The New Stack Podcast

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Rob Skillington, co-founder and CTO of Chronosphere, discusses the challenges engineers face in building tools for their organizations. Skillington emphasizes that the "build or buy" decision oversimplifies the issue of tooling and suggests that understanding the abstractions of a project is crucial. Engineers should consider where to build and where to buy...

Jean Yang, founder of API observability company Akita Software, emphasizes that programming languages should be shaped by software development needs and data, rather than philosophical ideals. Yang, a former assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, believes that programming tools and processes should be influenced by actual use and data, prioritizing the developer experience over the lan...

Docker CTO Justin Cormack reveals that Docker has been a go-to tool for data scientists in AI and machine learning for years, primarily in specialized areas like image processing and prediction models. However, the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT last year sparked a significant surge in Docker's popularity within the AI community. The focus shifted to large language models (LLMs), with a growing inter...

In this episode, Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative, discusses the need for a new definition as AI differs significantly from open source software. The complexity arises from the unique nature of AI, particularly large language models and transformers, which challenge traditional copyright frameworks. Maffulli emphasizes the urgency of establishing a definition for...

DockerCon showcased a commitment to enhancing the developer experience, with a particular focus on addressing the challenge of debugging containers in Kubernetes. The newly launched Docker Debug offers a language-independent toolbox for debugging both local and remote containerized applications. By abstracting Kubernetes concepts like pods and namespaces, Docker aims to simplify debugging processe...

TNS host Alex Williams is joined by Florian Valeye, a data engineer at Back Market, to shed light on the evolving landscape of data engineering, particularly focusing on Delta Lake and his contributions to open source communities. As a member of the Delta Lake community, Valeye discusses the intersection of data warehouses and data lakes, emphasizing the need for a unified platform that breaks dow...

Liam Crilly, Senior Director of Product Management at NGINX, discussed the potential of WebAssembly (Wasm) during this recording at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao, Spain. With over three decades of experience, Crilly highlighted WebAssembly's promise of universal portability, allowing developers to build once and run anywhere across a network of devices. While Wasm is more mature on the client s...

Jonathan Katz, a principal product manager at Amazon Web Services, discusses the evolution of PostgreSQL in an episode of The New Stack Makers. He notes that PostgreSQL's uses have expanded significantly since its inception and now cover a wide range of applications and workloads. Initially considered niche, it faced competition from both open-source and commercial relational database systems. Kat...

The practice of "shift left," which involves moving security concerns to the code level and increasing developers' responsibility for security, is facing a backlash, with both developers and security professionals expressing concerns. Peter Klimek, director of technology at Imperva, discusses the reasons behind this backlash in this episode. Some organizations may have exhausted the benefits of sh...

Operational resiliency, as explained by Dormain Drewitz of PagerDuty, involves the ability to bounce back and recover from setbacks, not only technically but also in terms of organizational recovery. True resiliency means maintaining the willingness to take risks even after facing challenges. In a conversation with Heather Joslyn on the New Stack Makers podcast, Drewitz discussed the role of AI an...

In this episode, Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker, highlights the evolving role of developers, emphasizing their increasing importance in architectural decision-making and tool development for applications. This shift in prioritizing a great developer experience and rapid tool development has led to substantial spending in the industry. Johnston expressed confidence that integrating generative AI int...

This episode of The New Stack Makers was recorded on the road at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao, Spain. A pair of technologists from Amazon Web Services (AWS) join us to discuss the development of Powertools for AWS Lambda. Andrea Amorosi, a senior solutions architect at AWS, and Leandro Damascena, a specialist solutions architect, share insights into how Powertools evo...

KubeCon 2023 is set to feature three hot topics, according to Taylor Dolezal from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Firstly, GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are taking the spotlight, particularly regarding their security and integration with legacy infrastructure. Platform engineering is also on the rise, with over 25 sessions at KubeCon Chicago focusing on its definition and how it be...

Digital.ai, an AI-powered DevSecOps platform, serves large enterprises such as financial institutions, insurance companies, and gaming firms. The primary challenge faced by these clients is scaling their DevOps practices across vast organizations. They aim to combine modern development methodologies like agile DevOps with the need for speed and intimacy with end-users on a large scale. This episod...

Moving workloads to the cloud presents cost prediction challenges. Traditional setups with on-premises hardware offer predictability, but cloud costs are usage-based and granular. In this podcast episode, Matt Stellpflug, a senior FinOps specialist at ProsperOps, discusses the complexities of forecasting cloud expenses with TNS host Heather Joslyn. Cloud users face fluctuating costs due to continu...

In her keynote address at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Europe, Fatima Sarah Khalid emphasized that being an ally is more than just superficial gestures like wearing pronouns on badges or correctly pronouncing coworkers' names. True allyship involves taking meaningful actions to support and uplift individuals from underrepresented or marginalized backgrounds. This support is essential,...

In a recent conversation at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao, Spain, Gabriel Colombo, the General Manager of the Linux Foundation Europe and the Executive Director of the Fintech Open Source Foundation, discussed the potential impact of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) on the open source community. The conversation shed light on the challenges and opportunities that the CRA presents to open source a...

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Uma Daniel, a product manager at UST, discusses the current complexities in the global economy, marked by low unemployment except in the tech industry, high inflation, high interest rates, a volatile stock market, and the looming threat of recession. Amid these challenges, organizations are seeking ways to enhance their operational efficiency. Danie...

Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3 in late 2022, various industries have been actively exploring its applications. Madhukar Kumar, CMO of SingleStore, discussed his experiments with large language models (LLMs) in this podcast episode with TNS host Heather Joslyn. He mentioned a specific LLM called Gorilla, which is trained on APIs and can generate APIs based on specific tasks. Kumar also tal...

Observability in multi-cloud environments is becoming increasingly complex, as highlighted by Martin Mao, CEO and co-founder of Chronosphere. This challenge has two main components: a rise in customer-facing incidents, which demand significant engineering time for debugging, and the ineffectiveness and high cost of existing tools. These issues are creating a problematic return on investment for th...

Platform engineering is gaining prominence due to the need for faster application deployment, which directly impacts business velocity. Valentina Alaria, Senior Director of Product at VMware, emphasizes that not all organizations pursuing platform engineering have the same goals, context, or pain points. They tailor solutions to each organization's specific needs. Some focus on rapid onboarding fo...

ByConity is an open source project that emerged from ByteDance's use of Clickhouse, an open-source database system, to address their growing data volume. ByConity focuses on enhancing the separation of compute and storage, improving multitenancy support, and optimizing query performance in cloud-native environments. ByteDance's Vini Jaiswal, a principle developer advocate at the parent company of...

Along with discussing the emergence and ascension of platform engineering in this episode, we also discuss the role that Humanitec plays in helping organizations establish platforms for developers, as well as Backstage, a popular open source internal developer platform that was developed by Spotify for its own developers. An IDP, our guest Kaspar Von Grünberg explained, is a standardized interface...

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, technologist and author John Willis emphasized caution when considering AI solutions from vendors. He advised against blindly following vendor recommendations for "one-size-fits-all" AI products, likening it to discouraging learning Java in the past in favor of purchasing a product. Willis stressed that DevOps serves as an example of how human expertise, no...

Deliveroo, a prominent food delivery company, relies on Apache Flink, a distributed processing engine, to enhance its three-sided marketplace, connecting delivery drivers, restaurants, and customers. Seeking to improve real-time data streaming and gain insights into customer behavior, Deliveroo transitioned to Flink, comparing it to alternatives like Apache Spark and Kafka Streams. Flink, with fea...