The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I spoke with James Campbell, CEO of Cado Security, about his background in the security world and why he felt like there needed to be a better way to manage security forensics in a cloud native environment. Highlights: Why it’s important to get better information about security incidents — or potential security incidents — to make better decisions. Why security has to be relatively easy because otherwise people will ignore it — at their peril. How cloud native features like auto-scaling are great for compute but make security, especially security forensics, more complex. Without enough data collected in real time, companies can end up unable to know whether or not an anomaly actually caused data loss, which data was impacted and what the root cause of incident was. How some of the most sophisticated attackers operate and how they can cause havoc even if the impacted container has spun down. The triggers that led Campbell and his co-founder to start Cado Security. Why having better information is critical to responding effectively to breaches, large and small. Links: James Campbell on LinkedInJames Campbell on TwitterCado Security

What is edge? What is cloud? What is the difference and what are the different requirements for each use case? I talked to Samy Fodil, CEO and founder of Taubyte, about edge computing, industrial IoT and how the edge requires a dramatically different approach from the cloud. Highlights:Why edge is a truly distributed system, unlike the cloud. What inspired Fodil to start Taubyte and why he thinks the edge will be the default computing platform in the years to come.What overlap there is in skill sets between on-prem development, cloud development and developing edge-native applications.Why edge-to-edge communications can be so hard for developers to understand. What barriers prevent companies from taking advantage of the edge and why it’s worth it for those businesses in spite of the complexity. Links:Samy Fodil on LinkedInTaubyte

This week on The Business of Cloud Native I spoke with Travis Nielsen and Sebastien Han about how Rook has evolved over the years, beginning as a way to build a cloud native storage platform but before anyone was talking about cloud native or Kubernetes. Links: Travis on LinkedInSebastien on LinkedInThe Rook project page

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I talked with former Gartner Analyst, current VP of Solutions at Securonix Augusto Barros. We talked about how Securonix’s positioning has evolved over the years as it has move between market categories as well as how to evaluate and test cloud native security solutions. Links:Augusto on TwitterAugusto on LinkedInSecuronix

In this episode with Evan Reiser, CEO of Abnormal Security, we explored how positioning and an understanding of who your ideal customers are and what their needs are can influence technology choices, including which cloud provider you build on. HighlightsHow a seemingly pure technology choice like cloud provider can have serious implications for customer experience. The difference between having a board-level discussion about cloud providers is different from gathering the engineering team to talk about cloud infrastructure Why being integrated in the Microsoft ecosystem was a strategic business decision and how technology decisions in general can be high-level business decisionsWhy technology teams should think more about what the customers need and want instead of just choosing the best tool from a technical perspectiveEvan’s hesitations about making the transition to Azure and why they did it anywayWhy they chose to re-architect at the time they didEven though the move to Azure was made to improve customer experience, customers don’t necessarily have a different experience since the moveWhy founders should keep in mind that startups rarely fail because their technology doesn’t work, but because they don’t meet the needs of their customersLinks: Evan on LinkedInAbnormal Security

This week on The Business of Cloud Native I talked with Yong Tang, one of the maintainers of CoreDNS, about how the project started, how it’s evolved over the years and how the team decided to integrate it with Kubernetes. Links: CoreDNSYong Tang on LinkedIn

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I talked with Brian Gracely about using Kubernetes for edge workloads as well as the difference between “cloud” and “edge.” HighlightsIs edge part of the cloud, is cloud a part of edge or are they completely separate but slightly related environments? What makes something a data center vs what makes something an edge device? How enterprises think of edge vs how Telcos think about edge. How the edge has gone from being a cost center to a competitive advantage for enterprises.Why Telcos have always thought of edge as a market opportunity. Why Kubernetes can help standardize environments and make it easier to deploy software to the edge, but there are still challenges to overcome. Why edge deployments require re-thinking many basic environmental factors like bandwidth and compute capacity. Why consistency at the edge is so important. Why you can’t ignore the physical conditions that make edge environments unique. LinksBrian on TwitterThe CloudcastRedHat OpenShift

In today’s episode of The Business of Cloud Native, I talked with Julien Pivotto and Richard Hartmann, two of the maintainers of Prometheus, about how the project started, how it’s evolved over the years (and how it’s stayed the same) as well as some novel ways Prometheus is used in the real world. HighlightsWhy both Julien and Richard got started with PrometheusSome surprising ways that Prometheus is used to monitor things beyond the software engineering worldHow Prometheus has evolved in technology and usage over the yearsHow Kubernetes and its relationship with Prometheus has changed the projectWhat assumptions ‘cloud native’ creates for potential Prometheus usersLinksJulien on TwitterRichard on Twitter

In this episode of The Business of Cloud Native, Chris Holmes talks about bootstrapping Decipher Technology Studies and their core product, intelligent service mesh Greymatter.io. He also talks about why it's so important for brownfield and greenfield apps to talk to one another and the many similarities between public sector and private sector organizations. Highlights: How Greymatter combines business intelligence and security controls.The difference between working with public sector customers and private sector / enterprise customers — and why there are more similarities than differences. How segmentation is sometimes necessary for any highly security-conscious organization, including both government organizations and financial services companies in the private sector. Why we need to respect legacy applications — because they tend to be the mission-critical applications that drive revenue. Why connecting brownfield and greenfield applications is critical, because not all ‘legacy’ apps will ever be moved to the cloud.What ‘returns’ a company is looking for when evaluating ROI on cloud migrations. What we mean when we talk about an “ROI” on security tools. Why Kubernetes’ terrible networking is part of why Chris could see that service meshes would be necessary even back in 2015. Links:Chris on LinkedIngreymatter.io 

This week on The Business of Cloud Native I spoke with Chris Psaltis, CEO and co-founder of mist.io. We spoke about why multicloud is necessary (and scenarios where multicloud is not necessary), where multicloud is headed in the future and the journey Chris and his co-founders have been on with Mist. HighlightsThe difference between using multicloud for legal / regulatory reasons or because of the company’s history and using multicloud strategically to improve developer velocity or improve customer experience. The complexity involved with pursuing multicloud and why many organizations are better off in just one cloud. Why being cloud agnostic from day one is not a good strategy in the vast majority of cases. Why no one seems to be able to correctly estimate how difficult it is to build a multicloud platform. Why ‘silos’ are the competitive alternative to a unified platform for companies How Mist went from working primarily with smaller teams before figuring out that they provided more value for large teams because the pain from multicloud management increases exponentially as the number of engineers, applications and environments increases. When the founding team decided to stop being consultants and start an open source technology startup. LinksMistChris on LinkedInChris on Twitter