The New Stack Makers

When she was a student in her native Israel, Shira Shamban was a self-proclaimed “geek.” But, unusually for a tech company founder and CEO, not a computer geek. Shamban was a science nerd, with her sights set on becoming a doctor. But first, she had to do her state-mandated military service. And that’s where her path diverged. In the military, she was not only immersed in computers but spent years working in intelligence; she stayed in the service for more than a decade, eventually rising to become head of an intelligence sector for the Israeli Defense Forces. At home, she began building her own projects to experiment with ideas that could help her team. “So that kind of helped me not to be intimidated by technology, to learn that I can learn anything I want by myself,” said Shamban, co-founder of Solvo, a company focused on data and cloud infrastructure security. “And the most important thing is to just try out things that you learn.” To date, Solvo has raised about $11 million through investors like Surroun

At Cloud Native Security Con, we sat down with Solo.io's Marino Wijay and Jim Barton, who discussed how service mesh technologies have matured, especially now with the removal of sidecars in Ambient Mesh that it developed with Google. Ambient Mesh is "a new proxy architecture that, according to the Solo.io site, "moves the proxy to the node level for mTLS and identity. It also allows a policy-enforcement policy to manage Layer 7 security filters and policies. A sidecar is a mini-proxy, a mini-firewall, like an all-in-one router, said Wijay, who does developer relations and advocacy for Solo. A sidecar receives instructions from an upstream control plane. "Now, one of the things that we started to realize with different workloads and different patterns of communication is that not all these workloads need a sidecar or can take advantage of the sidecar," Wijay said. "Some better operate without the sidecar." Ambient Mesh reflects the maturity of service mesh and the difference between day one and day two operat

Here's a breakdown of what we cover: Cloud IDEs will mature as GitHub's Codespaces platform gains acceptance through its integration into the GitHub service. Other factors include new startups in the space, such as GitPod, which offers a secure, cloud-based IDE, and Uptycs, which uses telemetry data to lock-down developer environments. "So I think you'll, you're just gonna see more people exposed to it, and they're gonna be like, 'holy crap, this makes my life a lot easier '." FinOps reflects the more stringent views on managing costs, focusing on the efficiency of resources that a company provides for developers. The focus also translates to the GreenOps movement with its emphasis on efficiency. Software bill of materials (SBOMs) will continue to mature with Sigstore as the project with the fastest expected adoption. Witness, from Telemetry Project, is another project. The SPDX community has been at the center of the movement for over a decade now before people cared about it.  GitOps and Open Telemetry: Thi

Everyone in the community was surprised by ChatGPT last year, which a web service responded to any and all user questions with a surprising fluidity. ChatGPT is a variant of the powerful GPT-3 large language model created by OpenAI, a company owned by Microsoft. It is still a demo though it is pretty clear that this type of generative AI will be rapidly commercialized. Indeed Microsoft is embedding the generative AI in its Bing Search service, and Google is building a rival offering. So what are smaller businesses to do to ensure their messages are heard to these machine learning giants? For this latest podcast from The New Stack, we discussed these issues with Ryan Johnston, chief marketing officer for Writer. Writer has enjoyed an early success in generative AI technologies. The company's service is dedicated to a single mission: making sure its customers' content adheres to the guidelines set in place. This can include features such as ensuring the language in the copy matches the company's own designated

The story goes something like this: There's this marketing manager who is trying to time a launch. She asks the developer team when the service will be ready. The dev team says maybe a few months. Let's say three months from now in April. The marketing manager begins prepping for the release. The dev team releases the services the following week. It's not an uncommon occurrence. Edith Harbaugh is the co-founder and CEO of LaunchDarkly, a company she launched in 2014 with John Kodumal to solve these problems with software releases that affect organizations worldwide. Today, LaunchDarkly has 4,000 customers and an annual return revenue rate of $100 million. We interviewed Harbaugh for our Tech Founder Odyssey series on The New Stack Makers about her journey and LaunchDarkly's work. The interview starts with this question about the timing of dev releases and the relationship between developers and other constituencies, particularly the marketing organization. LaunchDarkly is the number one feature management com

By now, almost everyone agreed platform engineering is probably a good idea, in which an organizations builds an internal development platform to empower coders and speed application releases. So, for this latest edition of The New Stack podcast,  we spoke with one of the pioneers in this space,  Zohar Einy, CEO of Port, to see how platform engineering would work in your organization. TNS Editor Joab Jackson hosted this conversation. Port offers what it claims is the world's first low code platform for developers. Rethinking Web Application Firewalls With Port, an organization can build a software catalogue of approved tools, import its own data model, and set up workflows. Developers can consume all the resources they need through a self-service catalogue, without needing the knowledge how to set up a complex application, like Kubernetes. The DevOps and platform teams themselves maintain the platform. Application owners aren't  the only potential users of a self-service catalogues, Einy points out in our con

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we delve more deeply into the emerging practice of platform engineering. The guests for this show are Aeris Stewart, community manager at platform orchestration provider Humanitec and  Michael Galloway, an engineering leader for infrastructure software provider HashiCorp. TNS Features Editor Heather Joslyn hosted this conversation. Although the term has been around for several years, platform engineering caught the industry's attention in a big way last September, when Humanitec published a report that identified how widespread the practice was quickly becoming, citing its use by Nike, Starbucks, GitHub and others. Right after the report was released, Stewart provided an analysis for TNS arguing that platform engineering solved the many issues that another practice, DevOps, was struggling with. "Developers don’t want to do operations anymore, and that’s a bad sign for DevOps," Stewart wrote. The post stirred a great deal of conversation around the succes

Platform engineering “is the art of designing and binding all of the different tech and tools that you have inside of an organization into a golden path that enables self service for developers and reduces cognitive load,” said Kaspar Von Grünberg, founder and CEO of Humanitec, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast.  This is structure is important for individual contributors, Grünberg said, as well as backend engineers: “if you look at the operation teams, it reduces their burden to do repetitive things. And so platform engineers build and design internal developer platforms, and help and serve users. “ This conversation, hosted by Heather Joslyn, TNS features editor, dove into platform engineering: what it is, how it works, the problems it is intended to solve, and how to get started in building a platform engineering operation in your organization. It also debunks some key fallacies around the concept. This episode was sponsored by Humanitec.The Limits of ‘You Build It, You Run It’The notion of “y

Feature flags — the on/off toggles, written in conditional statements, that allow organizations greater control over the user experience once code has been deployed —  are proliferating and growing more complex, and demand robust feature management, said Karishma Irani, head of product at LaunchDarkly, in this episode of The New Stack Makers. In a November survey by LaunchDarkly, which queried more than 1,000 DevOps professionals,  69% of participants said that feature flags are “must-have, mission-critical and/or high priority” for their organizations. “Feature management, we believe, is a modern practice that's becoming more and more common with companies that want to deploy more frequently, innovate faster, and just keep a healthy engineering team,” Irani said. The idea of feature management, Irani said, is to “maximize value while minimizing risk.” LaunchDarkly uses its own software, she said, and eating its own dog food, as the saying goes, has paid off in gaining insights into user needs. As part of Lau

In this latest podcast from The New Stack, we interview Manish Devgan, chief product officer for Hazelcast, which offers a real time stream processing engine. This interview was recorded at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, held last October in Detroit. "'Real time' means different things to different people, but it's really a business term," Devgan explained. In the business world, time is money, and the more quickly you can make a decision, using the right data, the more quickly one can take action. Although we have many "batch-processing" systems, the data itself rarely comes in batches, Devgan said. "A lot of times I hear from customers that are using a batch system, because those are the things which are available at that time. But data is created in real time sensors, your machines, espionage data, or even customer data — right when customers are transacting with you." What is a Real Time Data Processing Engine? A real time data processing engine can analyze data as it is coming in from the source. This is differ

Back in April, Kris Nóva, now principal engineer at GitHub, started creating a server on Mastodon as a side project in her basement lab. Then in late October, Elon Musk bought Twitter for an eye-watering $44 billion, and began cutting thousands of jobs at the social media giant and making changes that alienated longtime users. And over the next few weeks, usage of Nóva’s hobby site, Hachyderm.io, exploded. “The server started very small,” she said on this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. “And I think like, one of my friends turned into two of my friends turned into 10 of my friends turned into 20 colleagues, and it just so happens, a lot of them were big names in the tech industry. And now all of a sudden, I have 30,000 people I have to babysit.” Though the rate at which new users are joining Hachyderm has slowed down in recent days, Nóva said, it stood at more than 38,000 users as of Dec. 20. Hachyderm.io is still run by a handful of volunteers, who also handle content moderation. Nóva is now seeking

During the pandemic, many organizations sped up their move to the cloud — without fully understanding the costs, both human and financial, they would pay for the convenience and scalability of a digital transformation. “They really didn’t have a baseline,” said Mekka Williams, principal engineer, at Spot by NetApp, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. “And so the those first cloud bills, I'm sure were shocking, because you don't get a cloud bill, when you run on your on-premises environment, or even your private cloud, where you've already paid the cost for the infrastructure that you're using. What’s especially worrisome is that many of those costs are simply wasted, Williams said. “Most of the containerized applications running in Kubernetes clusters are running underutilized,” she said. “And anything that's underutilized in the cloud equates to waste. And if we want to be really lean and clean and use resources in a very efficient manner, we have to have really good cloud strategy in order to d

Redis, best known as a data cache or real-time data platform, is evolving into much more, Tim Hall, chief of product at the company told The New Stack in a recent TNS Makers podcast. Redis is an in-memory database or memory-first database, which means the data lands there and people are using us for both caching and persistence. However, these days, the company has a number of flexible data models, but one of the brand promises of Redis is developers can store the data as they're working with it. So as opposed to a SQL database where you might have to turn your data structures into columns and tables, you can actually store the data structures that you're working with directly into Redis, Hall said.  Primary Database? “About 40% of our customers today are using us as a primary database technology,” he said. “That may surprise some people if you're sort of a classic Redis user and you knew us from in-memory caching, you probably didn't realize we added a variety of mechanisms for persistence over the years.” M

Let’s say you’re a passenger on a cruise ship. Floating in the middle of the ocean, far from reliable Wi-Fi, you wear a device that lets you into your room, that discreetly tracks your move from the bar to the dinner table to the pool and delivers your drink order wherever you are. You can buy sunscreen or toothpaste or souvenirs in the ship’s stores without touching anything. If you’re a Carnival Cruise Lines passenger, this is reality right now, in part because of the company’s partnership with Couchbase, according to Mark Gamble, product and solutions marketing director, Couchbase. Couchbase provides a cloud native, no SQL database technology that's used to power applications for customers including Carnival but also Amadeus, Comcast, LinkedIn, and Tesco. In Carnival’s case, Gamble said, “they run an edge data center on their ships to power their Ocean Medallion application, which they are super proud of. They use it a lot in their ads, because it provides a personalized service, which is a differentiator

Wayfair describes itself as the “the destination for all things home: helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home.” It provides an online platform to acquire home furniture, outdoor decor and other furnishings. It also supports its suppliers so they can use the platform to sell their home goods, explained Natali Vlatko, global lead, open source program office (OSPO) and senior software engineering manager, for Wayfair as the featured guest in Detroit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022. “It takes a lot of technical, technical work behind the scenes to kind of get that going,” Vlatko said. This is especially true as Wayfair scales its operations worldwide. The infrastructure must be highly distributed, relying on containerization, microservices, Kubernetes, and especially, open source to get the job done. “We have technologists throughout the world, in North America and throughout Europe as well,”  Vlatko said. “And we want to make sure that we are utilizing cloud native and open sou

In the rush to create, provision and manage Kubernetes, often left out is proper resource provisioning. According to StormForge, a company paying, for example, a million dollars a month on cloud computing resources is likely wasting $6 million a year of resources on the cloud on Kubernetes that are left unused. The reasons for this are manifold and can vary. They include how DevOps teams can tend to estimate too conservatively or aggressively or overspend on resource provisioning. In this podcast with StormForge’s Yasmin Rajabi, vice president of product management, and Patrick Bergstrom CTO, we look at how to properly provision Kubernetes resources and the associated challenges. The podcast was recorded live in Detroit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. Rethinking Web Application Firewalls  Almost ironically, the most commonly used Kubernetes resources can even complicate the ability to optimize resources for applications.The processes typically involve Kubernetes resource requests and limits, and

Feature management isn’t a new idea but lately it’s a trend that’s picked up speed. Analysts like Forrester and Gartner have cited adoption of the practice as being, respectively, “hot” and “the dominant approach to experimentation in software engineering.” A study released in November found that 60% of 1,000 software and IT professionals surveyed started using feature flags only in the past year, according to the report sponsored by LaunchDarkly, the feature management platform and conducted by Wakefield Research. At the heart of feature management are feature flags, which give organizations the ability to turn features on and off, without having to re-deploy an entire app. Feature flags allow organizations test new features, and control things like access to premium versions of a customer-facing service. An overall feature management practice that includes feature flags allows organizations “to release progressively any new feature to any segment of users, any environment, any cohort of customers in a contr

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. “And I think about observability as that same maturity of engineering practice. When  it comes to building software that actually is useful in the world, it is this process that helps you actually achieve the deployment and operation of these large scale systems that we use every day.” Skillington spoke about the evolution of observability, and his company’s recent donation of an open source project to Prometheus, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. Heather Joslyn, features editor of TNS, hosted the conversation. This On the Road edition of The New Stack Makers was recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North 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 of cloud native technologies. While we may think of Boeing as an airplane manufacturer, it would be more accurate to think of the company as a large-scale system integrator, one that uses a lot of software. So, like other large-scale companies, Boeing sees a distinct advantage in maintaining good relations with the open source community. "Being able to leverage the best technologists out there in the rest of the world is of great value to us strategically," Torres said. This strategy allows Boeing to "differentiate on what we do as our core business rather than having to reinvent the wheel all the time on all of the t

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 challenges faced by its existing customer base, which is “very Ops centric — server admins, system admins,” according to Brad Maltz, of Dell. With the rise of the DevOps movement, “what we realized is our end users have been trying to figure out how to become infrastructure developers,” said Maltz, the company’s senior director of DevOps portfolio and DevRel. “They've been trying to figure out how to use infrastructure as code Kubernetes, cloud, all those things.” “And what that means is we need to be able to speak to them where they want to go, when they want to become those developers. That’s led us to build out a developer