The New Stack Podcast

DETROIT —  Rob Skillington’s grandfather was a civil engineer, working in an industry that, in over a century, developed processes and know-how that enabled the creation of buildings, bridges and road.   “A lot of those processes matured to a point where they could reliably build these things,” said Skillington, co-founder and chief technology officer at Chronosphere, an observability platform. “A...

In this latest podcast from The New Stack, we spoke with Ricardo Torres, who is the chief engineer of open source and cloud native for aerospace giant Boeing. Torres also joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in May to serve as a board member. In this interview, recorded at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon last month, Torres speaks about Boeing's use of open source software, as well as its adoption o...

DETROIT — Developer relations, or DevRel to its friends, is not only a coveted career path but also essential to helping developers learn and adopt new technologies.   That guidance is a matter of survival for many organizations. The cloud native era demands new skills and new ways of thinking about developers and engineers’ day-to-day jobs. At Dell Technologies, it meant responding to the challen...

Cloud giant Amazon Web Services manages the largest number of Kubernetes clusters in the world, according to the company.  In this podcast recording, AWS Senior Engineer Jay Pipes discusses AWS' use of Kubernetes, as well as the company's contribution to the Kubernetes code base. The interview was recorded at KubeCon North America last month. The Difference Between Kubernetes and AWS Kubernetes is...

LOS ANGELES — Kubernetes, the open source container orchestrator, may have a big footprint in the cloud native world, but some organizations are doing just fine without it. Take, for example, SeatGeek, which runs a mobile application that serves as a primary and secondary market for event tickets.   For cloud infrastructure, the 12-year-old company’s workloads — which include non-containerized app...

OpenTelemetry project offers vendor-neutral integration points that help organizations obtain the raw materials — the "telemetry" — that fuel modern observability tools, and with minimal effort at integration time. But what does OpenTelemetry mean for those who use their favorite observability tools but don’t exactly understand how it can help them? How might OpenTelemetry be relevant to the folks...

DETROIT — Even in the midst of hand-wringing at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America about how the global economy will make it tough for startups to gain support in the near future, the news about a couple of young WebAssembly-centric companies was bright.   Cosmonic announced that it had raised $8.5 million in a seed round led by Vertex Ventures. And Fermyon Technologies unveiled both funding a...

Organizations are now, almost by default, now becoming multi-cloud operations. No cloud service offers the full breadth of what an enterprise may need, and enterprises themselves find themselves using more than one service, often inadvertently.   HashiCorp is one company preparing enterprises for the challenges with managing more than a single cloud, through the use of a coherent set of software t...

DETROIT — Modern software projects’ emphasis on agility and building community has caused a lot of security best practices, developed in the early days of the Linux kernel, to fall by the wayside, according to Aeva Black, an open source veteran of 25 years.   “And now we're playing catch up,“ said Black, an open source hacker in Microsoft Azure’s Office of the CTO  “A lot of less than ideal practi...

Ukraine has a bright future. It will soon be time to rebuild. But rebuilding requires more than the resources needed to construct a hydroelectric plant or a hospital. It involves software and an understanding of how to use it.   Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and Dima Zakhalyavko, board member at Razom for Ukraine , came to KubeCon in Detroit t...

Redis is not just a cache. It is used in the broader cloud native ecosystem, fits into many service-oriented architectures, and simplifies the deployment and development of modern applications, according to Madelyn Olson , a principal engineer at AWS, during an interview on the New Stack Makers at KubeCon North America in Detroit .   Olson said that people have a primary backend database or some o...

LOS ANGELES — When you’re deploying a business-critical application to the cloud, it’s nice to not need the “war room” you’ve assembled to troubleshoot Day 1 problems.   When BOK Financial, a financial services company that’s been moving apps to the cloud over the last three years, was launching its largest application on the cloud, its engineers supported it with a “war room type situation, monit...

DETROIT — Are we still shifting left? Is it realistic to expect developers to take on the burdens of security and infrastructure provisioning, as well as writing their applications? Is platform engineering the answer to saving the DevOps dream?   Bottom line: Do Devs and Ops really talk to each other — or just passive-aggressively swap Jira tickets?   These are some of the topics explored by a pan...

What is Terraform? Terraform is HashiCorp’s flagship software. The open source tool provides a way to define IT resources — such as monitoring software or cloud services — in human-readable configuration files. These files, which serve as blueprints, can then be used to automatically provision the systems themselves. Kubernetes deployments, for instance, can be streamlined through Terraform.   "Te...

GumGum is a company whose platform serves up online ads related to the context in which potential customers are already shopping or searching. (For instance: it will send ads for Zurich restaurants to someone who’s booked travel to Switzerland.) To handle that granular targeting, it relies on its proprietary machine learning platform, Verity.   “For all of our publishers, we send a list of URLs to...

Wix is a cloud-based development site for making HTML 5 websites and mobile sites with drag and drop tools. It is suited for the beginning user or the advanced developer, said Hila Fish , senior DevOps engineer for Wix, in an interview for The New Stack Makers at HashiCorp’s HashiConf Global conference in Los Angeles earlier this month.   Our questions for Fish focused on Terraform , the open sour...

DUBLIN — The mission of Linux Foundation Energy —  a collaborative, international effort by power companies to help move the world away from fossil fuels — has never seemed more urgent.   In addition to the increased frequency and ferocity of extreme weather events like hurricanes and heat waves, the war between Russia and Ukraine has oil-dependent countries looking ahead to a winter of likely ene...

It's that time of the year again, when cloud native enthusiasts and professionals assemble to discuss all things Kubernetes. KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2023 is being held later this month in Detroit, October 24-28.   In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with Priyanka Sharma, general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — which organizes KubeCon —and CERN compute...

Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto are long-time open source practitioners. It's that practitioner focus they established as core to their approach when they started HashiCorp about ten years ago. Today, HashiCorp is a publicly traded company.   Before they started HashiCorp, Dadgar and Hashimoto were students at the University of Washington. Through college and afterward, they cut their teeth on...

DUBLIN — Europe's open source contributors, according to The Linux Foundation's first-ever survey of them released in September, are driven more by idealism than their American counterparts. The data showed that social reasons for contributing to open source projects were more often cited by Europeans than by Americans, who were more likely to say they participate in open source for professional a...

Brian Douglas was “the Beyoncé of GitHub.” He jokingly crowned himself with that title during his years at that company, where he advocated for open source and a more inclusive community supporting it. His work there eventually led to his new startup, Open Sauced .   Like the Queen Bey, Douglas’ mission is to empower a community. In his case, he’s seeking to support the open source community. With...

Amazon Web Services would not be what it is today without open source.   "I think it starts with sustainability," said David Nalley , head of open source and marketing at AWS in an interview at the Open Source Summit in Dublin for The New Stack Makers. "And this really goes back to the origin of Amazon Web Services. AWS would not be what it is today without open source."   Long-term support for op...

Paul Vixie grew up in San Francisco. He dropped out of high school in 1980. He worked on the first Internet gateways at DEC and, from there, started the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), establishing Internet protocols, particularly the Domain Name System (DNS).   Today, Vixie is one of the few dozen in the technology world with the title "distinguished engineer," working at Amazon Web Services...

Ryan Dahl is the co-founder and creator of Deno, a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly based on the V8 JavaScript engine and the Rust programming language. He is also the creator of Node.js.   We interviewed Dahl for The New Stack Technical Founder Odyssey series.   "Yeah, so we have a JavaScript runtime ," Dahl said. "It's pretty similar in, in essence, to Node. It executes some J...

The whole world uses open source, but as we’ve learned from the Log4j debacle, “free” software isn’t really free. Organizations and their customers pay for it when projects aren’t frequently updated and maintained.   How can we support open source project maintainers — and how can we decide which projects are worth the time and effort to maintain?   “A lot of people pick up open source projects, a...