Giant Conversations

Tommy jumps on with Joshua Olson-Kerrigan (otherwise known as Dr. OK) to talk On-sites and mansions, with a cameo from Oliver from his On-site. Giant Conversations Episode #15 Topic Giant Mansions: How we bring a remote team together Hosted by: Joshua Olson - Kerrigan Tommy Hobin * Cameo from Oliver Thylmann Main topic On-sites and Mansions Intro to Josh Human Resources / HR Teams Involvement Why we do On-sites Planning and Logistics Benefits Retro's done in the past Slide Deck to Teams' mansions Has Team-Team noticed any "changes" in the team(s) after an onsite? (negative or positive but looking for positive of course) On Location Program / Agenda During on-sites Activities (Planned vs. spontaneous) Locations we've been Frequency: (used to do 2 per year) Team Mansions vs. Company On-sites History (One Villa in Mallorca) Budgets team coordination, why it's important to coordinate Giant Mansions Personal - type questions: What makes our on-sites different? With an unlimited budget, what / where would you go and do? Where we've been https://www.giantswarm.io/hubfs/Illustrations/gs23-team-onsite-map-2023.svg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14CJxNU42BR1Re6mVcSjeMqh_Cdd_u_dQY4T1cxKS2Nc/edit#slide=id.g268ad0de9ad_1_6 Further Reading https://www.giantswarm.io/blog/all-work-all-play-the-giant-mansions

Enjoy the musings of Oliver Thylmann and Tommy Hobin as they discuss Kubernetes Ecosystem news, AI and our Slack channel #YELLING Giant Conversations Episode #14 Topic News from the Ecosystem Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Swarmalicious News Introducing Hydrophone: a lightweight runner designed to streamline Kubernetes tests using the official conformance images released by the Kubernetes release team. Microsoft's new recall feature seems to be a really good idea… This very simple tool extracts and displays data from the Recall feature in Windows 11, providing an easy way to access information about your PC's activity snapshots. @kubernetesio, the official account for Kubernetes - K8s, seems to have been silently deleted or deactivated because it is underage Understanding DNS in Kubernetes Delve into DNS resolution mechanics Kubernetes DNS policies like ClusterFirst, Default, and None, and their impact on DNS queries within Pods. IT pros rush to cloud-native Kubernetes platforms to speed app development AI News Series B Funding Round xAI is pleased to announce our series B funding round of $6 billion. CNCF AI Whitepaper just landed and gives good overview over the landscape Apple signs deal with OpenAI for iOS, still wants Google as an 'option' Elon Musk threatens Apple ban over OpenAI integration, cybersecurity experts raise alarms NVIDIA stock split 1-10 News to me Our colleague Antonia von den Driesch ran keyword stats in our #YELLING channel and came up with these metrics: SLACK AZURE GITHUB/AWS MICROSOFT5 HELM Giant Swarm & Friends happening again on July 9th: Developer Productivity

Tommy is joined by esteemed Podcast Producer Heather Clancy to reminisce over the last 12 episodes. Giant Conversations Episode #13 Topic Podcast Sausage: A walk down memory lane… Hosted by: Tommy Hobin Heather Clancy Main topic We take a look back at our last 3 months of Giant Conversations and have a few laughs about each episode. Guests in these episodes: Miles Bryant Liz Rice Cortney Nickerson Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Zach Stone Joe Salisbury Timo Derstappen Marian Steinbach Looking back: a tour of episodes gone by! Episode 1: The Big Introduction Challenges of recording technology and signs the episode is going well. Episode 2: The Pre-KubeCon Special Preparing for the podcast while doing usual event preparation for KubeCon. Episode 3: It's All About Security Tommy missed Zach's soothing voice but was happy to skip and do live recordings at KubeCon. Episode 4: Back from KubeCon EU Teamwork and collaboration spirit of Giant Swarm shone, with colleagues helping on the KubeCon floor. Episode 5: Hanging with Monzo Great episode about Monzo Bank's cloud native journey. Episode 6: Swarmalicious Tommy and Oli unpacked news from the ecosystem with a fun episode of banter. Episode 7: Giant Swarm Platform 3.0 Timo bringing Giant Swarm Platform 3.0 into the spotlight, a great starting point for newbies. Episode 8: News from the Ecosystem Tommy and Oli discussed topics from digital nomads to enterprise technologies. Episode 9: It's Liz Rice! Tommy and Oli were a bit starstruck by Liz Rice. Episode 10: Unpacking Open Source with Cortney Nickerson Open Source is powered by love and pricing Open Source is difficult. Episode 11: From Flatcar to Emotional Support Gators The importance of rotating nodes and alligators who are friends too. Episode 12: Backstage with Backstage Best episode title, showing how Giant Swarm helps customers focus on Backstage with Backstage.

00:00 — Introduction Join hosts Oliver and Tommy as they welcome special guest Marian to discuss Backstage, the open source developer portal framework that's taking the tech world by storm. 01:20 — Swarmalicious News Get up to speed with the latest buzz in the world of tech and beyond. 05:06 — What is Backstage? Marian introduces Backstage, the powerful framework for developer portals created by Spotify and donated to the CNCF. Discover how this tool is designed to bring developers onto the same page and boost their productivity. 09:40 — Solving Problems with Backstage Explore how Backstage tackles common challenges faced by developers and platform teams, such as reducing learning curves, improving information accessibility, and providing a unified interface for creating and managing resources. Marian shares Giant Swarm's journey towards offering Backstage as the sole web interface for a streamlined developer experience. 29:23 — Is Backstage a Silver Bullet? The hosts discuss the realities of implementing Backstage, including the effort required to set up and maintain the framework. Marian highlights the need for dedicated teams to develop and manage Backstage plugins, especially in large organizations. 33:25 — The Real Selling Points of Backstage Dive into the key benefits of Backstage for platform teams and organizations. While teams can leverage the open-source nature of Backstage to unify information access, organizations must navigate the long-term process of proper implementation and the accompanying cultural shifts. 39:24 — The Secret to Backstage's Success Marian reveals the factors contributing to Backstage's popularity, including its lack of open-source competition and the wealth of building blocks it provides for getting started quickly. The hosts also discuss ongoing efforts to create a centralized community plugin repository.

This is our news. Directly from the source of Giant Swarm Giant Conversations Episode #11 Topic Diving into the latest buzz with Swarmalicious News Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Swarmalicious News The Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) has proven to be a powerful design decision, enabling generic tooling and reducing the effort required to manage diverse resource types. By using the same format for at-rest serialization and API communication, KRM allows resources to be self-describing, facilitating various management tasks and automation scenarios. The current state of systemd-sysext in Flatcar and the next steps. Flatcar can now do in-place Kubernetes upgrades without replacing nodes as the Kubernetes components no longer need to be baked into the images. Flux 2.3 is out with Helm Controller GA Flatcar can now do in-place kubernetes upgrades without replacing nodes as the kubernetes components no longer need to be baked into the images. guide to running renovate Our very own Joe Salisbury was featured as an industry expert in this article on the future of cloud native. How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode Imagine you create an empty, private AWS S3 bucket in a region of your preference. What will your AWS bill be the next morning? AWS ‘Disappointed’ It’s No Longer A VMware Cloud On AWS Reseller; Future Of Product In Doubt IBM's $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp presents both opportunities and challenges. The deal could strengthen IBM's cloud and automation capabilities, but the impact on HashiCorp's open source projects like Terraform and its positioning within IBM will be key factors to watch. The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey How Twitter lost its way, Jack’s strategy for ending censorship forever, new background on the Elon saga, and the death of social media as we know it. Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ AI News Google I/O 2024 was all about AI Chat GPT-4o: The O is for Omni A coffee roastery in Finland has launched an AI-generated blend. The results were surprising Finnish coffee roasters named the coffee AI-conic. Using a mixture of beans from Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia and Guatemala, AI created the coffee package label and a detailed taste description saying “AI-conic” is “a well balanced blend of sweetness and ripe fruit.” News to me Man says his emotional support alligator, known for its big social media audience, has gone missing Emotional support animal, (from PA.) Wally was thought to be abducted and put in front of a persons house as a prank. Wally has a pretty large following on social media.

Giant Conversations Episode #10 Topic Unpacking Open Source with Cortney Nickerson Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Starring: Cortney Nickerson Main topic From KubeCon in Paris, we asked our guest this question: Can successful open source projects only originate from organizations that don’t prioritize monetizing the project? Cortney's answer resonated with us in the era of new Open Source Licensing, and we just had to have her on. Theme: Corporations and Open Source: How should corporations approach and engage with open source projects? What are the benefits and challenges for corporations when getting involved in open source? Theme: Open Source as a Business Model: Can open source be a sustainable business model for companies, especially those founded specifically for an open source project? Theme: Role of Big Tech Companies: Do you think big tech companies should be the primary drivers of open source projects? How do the contributions and influence of big tech companies shape the open source ecosystem? Should we expect open source innovation to primarily come from big tech companies, or is there room for smaller players and community-driven projects? Theme: Balancing Corporate Interests and Open Source Values: How can corporations strike a balance between their commercial interests and the values of the open source community? What are some best practices for corporations to engage with open source projects in a mutually beneficial way? How can corporations foster a culture of open source contribution and collaboration within their organizations?

Come meet Liz Rice as we talk about how much we all love our Kubernetes community. So actually it's an Episode about you. Giant Conversations Episode #09 Topic Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Starring: Liz Rice Main topic: Interview with Liz Rice Questions: 100's of people lined up at KubeCon. Invited to all the events. Asked to speak on webinars, at meetups, at conferences… How does it feel being a cloud native celebrity? How did you end up in the Kubernetes space? There is the saying: we stumbled upon our greatest successes, but you only stumble if you are walking? Did you just walk where you liked it or did you target something? If you had to put your day in percentages, what amount goes where? Obviously everything Isovalent connected but how much internal, wider community, book writing, speeches, podcasts :) ? In a rapidly evolving cloud native landscape, staying up-to-date can be a challenge. How do you approach staying informed? You are a diverse character? Which 3 Books would you recommend for somebody in IT? How to manage developers? Write Product Specs? Invest your Time? … What did the Kubernetes Community Fuck up in the Last Few Years and Approved upon? What is our biggest risk? What are the most important things to focus on when using Kubernetes, ignoring all the buzz word bingo? Does that change over time or are there things set in stone you need to never lose sight of? You're known for your ability to explain complex technical concepts in a clear and engaging way. What's your secret sauce for making topics accessible and entertaining for a wide audience? If you could create a new CNCF project to solve any problem in the cloud native space, what would it be and why? If you could take over kubernetes.io for a day. Clean slate, one page, to everyone in our ecosystem and add your your idea or message. AND everyone has to do "it" — what would be your message and why?

We discuss digital nomads, IBM buying Hashicorp, the Puppet State of DevOps report, and scary Boston Dynamics robots Giant Conversations Episode #08 Topic: News of the week from Giant Swarm Hosted by: Oliver Thylmann Tommy Hobin Swarmalicious News By 2035, the number of digital nomads is projected to reach 1 billion worldwide. Kubernetes v1.30: Uwubernetes is here and the logo is very cute We can talk about the name. :) 10 years of effort Cost to develop and People required for Kubernetes development More news from Hashicorp It seems that OpenTofu, an open source project, has been accused by HashiCorp's lawyers of violating the terms of the Business Source License (BSL) under which HashiCorp's Terraform codebase is licensed. OpenTofu strongly denies any wrongdoing, suggesting that HashiCorp may be confusing code that was previously open-sourced under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with more recently developed code released under the BSL. OpenTofu is investigating the matter and plans to provide a detailed written response explaining their position in the coming days. OpenTofu has answered. But looks like now IBM will be buying Hashicorp Our VP Product Puja was interviewed by Alex Williams from The New Stack discussing our support for Flux Pini's talk in Cologne at the Sustainable Offsite Meetup with Timo raised some interesting points. Starting this year, the largest companies in Europe will be required to report their carbon footprint due to the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). In the future, these reports will need to be more detailed, and smaller companies will also be required to comply. In Europe, 11,700 of the largest, exchange-listed companies, banks, and insurers will have to report their greenhouse gas emissions for the first time in 2025 under the CSRD. These companies have more than 500 employees each and were previously covered by the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD). Puppet State of DevOps Report is out. Some interesting insights: security is now built into most platform engineering efforts from the very start. This means everyone, not just IT, can take responsibility for security. In addition, 83% of companies say their platform engineering team has been crucial to improving regulatory compliance and 43% of organizations have had a platform team for 3-5 years. Boston Dynamics - say hello to Atlas: Crazy video shows new movements that are, as Tommy would put it "Excorcist Like" In the comments of the video, one person says "This is when I realized that not having 360 degree joints as a human is so frustrating"

Meet the Giant Swarm Platform 3.0 with Timo Derstappen Main topic Giant Swarm has release version 3.0 of it's Platform and we talk a bit with Timo Derstappen about the history and how we got there and what changes. History of Giant Swarm to version 3.0 Why we chose to go with CAPI Why the move took so long and what we needed to contribute What are the benefits for our customers and us What is the future of the 3.0 Platform

All the latest news from the Cloud Native ecosystem Our KubeCon survey results Results of the 412 survey participants (THAT's 3.4% of attendees): KubeCon Survey The biggest challenges companies face are hiring the right people, dealing with too many different tools, and lacking time for automation, which leads to operational overload. Interestingly, only 12% of companies couldn't think of any challenges at all. When it comes to platform teams, every second one named increasing stability and reliability of the platform as their biggest challenge, followed by extending the platform's functionality. Surprisingly, while we expected platform teams to be understaffed, the majority are actually overstaffed compared to what we consider a good ratio. Yet, there never seem to be enough people to tackle all the topics. This is where Giant Swarm comes in, offering a smarter approach to platform engineering. NOTE: In the Podcast, Tommy mentions a ratio Platform Team size to Number of Software Developers. We calculate this ratio as 5/100 or 5%). With the caveat that with over 1,000 devs, you can go 3/100 (being 3%) News from KubeCon (the behind-the-scenes notes our Swarmies jotted down at the conference) Customization was a hot topic. First up, we have to mention the kubecolor tool, which adds a splash of color to your kubectl output. It's a small thing, but it makes working with Kubernetes just a little more fun. In addition, Marian from Giant Swarm highlighted the importance of branded dev portals for enterprises. It's not just about the technology; it's about creating a cohesive experience that aligns with a company's culture. There was a lot of buzz around the kcp project and its potential to simplify multi-cluster deployments. The API export-import capabilities across namespaces could be a game-changer. We also heard about some exciting emerging technologies, like Kratix and its process-oriented approach to platform building, and Keptn, which offers application lifecycle management with promotions, metrics, and traces. Definitely worth keeping an eye on those. On the security front, there was a growing interest in supply chain security tools and standards. Swarmalicious News KubeCon presentations available on YouTube If you've missed any talks at KubeCon, you can catch up on YouTube. STAFF PICKS: Beyond Platform Thinking at Ritchie Brothers - Build Things No One Expects, in a Place No One Expect Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking - Spotify Securing 900 Kubernetes Clusters Without PSP Teleport announced a licensing change for their product Starting in June, the community edition will no longer be published under the Apache 2.0 license. Instead, “Companies may use Teleport Community Edition on the condition they have less than 100 employees and less than $10MM in annual recurring revenue” and “Companies cannot resell or embed Teleport Community Edition in their products or services” and “We will stop distributing compiled binaries, container images, and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) under Apache 2.0” Mirantis Doubles Down on Open Source At KubeCon Europe in Paris, Mirantis CTO S revealed that the cloud native company is putting more effort into its open source programs than ever while shifting its business plans. Vercel is bad at comms, again The CEO took time to reply to the tweet clarifying their position. Cloud Native Night Munich Meet-up A hybrid meet-up about GitOps on Kubernetes. 2 x Presentations: Efficient Kubernetes Fleet Management with Cluster API and GitOps & Extending Flux for Fun and Profit. Date: Tuesday, April 18. Our CTO Timo spoke about Sustainable Cloud Native Infrastructure in Cologne. The most detailed timeline of the xz backdoor I've seen so far In a multi-year social engineering attack, a malicious contributor gained maintainer access to the xz compression library and hid a backdoor enabling remote code execution attacks on many Linux systems. The attack was discovered on March 28, 2024 and marks a watershed moment in open source software supply chain security. Vultr, a cloud server provider, hastily removed a controversial clause from its terms of service that had granted the company broad rights to user content, following an outcry from concerned customers who feared the biz was giving itself too much control over their data in an era of AI models being trained on such information.