Cloud Engineering Archives - Software Engineering Daily

Modern SaaS products are increasingly delivered via the cloud, rather than as downloadable, executable programs. However, many potential users of those SaaS products may need that software deployed on-prem, in a private network. Organizations have a variety of reasons for preferring on-prem software, such as security, integration with private tools, and compliance with regulations. The cost of setting up a bespoke on-prem version of a SaaS offering was often prohibitive for both the vendor and potential users. Replicated leverages the portability of containers to help SaaS vendors ship an on-prem or multi-prem version of their software. Replicated gives SaaS vendors a suite of ready-made components to help install and manage an instance of their software on-prem. Replicated has seen explosive growth in its six-year lifespan: today, 50 of the Fortune 100 companies manage apps with Replicated. Grant Miller is the Founder and CEO of Replicated. Replicated recently closed a Series B fundraising round to help scale their work in the cloud-native space, including the launch of their Kubernetes-Off-the-Shelf platform. He joins the show today to talk about the next generation of tools on the Replicated platform, how Kubernetes is changing enterprise IT, and why the on-prem software market isn’t going away anytime soon. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Multi-Prem Software Delivery and Management with Grant Miller appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cloud platforms are often categorized as providing either Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service. On one side of the spectrum are IaaS giants such as AWS, which provide a broad range of services for building infrastructure. On the other are PaaS providers such as Heroku and Netlify which abstract away the lower-level choices and focus on developer experience.  Digital Ocean has carved out a sizable niche in the cloud hosting space by targeting the middle ground- a streamlined cloud platform built for developers, which still offers the ability to choose, customize, and manage infrastructure. The release of Digital Ocean’s App Platform takes this goal a step further. The App Platform allows users to build and deploy an app or static site directly from GitHub directly onto a DigitalOcean-managed Kubernetes cluster. Teams can access the power, scale, and flexibility of Kubernetes without having to worry about the complexity of managing a cluster themselves. The App Platform gives developers the choice of how much of their infrastructure they want to control, and how much they want to be provided by the platform. Cody Baker and Apurva Joshi work at Digital Ocean. They join the show today to talk about why Digital Ocean stands out in a competitive cloud hosting space, what is the value proposition for developers interested in the App Platform, and how the PaaS industry is evolving. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Digital Ocean Platform with Cody Baker and Apurva Joshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In the past several years, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for orchestrating containerized, stateless applications. Tools such as StatefulSets and Persistent Volumes have helped developers build stateful applications on Kubernetes, but this can quickly become difficult to manage as an application scales. Tasks such as machine learning, distributed AI, and big data analytics often require a distributed application to maintain some sort of state across services.  KubeDirector is an open-source controller that helps streamline the deployment and management of complex stateful scale-out application clusters on Kubernetes. KubeDirector provides an application-agnostic deployment pattern and enables developers to run non-cloud native stateful applications on Kubernetes without modifying the code. KubeDirector aims to bring enterprise-level capabilities for distributed stateful applications to Kubernetes. Kartik Mathur is an engineer at HPE Developer, an open-source initiative within Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. HPE is an enterprise contributor to the KubeDirector open-source community. Kartik previously worked as senior software engineers at BlueData, which created the KubeDirector project before its acquisition by HPE. Kartik joins the show today to talk about why state is important for Big Data or Machine learning applications, how KubeDirector can help manage the complexity of stateful applications. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post KubeDirector with HPE’s Kartik Mathur appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Serverless computing refers to an architectural pattern where server-side code is run on-demand by cloud providers, who also handle server resource allocation and operations. Of course, there is a server involved on the provider’s side, but administrative functions to manage that server such as capacity planning, configuration, or management of containers are handled behind-the-scenes, allowing the application developers to focus on business logic. This makes for highly elastic and scalable systems and can reduce development, testing, and iteration time due to reduced overhead. Function as a Service (FaaS) describes a model of serverless computing where services are decomposed into modular functions and deployed to a serverless platform. These functions are executed only when called and are typically stateless. Despite the benefits of elasticity and modularity that FaaS offers, it has drawbacks as well. Taking disaggregation of functionality to an extreme means that behavior that formerly required a method call now may require a network call to another function, increasing latency and making larger-scale operations inefficient.  Cloudburst is a stateful FaaS platform built to combine the power of low-latency mutable state and communication in Python with the elasticity and scalability allowed by serverless architecture. Johann Schleier-Smith is an entrepreneur and engineer who is currently a board member of Sama. Johann was formerly the founder and CTO of if(we), a social network and incubator. He is the co-author of the paper “Cloudburst: Stateful Functions as a Service,” and joins the show today to talk about how Cloudburst addresses the drawbacks of current FaaS models, and what’s next for serverless computing. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Serverless Properties with Johann Schleier-Smith appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Dan Wendlant and Thomas Graf, co-founders of Isovalent, discuss the open-source software Cilium, which enables improved networking and security controls for Linux systems in containerized environments. They explore the impact of containers and Kubernetes on application management, the shift from VMs to containers and its effects on networking, the significance of eBPF in programmable Linux networking, and the abstract complexity and enhanced visibility in Kubernetes networking provided by Cilium.

Microservices are built to scale. But as a microservices-based system grows, so does the operational overhead to manage it. Even the most senior engineers can’t be familiar with every detail of dozens- perhaps hundreds- of services. While smaller teams may track information about their microservices via spreadsheets, wikis, or other more traditional documentation, these methods often prove unsuitable for the unique demands of a sprawling microservices system.  A microservices catalog is a solution to this problem. A microservices catalog seeks to centralize information about the services in your software architecture, including the purpose of a service, its owner, and instructions for using it. A microservices catalog can also provide a centralized source of knowledge about a system, which can help on-call engineers diagnose issues and also provide resources for onboarding new team members. Larger companies sometimes devote significant internal resources toward developing in-house microservices catalogs, while smaller organizations may not have the resources at their disposal to do so. OpsLevel’s founders recognized that many teams were re-inventing the wheel building internal microservices catalogs, and set out to design a toolset that could meet the needs of users of all sizes. OpsLevel’s team has drawn from extensive experience working with industry leaders in DevOps to create a comprehensive toolset for managing microservices infrastructure. OpsLevel provides a “single pane of glass for operations,” integrating with a variety of tools such as Slack, git, CI/CD, incident management, and deployment systems.  John Laban and Kenneth Rose are the co-founders of OpsLevel. Before John and Kenneth founded OpsLevel they worked together at PagerDuty, where John was the first engineer on the team. Kenneth, OpsLevel’s CTO, was also previously a senior developer at Shopify. John and Kenneth join the show today to talk about how OpsLevel can help developers manage their microservices better, and even transform how their team does DevOps. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post OpsLevel: Service Ownership Platform with John Laban and Kenneth Rose appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cost management is growing in importance for companies that want to manage their significant cloud bill. Kubernetes plays an increasing role in modern infrastructure, so managing cost of Kubernetes clusters becomes important as well. Kubecost is a company focused on giving visibility into Kubernetes resources and reducing spend. Webb Brown is a founder of Kubecost and joins the show to talk about Kubernetes cost optimization and what he is building with Kubecost. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Kubecost with Webb Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Serverless has grown in popularity over the last five years, and the space of applications that can be built entirely with serverless has increased dramatically. This is due to two factors: the growing array of serverless tools (such as edge-located key value stores) and the rising number of companies with serverless offerings. One of those companies is Fastly, which originally gained adoption for its CDN solution. Tyler McMullen is the CTO of Fastly and he joins the show to talk through how Fastly looks at edge computing today. This is Tyler’s third appearance on the show. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Serverless Revolution with Tyler McMullen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Originally published September 13, 2019 Amazon Web Services first came out in 2006. It took several years before the software industry realized that cloud computing was a transformative piece of technology. Initially, the common perspective around cloud computing was that it was a useful tool for startups, but would not be a smart option for large, established businesses. Cloud computing was not considered economical nor secure. Today, that has changed. Every company that writes software is figuring out how to utilize the cloud. Software companies with on-prem servers are migrating old applications to the cloud, and most companies that have started in the last decade do not even have physical servers.  Applications that are started on the cloud are referred to as “cloud-native.” The architecture of cloud-native applications is a newer topic of discussion, and some software patterns that became established in the pre-cloud era make less sense today. Cornelia Davis is VP of technology at Pivotal and the author of Cloud Native Patterns, a book about developing applications in the distributed, virtual world of the cloud. Cornelia was previously on the show to discuss Cloud Foundry. In today’s episode, our conversation centers on her book, and her perspective on the emerging patterns of cloud native software. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Cloud-Native Applications with Cornelia Davis (Repeat) appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Originally published May 29, 2020 Kubernetes has become a highly usable platform for deploying and managing distributed systems.  The user experience for Kubernetes is great, but is still not as simple as a full-on serverless implementation–at least, that has been a long-held assumption. Why would you manage your own infrastructure, even if it is Kubernetes? Why not use autoscaling Lambda functions and other infrastructure-as-a-service products? Matt Ward is a listener of the show and an engineer at Mux, a company that makes video streaming APIs. He sent me an email that said Mux has been having success with self-managed Kubernetes infrastructure, which they deliberately opted for over a serverless deployment. I wanted to know more about what shaped this decision to opt for self-managed infrastructure, and the costs and benefits that Mux has accrued as a result. Matt joins the show to talk through his work at Mux, and the architectural impact of opting for Kubernetes instead of fully managed serverless infrastructure. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Kubernetes vs. Serverless with Matt Ward (Repeat) appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.