The New Stack Podcast

In today’s uncertain economy, businesses are tightening costs, including for Kubernetes (K8s) operations, which are notoriously difficult to optimize. Yodar Shafrir, co-founder and CEO of ScaleOps, explained at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe that dynamic, cloud-native applications have constantly shifting loads, making resource allocation complex.  Engineers must provision enough resources to han...

Heroku has been undergoing a major transformation, re-platforming its entire Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering over the past year and a half. This ambitious effort, dubbed “Fir,” will soon reach general availability. According to Betty Junod, CMO and SVP at Heroku (owned by Salesforce), the overhaul includes a shift to Kubernetes and OCI standards, reinforcing Heroku’s commitment to open sourc...

In this episode of  The New Stack Makers , recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, Alex Williams speaks with Ville Aikas, Chainguard founder and early Kubernetes contributor. They reflect on the evolution of container security, particularly how early assumptions—like trusting that users would validate container images—proved problematic. Aikas recalls the lack of secure defaults, such as allo...

In a candid episode of  The New Stack Makers , Kubernetes pioneer Kelsey Hightower and AWS’s Eswar Bala explored the evolving relationship between enterprise cloud providers and open source software at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon London. Hightower highlighted open source's origins as a grassroots movement challenging big vendors, and shared how it gave people—especially those without traditional tech c...

In a rare show of collaboration, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have joined forces on Kro — the Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator — an open source, cloud-agnostic tool designed to simplify custom resource orchestration in Kubernetes. Announced during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, Kro was born from strong customer demand for a Kubernetes-native solution that works across cloud providers without ve...

OpenSearch has evolved significantly since its 2021 launch, recently reaching a major milestone with its move to the Linux Foundation. This shift from company-led to foundation-based governance has accelerated community contributions and enterprise adoption, as discussed by NetApp’s Amanda Katona in a  New Stack Makers  episode recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe. NetApp, an early adopter...

AI applications are evolving beyond chatbots into more complex and transformative solutions, according to Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong. In a recent episode of The New Stack Makers, he discussed the rise of AI agents, which act as "virtual employees" to enhance organizational efficiency. For instance, AI can now function as a product manager for APIs—analyzing documentation, detectin...

Platform engineering was meant to ease the burdens of Devs and Ops by reducing cognitive load and repetitive tasks. However, building internal development platforms (IDPs) has proven challenging. Despite this, Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have a platform team. In a recent  New Stack Makers  episode, Mallory Haigh of Humanitec and Nathen Harvey of Go...

AI agents are set to transform software development, but software itself isn’t going anywhere—despite the dramatic predictions. On this episode of The New Stack Makers, Mark Hinkle, CEO and Founder of Peripety Labs, discusses how AI agents relate to serverless technologies, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), and configuration management.  Hinkle envisions AI agents as “dumb robots” handling tasks like...

The transition from SaaS to Services as Software with AI agents is underway, necessitating new orchestration methods similar to Kubernetes for containers. AI agents will require resource allocation, workflow management, and scalable infrastructure as they evolve. Two key trends are driving this shift:  Data Evolution – From spreadsheets to AI agents, data has progressed through relational database...

Amazon Q Developer is streamlining the software development lifecycle by integrating AI-powered tools into AWS. In an interview at AWS in Seattle, Srini Iragavarapu, director of generative AI Applications and Developer Experiences at AWS, discussed how Amazon Q Developer enhances the developer experience. Initially focused on inline code completions, Amazon Q Developer evolved by incorporating gen...

Maya Kaczorowski noticed that AI identity and AI agent identity concerns were emerging from outside the security industry, rather than from CISOs and security leaders. She concluded that OAuth, the open standard for authentication, already serves the purpose of granting access without exposing passwords.  Kaczorowski, a respected technologist and founder of Oblique, a startup focused on self-serve...

The rise of the World Wide Web enabled developers to build tools and platforms on top of it. Similarly, the advent of large language models (LLMs) allows for creating new AI-driven tools, such as autonomous agents that interact with LLMs, execute tasks, and make decisions. However, verifying these decisions is crucial, and critical reasoning may be a solution, according to Yam Marcovitz, tech lead...

Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative, discusses a shift in infrastructure automation—moving from writing code to building models that enable rapid simulations and collaboration. In The New Stack Makers, he compares this approach to Formula One racing, where teams use high-fidelity models to simulate race conditions, optimizing performance before hitting the track. System Initiative applies this co...

Morgan McLean, co-founder of OpenTelemetry and senior director of product management at Splunk, has long tackled the challenges of observability in large-scale systems. In a conversation with Alex Williams on The New Stack Makers , McLean reflected on his early frustrations debugging high-scale services and the need for better observability tools. OpenTelemetry, formed in 2019 from OpenTracing and...

Observability is expensive because traditional tools weren’t designed for the complexity and scale of modern cloud-native systems, explains Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb.io. Logging tools, while flexible, were optimized for manual, human-scale data reading. This approach struggles with the massive scale of today’s software, making logging slow and resource-intensive. Monitoring tools, with their...

Generative AI is a data-driven story with significant infrastructure and operational implications, particularly around the rising demand for GPUs, which are better suited for AI workloads than CPUs. In an episode of The New Stack Makers recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, Sudha Raghavan, SVP for Developer Platform at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, discussed how AI’s rapid adoption ha...

The hardware industry is surging, driven by AI's demanding workloads, with Arm—a 35-year-old pioneer in processor IP—playing a pivotal role. In an episode of The New Stack Makers recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, Pranay Bakre, principal solutions engineer at Arm, discussed how Arm is helping organizations migrate and run applications on its technology. Bakre highlighted Arm’s par...

Heroku has open-sourced its Twelve-Factor App methodology, initially created in 2011 to help developers build portable, resilient cloud applications. Heroku CTO Gail Frederick announced this shift at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, explaining the move aims to involve the community in modernizing the framework. While the methodology inspired a generation of cloud developers, certain factors...

Falco, an open-source runtime observability and security tool, was created by Sysdig founder Loris Degioanni to collect real-time system events directly from the kernel. Leveraging eBPF technology for improved safety and performance, Falco gathers data like pod names and namespaces, correlating them with customizable rules. Unlike static analysis tools, it operates in real-time, monitoring events...

Jetstack’s cert-manager, a leading open-source project in Kubernetes certificate management, began as a job interview challenge. Co-founder Matt Barker recalls asking a prospective engineer to automate Let’s Encrypt within Kubernetes. By Monday, the candidate had created kube-lego, which evolved into cert-manager, now downloaded over 500 million times monthly. Cert-manager’s journey to CNCF gradua...

The tech industry faces a paradox: despite high demand for skills, many developers and engineers are unemployed. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City, Utah, Andela and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced an initiative to train 20,000 technologists in cloud native computing over the next decade. oss O'neill, Senior Program Manager at Andela and Chris Aniszc...

When open source projects shift to proprietary licensing, forks and new communities often emerge. Such was the case with MapLibre, born from Mapbox’s 2020 decision to make its map rendering engine proprietary. In conjunction with All Things Open 2024, Seth Fitzsimmons, a principal engineer at AWS and Tarus Balog, principal technical strategist for open source at AWS shared that this engine, popula...

At All Things Open in October, Anandhi Bumstead, AWS’s director of software engineering, highlighted OpenSearch's journey and the advantages of the Linux Foundation's stewardship. OpenSearch, an open source data ingestion and analytics engine, was transferred by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the Linux Foundation in September 2024, seeking neutral governance and broader community collaboration. Orig...

Is Apache Spark too costly? Amazon Principal Engineer Patrick Ames tackled this question during an interview with The New Stack Makers , sharing insights into transitioning from Spark to Ray for managing large-scale data. Ames, described as a "go-to" engineer for exabyte-scale projects, emphasized a goal-driven approach to solving complex engineering problems, from simplifying daily chores to opti...