Cloud Engineering Archives - Software Engineering Daily

The container orchestration wars ended in 2016 with Kubernetes being the most popular open source tool for deploying and managing infrastructure. Since that time, most large enterprises have been implementing a “platform strategy” based around Kubernetes. A platform strategy is a plan for creating a consistent experience for software engineers working throughout an enterprise. At most companies, a software engineer should be thinking about business logic–whether that logic is related to banking, insurance, oil and gas, or e-commerce.  Today, engineers at many enterprises need to think about continuous delivery, application deployment, security policy management, and other deeply technical problems that have nothing to do with the business that they are actually working at. Kubernetes is a foundational open source building block that allows enterprises to base the rest of their infrastructure decisions around. Kubernetes has made it much more viable for enterprises to pursue a platform strategy. With widespread adoption of Kubernetes, there is a business opportunity for companies that can offer other platform solutions that build on top of Kubernetes. A service mesh is one such tool. A service mesh provides networking and security features for all the services in an organization. The service mesh category is a large business opportunity because it sits on the critical path of every network request that goes through an enterprise. It is a potential insertion point for lots of other products including logging agents, distributed tracing, network packet scanning, security policy management, and A/B testing. The potential for business expansion is why so many businesses are entering the service mesh category today, from cloud providers to API gateways. Buoyant was one of the first companies to work on a service mesh tool, with the Linkerd open source project. William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant, and he returns to the show to discuss the competitive dynamics of the service mesh market. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a content writer and also an operations lead. Both of these are part-time positions working closely with Jeff and Erika. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. The post Linkerd Market Strategy with William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Kubernetes has created a widespread system for deploying and managing infrastructure. As Kubernetes has been increasingly adopted, companies are thinking about how to leverage that common layer of infrastructure. With the common infrastructure abstraction of Kubernetes, it becomes easier to adopt other abstractions that are uniform across the entire company.  This has created a market opportunity for products such as a service mesh. A service mesh consists of sidecar containers that get deployed alongside services in a distributed system. Each sidecar container is used as a proxy for all the communication that goes through the service it is deployed with. This consistent proxying layer provides each service with benefits such as security, routing, telemetry, and policy management. Istio is a service mesh that was created and open sourced by Google. Istio is built around the Envoy service proxy sidecar and a control plane that manages the Envoy sidecars. Since the launch of Istio, some of the Google employees who were working on Istio have started Tetrate, a company with the goal of commercializing Istio into a product that enterprises will pay for.   The market demand for service mesh has been proven, but there are many competitors to Tetrate. Istio is open source and can be commercialized by other companies, as well as cloud providers such as Google and AWS. Linkerd is a service mesh built by the company Buoyant, which was the first company to focus exclusively on this space. There are other companies that are expanding existing products into service mesh: Kong, NGINX, and Hashicorp. Zack Butcher is a founding engineer with Tetrate, and he joins the show to discuss the market for service mesh and the plan for Tetrate to build a business around Istio. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a content writer and also an operations lead. Both of these are part-time positions working closely with Jeff and Erika. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. The post Istio Market Strategy with Zack Butcher appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A cloud provider gives a developer low-cost compute infrastructure on-demand.  Cloud providers can be divided up into two categories: Layer 1 cloud providers and Layer 2 cloud providers. A Layer 1 cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services owns server hardware and sells compute infrastructure as a commodity. A Layer 2 cloud provider purchases compute infrastructure from a Layer 1 provider and builds a high quality developer experience on top of that compute infrastructure. Heroku was the first Layer 2 cloud provider. Heroku’s first business was to provide a high quality developer experience and low cost containerization infrastructure on top of Amazon’s EC2 virtual machine infrastructure. Heroku has added features for continuous integration, relational databases, caches, and queueing. Building a Layer 2 cloud provider is a very different challenge than building a Layer 1 cloud provider. A Layer 1 provider must focus on low level problems such as hardware infrastructure and virtualization. This does not leave much time for focusing on developer experience. A Layer 1 cloud provider must be able to serve every type of potential software customer. A Layer 2 provider can provide a streamlined experience. Mark Turner is an engineer at Heroku. He joins the show to discuss the architecture and engineering of a Layer 2 cloud provider. Heroku is built on top of Amazon Web Services, and the core compute infrastructure is built on top of a pool of EC2 virtual machines that are continually scheduled with applications that users create on Heroku. Full disclosure: Heroku is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a content writer and also an operations lead. Both of these are part-time positions working closely with Jeff and Erika. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. We will be at KubeCon San Diego 2019, and AWS re:Invent Las Vegas. We are planning a meetup at re:Invent on Wednesday December 4. The post Heroku Infrastructure with Mark Turner appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

New software abstractions always take advantage of the abstractions that have been built before. Software libraries allow us to import code that sits on the same host as a new program. Open source software let us copy and paste existing code, or clone entire repositories. Cloud providers offer hosted tools and APIs that we can leverage to develop scalable, easy-to-use infrastructure. When existing pieces of software are built into new software, the existing software becomes a dependency. Managing those dependencies is an engineering problem. Mya Pitzeruse is the founder of deps.cloud, a project with the goal of improving dependency changes across a company’s ecosystem. In today’s show, we talk about the modern dependency issues of a large company, and her perspective on how to address them. Mya has developed the project in public on FindCollabs, and we also spend some time talking about building in the open. Announcements We are hiring a content writer and also an operations lead. Both of these are part-time positions working closely with Jeff and Erika. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. We will be at KubeCon San Diego 2019, and AWS re:Invent Las Vegas. We are planning a meetup at re:Invent on Wednesday December 4. The post Cloud Dependencies with Mya Pitzeruse appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Serverless” is an execution model where applications are scheduled and deployed to servers that are not directly managed by the application developer.  In serverless execution, an application only loads and operates when a user actually needs to get a response from that application. This saves on resources, because many applications do not need to run at all times–they only need to be available for user requests. The serverless model was popularized by Amazon Web Services Lambda. When Lambda first launched in 2015, it was an experimental product. Today, it is a widely used product and the market has validated the desire for serverless execution. Other cloud providers have introduced different models of serverless functionality including Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and Fastly edge computing. Zack Bloom is director of product for product strategy at Cloudflare, and he joins the show to discuss Cloudflare’s model for serverless execution. Zack also discusses Cloudflare’s growing product line, including the fast, privacy-protecting DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. Zack is a rare mix of engineering, business strategy, and product vision, which made for a great conversation. For more content, you can check out our episodes about serverless technology and episodes about Cloudflare. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a content writer and also an operations lead. Both of these are part-time positions working closely with Jeff and Erika. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. We will be at KubeCon San Diego 2019, and AWS re:Invent Las Vegas. We are planning a meetup at re:Invent on Wednesday December 4. The post Cloudflare Serverless with Zack Bloom appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Java programs run in a different environment than they did ten years ago. Modern infrastructure runs on containers sitting in a Kubernetes cluster. The optimal configuration for a Java program in that context is different than it was for an environment dominated by virtual machines and bare metal. When you are co-scheduling your services with each other, those services could be fighting for resources. You may want to optimize them with more ahead-of-time compilation. Quarkus is a system for accelerating Java performance through the use of GraalVM. In a previous show, we explored the basics of GraalVM. In today’s show, Guillaume Smet and Emmanuel Bernard join the show to describe an application of GraalVM: the acceleration of Java. Guillaume and Emmaneul are engineers at Red Hat, and are working on changes to the Java ecosystem that are informed by the cloud and the rise of Kubernetes. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post GraalVM Quarkus: Java Acceleration with Guillaume Smet and Emmanuel Bernard appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Dark Lang is a programming language that is tightly integrated with the cloud.  Dark takes an opinionated approach that most developers are going to want to run their applications in the cloud, and this perspective influences how Dark looks at deployments, IDEs, exception handling, and other aspects of software development. Paul Biggar is the founder of CircleCI, and ran the company for eight years before leaving to found Dark with Ellen Chisa. Ellen is a software engineer and the CEO of Dark. Paul and Ellen join the show to give their perspective on modern software engineering, and why it was time to build a new high level language that assumes the presence of a cloud. It is difficult to get programmers to adopt a new language. It is even harder to get those programmers to pay for products built around that language. But the timing could be perfect for Dark.  Software development is undergoing tremendous change–and many of these changes work to Dark’s advantage, such as the growing adoption of feature flags, low code tools, and sophisticated continuous delivery workflows. Whether or not Dark is a success, it is a bold project, and the team is working on something they believe in. We also discussed AWS–and whether the largest cloud provider has an obligation to contribute back to the open source community. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Check out our active projects: We are hiring a head of growth. If you like Software Engineering Daily and consider yourself competent in sales, marketing, and strategy, send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com FindCollabs is a place to build open source software. The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes. The post Dark Lang with Ellen Chisa and Paul Biggar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Modern applications are distributed systems. These applications require an installation mechanism that can run and update the software across multiple nodes.  When a SaaS company starts to work with large enterprise customers, that company needs to figure out a way to deliver their product to the enterprise. This requires the SaaS company to deploy the product to whatever infrastructure the enterprise is running. Some enterprises use on-prem infrastructure. Some use AWS. Some use a variety of cloud providers and on-premise servers. A SaaS company with limited resources must be able to have a standard deployment model that satisfies all of these different use cases. Ev Kontsevoy is the CEO of Gravitational, a company that builds software for application delivery. Ev’s company maintains Gravity, an open source tool for application imaging and delivery. Ev was also the founder of Mailgun, a popular email API service. Mailgun was acquired by Rackspace, and in his time running Mailgun, Ev became deeply aware of the problems faced by developers and operators who manage server infrastructure. Ev joins the show to discuss his experience building companies and the state of modern infrastructure. Full disclosure: Gravitational is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Check out our active projects: We are hiring a head of growth. If you like Software Engineering Daily and consider yourself competent in sales, marketing, and strategy, send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com FindCollabs is a place to build open source software. The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes. The post Gravity: Distributed Application Delivery with Ev Kontsevoy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Render is a cloud provider built on top of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Render uses the compute abstractions provided by the major cloud providers to build a second layer cloud provider with the goal of providing a better user experience. Anurag Goel is the founder of Render, and he returns to the show to discuss how Render works, and why there is a need for a new cloud provider.  Everyone knows that the market for cloud providers is gigantic, so why are so few companies pursuing it? From Anurag’s perspective, there is no good reason. AWS, Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, and Heroku have only explored a small percentage of the potential ways a cloud provider could be built. Anurag shares his strategy for building Render, and also talks through his belief around modern software engineering, including his belief that developers mostly choose their tools based on what they read from popular websites rather than what solves their problems–a phenomenon which he describes as “fashion driven development.” Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Check out our active projects: We are hiring a head of growth. If you like Software Engineering Daily and consider yourself competent in sales, marketing, and strategy, send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com FindCollabs is a place to build open source software. The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes. The post How To Build A Cloud Provider with Anurag Goel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cloud Foundry is a system for managing distributed applications. Cloud Foundry was released in 2011, and has been widely adopted by enterprises that need a platform for deploying and scaling the applications that run within their company. The ecosystem around Cloud Foundry includes systems for continuous delivery, pubsub messaging, and containerization. Abby Kearns is the executive director at Cloud Foundry Foundation, a nonprofit with the goal of raising awareness and adoption of the Cloud Foundry open source project. Abby joins the show to discuss her work with Cloud Foundry, and how the ecosystem has evolved with the maturity of distributed computing. We also talk about what enterprises need from an application runtime platform and how Cloud Foundry has adopted Kubernetes. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Check out our active companies and projects: FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. Find a project to work on Podsheets is an open source podcast hosting platform built with the learnings from Software Engineering Daily. Our goal is to be the best place to host and monetize your podcast. If you have been thinking about starting a podcast, check out podsheets.com. The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes. The post Cloud Foundry with Abby Kearns appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.