Anne Currie, a leading expert in sustainable tech and part of the Green Software Foundation, discusses practical steps for building resilient, sustainable software in an episode of The New Stack Makers. With 30 years of experience, Currie co-authored Building Green Software , emphasizing the tech industry's role in the energy transition. She highlights the complexity of adapting technology to renewable energy, involving extensive research and debunking misinformation. Currie discusses the import...
Aug 15, 2024•42 min•Ep. 1484
In an era marked by complexity, the golden path is essential for software architects, asserts James Watters, senior director of R&D at VMware Tanzu, Broadcom. This approach, emphasizing fewer application patterns, simplifies life for security personnel, developers, and infrastructure teams. VMware defines the golden path as streamlining software development, crucial in today's economic climate. Watters highlights this in the Broadcom report: State of Cloud Native App Platforms 2024, noting t...
Aug 08, 2024•26 min•Ep. 1483
Maintaining and ensuring the success of a microservice-based system can be challenging. Sarah Wells, a seasoned tech consultant with over 20 years of experience, offers valuable insights in her book "Enabling Microservices Success" and a discussion on The New Stack Makers podcast. Drawing from her tenure at the Financial Times (FT), Wells illustrates how transitioning to microservices and adopting DevOps and SRE practices enabled FT to accelerate software releases from 12 annually to over 20,000...
Aug 01, 2024•39 min•Ep. 1482
In August 2023, the open source community rallied to create OpenTofu, an alternative to Terraform, after HashiCorp, now owned by IBM, adopted a restrictive Business Source License for Terraform. Ohad Maislish, co-founder and CEO of env0, explained on The New Stack Makers how this move sparked the initiative. A few hours after HashiCorp's license change, Maislish secured the domain opentf.org and began developing the new project, eventually named OpenTofu, which was donated to The Linux Foundatio...
Jul 25, 2024•30 min•Ep. 1473
In the early days, the internet was a decentralized space created by enthusiasts. However, it has since transformed into a centralized, commerce-driven entity dominated by a few major players. The promise of the fediverse, a decentralized social networking concept, offers a refreshing alternative. Evan Prodromou, OpenEarth Foundation's director of open technology, has been advocating for decentralized social networks since 2008, starting with his creation, Identi.ca. Unlike Twitter, Identi.ca wa...
Jul 18, 2024•41 min•Ep. 1481
In a recent episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at the Open Source Summit North America, Matt Hartley, Linux support lead at Framework, discusses the importance of the "right to repair" movement. This initiative seeks to allow consumers to repair and upgrade their own electronic devices, countering the trend of disposable electronics that contribute to environmental damage. Framework, a company offering modular and customizable laptops, embodies this philosophy by enabling users to replace...
Jul 11, 2024•19 min•Ep. 1480
Blockchain technology continues to drive innovation despite declining hype, with Distributed Ledgers (DLTs) offering secure, decentralized digital asset transactions. In an On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers recorded at Open Source Summit North America, Andrew Aitken of Hedera and Dr. Leemon Baird of Swirlds Labs discussed DLTs with Alex Williams. Baird highlighted the Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm, an efficient, secure distributed consensus mechanism he created, leveraging a hashgraph ...
Jul 02, 2024•24 min•Ep. 1479
The Linux xz utils backdoor exploit, discussed in an interview at the Open Source Summit 2024 on The New Stack Makers with John Kjell, director of open source at TestifySec, highlights critical vulnerabilities in the open-source ecosystem. This exploit involved a maintainer of the Linux xz utils project adding malicious code to a new release, discovered by a Microsoft engineer. This breach demonstrates the high trust placed in maintainers and how this trust can be exploited. Kjell explains that ...
Jun 27, 2024•13 min•Ep. 1478
Suman Debnath, principal developer advocate for machine learning at Amazon Web Services, emphasized the advantages of using Python in machine learning during a New Stack Makers episode recorded at PyCon US. He noted Python's ease of use and its foundational role in the data science ecosystem as key reasons for its popularity. However, Debnath highlighted that building generative AI applications doesn't necessarily require deep data science expertise or Python. Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s generative AI...
Jun 20, 2024•6 min•Ep. 1477
Nathan Peck, a senior developer advocate for generative AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), shares his experiences working with Python in a recent episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at PyCon US. Although not a Python expert, Peck frequently deals with Python scripts in his role, often assisting colleagues in running scripts as cron jobs. He highlights the challenge of being a T-shaped developer, possessing broad knowledge across multiple languages and frameworks but deep expertise in only a ...
Jun 13, 2024•10 min•Ep. 1476
Mike Fiedler, a PyPI safety and security engineer at the Python Software Foundation, prefers the title “code gardener,” reflecting his role in maintaining and securing open source projects. Recorded at PyCon US, Fiedler explains his task of “pulling the weeds” in code—handling unglamorous but crucial aspects of open source contributions. Since August, funded by Amazon Web Services, Fiedler has focused on enhancing the security of the Python Package Index (PyPI). His efforts include ensuring that...
Jun 06, 2024•18 min•Ep. 1475
The name "Falcon" for the UAE’s large language model (LLM) symbolizes the national bird's qualities of courage and perseverance, reflecting the vision of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi. TII, launched in 2020, addresses AI’s rapid advancements and unintended consequences by fostering an open-source approach to enhance community understanding and control of AI. In this New Stack Makers, Dr. Hakim Hacid, Executive Director and Acting Chief Researcher, Technology Innovation I...
May 30, 2024•23 min•Ep. 1474
Crash-level bugs continue to pose a significant challenge due to the lack of memory safety in programming languages, an issue persisting since the punch card era. This enduring problem, described as "the Joker to the Batman" by Anil Dash, VP of developer experience at Fastly, is highlighted in a recent episode of The New Stack Makers. The White House has emphasized memory safety, advocating for the adoption of memory-safe programming languages and better software measurability. The Office of the...
May 22, 2024•36 min•Ep. 1471
In the push to integrate data into development, time series databases have gained significant importance. These databases capture time-stamped data from servers and sensors, enabling the collection and storage of valuable information. InfluxDB, a leading open-source time series database technology by InfluxData, has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer a managed open-source service for time series databases. Brad Bebee, General Manager of Amazon Neptune and Amazon Timestream highlig...
May 16, 2024•21 min•Ep. 1472
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced PG Vector, an open-source tool that integrates generative AI and vector capabilities into PostgreSQL databases. Sirish Chandrasekaran, General Manager of Amazon Relational Database Services, explained at Open Source Summit 2024 in Seattle that PG Vector allows users to store vector types in Postgres and perform similarity searches, a key feature for generative AI applications. The tool, developed by Andrew Kane and offered by AWS in services like Aurora a...
May 09, 2024•18 min•Ep. 1470
Valkey, a Redis fork supported by the Linux Foundation, challenges Redis' new license. In this episode, Madelyn Olson, a lead contributor to the Valkey project and former Redis core contributor, along with Ping Xie, Staff Software Engineer at Google and Dmitry Polyakovsky, Consulting Member of Technical Staff at Oracle highlights concerns about the shift to a more restrictive license at Open Source Summit 2024 in Seattle. Despite Redis' free license for end users, many contributors may not suppo...
May 02, 2024•18 min•Ep. 1469
A virtual cluster, described by Loft Labs CEO Lukas Gentele at Kubecon+ CloudNativeCon Paris, is a Kubernetes control plane running inside a container within another Kubernetes cluster. In this New Stack Makers episode, Gentele explained that this approach eliminates the need for numerous separate control planes, allowing VMs to run in lightweight, quickly deployable containers. Loft Labs' open-sourced vcluster technology enables virtual clusters to spin up in about six seconds, significantly fa...
Apr 25, 2024•23 min•Ep. 1468
When Weaveworks, known for pioneering "GitOps," shut down, concerns arose about the future of Flux, a critical open-source project. However, Puja Abbassi, Giant Swarm's VP of Product, reassured Alex Williams, Founder and Publisher of The New Stack at Open Source Summit in Paris that Flux's maintenance is secure in this episode of The New Makers podcast. Giant companies like Microsoft Azure and GitLab have pledged support. Giant Swarm, an avid Flux user, also contributes to its development, ensur...
Apr 22, 2024•29 min•Ep. 1466
The use of large language models (LLMs) has become widespread, but there are significant security risks associated with them. LLMs with millions or billions of parameters are complex and challenging to fully scrutinize, making them susceptible to exploitation by attackers who can find loopholes or vulnerabilities. On an episode of The New Stack Makers, Chris Pirillo, Tech Evangelist and Lance Seidman, Backend Engineer at Atomic Form discussed these security challenges, emphasizing the need for h...
Apr 11, 2024•38 min•Ep. 1464
The Kubernetes community primarily focuses on improving the development and operations experience for applications and infrastructure, emphasizing DevOps and developer-centric approaches. In contrast, the data science community historically moved at a slower pace. However, with the emergence of the AI engineer persona, the pace of advancement in data science has accelerated significantly. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack co-hosted a discussion with Sanjeev Mohan, an independ...
Apr 04, 2024•29 min•Ep. 1465
LLM observability focuses on maximizing the utility of larger language models (LLMs) by monitoring key metrics and signals. Alex Williams, Founder and Publisher for The New Stack, and Janikiram MSV, Principal of Janikiram & Associates and an analyst and writer for The New Stack, discusses the emergence of the LLM stack, which encompasses various components like LLMs, vector databases, embedding models, retrieval systems, read anchor models, and more. The objective of LLM observability is to ...
Mar 28, 2024•26 min•Ep. 1463
In a conversation on The New Stack Makers, co-hosted by Alex Williams, TNS founder and publisher, and Charles Humble, an industry expert who served as a software engineer, architect and CTO and now podcaster, author and consultant at Conissaunce Ltd., discussed why software developers and engineers should care about their impact on climate change. Humble emphasized that building software sustainably starts with better operations, leading to cost savings and improved security. He cited past succe...
Mar 21, 2024•39 min•Ep. 1462
This New Stack Makers podcast co-hosted by Alex Williams, TNS founder and publisher, and Adrian Cockcroft, Partner and Analyst at OrionX.net, discussed Nvidia's GH200 Grace Hopper superchip. Industry expert Sunil Mallya, Co-founder and CTO of Flip AI weighed in on how it is revolutionizing the hardware industry for AI workloads by centralizing GPU communication, reducing networking overhead, and creating a more efficient system. Mallya noted that despite its innovative design, challenges remain ...
Mar 14, 2024•40 min•Ep. 1461
This New Stack Makers podcast co-hosted by TNS founder and publisher, Alex Williams and Joan Westenberg, founder and writer of Joan’s Index, discussed Copilot. Westenberg highlighted its integration with Microsoft 365 and its role as a coding assistant, showcasing its potential to streamline various tasks. However, she also revealed its limitations, particularly in reliability. Despite being designed to assist with tasks across Microsoft 365, Copilot's performance fell short during Westenberg's ...
Mar 07, 2024•30 min•Ep. 1460
This New Stack Makers podcast co-hosted by Adrian Cockroft, analyst at OrionX.net and TNS founder and publisher, Alex Williams discusses the importance of monitoring services utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) and the emergence of tools like LangChain and LangSmith to address this need. Adrian Cockcroft, formerly of Netflix and now working with The New Stack, highlights the significance of monitoring AI apps using LLMs and the challenges posed by slow and expensive API calls from LLMs. LangC...
Feb 28, 2024•27 min•Ep. 1459
In this New Stack Makers podcast, Martin Parker, a solutions architect for UST, spoke with TNS editor-in-chief, Heather Joslyn and discussed the significance of internal developer platforms (IDPs), emphasizing benefits beyond frontend developers to backend engineers and site reliability engineers (SREs). Parker highlighted the role of IDPs in automating repetitive tasks, allowing SREs to focus on optimizing application performance. Standardization is key, ensuring observability and monitoring so...
Feb 07, 2024•19 min•Ep. 1458
In this New Stack Makers podcast, Ben Wilcock, a senior technical marketing architect for Tanzu, spoke with TNS editor-in-chief, Heather Joslyn and discussed the challenges organizations face when building internal developer platforms, particularly the issue of scope, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. He emphasized the difficulty for platform engineering teams to select and integrate various Kubernetes projects amid a plethora of options. Wilcock highlights the complexity of tracking so...
Jan 31, 2024•15 min•Ep. 1457
In this New Stack Makers podcast, Mike Stefaniak, senior product manager at NGINX and Kate Osborn, a software engineer at NGINX discusses challenges associated with network ingress in Kubernetes clusters and introduces the Kubernetes Gateway API as a solution. Stefaniak highlights the issues that arise when multiple teams work on the same ingress, leading to friction and incidents. NGINX has also introduced the NGINX Gateway Fabric, implementing the Kubernetes Gateway API as an alternative to ne...
Jan 23, 2024•15 min•Ep. 1456
TNS publisher Alex Williams spoke with Ben Kramer, co-founder and CTO of Monterey.ai Cole Hoffer, Senior Software Engineer at Monterey.ai to discuss how the company utilizes vector search to analyze user voices, feedback, reviews, bug reports, and support tickets from various channels to provide product development recommendations. Monterey.ai connects customer feedback to the development process, bridging customer support and leadership to align with user needs. Figma and Comcast are among the ...
Jan 17, 2024•25 min•Ep. 1455
TNS host Heather Joslyn sits down with Ron Masas to discuss trade-offs when it comes to creating fast, secure applications and APIs. He notes a common issue of neglecting documentation and validation, leading to vulnerabilities. Weak authorization is a recurring problem, with instances where changing an invoice ID could expose another user's data. Masas, an ethical hacker, highlights the risk posed by "zombie" APIs—applications that have become disused but remain potential targets. He suggests i...
Jan 10, 2024•16 min•Ep. 1454
