The New Stack Podcast

Low-code and no-code is becoming increasingly popular in software development, particularly in enterprises that are looking to expand the number of people who can create applications for digital transformation efforts. While in 2020, less than 25% of new apps were developed using no code/low code, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% will utilize this means. Microsoft is one vendor who has been paving the way in this shift by reducing the burden on those in the lines of business and developers in exchange for speed. But what are the potential and best practices for low code/no code software development? In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Apps and Platform at Microsoft discusses what the company is doing in the low-code/no code space with its Power Platform offering, including bringing no code/low-code professionals together to deliver applications. Joab Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of The New Stack and Darryl Taft, News Editor of The New Stack hosted this podcast. 

Developers are often faced with complexity when building and operating long-running processes that involve multiple service calls and require continuous coordination. To solve this challenge, Uber built and introduced Cadence, the open-source solution for workflow orchestration in 2016 that enables developers to directly express complex, long-running business logic as simple code. Since its debut, it continues to find increased traction with developers operating large-scale, microservices-based architectures. More recently, Instaclustr announced support for a hosted version of Cadence.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer at Instaclustr and Emrah Seker, Staff Software Engineer at Uber discuss Cadence, and how it is used by developers to solve various business problems by enabling them to focus on writing code for business logic, without worrying about the complexity of distributed systems.Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted this podcast, along with co-host Joab Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of The New Stack.

As the tech stack grows, the list of technologies that must be configured in cloud computing environments has grown exponentially and increased the complexity in the IT infrastructure. While every layer of the stack comes with its own implementation of encrypted connectivity, client authentication, authorization and audit, the challenge for developers and DevOps teams to properly set up secure access to hardware, software throughout the organization will continue to grow, making IT environments increasingly vulnerable. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Ben Arent, Developer Relations Manager, Teleport discusses how to address the hardware, software and peopleware complexity that comes from the cloud by using tools like Teleport 9.0 and the company’s first release of Teleport Machine ID. 

From cloud security providers to open source, trust has become a staple from which an organization's security is built. But with the rise of cloud-native technologies, the new ways of building applications are challenging the traditional approaches to security. The changing cloud-native landscape is requiring broader security coverage across the technology stack and more contextual awareness of the environment. So how should DevOps and InfoSec teams across commercial businesses and governments rethink their security approach? In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Tom Bossert, president of Trinity Cyber (and former Homeland Security Advisor to two Presidents); Patrick Hylant, client executive of VMware; and Chenxi Wang, managing general partner, Rain Capital discuss how businesses and the U.S. government can adapt to the evolving threat landscape, including new initiatives and lessons that can be applied in this high-risk environment. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this podcast. Jim Douglas, CEO of Armory also joined as co-host of this livestream event.

"Many Ukrainians continue working. A very good opportunity is to continue working with them, to buy Ukrainian software products, to engage with people who are working [via] UpWork. Help Ukrainians by giving them the ability to work, to do some paid work," whether still in the country or as refugees abroad. If you take something from this conversation, Anastasiia Voitova's words may be the ones that should stick. After all, Ukraine has a renowned IT workforce, with IT outsourcing among its most important exports.Voitova, the head of customer solutions and security software engineer at Cossack Labs, just grabbed her laptop and some essentials when she suddenly fled to the mountains last month to "a small village that doesn't even have a name." She doesn't have much with her, but she has more work to do than ever — to meet her clients' increasing demand for cybersecurity defenses and to support the Ukrainian defense effort. Earlier this month, her Ukraine-based team even released a new open source cryptographic framework for data protection, on time, amidst the war.Voitova was joined in this episode of The New Stack Makers by Oleksii Holub, open source developer, software consultant and GitHub Star, and Denys Dovhan, front-end engineer at Wix. All three of them are globally known open source community contributors and maintainers. And all three had to suddenly relocate from Kyiv this February. This conversation is a reflection into the lives of these three open source community leaders during the first three weeks of the Russian invasion.This conversation aims to help answer what the open source community and the tech community as a whole can do to support our Ukrainian colleagues and friends. Because open source is a community first and foremost. "Open source for me is a very big part of my life. Idon't try to like gain anything out of it, I just code things. If I had a problem, I solve it, and I think to myself, why not share it with other people," Holub said.He sees open source as an opportunity for influence in this war, but also is acutely aware that his unpaid labor could be used to support the aggression against his country. That's why he added terms of use to his open source projects that use of his code implicitly means you condemn the Russian invasion. This may be controversial in the strict open source licensing world, but the semantics of OSS seem less important to Holub right now.Of course, when talking about open source, the world's largest code repository GitHub comes up. Whether GitHub should block Russia is an on going OSS debate. On the one hand, many are concerned about further cutting off Russia — which has already restricted access to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — from external news and facts about the ongoing conflict. On the other hand, with the widespread adoption of OSS in Russia, it's reasonable to assume swaths of open source code is directly supporting the invasion or at least supporting the Russian government through income, taxes, and some of the Kremlin's technical stack.For Dovhan, there's a middle ground. His employer, website builder Wix, has blocked all payments in Russia, but has maintained its freemium offering there. "There is no possibility to pay for your premium website. But you still can make a free one, and that's a possibility for Russians to express themselves, and this is a space for free speech, which is limited in Russia." He proposes that GitHub similarly allows the creation of public repos in Russia, but that it blocks payments and private repos there.Dovhan continued that "I believe [the] open source community is deeply connected and blocking access for Russian developers, might cause serious issues in infrastructure. Alot of projects are actually made by Russian developers, for example, PostCSS, Nginx, and PostHTML."These conversations will continue as this war changes the landscape of the tech world as we know it. One thing is for sure, Voitova, Dovhan and Holub have joined the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian software developers in making a routine of work-war balance, doing everything they can, every waking hour of the day. 

From cloud security providers to open source, trust has become the foundation from which an organization's security is built. But with the rise of cloud-native technologies such as containers and infrastructure as code (IaC), it has ushered in new ways to build applications and requirements that are challenging the traditional approaches to security. The changing nature of the cloud-native landscape is requiring broader security coverage across the technology stack and more contextual awareness of the environment. But how should teams like Infosec, DevOps rethink their approach to security?In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Guy Eisenkot, co-founder and vice president of product at Bridgecrew, Barak Schoster Goihman, senior director, chief architect at Palo Alto Networks and Ashish Rajan, head of security and compliance at PageUp and producer and host for Cloud Security Podcast preview what’s to come at Palo Alto Network’s Code to Cloud Summit on March 23-24, 2022, including the role of security and trust as it relates to DevOps, cloud service providers, software supply chain, SBOM (Software Bill of materials) and IBOM (Infrastructure Bill of Material),Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted this podcast.

Kubernetes is great at large-scale systems, but its complexity and transparency has caused higher cloud costs, delays in deployment and developer frustration. As Kubernetes has taken off and workloads continue to move to a containerized environment, optimizing resources is becoming increasingly important. In fact, the recent 2021 Cloud Native Survey revealed that Kubernetes has already crossed the chasm to mainstream with 96 percent of organizations using or evaluating the technology.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Matt Provo, founder and CEO of StormForge, discusses new ways to think about Kubernetes, including resource optimization which can be achieved by empowering developers through automation. He also shared the company’s latest new machine learning-powered multi-dimensional optimization solution, Optimize Live.Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this podcast.

While Java continues to be the most widely used programming language in the enterprise, how is it faring the emerging cloud native ecosystem? Quite well, observed a panel of Oracle engineers who work the language. In fact, they estimate that they there are more than 50 million Java virtual machines running concurrently in the cloud at present.In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we discussed the current state of Java with Georges Saab, who is Oracle's vice president of software development, for the Java Platform Group; Donald Smith, Oracle senior director of product management; and Sharat Chander, Oracle senior director of product management. TNS editors Darryl Taft and Joab Jackson hosted the conversation.

Two decades ago, security was an afterthought; it was often ‘bolted on’ to existing applications that left businesses with a reactive approach to threat visibility and enforcement. But with the proliferation of cloud native applications and businesses employing a work from anywhere model, the traditional approach to security is being reimagined to play an integral role from development through operations. From identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and adapting to risk across the applications, organizations are moving to a full view of their risk posture by employing security across the entire lifecycle.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Ratan Tipirneni, President and & CEO, Tigera discusses how organizations can take an active approach to security by bringing zero-trust principles to reduce the application’s attack surface, harness machine learning to combat runtime security risks and enable a continuous compliance while mitigating risks from vulnerabilities and attacks through security policy changes.Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted this podcast.

Cloud-native applications provide an advantage in terms of their scalability and velocity. Yet, despite their resiliency, the complexity of these systems has grown as the number of application components continue to increase. Understanding how these components fit together has stretched beyond what can be easily digested, further challenging the ability for organizations to prepare for technical issues that may arise from the system complexities.Last month, ChaosNative hosted its second annual engineering event, Chaos Carnival where we discussed the principles of chaos engineering and using them to optimize cloud applications in today’s complex IT systems.The panelists for this discussion:Karthik Satchitanand, Co-founder and Open-Source Lead, ChaosNativeRamya Ramalinga Moorthy, Industrialization Head - Reliability & Resilience Engineering, LTI – Larsen & Toubro InfotechCharlotte Mach, Engineering Manager, Container SolutionsNora Jones, Founder and CEO, JeliIn this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack served as the moderator, with the help of Joab Jackson, editor-in-chief of The New Stack.