spoke to Mark Boyd, Writer and Analyst at Platformable, Guy Podjarny, CEO of Snyk, and Paul Johnston, Founder of Roundabout Labs, about the state of severless security. In our discussion at ServerlessConf Austin, we talked about both the tools used to secure serverless environments, and the methodologies used to provide inherent, consistently secure approaches. We talked about how serverless moves the security concern from the infrastructure level to high-level targets, such as application security, data security, and network security. The panel agreed that there are many classic security questions which remain the same, especially in regards to best practices from cloud providers, but there are still new security threats dealing with the pace at which serverless allows teams to experiment. Finally, we also discussed how the state of serverless security will change as it sees greater adoption. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QBKvDM_pgX4

Stackie, the New Stack's traveling pancake robot, ventured to Santa Clara California this week to host a pancake breakfast and podcast recording for the Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley 2017.  As steampunk hacker Dr. Torq tended to the fussy 3D pancake maker, TNS founder Alex Williams hosted a lively panel discussion about the evolution of Cloud Foundry, the Open Service Broker API, and Kubo, which is a new open source project being developed by Pivotal and Google that uses Google Bosh to package and deploy Kubernetes. The panel also discussed their favorite forms of communications for geographically diverse development teams, mentioning Twitter, Slack, telepathy and conferences. The panelists for this episode of the The New Stack Analysts podcast were: Dieu Cao: Pivotal director of product management, Holger Mueller: Constellation Research vice president and principal analyst, Abby Kearns: Cloud Foundry executive director, Sarah Novotny: Google Program Manager of Kubernetes Community. As an added bonus, play through to the end of the podcast to hear a special bonus segment where Dr. Torq explains the hardware hacker methodology and demonstrates his steampunk eyeball and as well as his "Electro-Matic Conference Personality Identification Device." Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NXlQ5UZmqxA