The New Stack Podcast

Christine Yen, Co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb.io, discusses the rising costs of observability in modern cloud-native systems. She highlights how traditional logging and monitoring tools struggle to cope with today's software complexities, leading to inefficiencies. Yen emphasizes the need for innovative solutions that prioritize user experience, like Service Level Objectives (SLOs). She also explores the role of AI and OpenTelemetry in addressing these challenges, showcasing the potential for enhanced insights in software management.

Sudha Raghavan, SVP for Developer Platform at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, discusses the seismic shift in infrastructure needs driven by AI's rapid adoption. She highlights the explosive demand for GPUs and the challenges posed by continuous workloads like large language model training. Raghavan elaborates on Oracle's innovative GPU superclusters and improvements in Kubernetes for better job management and observability. The conversation also touches on the evolution of AI pipelines and the critical trade-offs in AI model selection to meet specific business demands.

The hardware industry is surging, driven by AI's demanding workloads, with Arm—a 35-year-old pioneer in processor IP—playing a pivotal role. In an episode ofThe New Stack Makersrecorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, Pranay Bakre, principal solutions engineer at Arm, discussed how Arm is helping organizations migrate and run applications on its technology.Bakre highlighted Arm’s partnership with hyperscalers like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, showcasing processors such as AWS Graviton and Google Axion, built on Arm’s power-efficient, cost-effective Neoverse IP. This design ethos has spurred wide adoption, with 90-95% of CNCF projects supporting native Arm binaries.Attendees at Arm’s booth frequently inquired about its plans to support AI workloads. Bakre noted the performance advantages of Arm-based infrastructure, delivering up to 60% workload improvements over legacy architectures. The episode also features a demo on migrating x86 applications to ARM64 in both cloud and containerized environments, emphasizing Arm’s readiness for the AI era.Learn more from The New Stack about Arm: Arm Eyes AI with Its Latest Neoverse Cores and SubsystemBig Three in Cloud Prompts ARM to Rethink SoftwareJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gail Frederick, CTO at Heroku Salesforce, champions developer productivity and community-driven innovation. She reveals the open-sourcing of the Twelve-Factor App methodology, aimed at modernizing cloud development practices. Gail discusses updating outdated elements like logging, while introducing new concepts for telemetry and metrics visualization. The talk highlights the significance of diverse contributions in open source and Heroku's adoption of Kubernetes to enhance performance. Plus, they explore AI integration, ensuring that the methodology evolves with emerging technologies.

Leonardo Grasso, Open Source Tech Lead Manager at Sysdig and a core maintainer of Falco, dives into the evolution of this innovative open-source runtime observability tool. The discussion highlights Falco’s integration with eBPF technology, enabling real-time event monitoring from the kernel. Grasso reveals the journey of Falco from its early days to its recent graduation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. He also discusses Falco Talon, a no-code response engine that enhances security automation, making runtime security more efficient than ever.

Matt Barker, co-founder of Jetstack, and Ashley Davis, staff software engineer at Venify, dive into the fascinating journey of cert-manager, an open-source project that revolutionized Kubernetes certificate management. They recount how a job interview challenge sparked its creation, leading to over 500 million downloads monthly. The discussion highlights cert-manager's CNCF graduation, upcoming sub-projects like trust-manager, and the importance of managing machine identities in cloud-native environments, while also addressing the challenges of community engagement and scaling.

Ross O'Neill, Senior Manager of Learning at Andela, focuses on bridging the tech skills gap, particularly in Africa. Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF, emphasizes the urgent need for Kubernetes-certified professionals. Together, they discuss an initiative to train 20,000 tech talents in cloud-native technologies. The conversation explores how tech layoffs and regional disparities affect the developer job market. They also highlight the importance of networking and soft skills in landing tech positions amidst evolving demands for cloud and security expertise.

When open source projects shift to proprietary licensing, forks and new communities often emerge. Such was the case with MapLibre, born from Mapbox’s 2020 decision to make its map rendering engine proprietary. In conjunction with All Things Open 2024, Seth Fitzsimmons, a principal engineer at AWS and Tarus Balog, principal technical strategist for open source at AWS shared that this engine, popular for its WebGL-powered vector maps and dynamic customization features, was essential for organizations like BMW, The New York Times, and Instacart. However, Mapbox’s move disappointed its open-source user base by tying the upgraded Mapbox GL JS library to proprietary products.In response, three users forked the engine to create MapLibre, committing to modernizing and preserving its open-source ethos. Despite challenges—forking often struggles to sustain momentum—MapLibre has thrived, supported by contributors and corporate sponsors like AWS, Meta, and Microsoft. Notably, a community member transitioned the project from JavaScript to TypeScript over nine months, showcasing the dedication of unpaid contributors.Thanks to financial backing, MapLibre now employs maintainers, enabling it to reciprocate community efforts while fostering equality among participants. The project illustrates the resilience of open-source communities when proprietary shifts occur.Learn more from The New Stack about forking open source projects:Why Do Open Source Projects Fork?OpenSearch: How the Project Went From Fork to FoundationJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anandhi Bumstead, Director of Software Engineering at AWS, shares insights on OpenSearch’s fascinating evolution from a fork of Elasticsearch to a project under the Linux Foundation. She discusses the importance of neutral governance and community engagement, enhancing its versatility across analytics and security. Performance boosts are notable, with the latest release showing 6.5x faster query performance. Anandhi emphasizes the need for open source innovation, calling for community contributions to further elevate OpenSearch’s capabilities, especially in AI integration.

In this insightful discussion, Patrick Ames, a Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services specializing in exabyte-scale data, shares his journey from Apache Spark to Ray. He reveals the challenges Spark posed as data volumes increased, leading to long processing times and high costs. Ames emphasizes the efficiency and cost advantages of Ray, a framework designed for scalable AI applications. He also touches on the significance of automation in daily life and the importance of community contributions to open-source innovations.