The MonkCast

What happens when you build an ultra low-latency compute platform and then realize the round trips are going to kill you? Absent changing physics or your cap table: you partner! This RedMonk Conversation explores how Fermyon - a platform that compiles serverless compute into Wasm - partnered with Akamai - a company that started out as a CDN and has evolved into a full-fledged alternative cloud - to build a better together story. Join RedMonk's Research Director Rachel Stephens, Fermyon CEO Matt Butcher, and Akamai's Director of Product Management Allen Duet to discuss the future of serverless computing at the edge. This RedMonk video is sponsored by Akamai. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/akamai-fermyon/

In this RedMonk conversation, Austin Parker, Director of Open Source at Honeycomb and a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry project, chats AI, Olly, and OTel with Kate Holterhoff. They explore the implications of AI on SREs and observability practitioners, the development of honeycomb's MCP server, and the challenges vendors face in adapting to changes in the observability space. The discussion also touches on the balance between speed and quality in feedback, the complexities introduced by software abstractions, and the future role of OpenTelemetry in the AI-driven observability space. Honeycomb is a RedMonk client, but this content is unsponsored. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/10/23/rmc-austin-parker/

In this RedMonk Conversation on the Road at IBM TechXchange 2025, RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady chats with Kate Soule, IBM's Director of Technical Product Management for Granite about the newly announced Granite 4.0 family of large language models. Soule explains IBM's strategic focus on small, efficient models that are open sourced under Apache 2, highlighting how these models achieve better performance than previous generations while reducing costs and improving latency through new architecture and training approaches. This RedMonk video is sponsored by IBM. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/rmc-ibm-techxchange-granite-kate-soule/

In this RedMonk conversation, Pascal Martin, principal software engineer at Bedrock Streaming, and Valentin Clavreul, principal backend engineer at Bedrock Streaming, discuss the evolution of streaming architectures and their partnership with Fastly as a crucial element in optimizing performance with RedMonk's James Governor. They explore the challenges of scaling streaming services, the transition from PHP to Go for backend development, and the importance of interoperability with AWS and edge compute. The discussion also highlights the significance of observability in ensuring reliable architectures and the preparations needed for major sporting events like the Euros. This RedMonk Conversation is sponsored by Fastly. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/bedrock-streaming-from-cdn-to-compute-for-50m-people-watching-the-euros/

In this conversation, Rachel Stephens (Research Director at RedMonk) and Mike Milinkovich (Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation) discuss the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). Mike explains the law, its implications for the software industry – particularly open source software – and the responsibilities it places on manufacturers. This episode covers: the evolution of the CRA from a “near-death experience for open source” in its initial drafts to a “workable piece of legislation” understanding the responsibilities the legislation places upon different industry roles exploring the CRA's potential impacts on open source communities discussing how to get prepared This discussion is emphatically important if you sell software into a European market. Come listen to Mike to help understand the new legal obligations that come with the CRA. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/10/8/rmc-cra-ecplisefoundation

In this RedMonk conversation, Taylor Barnett-Torabi , Staff Product Manager at Netlify, and Lyle Schemmerling, Senior Software Engineer at FusionAuth, discuss the impact of large language models (LLMs) on developer experience with Kate Holterhoff. They chat about the evolution of agent experience (AX), the integration of LLMs into documentation, and the challenges of ensuring that documentation remains relevant and secure in a rapidly changing landscape. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/09/30/rmc-taylor-barnett-torabi-lyle-schemmerling/

In this MonkCast with the Monks episode, RedMonk analysts Rachel Stephens, Kate Holterhoff, and James Governor discuss the current 'grumpy era' of AI, where developers are questioning the ROI of AI tools and their effectiveness. They check in on AI code assistants, vibe coding, agentic IDEs, AI spec-driven development, and the AI Engineer. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/09/11/ais-grumpy-fun-era/

In this RedMonk conversation, Emily Winck, Staff Engineer at CallRail, and Jess Burns, Engineering Manager at 1Password, join Kate Holterhoff to reflect on their shared experiences working on the engineering team at a digital marketing agency. In addition to trading war stories, they discuss the gender balance in engineering teams, how agency life compares to SaaS companies, the Covid19 pandemic, challenges of remote work, bootcamps, hiring, and the impact of AI on software development. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/09/04/emily-winck-jess-burns/

In this New Builders conversation, Kate Holterhoff speaks with Clare Liguori, Senior Principal Software Engineer at AWS, about Kiro. They discuss Kiro's Vibe and Spec modes, and how these both factor into better coding practices and outcomes for developers. Clare explains the importance of requirements in software development, the collaborative nature of spec-driven development, as well as Kiro's roadmap. This is a RedMonk video, sponsored by Amazon. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/tnb-clare-liguori-kiro-ai-spec-driven-software-development/

In this RedMonk Conversation, James Governor talks with Prashanth Shenoy, VP of Marketing for Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). They discuss the impact of VMware's integration into Broadcom, including the shift from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, portfolio and ecosystem simplification, and the evolving role of cloud admins, platform engineers, and developers. Shenoy outlines how VCF supports both VM and containerized workloads, integrates Kubernetes services, and enables flexible developer experiences. The conversation also explores VMware's Private AI strategy with NVIDIA, addressing digital sovereignty, GPU virtualization, and performance benchmarks for AI workloads.