The New Stack Makers

Episode 312: Chef Across The Enterprise

July 3rd, 2018  |  24 mins 53 secs

automation engineering, caxfax, chef, chef architecture, chef habitat, developers, devops, it administration, linux, software architecture

Chef isn't just for standing up machines anymore. With so much riding on enterprise infrastructure, it's tough to move things around with confidence, and to remain certain that everything you removed, moved or replaced is properly back online after such a shift. Chef has evolved to provide this sort of reassurance to IT administrators and developers, far beyond the original use case of provisioning and standing up single machines.

Episode 311: Discussing DevOps, Data and Microservices with Vexata CTO Surya Varanasi

July 2nd, 2018  |  16 mins 11 secs

application development, big data, data, developers, devops, enterprise software, microservices, microsoft, oracle, sap, software development, vexata

Data in microservice-based environments can be difficult to manage at scale. When application servers scale to near infinity, the datastores can't necessarily expand to meet that demand; they can only be optimized to keep up, and perhaps sharded. Considering just how much enterprise information is stored in some of those large systems, it's a worrying proposition to be asked by management to increase application performance when much of it is tied to an Oracle or Microsoft database.

Episode 310: The State Of Building Images On Kubernetes

June 28th, 2018  |  24 mins 53 secs

ci/cd, cloudnativecon, cncf, continuous deployment, continuous integration, kubecon, kubernetes, red hat, red hat openshift

At KubeCon in Copenhagen in May, many talks focused on the work required to build continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines using containers. One of the major issue still remaining in the container world is specifically that last bit of the CI/CD pipeline: building, storing, and securing containers built for internal software projects.

Steve Speicher, principal product manager on the Red Hat OpenShift Team, spent a good deal of time at KubeCon looking into the solutions and remaining pain points that exist around dynamically building and managing containers within a more traditional agile development environment. "A lot of people want to leverage Kubernetes for the build in the pipeline itself, and so that's one of the things we're talking about here and learning more about what people are interested in to leverage the platform to do more CI/CD," said Speicher.

Episode 309: Optimizely's Claire Vo Talks Successful A/B Testing at Scale

June 27th, 2018  |  19 mins 44 secs

a/b testing, ci/cd, continuous deployment, continuous integration, enterprise software, front-end software, optimizely, software, test environments

When building front-end software, it can be tricky to figure out just what works. As with any page layout endeavor, from the Web to the supermarket checkout line tabloids, there are plenty of nooks and crannies to explore with headlines, graphics, and colors. Any software shop earning money on the Web likely already knows about "A/B" testing: the practice of subtle changing your page design and gathering metrics on its effectiveness at converting visitors versus the existing version of the site.

Episode 308: Security for Kubernetes

June 26th, 2018  |  22 mins 13 secs

cncf, enterprise software, frameworks, kubecon, kubecon + cloudnativecon, kubecon eu, kubernetes, observability, security, tuf notary, tuf project

With all the excitement around containers and Kubernetes, it can be easy to forget that these systems still require the same types of help that older virtual machine and hardware-based systems needed. Chief among that list of needs is security. We sat down at KubeCon in Copenhagen to discuss this very topic with Liz Rice, Technology Evangelist at Aqua Security, Justin Cappos, Associate Professor Computer Science and Engineering at the NYU - Tandon School of Engineering.

Episode 307: Dipping Into Data Lakes With Dremio's Kelly Stirman

June 25th, 2018  |  18 mins 56 secs

big data, cloud, cloud-native, data, data lakes, databases, dremio, mongodb

Data lakes are an enticing idea: pour all of a company's information--both structured and unstructured--into a single system, and then everyone can access it and analyze it on demand. It's a great idea, but in practice, actually getting that data back out of the lake and into the hands of the people who need it can be a lot more difficult than it sounds.

Episode 306: Removing Cultural Impediments To DevOps Uptake With Chef

June 20th, 2018  |  38 mins 14 secs

automation, business culture, chef, chefconf, chefconf 2018, community management, culture, developers, devops, it, programming

At ChefConf 2018 in Chicago in late May, the CTO and senior vice president of Chef sat down with us to discuss the cultural currents in the enterprise. Specifically, they focused on the proliferation of DevOps and DevOps tools within the business community. One of the things that is potentially a roadblock for uptake of DevOps in the enterprise has been the internal culture of many organizations. With so many new ideas and tools out there, it can feel like your company doesn't get it at all, and even perhaps fears DevOps.

Adam Jacob, CTO Chef said that the whole IT organization inside of an enterprise must change to properly embrace DevOps, and he said this must even extend to the opinion IT has of itself. If an organization is doing the wrong thing, or is impeding the uptake of DevOps, said Jacob, administrators and IT workers must push to change those impediments, not resign themselves this being the state of things forever and always.

Episode 305: Iguazio's nuclio Serves Data 100x faster than AWS

June 19th, 2018  |  21 mins 2 secs

big data, cloud, data, iguazio, networking, nuclio, open source, open source software, storage

Yaron Haviv, CTO and co-founder of Iguazio joins TC Currie for this episode of The New Stack Makers.  Haviv’s deep technological experience in the fields of big data, cloud, storage and networking led to him leading the team creating Iguazio’s new product nuclio.

This open-source project, launched in December 2017, is an extremely fast serverless platform with a real-time processing engine.  Extremely fast meaning 100x faster than AWS Lambda. “Everyone knows that the value of data diminishes over time,” said Haviv, “so that means when the data starts flowing into the system, you need to start aggregating contextualizing and acting on it as it flows.”

Episode 304: Red Hat's Michael Hausenblas Discusses The State Of Functions As A Service On Kubernetes

June 18th, 2018  |  25 mins 7 secs

cloudnativecon, cncf, kubecon, kubernetes, openshift, red hat

Michael Hausenblas, Red Hat developer advocate for OpenShift, still prefers the term Functions as a Service. In the push to expand the serverless capabilities of Kubernetes, Hausenblas, at KubCon in May, told us that one of the key desires for enterprises is to be able to host Amazon Lambda-like functionality internally as well as in public clouds. He expects as more users adopt serverless functions, that developers will increasingly become comfortable with function accessibility via APIs.

Episode 303: KubeFlow: Manage AI Workflows With Kubernetes

June 14th, 2018  |  19 mins 56 secs

ai, artificial intelligence, google, kubecon, kubecon + cloudnativecon, kubecon eu, kubeflow, kubernetes, machine learning, mesosphere

Artificial intelligence may be at the peak of its hype cycle for modern businesses, but for the IT administrator it is still a headache, requiring software and processes that may entirely outside the normal sphere of operations. But help is on the way. At Kubecon + CloudNativeCon 2018 last month, David Aronchick introduced the first working version (0.1) of Kubeflow, software that packages the most popular AI and machine learning software so it can be easily run on the Kubernetes container orchestration engine.

Episode 302: Refocusing On Container Application Security

June 13th, 2018  |  29 mins 20 secs

aqua security, container orchestration, containers, docker, ebook, google, gvisor, hyper.sh, kata containers, kubernetes ebook 2, linux, linux kernel, microservices

In the race to make this weird, wild world of distributed, containerized applications compatible with the virtualized infrastructure upon which most enterprises depend, perhaps no project has made more progress than Kata Containers.  The product of collaboration between the Hyper.sh project and Intel’s Clear Containers, Kata aims to pair individual containers with hypervisors, creating that direct link with the hardware that typifies first-generation virtualization, and isolating host Linux kernels from one another.

Google’s recent gVisor project follows a similar path, creating a minimal Linux kernel for the container hosts that reduces the likelihood of exploit.

Episode 301: The Kubernetes Community 20-Year Health Plan

June 12th, 2018  |  41 mins 52 secs

cloudnativecon, cncf, google, kubecon, kubernetes, open source, open source software

Back in May, the world's biggest Kubernetes users and contributors gathered in Denmark for KubeCon Europe. One of the topics we were keen to see addressed by this meeting of the minds was the future of Kubernetes, and the CNCF as a whole.

Episode 300: Inspec: Who’s Adopting It, Why, And How It Fits With Today’s DevOps Practices

June 11th, 2018  |  25 mins 17 secs

chef, chefconf, cloud, compliance, devops, inspec, security

InSpec is a tool for compliance and security testing. It started around operating systems and traditional VMs, and has grown into the security space as a result. Now, it has expanded beyond that. At this year's ChefConf held recently in May, TNS Founder Alex Williams sat down with Dominik Richter, Senior Product Manager at Chef, andAnnie Hedgpeth, Cloud Automation Engineer at 10th Magnitude.

Episode 299: A New Approach to DevOps with Spinnaker on Kubernetes

June 6th, 2018  |  47 mins 13 secs

developers, devops, digital transformation, google, google cloud platform, kubernetes, operations, programming, spinnaker

As organizations look to DevOps as a means to achieve digital transformation, they realize they must accelerate the end-to-end software delivery process, and also make it safer.  

“It can seem like a boil-the-ocean type of problem. That makes it hard to figure out how you’re going to incrementally derive value from it,” said Andrew Phillips, a product manager in Google Cloud Platform’s DevOps division, in this episode of The New Stack Makers.

Episode 298: The Best CI/CD Tool for Kubernetes Doesn't Exist

June 5th, 2018  |  32 mins 43 secs

ci/cd, cloud-native, cloud-native security, cncf, continuous deployment, continuous integration, ebook, kubernetes, kubernetes ebook series

There is no single, best set of tools for continu…There is no single, best set of tools for continuous integration / continuous development (CI/CD) with Kubernetes — each organization will use the tools that are best suited for its specific use case. For this reason, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) does not advocate for one toolset over another when it comes to building, deploying and managing applications on Kubernetes, says Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate at the CNCF. However, they do analyze what integrations and support are needed in the Kubernetes core and identify CI/CD trends in the process.

Episode 297: All Things Enterprise Cloud Native At Red Hat

June 4th, 2018  |  29 mins 53 secs

cloudnativecon, cncf, coreos, kubecon, kubernetes, red hat, red hat openshift

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen in early May, we caught up with Red Hat's newest CTO, Brandon Philips, to discuss the state of CoreOS and containers as a whole. Philips and his team were acquired by Red Hat back in January, and the pairing has focused a good amount of Linux thought leadership onto the Kubernetes project. In Copenhagen, he and Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat, sat down to talk about what it's been like merging the CoreOS and Red Hat teams.