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 practices have taken root in the past five years. We're trying to help educate everybody now.” Chris Short, s...
Nov 08, 2022•21 min•Ep. 1363
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 to discuss the push to provide training materials for Ukraine as they rebuild from the destruction caus...
Nov 04, 2022•16 min•Ep. 1362
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 other workflow that takes a long time to run. They store the intermediate results in Redis, which provi...
Nov 03, 2022•16 min•Ep. 1361
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, monitoring everything” according to BOK’s Andrew Rau . “After the first day, the system just scaled like it...
Nov 02, 2022•14 min•Ep. 1360
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 panel, “Devs and Ops People: It’s Time for Some Kubernetes Couples Therapy,” convened by The New Stack at K...
Nov 01, 2022•42 min•Ep. 1359
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. "Terraform basically translates what your configuration was codified in by your configuration, and provis...
Oct 26, 2022•18 min•Ep. 1358
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 Verity,” according to Keith Sader, GumGum’s director of engineering. “Verity goes in and basically ca...
Oct 20, 2022•27 min•Ep. 1357
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 source infrastructure-as-code software tool: How has Terraform evolved in uses since Fish started using it...
Oct 19, 2022•14 min•Ep. 1356
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 energy shortages. “I think we need to go faster,” said Benoît Jeanson, an enterprise architect at RTE, the...
Oct 18, 2022•13 min•Ep. 1355
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 computer engineer and KubeCon co-chair Ricardo Rocha . For this show, we discussed what we can expect from th...
Oct 13, 2022•27 min•Ep. 1354
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 open source and learning how to build software in open source. HashiCorp's business is an outgrowth o...
Oct 12, 2022•17 min•Ep. 1353
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 advancement. A big part of Gabriele (Gab) Columbro's mission as the general manager of the new Linux ...
Oct 11, 2022•17 min•Ep. 1352
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 his former employer, GitHub, serving 4 million developers worldwide, the potential size of that audie...
Oct 07, 2022•34 min•Ep. 1351
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 open source is one of three pillars of the organization's open source strategy. AWS builds and innovates o...
Oct 05, 2022•14 min•Ep. 1350
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 as vice president of security, where he believes he can make the Internet a more safe place. As safe a...
Sep 28, 2022•29 min•Ep. 1349
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 JavaScript, but it's much more modern. " The Deno project started four years ago, Dahl said. He recounted...
Sep 27, 2022•21 min•Ep. 1348
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, and use them in their products and in their companies without really thinking about whether or not that p...
Sep 22, 2022•18 min•Ep. 1347
In the early 2000s, Charity Majors was a homeschooled kid who’d gotten a scholarship to study classical piano performance at the University of Idaho. “I realized, over the course of that first year, that music majors tended to still be hanging around the music department in their 30s and 40s,” she said. “And nobody really had very much money, and they were all doing it for the love of the game. And I was just like, I don't want to be poor for the rest of my life.” Fortunately, she said, it was p...
Sep 21, 2022•34 min•Ep. 1346
Idit Levine’s tech journey originated in an unexpected place: a basketball court. As a seventh grader in Israel, playing in hoops tournaments definitely sparked her competitive side. “I was basically going to compete with all my international friends for two minutes without parents, without anything,” Levine said. “I think it made me who I am today. It’s really giving you a lot of confidence to teach you how to handle situations … stay calm and still focus.” Developing that calm and focus proved...
Sep 16, 2022•34 min•Ep. 1345
Aerospike Founder Srini Srinivasan had just finished his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin when he joined IBM and worked under Don Haderle , the creator of DB2, the first commercial relational database management system. Haderle became a major influencer on Srinivasan when he started Aerospike, a real-time data platform. To this day, Haderle is an advisor to Aerospike. "He was the first one I went back to for advice as to how to succeed," Srinivasan said in the most recent episode of The New ...
Sep 08, 2022•28 min•Ep. 1344
Ask a developer about how they got into programming, and you learn so much about them. In this week's episode of The New Stack Makers, Chainguard founder Dan Lorenc said he got into programming halfway through college while studying mechanical engineering. "I got into programming because we had to do simulations and stuff in MATLAB," Lorenc said. And then I switched over to Python because it was similar. And we didn't need those licenses or whatever that we needed. And then I was like, Oh, this ...
Aug 30, 2022•26 min•Ep. 1343
In the early 1990s, many kids got into programming video games. Tina Huang enjoyed developing her GeoCities site but not making games. Huang loved automating her website. "It is not a lie to say that what got me excited about coding was automation," said Huang, co-founder of Transposit, in this week's episode of The New Stack Makers as part of our Tech Founder Series. "Now, you're probably going to think to yourself: 'what middle school kid likes automation?' " Huang loved the idea of automating...
Aug 24, 2022•30 min•Ep. 1342
Welcome to the first in our series on The New Stack Makers about technical founders, those engineers who have moved from engineering jobs to running a company of their own. What we want to know is what that's like for the founder. How is it to be an engineer turned entrepreneur? We like to ask technologists about their first computer or when they started programming. We always find a connection to what the engineer does today. It's these kinds of questions you will hear us ask in the series to g...
Aug 17, 2022•27 min•Ep. 1341
Web Application Firewalls (WAF) first emerged in the late 1990s as Web server attacks became more common. Today, in the context of cloud native technologies, there’s an ongoing rethinking of how a WAF should be applied. No longer is it solely static applications sitting behind a WAF, said Tigera CEO Ratan Tipirneni, President & CEO of Tigera in this episode of The New Stack Makers. “With cloud native applications and a microservices distributed architecture, you have to assume that something...
Aug 09, 2022•27 min•Ep. 1340
Passage adds device native biometric authorization to web sites to allow passwordless security on devices with or without Touch ID. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Passage Co-Founders Cole Hecht and Anna Pobletts talk about how the service works for developers to offer users its biometric service. Hecht and Pobletts have worked in product security for many years and the recurring problem is always password-based security. But there really is no great solution, Pobletts said. Multi-facto...
Aug 02, 2022•11 min•Ep. 1339
In this episode of The New Stack’s On the Road show at Open Source Summit in Austin, Webb Brown , CEO and co-founder of KubeCost , talked with The New Stack about opening up the black box on how much Kubernetes is really costing. Whether we’re talking about cloud costs in general or the costs specifically associated with Kubernetes, the problem teams complain about is lack of visibility. This is a cliche complaint about AWS, but it gets even more complicated once Kubernetes enters the picture. “...
Jul 27, 2022•12 min•Ep. 1338
In this episode of The New Stack’s On the Road show at Open Source Summit in Austin, Amanda Brock , CEO and founder of OpenUK , talked with The New Stack about revenue models for open source and how those fit into building a sustainable project. Funding an open source project has to be part of the sustainability question — open source requires humans to contribute, and those humans have bills to pay and risk burnout if the open source project is a side gig after their full time job. That’s not t...
Jul 19, 2022•13 min•Ep. 1337
AUSTIN, TEX. — In one of the most compelling keynote addresses at The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America, held here in June, Aeva Black , a veteran of the open source community, said that a friend of theirs recently commented that, “I feel like all the trans women I know on Twitter, are software developers.” There’s a reason for that, Black said. It’s called “survivor bias”: The transgender software developers the friend knows on Twitter are only a small sample of the trans kids...
Jul 13, 2022•10 min•Ep. 1336
AUSTIN, TEX. —What’s the future of WebAssembly — Wasm, to its friends — the binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine that allows developers to build in their favorite programming language and run their code anywhere? For Matt Butcher , CEO and founder of Fermyon Technologies, the future of Wasm lies in running it outside of the browser and running it inside of everything, from proxy servers to video games.” And, he added, “the really exciting part is being able to run it in th...
Jul 12, 2022•14 min•Ep. 1335
VALENCIA, Spain — WebAssembly (Wasm) is among the more hot topics under the CNCF project umbrella. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded on the show floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 , Liam Randall , CEO and co-founder, Cosmonic, and Colin Murphy, senior software engineer, Adobe , discuss why Wasm’s future looks bright. A quintessential feature of Wasm is that it functions on a CPU level, not unlike Java or Flash. This means, Randall said, that Wasm “can run anywh...
Jul 07, 2022•16 min•Ep. 1334
