The New Stack Podcast

"Many Ukrainians continue working. A very good opportunity is to continue working with them, to buy Ukrainian software products, to engage with people who are working [via] UpWork. Help Ukrainians by giving them the ability to work, to do some paid work," whether still in the country or as refugees abroad. If you take something from this conversation, Anastasiia Voitova's words may be the ones that should stick. After all, Ukraine has a renowned IT workforce, with IT outsourcing among its most important exports.Voitova, the head of customer solutions and security software engineer at Cossack Labs, just grabbed her laptop and some essentials when she suddenly fled to the mountains last month to "a small village that doesn't even have a name." She doesn't have much with her, but she has more work to do than ever — to meet her clients' increasing demand for cybersecurity defenses and to support the Ukrainian defense effort. Earlier this month, her Ukraine-based team even released a new open source cryptographic framework for data protection, on time, amidst the war.Voitova was joined in this episode of The New Stack Makers by Oleksii Holub, open source developer, software consultant and GitHub Star, and Denys Dovhan, front-end engineer at Wix. All three of them are globally known open source community contributors and maintainers. And all three had to suddenly relocate from Kyiv this February. This conversation is a reflection into the lives of these three open source community leaders during the first three weeks of the Russian invasion.This conversation aims to help answer what the open source community and the tech community as a whole can do to support our Ukrainian colleagues and friends. Because open source is a community first and foremost. "Open source for me is a very big part of my life. Idon't try to like gain anything out of it, I just code things. If I had a problem, I solve it, and I think to myself, why not share it with other people," Holub said.He sees open source as an opportunity for influence in this war, but also is acutely aware that his unpaid labor could be used to support the aggression against his country. That's why he added terms of use to his open source projects that use of his code implicitly means you condemn the Russian invasion. This may be controversial in the strict open source licensing world, but the semantics of OSS seem less important to Holub right now.Of course, when talking about open source, the world's largest code repository GitHub comes up. Whether GitHub should block Russia is an on going OSS debate. On the one hand, many are concerned about further cutting off Russia — which has already restricted access to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — from external news and facts about the ongoing conflict. On the other hand, with the widespread adoption of OSS in Russia, it's reasonable to assume swaths of open source code is directly supporting the invasion or at least supporting the Russian government through income, taxes, and some of the Kremlin's technical stack.For Dovhan, there's a middle ground. His employer, website builder Wix, has blocked all payments in Russia, but has maintained its freemium offering there. "There is no possibility to pay for your premium website. But you still can make a free one, and that's a possibility for Russians to express themselves, and this is a space for free speech, which is limited in Russia." He proposes that GitHub similarly allows the creation of public repos in Russia, but that it blocks payments and private repos there.Dovhan continued that "I believe [the] open source community is deeply connected and blocking access for Russian developers, might cause serious issues in infrastructure. Alot of projects are actually made by Russian developers, for example, PostCSS, Nginx, and PostHTML."These conversations will continue as this war changes the landscape of the tech world as we know it. One thing is for sure, Voitova, Dovhan and Holub have joined the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian software developers in making a routine of work-war balance, doing everything they can, every waking hour of the day. 

From cloud security providers to open source, trust has become the foundation from which an organization's security is built. But with the rise of cloud-native technologies such as containers and infrastructure as code (IaC), it has ushered in new ways to build applications and requirements that are challenging the traditional approaches to security. The changing nature of the cloud-native landscape is requiring broader security coverage across the technology stack and more contextual awareness of the environment. But how should teams like Infosec, DevOps rethink their approach to security?In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Guy Eisenkot, co-founder and vice president of product at Bridgecrew, Barak Schoster Goihman, senior director, chief architect at Palo Alto Networks and Ashish Rajan, head of security and compliance at PageUp and producer and host for Cloud Security Podcast preview what’s to come at Palo Alto Network’s Code to Cloud Summit on March 23-24, 2022, including the role of security and trust as it relates to DevOps, cloud service providers, software supply chain, SBOM (Software Bill of materials) and IBOM (Infrastructure Bill of Material),Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted this podcast.

Kubernetes is great at large-scale systems, but its complexity and transparency has caused higher cloud costs, delays in deployment and developer frustration. As Kubernetes has taken off and workloads continue to move to a containerized environment, optimizing resources is becoming increasingly important. In fact, the recent 2021 Cloud Native Survey revealed that Kubernetes has already crossed the chasm to mainstream with 96 percent of organizations using or evaluating the technology.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Matt Provo, founder and CEO of StormForge, discusses new ways to think about Kubernetes, including resource optimization which can be achieved by empowering developers through automation. He also shared the company’s latest new machine learning-powered multi-dimensional optimization solution, Optimize Live.Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this podcast.

While Java continues to be the most widely used programming language in the enterprise, how is it faring the emerging cloud native ecosystem? Quite well, observed a panel of Oracle engineers who work the language. In fact, they estimate that they there are more than 50 million Java virtual machines running concurrently in the cloud at present.In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we discussed the current state of Java with Georges Saab, who is Oracle's vice president of software development, for the Java Platform Group; Donald Smith, Oracle senior director of product management; and Sharat Chander, Oracle senior director of product management. TNS editors Darryl Taft and Joab Jackson hosted the conversation.

Two decades ago, security was an afterthought; it was often ‘bolted on’ to existing applications that left businesses with a reactive approach to threat visibility and enforcement. But with the proliferation of cloud native applications and businesses employing a work from anywhere model, the traditional approach to security is being reimagined to play an integral role from development through operations. From identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and adapting to risk across the applications, organizations are moving to a full view of their risk posture by employing security across the entire lifecycle.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Ratan Tipirneni, President and & CEO, Tigera discusses how organizations can take an active approach to security by bringing zero-trust principles to reduce the application’s attack surface, harness machine learning to combat runtime security risks and enable a continuous compliance while mitigating risks from vulnerabilities and attacks through security policy changes.Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack hosted this podcast.

Cloud-native applications provide an advantage in terms of their scalability and velocity. Yet, despite their resiliency, the complexity of these systems has grown as the number of application components continue to increase. Understanding how these components fit together has stretched beyond what can be easily digested, further challenging the ability for organizations to prepare for technical issues that may arise from the system complexities.Last month, ChaosNative hosted its second annual engineering event, Chaos Carnival where we discussed the principles of chaos engineering and using them to optimize cloud applications in today’s complex IT systems.The panelists for this discussion:Karthik Satchitanand, Co-founder and Open-Source Lead, ChaosNativeRamya Ramalinga Moorthy, Industrialization Head - Reliability & Resilience Engineering, LTI – Larsen & Toubro InfotechCharlotte Mach, Engineering Manager, Container SolutionsNora Jones, Founder and CEO, JeliIn this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack served as the moderator, with the help of Joab Jackson, editor-in-chief of The New Stack.

If there is a secret to the success of TypeScript, it is in the type checking, ensuring that the data flowing through the program is of the correct kind of data. Type checking cuts down on errors, sets the stage for better tooling, and allows developers to map their programs at a higher level. And TypeScript itself, a statically-typed superset of JavaScript, ensures that an army of JavaScript programmers can easily enjoy these advanced programming benefits with a minimal learning curve.In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with a few of TypeScript's designers and maintainers to learn a bit more about the design of the language: Ryan Cavanaugh, a principal software engineering manager for Microsoft; Luke Hoban, chief technology officer for Pulumi, who was one of original creators of TypeScript, and; Daniel Rosenwasser, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft. TNS editors Darryl Taft and Joab Jackson hosted the discussion.

While Kubernetes brings a great deal of flexibility to application management, the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software offers the best level of standardization, observed Julian Fischer, CEO, of cloud native services provider anynines.We chatted with Fischer for this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, to learn about the company's experience in managing large-scale deployments of both Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry."A lot of the conversation today is about Kubernetes. But the Cloud Foundry ecosystem has been very strong," especially for enterprises, noted Fischer.

Want an easy way to get started in Web3? Download a desktop copy of  IPFS (Interplanetary File System) and install it on your computer, advises Dietrich Ayala, IPFS Ecosystem Growth Engineer, Protocol Labs, in our most recent edition of The New Stack Makers podcast.We've been hearing a lot of hype about the Web3 and its promise of decentralization — how it will bring the power of the web back to the people, through the use of a blockchain. So what's up with that? How do you build a Web3 stack? What can you build with a Web3 stack? How far along is the community with tooling and ease-of-use?This virtual panel podcast sets out to answer all these questions.In addition to speaking to Ayala, we spoke with Rowland Graus, head of product for Agoric, and Marko Baricevic, software engineer for The Interchain Foundation, which manages Cosmos Network. an open source technology to help blockchains interoperate. Each participant describes the role in the Web3 ecosystem where their respective technologies play. These technologies are often used together, so they represent an emerging blockchain stack of sorts.TNS Editor-in-Chief Joab Jackson hosted the discussion.

Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native technologies offer organizations the benefits of portability, flexibility and increased developer productivity but the security risks associated with adopting them continue to be a top concern for companies. In the recent State of Kubernetes Security report, 94% of respondents experienced at least one security incident in their Kubernetes environment in the last 12 months. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Avi Shua, CEO and Co-Founder of Orca Security talks about how organizations can enhance the security of their cloud environment by acting on the critical risks such as vulnerabilities, malware and misconfigurations by taking a snapshot of Kubernetes clusters and analyzing them, without the need for an agent.