TFIR: Open Source & Emerging Technologies

While we would like to think that security is baked in from the start by developers, this is not always the case. Furthermore, security engineers and developers are not always on the same page when it comes to security testing. Code Intelligence aims to tackle this problem with CI Spark, a tool that harnesses AI to help write test code. In this episode of TFiR: Let's Talk, Sergej Dechand, CEO and Co-Founder of Code Intelligence, talks about the company and the problem they are trying to solve. He talks about the role of AI in security and how it is being used for fuzz testing. He talks about CI Spark and how it is analyzing code and automating fuzz tests and he takes us through some of the key trends he is seeing in the industry.

While there are a lot of managed Kubernetes services nowadays, one company is differentiating itself by focusing on offering a small-footprint Kubernetes-managed service that can be deployed on the edge. Zededa has partnered with SUSE using EVE-OS and K3s in an effort to help tackle some of the challenges of deploying Kubernetes on the edge. In this episode of TFiR: Let's Talk, Michael Maxey, Vice President of Business Development at Zededa, talks about how the company is helping customers deploy workloads to edge devices. He talks about their key focus on small-footprint Kubernetes and how they are helping to tackle some of the challenges associated with this. Since the company has just announced a managed Kubernetes service, he also discusses the benefits of offering customers this option.

In this episode of TFiR: Let's Talk, Shaun O'Meara, Field CTO at Mirantis, talks about the company's new open source project k0smotron, and how it is helping enterprises deploy and manage control planes.

In this episode of TFiR: Let's Talk, Mona Rakibe, Co-Founder and CEO at Telmai, talks about the company and how it is helping companies improve their data quality and investigate anomalies. They go on to talk about the company's journey so far, some of the key capabilities of the platform, and what sets them apart from competitors.

In this episode of TFiR: Let's Talk, Martin Phan, Field CTO at CloudCasa by Catalogic, talks about how the company is helping organizations with their data protection needs. He goes on to discuss some of the challenges customers are experiencing and how CloudCasa is helping to address these problems.

In this episode of TFiR: Let's Talk, Ryan Taylor, VP of Customer Success and Solutions Engineering at Transposit, talks about their new announcement about adding on-call capabilities. He also takes us through the evolution of incident management and what sets Transposit apart from its competitors.

With the growing adoption of Kubernetes, many technologies, including Cloud Foundry, are evolving to embrace this tectonic shift in the industry. Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) has been going through a major transformation to embrace this change. However, this change doesn't necessarily mean that Cloud Foundry is on its way out. On the contrary, like many major technologies, it will continue to serve a wide range of users and customers. What really matters is how Cloud Foundry leaders, including the foundation and companies sponsoring the project, look at this change; how committed they are to the users of this open source project. In this episode of TFiR Let's Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Catherine McGarvey, Vice President of Software Engineering at VMware and Chris Clark, Program Manager at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, to discuss the state of Cloud Foundry today and how it is evolving as the momentum continues towards Kubernetes. They also discuss VMware's continued commitment to the project and McGarvey's recent appointment to the Cloud Foundry's governing board.

Salt Security recently released the findings of their latest API Security Report, Q3 2022, which the company conducts every six months in line with the shifting currents of the market. In this episode of Let's Talk, Michelle McLean, VP of Marketing at Salt Security, joins me to deep dive into the report. When she looks back at previous reports, she finds that one thing remains consistent — “We are still seeing a fairly high percentage of folks getting impacted or having at least some form of API security incident in the past 12 months.” Over 94% of companies experienced security incidents in production APIs, even though nothing catastrophic happened to them, with over 20% of companies reporting some sort of data breach as a result of security gaps in APIs.

In this episode of TFiR Let's Talk from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Sanjeev Mohan, Principal Analyst at SanjMo, to discuss the key trends he is seeing with data and Kubernetes. Mohan is amazed at how Kubernetes is enabling companies to deploy databases more effectively and efficiently. “A few years ago, if I were to deploy a database on hundreds of nodes, it would take me days. What if a node went down and I had to reinstall it? Today, what I'm seeing is an extreme scale of databases provisioned literally within hours,” he said. Observability was one of the hottest topics of discussion at KubeCon this year. Mohan shares his views on its challenges and why he feels organizations need to change how they see the role observability plays in the pipeline.

Jetstack helps businesses to build and operate cloud-native infrastructure with Kubernetes. The company was formed back in 2015, just a year after the Kubernetes open source project was started. Matthew Bates, CTO of Jetstack, sits down with Swapnil Bhartiya in this episode of Let's Talk from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU to introduce the company and its mission. Jetstack recently released a comprehensive toolkit to help development and security teams secure the software supply chain. Bates feels that this is something we need to take seriously and people need to be made aware of the sophistication of the risks in the attacks they are seeing. He discusses what Jetstack is doing to provide a digestible means to better understand this topic. On discussing why he thought Kubernetes was such a game changer when it was first released, Bates says, “We felt that this presented a really interesting opportunity to be able to build those systems, and also for enterprises to rethink the way that they develop, build and ship software as well. We thought it was the start of a real shift.” Besides the opportunities Kubernetes brings, Bates gives some insights into the challenges enterprises face as they try to navigate Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. One of those challenges, security, continues to be a critical factor to handle. However, Bates feels that security is increasingly being made a priority earlier in the life cycle. Key highlights from this video interview are: Bates describes what motivated him to form Jetstack and how the introduction of Kubernetes presented many opportunities for building complex, potentially stateful systems. He discusses what challenges enterprises faced as they looked to understand and embrace the new technology and how Jetstack has been helping. Bates explains that Jetstack is an advisory and a product company. He goes into depth about the customers they are helping, particularly with very large banks and how Jetstack is helping them understand the challenges and the breadth of the tools in The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to help address them. The cloud-native ecosystem is evolving, which compared to traditional IT is considerably more complex. Bates discusses the evolution over time they have seen in people consuming Kubernetes and how the ecosystem is maturing. Security continues to be a critical consideration for cloud with zero-trust remaining complicated to implement. Bates feels that DevSecOps is prioritizing security rather than it being an afterthought. He explains the benefits Kubernetes brings for having the ability to have security built into the platform.

The Amazon EKS community has added support for Loft Labs' open source project vcluster, which enables you to spin up lightweight, virtual Kubernetes clusters inside the namespaces of an underlying Kubernetes cluster. In this episode of Newsroom, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Lukas Gentele, Co-Founder and CEO of Loft Labs, to talk about how the idea of adding support for EKS with vcluster came about and how it is fostering further collaborations and supporting the open source community.

Summary: FlexiDAO provides software solutions and advisory to help companies achieve their net-zero goals by eliminating the carbon emissions from the electricity that they buy. The company helps organizations by monitoring and certifying the origin of their power, and its carbon emissions every hour of the day. The company uses blockchain technology as a certification enabler to ensure credibility to their claims.

Summary: Ondat is a Kubernetes-native platform for running stateful applications, anywhere, at scale. The company recently announced Trousseau, an open source project for the encryption of resources and in particular, the encryption of Kubernetes Secret. We sat down with Nic Vermande, Principal Developer Advocate at Ondat to learn more about the project.

Slim.AI, a company focused on building better containerized apps with less friction, has raised $31M Series A financing led by Insight Partners and StepStone Group with participation by boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP, Knollwood and TechAviv Founder Partners. John Amaral, Co-Founder and CEO of Slim.AI, says, "I believe in two principles for a company at our stage: Build a great product that developers love and make sure they all know about it. So we will be doing a lot of the first thing, which is developing a lot of energy and investment in building something that developers love." Amaral continues, "So we'll be investing some in the ability to learn from developers, in product management, and even community. But the predominance of this is going towards R&D, building great software."

Salt Labs was created in 2021 to help the industry with tackling the increase in API threats. The research division of Salt Security focuses on not only finding API vulnerabilities, but also increasing awareness about API security and offering solutions to help mitigate such risks.

I sat down with Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research, to explore the factors that help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) & Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) select their cloud providers. Structure Research was founded 10 years ago in Toronto Canada as a research firm of analysts focused on the infrastructure services space. Their organization has seen, during the 18-month long pandemic, an acceleration of cloud infrastructure. Such an acceleration has led to faster deployment and the removal of barriers. To that end, Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research, says, "We follow the results coming from the public markets and not just the hyperscale guys, but also the SMB-oriented providers. Providers targeting SMBs are all showing tremendous growth and, in fact, are positioning for accelerated growth throughout '21 and into '22." This has led analysts, like Shih, to conclude that the cloud has become mainstream and will be a mainstay going forward.

FireHydrant is a purpose-built tool for reliability. With FireHydrant, businesses can better manage and learn from incidents, work with their legal and marketing teams, and all the way through customer service. This is a tool for the entire reliability lifecycle.

Guest: Cole Potrocky Company: Kintaba Show: Let's Talk Cole Potrocky, CTO and co-founder of Kintaba, talks with Swapnil Bhartiya about incident management. Kintaba is dedicated to modern incident management, enabling companies to better respond to major incidents and outages. The company got into this space because they considered it a learning problem. According to Potrocky, "We figured failure is sort of a constant theme, whether you're a one-person company or whether you're a thousand-person company. You learn through getting to the periphery of what failure is, and then you reflect on that failure."

In this episode of Dirk & Swap: Conversations on Open Source, we talk about Open Core. What is it? How different is it from Open Source or Closed Source software? What are the pros and cons of Open Core? Is it better than proprietary software as at least something is open there? How to do Open Core in the right way (if there is one)... We tackle many such complicated questions in this show. I hope you will enjoy it. We have also published a transcript of the recording so you can read it if you want to!

Cassandra Database reaches 4.0. Nearly six years on from the release of Apache Cassandra 3.0, the community behind the popular open-source distributed database has announced the release of v4.0 of Apache Cassandra. Patrick McFadin, VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, and Ben Bromhead, CTO of Instaclustr, are with Swapnil Bhartiya to talk about it. The first issue to be addressed is the importance Cassandra holds in the modern world. McFadin starts off by talking about what workloads Cassandra is focused on, which are websites and mobile applications. McFadin says, "When you use a mobile app on your phone, you're probably using Cassandra." Since its inception, Cassandra has developed into a "really awesome, general-purpose database," adds Bromhead. More importantly, he makes mention of scalability when he says, "As people reach the limits of scalability or availability when it comes to some of the other databases out there (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL), we see developers reaching for Apache Cassandra." The discussion then shifts to the new features available in Cassandra v4.0. Bromhead talks about structural changes based around the Netty networking framework, which has enabled several really cool features, such as zero-copy streaming which allows an Apache Cassandra node to stream the data it's responsible for and leads to wire-level streaming speeds between nodes. Practically speaking, that means users can now run denser nodes. The 4.0 release also saw the deprecation of the Thrift protocol, in favor of the CQL protocol, which was a major change. As far as the upgrade process is concerned, version 4.0 should be considerably easier than previous releases. "If you had been upgrading Cassandra, before, like in the three and twos, there was always a long list of intermediate patches that you had to put into place, or you had to do some extra work mid-upgrade. Because of that, the developers decided it was of utmost importance to make it simple," explains McFadin. Bromhead calls out to developers and admins to "not stress too much about this one. Still run through all the track checks and the standard processes you do. But again, this has been pretty well battle-tested." To further highlight the upgrade process, McFadin mentions that the maintainers had a lot of discussion about the project and how improvements to the upgrade start at the developer level. McFadin says, "Instead of just having someone drop code in and ask everyone what they think, we have a proposal process. So you outline the change that you want to make, we have good discussions about it, and make some changes before there's actual code." Processes like this certainly go a long way in making a project more stable over time.

How the Change to CentOS Affects the Community This past year, Red Hat made some changes to how CentOS is developed and released. With CentOS's strong following, the change came as a big surprise to the community, the user base, and enterprise companies. To that, Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-founder of RackN (https://tinyurl.com/458kbjpd), had this to say: "If CentOS was designed originally to be an alternative for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it was supposed to be an enterprise-grade Linux based on Red Hat bits." According to Hirschfeld, that led to a degree of commercial tension between the enterprise version (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and CentOS. But how did this impact the end-users? Hirschfeld makes it clear the impact was and is significant. At RackN, Hirschfeld says, "We heard immediately from customers, asking questions about how they were going to sustain their versions of deployed operating systems." Hirschfeld offered up some specifics on what happens when the previous version of an operating system (in this case CentOS 8) isn't maintained. He says, "When somebody has a patch, or a change, or an upgrade, or they're writing software that relies on that version, which is very common, then they do not have a way to get patches or fixes for the operating system, they have to literally forward port anything they've built on that operating system to the latest version." Hirschfeld also adds that this type of forced migration is very bad, unattractive, not desirable, or not even commercially feasible. As far as competitors are concerned, Hirschfeld mentions both Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, both of which are forks of CentOS and whose developers have committed to maintaining versions over time. He adds, "It's also worth noting that there are a lot of Linux distributions, like SUSE, Ubuntu, and Debian, which should be considered as an alternative." However, Hirschfeld says of their clients, "We do see people waiting to look at these alternatives. Some of them are just saying, I'm going to switch to a distro where I don't have to deal with vendors like Red Hat." Hirschfeld ends the discussion with talks of migration and says, "I think the jury's still out on whether or not we end up with as dominant a distribution as we have seen with CentOS. And that ultimately, I think, will cause further fragmentation in the Linux industries."

Contributing to an open-source project isn't only about coding. Dirk Hohndel, VP and Chief Open Source officer at VMware, and Swapnil Bhartiya, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of TFiR, discuss various ways in which people can contribute to open-source projects. Hohndel starts off with an idea that has been at play with the open-source community for years, when he says, "What very often happens with open-source components is that as you use them, you suddenly start seeing things that you would like to be different." He goes on by saying, "There is this problem in this integration; there is a mistake in the translation of the user interface, there is this other component that I work with and there is a problem between them, or here's a bug that I found." He finishes that thought by mentioning the first time you submit a bug report to the developers, you are contributing to open source. Hohndel states, "Any interaction with the developer team is a contribution." To that point, Swapnil adds, "It is natural that if you're using an open-source tool, you will engage with code at some point." But not everyone who uses open source has either the skill or the time to write code, so it's not an unavoidable path. And for those who do wish to contribute to an open-source project, it can be done via enhancement requests, submitting bug reports, helping to improve documentation, adding or fixing a translation, and helping with localizations. One very interesting idea is that of snowflakes. Hohndel adds, "When you fix something locally, you have created a snowflake. You have created something that is unique. That is not what everyone else uses, but that is your version. And this is where the desire that I talk so much about, of contributing back to the project in a patch, in the form of code." Fortunately, as Bhartiya says, "When you are using open source, the code is open to you. So you will be able to see problems and may want to fix them. And scratching your own itch can become a contribution as well." That idea is very much at the heart of where most open-source contributions start. But what are the other ways in which companies can contribute to open source? Hohndel lists out some very good ideas such as, giving open-source projects money, helping to write code, translating documentation, helping project engineers to understand various use-cases and how the project is used in real life, creating a design process and providing input into the user interface, helping to make sure the software is usable to people with disabilities. To that list, Bhartiya adds the very important aspect of helping with marketing, which is a big part of what helps keep open-source projects healthy and viable. How can you start contributing to an open-source project? To that end, Hohndel says the project's code repository (such as GitHub) is a great place to start. On services like GitHub, users can open an issue for a project, which is a fantastic way to start the conversation. Ultimately, Hohndel says, "When I engage with a new project, the first thing I do is look at their mailing list and read the last couple of weeks of posts. Or, if there is an IRC or Slack channel, I see how people are interacting." With that information in hand, you'll find it much easier to start contributing to an open-source project.

Observability is key to your cloud strategy According to anynines, observability is defined as The value for how well the internal state of a system can be derived from external sources. Although monitoring can warn you of failure, observability can help you discover why something failed. Patrick Hartz, Sales Engineer at anynines, starts off by remembering what application performance monitoring (APM) was 20 years ago (when he first started in professional software development): "APM was used to watch static models [and] to see how an application behaves." Today's development process is quite different. To that, Hartz says, "By adopting modern application development practices and splitting legacy applications into microservices, the way we observe the systems has changed. So apps are mostly deployed into a lot of containers. And therefore you have more complex scenarios, which demand specialized knowledge." As Hartz puts it, one of the biggest challenges application developers often face is, "that they don't have access to the internals of Cloud Foundry, they only own their application container. So Cloud Foundry is designed to let the application developers run their application and data service themselves." Hartz goes on to discuss the different perspectives and different needs for observability. He says, "If you are a platform operator and you provide data services or the whole platform as a service to your customers, then you can have different kinds of SLAs." On the contrary, "As an operator, I will also observe your data service, for example, to guarantee that the opposite service always behaves in the best way." Finally, he adds, "You can immediately see that observability comes with the responsibility on how to operate and how to deal with your application and data service." But what about the awareness of observability? To that, Hartz offers up a telling anecdote. "...In one of the meetings I had with end-users, I was asked to get system metrics of an application container. I was a bit surprised that I couldn't find an out-of-the-box solution." Finally, Hartz hits on the importance of observability when he says, "Observability...works hand in hand with high availability. You need to be alerted to the fact that things are not healthy before it hits the customer. And you need the proper information and tools to investigate and react based on information, not feelings or guesses."

"How Self Service is All About Empowering Developers" DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider which empowers developers with cloud services to help them deploy and scale their applications. Raman Sharma, VP of Product Marketing at DigitalOcean, talks about how their self-service model is all about optimizing the path of a developer. Sharma starts off by pointing out there are multiple paths to take for application building: The full DIY Infrastructure as a Service model, the Platform as a Service model, and the Cloud Native method. To this end, Sharma says, "...We believe in providing them [developers] an experience where they can serve themselves; they should not need help from an expert or a service provider, just to be able to get started with that platform. So that's kind of what we are focused on." Talking further about this self-service model, Sharma says, "The self-service model is about removing all friction, from the path of a developer towards successfully consuming your products, and going about their business." Sharma also indicates that DigitalOcean is not in the low-code/no-code space, but a platform for technical practitioners (people with slightly deeper technical skills) and that, "...From the point that you sign up on the website, to onboarding and getting started with your first project, and then the next step to adding more team members to your projects, we want to make sure that all of this is super seamless." To that end, DigitalOcean is "feverishly focused" on ensuring this experience for developers (and small development teams) is super optimal and that they have all of the tools and knowledge available to get started. With everything in place, those who develop on the DigitalOcean platform can use the services themselves and won't have to rely on someone else to get everything set up and configured. At the same time, DigitalOcean is seeing that, increasingly, developers care more about productivity and less about the underlying infrastructure. For that, Sharma says, "...We have created services like App Platform, which we released last year, which is a fully managed, Platform-as-a-Service offering, which actually runs on top of our compute and our Kubernetes infrastructure." Sharma follows up with, "But it provides an experience to developers, which is very seamless; they don't have to worry about managing or orchestrating the underlying infrastructure." Finally, Sharma says that DigitalOcean thinks of their cloud as an "...open canvas which is available for developers to come and express their creativity by building applications."

As companies rush to embark on their cloud-native journey, it is becoming increasingly important to have visibility into their stack. In this interview, Richard Hartmann, Director of Community at Grafana Labs, talks about the importance of observability and why companies have it as a core requirement. In addition to understanding observability, we also talked about open-source technologies like Prometheus and how Grafana Labs is making it easier for customers to leverage these open source technologies.

Automation is one of the driving forces behind digital transformation and cloud-native adoption. There are many flavors of automation and RPA or Robotic Process Automation is one of those flavors. Robocorp is a fast-growing start-up based out of Helsinki and San Francisco that's building RPA solutions on top of open-source technologies to help RPA developers with tools and platforms they need to get their job done. In this episode of Let's Talk, I sat down with the CEO and Co-Founder of Robocorp, Antti Karjalainen, to learn more about the company that just closed $21 million in series A funding. The discussion centered on RPA, open source and how Robocorp is offering support for cloud-native applications. We also talked about the areas where Robocorp would be investing in considering the Series A funding. Guest: Antti Karjalainen Company: Robocorp About the guest: Antti Karjalainen is CEO & Co-founder of Robocorp and member of the board at Robot Framework Foundation. An open-source enthusiast with a background in software engineering, he's on a mission to transform the RPA industry with open-source technology and delivery for software robots. About the company: Robocorp empowers businesses and teams to work smarter by shattering previous boundaries of RPA and intelligent automation. It makes it easy, affordable and fast for developers to build software robots and automate manual tasks with first-class, open-source process automation tools. It also provides a robust, secure orchestration and execution platform to allow customers to run both cloud-based and self-managed robotic automations.

We all love to talk about our ‘multi-cloud' stories and strategies, but the fact is most organizations go ‘multi-cloud' by accident. Different teams within an organization pick their own cloud and they end up with ‘accidental' multi-cloud, which leads to more complexities and problems. In this episode of Let's Talk, Tim Wagner, CEO of Vendia, talks about such accidental multi-cloud deployments, what challenges they pose and what are the correct steps to embrace a truly multi-cloud strategy. He also talks about the concept of “Polycloud”, which he believes is the right way to approach ‘many' clouds. This discussion covers a wide range of topics including how companies fall into the trap of accidental multi-cloud, what role cross-cloud solutions like containers and Kubernetes play in accidental multi-cloud, and what are the side-effects of accidental multi-cloud beyond cost. Next, we take a deep dive into the Polycloud and how different it is from multi-cloud. Will we ever achieve cloud nirvana where users can run their workloads in ‘any' cloud without having to worry about data gravity and getting locked into one vendor? We also talk about Vendia's solution to address this problem and also ask Tim to share some tips on how to have a coherent and concrete multi-cloud strategy. Show: Let's Talk Guest: Tim Wagner (LinkedIn, Twitter) Company: Vendia Topics: Cloud Computing About the guest: Tim Wagner is CEO of Vendia, and formerly kick-started the serverless movement with the development of AWS Lambda. About the company: Vendia is a serverless, distributed data platform for sharing data and code in real time across clouds, teams, and partners. Vendia is designed to be simple to use and easy to deploy by bringing together the ease-of-use and unlimited scalability of serverless, with the decentralization benefits of distributed ledgers so that enterprise IT can access and manage data easily, securely, and at scale, no matter where it resides.

Learn more: https://www.leostream.com In this episode of Let's Talk, we sat down with Karen Gondoly, CEO at Leostream, a company that leverages open-source technologies to offer vendor-neutral VDI solutions to organizations of all sizes. The pandemic has created a massive demand for remote access to application environments so users can continue to work accessing enterprise applications remotely. In this interview, we talked about how the pandemic has changed the world around and also explored how Leostream helps organizations better manage their resources and also allow them to work with talented people all across the globe without any need for relocation. Guest: Karen Gondoly (LinkedIn, Twitter) Company: Show: Let's Talk Topics: Virtualization, Remote Work, Open Source, Linux About the company: Leostream provides the critical connection-broker technology required for enterprises to achieve successful large-scale VDI, hosted desktop, or hosted application environments in both private and public clouds. About the guest: Karen Gondoly joined Leostream from The MathWorks, Inc., a technical software company where she was a developer for the Control System Toolbox before specializing in usability. Her technical background includes roles as a software developer, GUI designer, technical writer, and usability specialist. Karen holds bachelor's and master of science degrees in aeronautical/astronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this episode of TFiR Let's Talk (which was recorded a while back), Sylvia Hooks, Vice President (Portfolio Marketing & Enablement) - Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, talks about one of the recent surveys by Aruba to better understand how IT leaders recognize that the ability of organizations to realize business value from data increasingly depends on their capacity to collect, process, store, and analyze that data at the edge. We covered a wide range of topics in this interview including how Hooks would define the ‘edge'. How are modern enterprises already leveraging edge computing? What trends is Hooks seeing in the space in terms of edge adoption? Unique challenges that edge poses and what kind of solutions is Aruba building to tackle those challenges? We then talked about the data side of the edge and how companies are processing data at the edge itself, instead of sending it back to the cloud. We also touched upon one of the biggest focus areas of TFiR -Security. We concluded the interview with a discussion on how the edge is using AI and ML technologies. Guest: Sylvia Hooks (LinkedIn, Twitter) Featured Company: Aruba Show: Let's Talk Topics: Edge Computing

In this episode of TFiR Let's Talk, we invited Navya Dwarakanath, Solutions Engineer at Catchpoint, to talk about the importance of observability and SLOs as more and more companies are rushing towards digital transformation and embracing cloud-native technologies. We started off our discussion with learning a bit more about Catchpoint, a digital experience monitoring platform which is helping companies with end-user monitoring, using both active & proactive as well as reactive monitoring methodologies. We then talked about the factors that are contributing to the increase in the growing popularity of observability. We also talked about the ‘holistic' approach to observability so that users can take actions based on the metrics observability tools provide them with. We also took a deep dive into the cultural or people and social side of observability which is as important as the tech aspect. We then moved to the core of the topic - SLO - as this interview was recorded as part of our coverage of SLOConf. What's the difference between SLO and SLA and why organizations should care about SLOs? We also asked her for recommendations or suggestions that organizations should follow as they implement SLOs. She also warned against some of the mistakes that organizations make with SLOs. Guest: Navya Dwarakanath (Twitter, LinkedIn) Featured company: Catchpoint Show: Let's Talk Topics: Observability, Cloud Native, Kubernetes

Register now: https://bit.ly/3z56C65 Cloud Foundry Foundation will be hosting the next Cloud Foundry Summit Virtual in July this year. We sat down with Chip Childers, Executive Director of the Foundation, to talk about the format of the event and what are some themes and topics we should be looking forward to. Essentially, there will be three tracks throughout the event – the first will be about the end users' stories and experiences, the second will be “How To”, the developers guide for using Cloud Foundry;, and the third track will be “Behind the Curtain” that is all about the interaction between and with the Open Source community who create the Cloud Foundry software. The Foundation will also organize certification exams that have become extremely popular.

Learn more about VMware Tanzu: https://bit.ly/3zdsKLu In 2020, we saw an uptake in the adoption of digital transformation and cloud-native technologies. Fast forward to 2021: As these adoptions are maturing, there has been a shift of focus towards Day 2 challenges and, more importantly, security. Security, as we all know, is no longer an afterthought in the cloud-native world and has moved into the developer's pipeline with the Shift Left movement. In this episode of Let's Talk, we invited James Watters, Chief Technology Officer at VMware's Modern Application Platforms Business Unit, to talk about various aspects of security in the cloud-native world.

Upbound, the creator of open source Crossplane — the modern, cloud-native alternative to Infrastructure as Code (IaC), has announced an enterprise-grade distribution of Crossplane called Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP). The company also took two core products - Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry - out of beta and announced their general availability. In this episode of Let’s Talk, we sat down with Bassam Tabbara, Founder and CEO of Upbound, to learn about these announcements.

Replicated is the modern way to ship on-prem software. Replicated gives software vendors a container-based platform for easily deploying cloud-native applications inside customers' environments to provide greater security and control. We invited Replicated CEO and Co-Founder Grant Miller to talk about the state of software delivery in the Kubernetes world, how software vendors struggle to deliver Kubernetes-based apps to their customers and how Replicated helps such customers and vendors.

Learn more: https://fauna.com/features Fauna is the creator of FaunaDB — a disruptive, global serverless database that makes modern applications possible with rich clients and serverless backends. The founders of the company come from global tech giants like Twitter. In this episode of Let’s Talk, I sat down with Evan Weaver, Co-Founder and CTO of Fauna, to learn more about FaunaDB and what unique problem it's trying to solve.

RackN has announced the release of RackN Digital Rebar v4.6, which introduces a load of new features including continuous provisioning automation with self-contained high availability and multi-platform universal workflow. In this episode of Let’s Talk, RackN CEO and Co-Founder Rob Hirschfeld joined us to tell us more about what’s new in v4.6 and also where does it fit in the broader bare metal story.

Learn more about Puppet Relay: https://puppet.com/products/relay/ Puppet announced the general availability of Relay recently. We hosted Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO of Puppet to learn more about the project. He said that Relay is based on a couple of core hypotheses. If you are an ops type of person, you would find that automation in this kind of modern environment is too hard; things move too quickly. In addition, the tooling is inaccessible to the broadest range of users that need to have it. With Relay Puppet is bringing the low-code approach to Ops, an interface to automate across all those different tools that teams use in the modern cloud environments. “Relay lets you do things like automated incident response, cost management, better security and compliance auditing,” said Giridharagopal.

“SIOS provides clustering software that offers high availability for mission-critical applications, particularly when they're in the cloud. We protect them both on-premises in the cloud and in hybrid environments,” - Margaret Hoagland. Hoagland was recently promoted as the Vice President of Global Marketing at SIOS Technologies. We invited her to our show TFiR Newsroom to talk about her new role and the importance of High Availability and Disaster Recovery in the cloud native world where companies can’t afford ‘any’ downtime.

“Open Policy Agent or OPA was designed to be a policy engine that enables users to have a unified solution to authorization and policies that are across that Cloud Native stack. That’s super important because when you start thinking about putting policies in place for different applications running in different clouds, or different platforms using different databases, different microservices built on different programming languages, what you really want to be able to do is have a single cogent way of solving that authorization problem of who (people) or what (machines) can perform which actions on that software. That’s why OPA is so powerful,” said Tim Hinrichs, Co-founder and CTO of Styra.

Lens is celebrating its first birthday this month. As companies accelerated their digital transformation and cloud-native journeys, Lens became an integral part of Kubernetes experience. Lens enjoyed wide-spread adoption within the Kubernetes ecosystem. In this episode of TFiR INSIGHTS, Miska Kaipiainen, Senior Director Of Engineering at Mirantis, joined me to talk about Lens and how they are planning to celebrate its first anniversary.

Scarf helps open-source developers distribute their software more effectively and with better observability. They believe that the open-source community as a whole should not only be sharing source code, but also data about that source code and how it is used. Scarf is creating a world where open-source maintainers can proactively make data-informed decisions, and are fairly compensated for their work by connecting with and supporting their commercial users. In this episode of TFiR INSIGHTS, we sat down with the co-founder and CEO of the company, Avi Press, to talk about the company and the challenges that exist for open source developers. Social: https://twitter.com/avi_press https://twitter.com/scarf_oss

Lin Sun recently joined Solo.io from IBM, where she focussed on Istio. When asked what attracted her towards Solo.io, a fairly new startup, Sun said, “I’m always impressed with Solo.io as a company as how fast they innovate. And they build those interesting solutions. On top of open source projects like Istio and Envoy, I would say Solo.io is really in the space of connecting services and API gateways to help our users transition from monolithic to microservices.”

Robin Schumacher, Vice President of Product at Netdata (https://www.netdata.cloud/), is an open-source veteran and in this episode of TFiR Insights, we discussed how open source is becoming a key piece of strategy for businesses of all sizes.

Register for PrestoCon Day: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/prestocon/ In this special episode of TFiR Insights for PrestoCon Day 2021, we talked to Vinoth Chandar, Creator of Apache Hudi. Apache Hudi came into existence when Chandar was working at Uber, designing its overall data architecture. His team ran into a lot of foundational gaps with the traditional data lake architectures of the time. Hudi was created as database abstraction, or data lake storage, with which you can then interact with the query from all your existing major league query engines. Chandar will be participating in a panel discussion at PrestoCon Day and this interview covers some of his work. Topics of interest: Apache Hudi, PrestoCon, Vinoth Chandar, Ahana

Inspired by the success of PrestoCon 2020, the Linux Foundation is hosting a special half-day event for the PrestoDB community called PrestoCon Day on March 24. We are covering the event remotely and hosting a series of interviews and panel discussions for the event in which we will talk to some of the core members of the PrestoDB community. In this interview, Dipti Borkar, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Ahana kick-starts the PrestoCon Day Coverage at TFiR.

Recommendation engines are quite popular in the consumer space, but they are even more effective and essential in the enterprise space. Robin Purohit, Co-founder and CEO of Peritus.ai (https://peritus.ai/) compares them with Grammarly that we all use in our work life to help write better, Peritus.ai recommendation engine does the same for DevOps engineers and Developers with technical content. “Millions of tech workers around the world are all trying to master the latest technology and do their job better, we are trying to provide them insights and how they can either support a customer or develop a new product faster by giving recommendations in the moment that they're doing their work,” said Purohit.

Further democratizing Apache Cassandra, DataStax (https://www.datastax.com) has announced a serverless option for Cassandra via DataStax Astra, its Cassandra-as-a-Service offering. “You can now deploy Cassandra without having to think about capacity,” said Patrick McFadin, VP, Developer Relations at DataStax. “It’s a huge shift for Cassandra as developers don’t have to worry about over-provisioning their capacity, which will have a direct impact on what they are going to pay for that capacity. Now in a pure serverless fashion, they can pay what they use.” In this episode of TFiR Insights, we dug deeper into this announcement. Here are some of the topics we discussed: • What is serverless Astra? • Why did DataStax feel a need to offer this now? • How is it more about giving developers greater control over what they pay? • What are the direct benefits for developers? • The evolution of DataStax Astra over time? • Discussion on Apache Cassandra, the heart and soul of Astra. Patrick McFadin is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, where he leads a team devoted to making users of Apache Cassandra successful. He has also worked as Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra and consultant for DataStax, where he helped build some of the largest and exciting deployments in production. Previous to DataStax, he was Chief Architect at Hobsons and an Oracle DBA/Developer for over 15 years.

Codefresh (https://codefresh.io/) recently appointed Dan Garfield as Chief Open Source Officer. Garfield is a regular guest on TFiR Insights so we hosted him again to learn more about this new role and what it means to Codefresh and open source projects that the company is involved with. It does further prove the commitment the company has towards open source.

Learn more about Polyverse: https://polyverse.com/ In this episode of TFiR Secure IT, we discussed three major cybersecurity stories — Windows Exchange hack, Senate’s hearing on SolarWinds hack and NSA’s recommendations on zero trust. We were joined by Ron Nixon, Vice President at Polyverse, to deep dive into these stories and also discuss how Polyverse and polymorphing can offer proactive solutions to many such cybersecurity problems.

Airbyte (https://airbyte.io/) is a promising, cloud based open-source data integration alternative to sync data from any applications, APIs, and databases to data warehouses, data lakes, and other destinations. Airbyte was co-founded by Michel Tricot (former director of engineering and head of integrations at Liveramp and RideOS) and John Lafleur (serial entrepreneur of dev tools and B2B). The company recently raised $5.2 Million in seed funding round. We hosted both co-founders of the company to learn more about the company and the current state of data integration challenges in the cloud.

In this episode of TFiR Insights, I invited Chris Patterson, Product Manager, GitHub Actions – GitHub to join us and talk about how GitHub is approaching DevOps. We touched upon a wide range of topics which are listed below: