The MonkCast

In this RedMonk conversation James Governor catches up with Boris Bialek, Field CTO at MongoDB on industry solutions and scalability. Given the story of the company includes one of the most well known memes in database history - “MongoDB is web scale” we felt it might be time to take another look. Bialek has been working on database scale for decades, including work on IBM's venerable relational database DB2, so he's seen it all. He's enjoying life at MongoDB working on customer problems at scale with MongoDB, and that's what the show is about. The conversation looks at ACID compliance and transactionality, something MongoDB isn't known for, but which it has supported for some time. It explores the complexity and scale of managing ecommerce financial transactions at scale with Black Friday events.. From luxury brands to real-time data management in cars, Boris highlights MongoDB's real-time integration functionality. The discussion also touches upon scalability and optimization in database systems for real-time decision-making. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 22, 2024.

As generative AI drives demand for training and inference workloads, the tech industry has turned to innovations in chip, board and server design to provide the infrastructure and compute power to meet these demands. Annapurna Labs, which Amazon acquired in 2015, plays a key role in AWS's ability to innovate in this area, having developed the Nitro, Graviton, Inferentia, and Trainium families of processors. As a follow-up to RedMonk's tour of Annapurna Labs in Austin, TX, Senior Analyst Kelly Fitzpatrick sits down with Chetan Kapoor (Director of Product Management for the Amazon EC2 Accelerated Computing Portfolio) to discuss how the custom silicon developed at Annapurna Labs is a differentiator for AWS, some of the differences between the infrastructure needs of training and inference workloads, and what AWS is doing to support developers building genAI applications. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 20, 2024.

Dr. Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon, drops in for a discussion with RedMonk's Kelly Fitzpatrick on Web Assembly (WASM), philosophy, and Matt's intersecting interests in the humanities and technology. Topics covered include analytic vs. continental philosophy (and what Descartes has to do with them); Baudrillard on hyperreality; a TL;DR intro to Web Assembly; and how Kant figures into the chapter Matt would write for a book on WASM and Philosophy. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on February 16, 2024. Related Resources: Learn more about Web Assembly: https://webassembly.org/ Information on Fermyon: https://www.fermyon.com/

Software quality and engineering metrics is a big topic in the industry right now, as companies seek to become more effective and competitive, and better understand how their engineering teams are performing. In this conversation Emilio Salvador, VP of Development at GitLab, and James Governor from RedMonk talk about the impact on generative AI on these topics, and take a look at GitLab's own framework for better understanding productivity - focusing on Task, Team, and Time dynamics. What is developer productivity, after all? What is team productivity? What does writing code 25% faster actually mean? What if you save an engineer an hour a week - what is that worth? What is breakthrough productivity? What if we could build 10 times as many things as we could before. What are the implications? Measuring, managing and understanding developer productivity requires us to consider these kinds of questions. The discussion delves into the complexities of measuring developer productivity, emphasizing that it cannot be reduced to a single number. The conversation explores the challenges in measuring performance, including the need for a combination of data sources and addressing cultural differences within teams. Emilio argues that we must recognise development as a team sport, with a focus on matching skill sets to internal transformations, always fostering collaboration within development teams. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 6, 2024.

AI is changing how software is written so it's no surprise that GitLab is investing accordingly. In this conversation with chief product officer David DeSanto we examine the company's strategies and approach to large language models (LLMs) and AI, with a particular focus on trust, security and transparency. GitLab sells to many regulated industry customers, which put a premium on responsible governance. The company's journey began with ModelOps to build, train, deploy, and version AI models alongside software. More recently GitLab has moved into the generative AI space by launching GitLab Duo, an AI platform, which touches all different facets of the software delivery workflow - for example automatically generating detailed issue reports. GitLab's focus on bringing AI to self-hosted customers in air-gapped environments really underscores its commitment to privacy and transparency, and is a significant differentiator in a market which has been defined by the You Only Live Once (YOLO) just ship it approaches of the likes of OpenAI. We talk to DeSanto about GitLab's pledge not to use customer intellectual property for model fine-tuning. We also discuss the company's collaboration with Google Cloud on the security side of DevSecOps lifecycle. It's a good show. Let us know what you think. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 6, 2024.

Rachel Stephens interviews Niki Manoledaki (Software Engineer at Grafana Labs) on her work on the CNCF's Environmental Sustainability TAG. They discuss the Kepler project, the SCI standard, and other efforts to help engineering teams understand the carbon intensity of their cloud workloads. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on January 24, 2024.

Kate Holterhoff, industry analyst at RedMonk discusses Frontend & Prototyping with Stephane Rodet, UX Engineering Manager at IBM. Rodet shares his experience working with the frontend, design, and UX teams at IBM. We discuss trends in this domain in terms of career opportunities, team roles, testing, and tooling. The landscape of frontend and prototyping is shifting fast, and Rodet explains how IBM fosters creativity and innovation in this space. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on July 26, 2022.

In this conversation we caught up Anant Jhingran, CEO and co-founder of StepZen, a GraphQL platform. His experiences make for strong, well justified opinions about the role of GraphQL, its present and future. He's worked in core database technology, he worked at Apigee during the original API Economy wave, he worked at Google after the acquisition. What should the GraphQL experience be like, and how are folks going to take advantage of it? This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 17, 2022.

An in-depth conversation between RedMonk analyst James Governor and Spotify engineering leaders including Saunak "Jai" Chakrabarti, Meera Srinivasan, and Tim Hansen about Spotify, cloud infrastructure cost management, FinOps, and empowering engineering teams to optimise infrastructure spend by shifting decisions left. This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on April 28, 2021.

In which James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk discusses Observability with David Cramer Co-founder and CTO at Sentry. David brings an opinionated view on what he sees as some misconceptions about the market for management tooling. We discuss developer experience, what it actually means in practice. How to build tools for developers and why that matters. David wants to cut through the hype about Observability, with a focused view on content, debugging, and dealing with errors in software. This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on June 15, 2022.