Software Engineering Daily

At KubeCon, I had the chance to catch up with Adam Stacoviak of the Changelog, a podcast that was an inspiration for starting Software Engineering Daily. Changelog has long been one of my favorite podcasts about engineering, thanks in part to Adam’s personality. This was a spontaneous conversation, but it was a good one.

A modern farm has hundreds of sensors to monitor the soil health, and robotic machinery to reap the vegetables. A modern shipping yard has hundreds of computers working together to orchestrate and analyze the freight that is coming in from overseas. A modern factory has temperature gauges and smart security cameras to ensure workplace safety. All of these devices could be considered “edge” devices...

After two weeks of episodes about Kubernetes, our in-depth coverage of container orchestration is drawing to a close. We have a few more shows on the topic before we move on to covering other aspects of software. If you have feedback on this thematic format (whether you like it or not), send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com Today’s episode fits nicely into some of the themes we have...

Last month, Software Engineering Daily had our 4th Meetup at Cloudflare in San Francisco. For this Meetup, the format was short interviews with security specialists from Pinterest, Cloudflare, and Segment. Each of these companies has unique security challenges, but they also have overlap in their security strategies. Nick Sullivan, Amine Kamel, and Evan Johnson are all seasoned engineers, and it w...

Creating a podcast is still too difficult. One of the main barriers to entry is the editing process. After recording a podcast, the podcast producer needs to line up soundwaves in a digital audio workstation and clip the raw audio files to remove sections that need to be removed. As someone who has edited a lot of podcasts, I know that this is difficult and tedious. One way of simplifying the edit...

In 2011, platform-as-a-service was in its early days. It was around that time that Gabe Monroy started a container platform called Deis, with the goal of making an open source platform-as-a-service that anyone could deploy to whatever infrastructure they wanted. Over the last six years, Gabe had a front row seat to the rise of containers, the variety of container orchestration systems, and the cha...

Oliver Gould worked at Twitter from 2010 to 2014. Twitter’s popularity was taking off, and the engineering team was learning how to scale the product. During that time, Twitter adopted Apache Mesos, and began breaking up its monolithic architecture into different services. As more and more services were deployed, engineers at Twitter decided to standardize communications between those services wit...

Modern applications store most of their data on hosted storage solutions. We use hosted block storage to back databases, hosted object storage for objects such as videos, and hosted file storage for file systems. Using a cloud provider for these storage systems can simplify scalability, durability, and availability–it can be less painful than taking care of storage yourself. One downside: the stor...

A common problem in a distributed system: how do you take a snapshot of the global state of that system? Snapshot is difficult because you need to tell every node in the system to simultaneously record its state. There are several reasons to take a snapshot. You might want to take a picture of the global state for the purposes of debugging. Or you might want to take a comprehensive snapshot of you...

In the last four years, CoreOS has been at the center of enterprise adoption of containers. During that time, Brian Harrington (or “Redbeard”) has seen a lot of deployments. In this episode, Brian discusses the patterns he has seen among successful Kubernetes deployments–and the pitfalls of the less successful. How should you manage configuration? How can you avoid IP address overlap between conta...

A backend application can have hundreds of services written in different programming frameworks and languages. Across these different languages, log messages are produced in different formats. Some logging is produced in XML, some is produced in JSON, some is in other formats. These logs need to be unified into a common format, and centralized for any developer who wants to debug. The popularity o...

Kubernetes has become the standard way of deploying new distributed applications. Most new internet businesses started in the foreseeable future will leverage Kubernetes (whether they realize it or not). Many old applications are migrating to Kubernetes too. Before Kubernetes, there was no standardization around a specific distributed systems platform. Just like Linux became the standard server-si...

Kubernetes has become the standard system for deploying and managing clusters of containers. But the vision of the project goes beyond managing containers. The long-term goal is to democratize the ability to build distributed systems. Brendan Burns is a co-founder of the Kubernetes project. He recently announced an open source project called Metaparticle, a standard library for cloud-native develo...

Ben Sigelman began working on distributed tracing when he was at Google and authored the “Dapper” paper. Dapper was implemented at Google to help debug some of the distributed systems problems faced by the engineers who work on Google infrastructure. Today, a decade after he started thinking about distributed tracing, Ben Sigelman is the CEO of Lightstep, a company that provides distributed tracin...

Since Kubernetes came out, engineers have been deploying clusters to Amazon. In the early years of Kubernetes, deploying to AWS meant that you had to manage the availability of the cluster yourself. You needed to configure etcd and your master nodes in a way that avoided having a single point of failure. Deploying Kubernetes on AWS became simpler with an open-source tool called kops (short for Kub...

A single user request hits Google’s servers. A user is looking for search results. In order to deliver those search results, that request will have to hit several different internal services on the way to getting a response. These different services work together to satisfy the user request. All of these services need to communicate efficiently, they need to scale, and they need to be secure. Serv...

With the community centralizing on Kubernetes, developers are able to comfortably bet big on open source projects like Istio, Conduit, Rook, Fluentd, and Helm, each of which we will be covering in the next few weeks. The centralization on Kubernetes also makes it easier to build enterprise companies, who are no longer trying to think about which container orchestration to support. There is a wide...

In the first 10 years of cloud computing, a set of technologies emerge that every software enterprise needs; continuous delivery, version control, logging, monitoring, routing, data warehousing. These tools were built into the Cloud Foundry project, a platform for application deployment and management. As we enter the second decade of cloud computing, another new set of technologies are emerging a...

In the 1980s and the 1990s, most applications used only a relational database for their data management. In the early 2000s, software projects started to use an ever increasing number of data sources. MongoDB popularized the document database, which allows storage of objects that do not have a consistent schema. The Hadoop distributed file system enabled the redundant storage and efficient queryin...

Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform as a service for deploying and managing web applications. Cloud Foundry is widely used by enterprises who are running applications that are built using Spring, a popular web framework for Java applications, but developers also use Cloud Foundry to manage apps built in Ruby, Node and any other programming language. Cloud Foundry includes routing, message bro...

Originally published October 22, 2015 Dwarf Fortress is a construction and management simulation computer game set in a procedurally generated fantasy world in which the player indirectly controls a group of dwarves, and attempts to construct a successful underground fortress. Tarn Adams works on Dwarf Fortress with his brother Zach.

Originally published January 6, 2016 Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the author of several books, including The Go Programming Language and The C Programming Language, a book more commonly referred to as K&R. Professor Kernighan also worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix.

Originally published November 18, 2015 Seth Godin is a writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the author of many books, including most recently, What To Do When It’s Your Turn.

Originally published November 10, 2015 Wolfram Research makes computing software powered by the Wolfram language, a knowledge-based programming language that draws from symbolic and functional programming paradigms. Stephen Wolfram is the Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, and also the author of A New Kind of Science.

Originally published November 17, 2015 Technical debt, referring to the compounding cost of changes to software architecture, can be especially challenging in machine learning systems. D. Sculley is a software engineer at Google, focusing on machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. He recently co-authored the paper Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt.