Technical interviews about software topics.
…
continue reading
Player FM - Internet Radio Done Right
294 subscribers
Checked 2+ y ago
Added eight years ago
Content provided by Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Similar to Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
S
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Cyber Security Podcast (Stormcast)
1
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Cyber Security Podcast (Stormcast)
Johannes B. Ullrich
2k
2k
Daily cybersecurity news for practitioners. Vulnerabilities, defenses, threats, network security insight, research and more to make you sound smarter as you get to the office in the morning. New each weekday.
…
continue reading
"OPB Politics Now" is a weekly podcast that takes a deep dive into the hottest political topics in Oregon and the Northwest. Every Friday, OPB’s political reporters and special guests offer in-depth analysis, discussion and insight into candidates, events and issues.
…
continue reading
Tech News Briefing is your guide to what people in tech are talking about. Every weekday, we’ll bring you breaking tech news and scoops from the pros at the Wall Street Journal, insight into new innovations and policy debates, tips from our personal tech team, and exclusive interviews with movers and shakers in the industry.
…
continue reading
The day's biggest news dissected by the day's newsmakers. Diverse opinions from across the political spectrum. The show that makes you decide, are you the Left, Right or the Centre?
…
continue reading
The 21st Century began with the rise of the Internet and social media. The next decade will mark the rise of the Intelligent Machines. AI will inhabit all our devices from cars and appliances to smart phones and robots. The Intelligent Machines podcast explores the most exciting revolution humanity has ever seen, filled with promise and peril. More than ever we need to understand what these new devices will bring to our lives and how to make best use of them as the 21st century unfolds. On t ...
…
continue reading
Babbage is our weekly podcast on science and technology, named after Charles Babbage—a 19th-century polymath and grandfather of computing. Host Alok Jha talks to our correspondents about the innovations, discoveries and gadgetry shaping the world. Published every Wednesday. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about Economist Podcasts+, including how to get access, please visit our FAQs pa ...
…
continue reading
Windows Weekly is about more than Windows. Veteran Microsoft insiders Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell join Leo for a deep dive into the most valuable company in the world. From consumer to enterprise, AI to Xbox, Windows Weekly is the only Microsoft podcast you'll ever need. Records live every Wednesday at 2:00pm Eastern / 11:00am Pacific / 18:00 UTC.
…
continue reading
Tempers fly as the newsmakers of the week face-off in this award-winning show. Anchored by Sanket Upadhyay, this weekly program has politicians battlling wits with a live audience.
…
continue reading
Player FM - Podcast App
Go offline with the Player FM app!
Go offline with the Player FM app!
))
Daily Deals
Podcasts Worth a Listen
SPONSORED
T
The Big Pitch with Jimmy Carr
1 Phil Wang Pitches Psychological Thriller Starring WHO?! 25:00
25:00 
Play Later 
Play Later 
Lists 
Like 
Liked25:00
Play Later
Play Later
Lists
Like
LikedIt’s the very first episode of The Big Pitch with Jimmy Carr and our first guest is Phil Wang! And Phil’s subgenre is…This Place is Evil. We’re talking psychological torture, we’re talking gory death scenes, we’re talking Lorraine Kelly?! The Big Pitch with Jimmy Carr is a brand new comedy podcast where each week a different celebrity guest pitches an idea for a film based on one of the SUPER niche sub-genres on Netflix. From ‘Steamy Crime Movies from the 1970s’ to ‘Australian Dysfunctional Family Comedies Starring A Strong Female Lead’, our celebrity guests will pitch their wacky plot, their dream cast, the marketing stunts, and everything in between. By the end of every episode, Jimmy Carr, Comedian by night / “Netflix Executive” by day, will decide whether the pitch is greenlit or condemned to development hell! Listen on all podcast platforms and watch on the Netflix Is A Joke YouTube Channel . The Big Pitch is a co-production by Netflix and BBC Studios Audio. Jimmy Carr is an award-winning stand-up comedian and writer, touring his brand-new show JIMMY CARR: LAUGHS FUNNY throughout the USA from May to November this year, as well as across the UK and Europe, before hitting Australia and New Zealand in early 2026. All info and tickets for the tour are available at JIMMYCARR.COM Production Coordinator: Becky Carewe-Jeffries Production Manager: Mabel Finnegan-Wright Editor: Stuart Reid Producer: Pete Strauss Executive Producer: Richard Morris Executive Producers for Netflix: Kathryn Huyghue, Erica Brady, and David Markowitz Set Design: Helen Coyston Studios: Tower Bridge Studios Make Up: Samantha Coughlan Cameras: Daniel Spencer Sound: Charlie Emery Branding: Tim Lane Photography: James Hole…
Scaling Lyft with Matt Klein
Archived series ("Inactive feed" status)
When?
This feed was archived on February 23, 2023 05:07 (
Why? Inactive feed status. Our servers were unable to retrieve a valid podcast feed for a sustained period.
What now? You might be able to find a more up-to-date version using the search function. This series will no longer be checked for updates. If you believe this to be in error, please check if the publisher's feed link below is valid and contact support to request the feed be restored or if you have any other concerns about this.
Manage episode 220244868 series 1439570
Content provided by Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Matt Klein has worked for three rapidly growing Internet companies. At AWS, he worked on EC2, the compute-as-a-service product that powers a large percentage of the Internet. At Twitter, he helped scale the infrastructure in the chaotic days before Twitter’s IPO. Today he works at Lyft, building systems to allow for ride sharing infrastructure to work more safely and reliably.
Hypergrowth Internet companies are faced with quickly growing demands on their software. The demands on the software expose problems with the core infrastructure. Simultaneously, the company tries to ramp up its hiring process. More engineers get hired, and the institutional knowledge within the company starts to weaken. Documentation gets out of date. Senior engineers burn out and leave the company.
When a company starts growing quickly, communications can break down. A hypergrowth company can suffer from a lack of “human scalability”. Matt Klein has observed these challenges at AWS, Twitter, and Lyft. In his article “The Human Scalability of ‘DevOps’”, he explains why these problems manifest and what can be done to alleviate them.
In a previous show, Matt discussed the engineering challenges at Lyft that led him to create Envoy, a service proxy. This episode covers some broad technical topics–DevOps, site reliability engineering, platform engineering–but the episode is mostly about how a hypergrowth company can manage culture, hiring, and engineering organization.
Matt is a very fun guest to have because he questions some of the strange practices that have been widely adopted by successful companies. Internet companies are a very new phenomenon, and the management tactics that they have adopted are not well proven–so it is great to have someone like Matt provide a fresh perspective on ways that companies can scale their technology and their organization more effectively.
Show Notes
- The human scalability of “DevOps” – Matt Klein – Medium
- How to scale DevOps: Recipes for larger organizations
- A Beginner’s Guide to Scaling DevOps – DZone DevOps
- DevOps vs. SRE: What’s the Difference Between Them, and Which One Are You? | OverOps Blog
- How do I do DevOps at Scale? – Plutora
- Five Top Tips for DevOps At Scale – DevOps.com
- Scaling DevOps at Pearson – DevOps.com
- In praise of fungible developers | Echo One
The post Scaling Lyft with Matt Klein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
367 episodes
ShareArchived series ("Inactive feed" status)
When?
This feed was archived on February 23, 2023 05:07 (
Why? Inactive feed status. Our servers were unable to retrieve a valid podcast feed for a sustained period.
What now? You might be able to find a more up-to-date version using the search function. This series will no longer be checked for updates. If you believe this to be in error, please check if the publisher's feed link below is valid and contact support to request the feed be restored or if you have any other concerns about this.
Manage episode 220244868 series 1439570
Content provided by Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Matt Klein has worked for three rapidly growing Internet companies. At AWS, he worked on EC2, the compute-as-a-service product that powers a large percentage of the Internet. At Twitter, he helped scale the infrastructure in the chaotic days before Twitter’s IPO. Today he works at Lyft, building systems to allow for ride sharing infrastructure to work more safely and reliably.
Hypergrowth Internet companies are faced with quickly growing demands on their software. The demands on the software expose problems with the core infrastructure. Simultaneously, the company tries to ramp up its hiring process. More engineers get hired, and the institutional knowledge within the company starts to weaken. Documentation gets out of date. Senior engineers burn out and leave the company.
When a company starts growing quickly, communications can break down. A hypergrowth company can suffer from a lack of “human scalability”. Matt Klein has observed these challenges at AWS, Twitter, and Lyft. In his article “The Human Scalability of ‘DevOps’”, he explains why these problems manifest and what can be done to alleviate them.
In a previous show, Matt discussed the engineering challenges at Lyft that led him to create Envoy, a service proxy. This episode covers some broad technical topics–DevOps, site reliability engineering, platform engineering–but the episode is mostly about how a hypergrowth company can manage culture, hiring, and engineering organization.
Matt is a very fun guest to have because he questions some of the strange practices that have been widely adopted by successful companies. Internet companies are a very new phenomenon, and the management tactics that they have adopted are not well proven–so it is great to have someone like Matt provide a fresh perspective on ways that companies can scale their technology and their organization more effectively.
Show Notes
- The human scalability of “DevOps” – Matt Klein – Medium
- How to scale DevOps: Recipes for larger organizations
- A Beginner’s Guide to Scaling DevOps – DZone DevOps
- DevOps vs. SRE: What’s the Difference Between Them, and Which One Are You? | OverOps Blog
- How do I do DevOps at Scale? – Plutora
- Five Top Tips for DevOps At Scale – DevOps.com
- Scaling DevOps at Pearson – DevOps.com
- In praise of fungible developers | Echo One
The post Scaling Lyft with Matt Klein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
367 episodes
All episodes
×
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Maintaining availability in a modern digital application is critical to keeping your application operating and available and to keep meeting your customers growing demands. There are many observability platforms out there and certainly Prometheus is a popular open source solution for cloud native companies yet operating an observability platform, costs money, and all of the platforms are highly data intensive. Managing costs and data retention policies is critical to keeping your application operating healthy and operating available. Chronosphere is the leading observability platform for scaling cloud native applications. Focusing on managing costs by managing data. Martin Mao is the co-founder and CEO of Chronosphere and he is our guest today . This episode is hosted by Lee Atchison. Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media) is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee is the host of his podcast, Modern Digital Business , an engaging and informative podcast produced for people looking to build and grow their digital business with the help of modern applications and processes developed for today’s fast-moving business environment. Subscribe at mdb.fm . Follow Lee, at leeatchison.com . Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Cloud Native Observability with Martin Mao appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Originally published on February 12, 2022. Lee Atchison spent seven years at Amazon working in retail, software distribution, and Amazon Web Services. He then moved to New Relic, where he has spent four years scaling the company’s internal architecture. From his decade of experience at fast-growing web technology companies, Lee has written the book Architecting for Scale, from O’Reilly. As an application scales, it becomes significantly more complicated while at the same time receiving more traffic. The intersection of these two problems leads to a variety of discussions around availability, risk management, and microservices. Sponsorship inquiries sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Architecting for Scale with Lee Atchison appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Cloud native applications utilizing microservice architectures has grown into one of the most popular application architectural patterns in recent years. The value of leveraging dynamic cloud resources, along with the flexibility and scalability of microservice architectures, creates a strong paradigm that’s hard to miss. The strong adoption of Kubernetes has strengthened the pattern enormously. The unique structure and requirements of Kubernetes has led to an increased need for Kubernetes specific monitoring and diagnostics tools. There has been a large number of companies who have jumped at this opportunity. One of those companies is Komodor , a Kubernetes diagnostics platform that focuses on Kubernetes troubleshooting for the entire Kubernetes stack. Itiel Shwartz is the co-founder and CTO of Komodor, and he joins us today. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post K8s Troubleshooting with Itiel Shwartz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Enterprise-grade authentication is often an essential ingredient to virtually all applications in today’s world. However, companies often have a hard time understanding the value of that authentication especially during the early stages of product development. And hardening of an application is often left as an afterthought. Add enterprise-level requirements such as single sign-on and two-factor authentication and other requirements that the once afterthought becomes are now major issues. Delaying launch schedules and new feature launches. WorkOS is dramatically shortening this development time by providing tools to allow in integrating complex enterprise standards with just a few lines of code, allowing developers to focus on core products and features. Michael Grinich is the CEO of WorkOS and is my guest today. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post WorkOS with Michael Grinich appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform for growing businesses, empowering millions of customers around the world to launch, build, and grow their businesses with world-class marketing technology, award-winning customer support, and inspiring content. Eric Muntz is Mailchimp’s CTO, responsible for the engineering teams that design, implement, and maintain Mailchimp’s products and infrastructure. He joins the show to take us through the engineering behind Mailchimp’s infrastructure. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Mailchimp Engineering with Eric Muntz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Venture capital investment has continued to flow into technology startups. No one builds technology from scratch. There are cloud services, software libraries, 3rd party services, and software platforms that modern entrepreneurs must adopt to build their products efficiently and quickly. These layers of infrastructure are a key area for many investors. Tim is a partner at Menlo Ventures where he invests in cloud and data infrastructure, AI/ML and cyber security. He joins the show to discuss what goes into a smart investment. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Technical Venture Capital with Tim Tully appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
This episode is hosted by Lee Atchison. Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media) is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee is the host of his podcast, Modern Digital Business , an engaging and informative podcast produced for people looking to build and grow their digital business with the help of modern applications and processes developed for today’s fast-moving business environment. Subscribe at mdb.fm . Follow Lee, at leeatchison.com . As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, cost management in the cloud is becoming critically important. Modern application development methodology increasingly involves moving to service and microservice architectures enabled by the cloud and kubernetes is the backbone of this modern infrastructure trend. Managing costs of kubernetes clusters is therefore becoming increasingly important. Kubecost is the company focused on giving visibility into kubernetes resources, allowing you to reduce your overall kubernetes based infrastructure spend. Webb Brown is the founder of Kubecost and joins us today. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com . The post Kubernetes Spend with Webb Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes Security Compliance with Jimmy Mesta 43:36
43:36 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:36
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe Kubernetes ecosystem has drastically changed how development teams ship software. While Kubernetes has provided many advancements in cloud infrastructure, it has also left organizations with massive security blindspots. KSOC was created to give developers and security teams a single control plane to harden multi-cluster Kubernetes environments through event-driven analysis, least privilege enforcement, and remediation-as-code. Jimmy Mesta is the Co-Founder and CTO of KSOC and joins the show to discuss modern Kubernetes security challenges and how security teams need to prepare for a future where Kubernetes is the top attack target for adversaries. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Kubernetes Security Compliance with Jimmy Mesta appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In software engineering, telemetry is the data that is collected about your applications. Unlike logging, which is used in the development of apps to pinpoint errors and code flows, telemetry data includes all operational data including logs, metrics, events, traces, usage, and other analytical data. Companies usually visualize this information to troubleshoot problems and understand patterns and opportunities in how their applications are used. The company New Relic is a modern observability platform built to optimize your entire software stack from one place. New Relic includes a Telemetry Data Platform that acts as a single source of truth for telemetry data. Built on top of that are tools for full stack observability to visualize and troubleshoot your data in milliseconds. When a problem does occur, New Relic’s applied intelligence will detect and understand the problem to help resolve it faster. Nic Benders is New Relic’s chief architect and GVP of engineering. As part of the engineering team since the early days of the company, Benders has been involved with everything from Agent development to ZooKeeper deployments and all the pieces and products in between. In his role as chief architect, Benders looks after the long-term technical strategy behind New Relic’s product and the experience of all the engineering teams who build it. He joins the show to discuss the engineering behind New Relic. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post New Relic Architecture with Nic Benders appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
One of the challenges with Microservices architecture is how you manage dependencies between your services when implementing workflows. Conductor is an open-source microservices and workflow orchestration platform. Boney Sekh co-founded Orkes Inc – a company focused on offering Conductor as a service. Boney joins the show to discuss how engineers leverage Conductor to build highly reliable distributed applications using. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Conductor Orchestration with Boney Sekh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The advent of the cloud introduced a new form of technical debt in which organizations can lose track of what infrastructure they have and how it relates to the business. While the cloud’s native APIs offer some transparency into your infrastructure, these offerings are often described as necessary but not sufficient. When companies have a non-trivial question about their environments, getting answers can have a big cognitive overhead to get a clear answer. In this episode, I interview Tyson Kunovsky, Co-Founder and CEO at AutoCloud, creators of the open source project Cloud Graph. CloudGraph is a free and open source GraphQL API for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. CloudGraph provides a much more intuitive graphQL based interface to ask questions about your infrastructure in context of the relationships between components. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post CloudGraph with Tyson Kunovsky appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
WP Engine is a domain specific cloud provider that hosts high performance WordPress infrastructure. This website, Software Engineering Daily, runs on WP Engine. Scaling a domain specific cloud provider for WordPress includes complexities at the level of the database, application, load balancer, and other areas. Brandon DuRutte from WP Engine joins the show to talk through his work. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Scaling WordPress with Brandon DuRette appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Loft Kubernetes Namespaces with Lukas Gentele 45:37
45:37 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked45:37
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedLoft is a platform for Kubernetes self-service and multi-tenancy. Loft allows you to control Kubernetes clusters with added multi-tenancy and self-service capabilities to get more value out of Kubernetes beyond simply cluster management. It allows for cost optimization, more efficient provisioning, and other features. Lukas Gentele joins the show to talk about Kubernetes multi-tenancy and the engineering behind Loft. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Loft Kubernetes Namespaces with Lukas Gentele appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Distributed Tracing Infrastructure with Ben Sigelman and Alex Kehlenbeck 45:37
45:37 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked45:37
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedBen Sigelman Alex Kehlenbeck Observability consists of metrics, logs, and traces. Lightstep is a company that builds distributed tracing infrastructure, which requires them to store and serve high volumes of trace data. There are numerous architecture challenges that come with managing this data. Ben Sigelman and Alex Kehlenbeck join the show to discuss the implementation of Lightstep. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Distributed Tracing Infrastructure with Ben Sigelman and Alex Kehlenbeck appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
SingleStore is a multi-use, multi-model database designed for transactional and analytic workloads, as well as search and other domain specific applications. SingleStore is the evolution of the database company MemSQL, which sought to bring fast, in-memory SQL database technology to market. Jordan Tigani is Chief Product Officer of SingleStore and joins the show to talk through the architecture and engineering of the SingleStore platform. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post SingleStore with Jordan Tigani appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Vantage is a system for optimizing cloud costs. It provides tools and interfaces for developers to analyze how they are spending on AWS resources, and has recently expanded into GCP as well. Vantage users gain an easy interface into their costs that would otherwise be hard to analyze via the raw AWS console. Ben Schaechter is the founder of Vantage. In a previous show he gave an overview of Vantage. In today’s episode he returns to discuss the engineering internals of Vantage and provide a macro perspective on where people are wasting money in the cloud. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Vantage Engineering with Ben Schaechter appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Managing Kubernetes nodes leads to operational complexity, security issues, and nodes that are perhaps more expensive to run than necessary. Deferring the node management to an underlying platform abstracts away these problems and can improve operations. Madhuri Yechuri runs Elotl, a nodeless Kubernetes platform. She joins the show to talk about the architecture and purpose of her company. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Nodeless Kubernetes with Madhuri Yechuri appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Lee Atchison spent seven years at Amazon working in retail, software distribution, and Amazon Web Services. He then moved to New Relic, where he has spent four years scaling the company’s internal architecture. From his decade of experience at fast-growing web technology companies, Lee has written the book Architecting for Scale, from O’Reilly. As an application scales, it becomes significantly more complicated while at the same time receiving more traffic. The intersection of these two problems leads to a variety of discussions around availability, risk management, and microservices. Sponsorship inquiries sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Architecting for Scale with Lee Atchison appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Linkerd is a service mesh that runs efficiently with a low memory footprint. We have covered the details of Linkerd in previous episodes. Buoyant is the company that sells Linkerd as a service, and today’s show focuses on the engineering details of the company, and how Linkerd is architected in 2022. William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant, and he joins the show to talk in detail about running a leading service mesh company. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Buoyant Cloud with William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Database product companies typically have a few phases. First, the company will develop a technology with some kind of innovation such as speed, scalability, or durability. The company will offer support contracts around that technology for a period of time, before eventually building a managed, hosted offering. PlanetScale is a database company built around the Kubernetes-based Vitess technology. Sugu Sougoumarane is the CTO of PlanetScale, and formerly worked at YouTube, where he built large-scale SQL databases. In today’s show, he talks about building out the core PlanetScale technology, tuning PlanetScale’s consensus model, and the development of the hosted cloud service offering of the company. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Scaling PlanetScale with Sugu Sougoumarane appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Rackspace is a multi cloud solutions provider that has evolved beyond its cloud computing origins into a diverse set of services and support offerings. Customers work with Rackspace to adopt cloud application deployments, modern data analytics, and all the other opportunities offered by cloud computing. Much of this occurs through partnerships where Rackspace provides teams of engineers to work with the customer. Jeff DeVerter is the CTO of products and services at Rackspace. He’s also the host of the podcast Cloud Talk , a show about cloud trends and technologies. Jeff previously served as the CTO of Microsoft Technology at Rackspace, so our conversation began with a discussion of Microsoft-based migrations. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Rackspace with Jeff DeVerter appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Infrastructure as code is a concept that has delighted software engineers, dev ops, and engineering management across the board. It’s neither fun nor efficient to configure the infrastructure and environments software teams require. Operating software at scale on a cloud, on-prem, or hybrid model is a problem of modernity that many enterprises find surprisingly challenging. Rob Hirschfeld is CEO and co-founder of RackN whose software helps IT teams maintain distributed, multi-vendor operations with consistent operational control. We discuss the approaches being adopted by modern enterprise teams for infrastructure management. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Infrastructure as Code with Rob Hirschfeld appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
As cloud providers enable greater levels of specificity and control, they empower compliance-driven enterprise companies. This level of parameterization is downright inhospitable to a new software engineer and can be a cognitive barrier to entry for a senior professional with a great idea but limited time. Developers want to focus on their code, algorithms, front end, and user experience. These concerns have created a huge vacuum in the market that companies like Render are filling. Render is a unified cloud experience to build and run all your apps and websites. It can auto-deploy for git and offers some really novel developer ergonomics. In this episode, I interview Anurag Goel, Founder, and CEO of Render.com about their approach to delivering a developer-centric all-in-one cloud solution. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Render with Anurag Goel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Software Engineering at Google with Titus Winters 52:14
52:14 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:14
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThanks to the amazing books, blogs, videos, quickstarts, frameworks, and other software-related resources, getting started as a software engineer is easier than ever. Although you can get started in a day, it can take years to become a master of the craft and most practitioners describe it as a profession of lifelong learning. Titus Winters is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google and the author of the book Software Engineering at Google , often known as “ the flamingo book ”. This book is not just tips for structuring, writing, and testing code. It’s a resource that outlines all the facets of the software engineering practice that apply in professional settings through the lens of lessons learned at Google. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Software Engineering at Google with Titus Winters appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Modern businesses run on the cloud and increasingly so they run on multi-cloud infrastructure. As any growing company can tell you, cloud costs can easily run far out of control. Today’s enterprises are trying to deliver new products and services at a fast pace. That needs to be done in a cost-effective, ideally cloud-agnostic way. In this interview, I speak with Jake Reichert, VP of Engineering at Yotascale, we discuss Yotascale’s solution and how they’ve helped companies like Zoom navigate the challenges of rapid growth. Yotascale offers a comprehensive spectrum of cloud cost management solutions and we get into how modern enterprises are using these tools for optimization, governance, and more. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Yotascale with Jake Reichert appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Remote Development in the Cloud with Gitpod & OpenVSCode Server with Sven Efftinge 44:51
44:51 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked44:51
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOne of the most painful parts of getting started on a new development team is getting one’s environment set up. Whether it’s undocumented steps, overly complex setups, or simply the challenges of understanding how the pieces fit together, getting a dev environment up often feels like a chore to be suffered through in order to do what I want: contribute to the codebase. Gitpod seeks to solve these and other common challenges. With Gitpod, you can spin up fresh, automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. In this episode, I interview Sven Efftinge, CEO of Gitpod. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Remote Development in the Cloud with Gitpod & OpenVSCode Server with Sven Efftinge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Developer Relations at Google with Luke Mahe 40:28
40:28 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked40:28
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe last 15 years have seen the emergence of cloud-based developer APIs and services as dominant components of the developer toolchain. As a result, there has never been more power at developers’ fingertips. But making that power usable and accessible is a challenge that is shared between the providers and the consumers of these services. Google’s Developer Relations team has spent the past 15 years bridging the gap between Google’s internal engineering teams and the broader developer community that consumes their APIs and services. Luke Mahé is a long-time engineering manager at Google DevRel. We talk about the history of Google’s developer offering and the critical role DevRel plays in shaping and promoting that offering. This episode is hosted by Yaniv Bernstein. Yaniv Bernstein was until recently COO of Airtasker and is now a startup coach, adviser, and public speaker. He is the author of the People Engineering newsletter and is active on LinkedIn and Twitter . Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Developer Relations at Google with Luke Mahe appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Darklang Deployless Applications with Paul Biggar 39:54
39:54 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked39:54
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe way we write, compile, and run software has continued to evolve since computer programming began. The cloud, serverless, no-code, and CI/CD are all contemporary ideas introduced to help software engineers spend more time on their application and less time on the chores of running it. Darklang is a new way of building serverless backends. It’s a cloud native programming language with several novel features including being not just serverless but deployless as well. In this episode, I interview Paul Biggar, founder and CEO of Dark. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Darklang Deployless Applications with Paul Biggar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Tetrate: Application Aware Networking with Varun Talwar 50:31
50:31 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:31
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedAn application network is a way to connect applications, data and devices through APIs that expose some or all of their assets and data on the network. That network allows other consumers from other parts of the business to come in and discover and use those assets ( mulesoft.com ). The company Tetrate provides the tools necessary for a highly efficient application (aware) network. Tetrate helps connect and manage applications across clusters, clouds, and data centers. It supports integrating traditional workloads into your cloud-native application infrastructure, defining access control and editing rights or teams on shared infrastructure, and out of the box conformance with NIST standards for microservices security. In this episode we talk to Varun Talwar, Co-Founder of Tetrate. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Tetrate: Application Aware Networking with Varun Talwar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Whether organizing projects, working from home, or conducting business, you need to use many necessary apps and cloud services to do the job. Despite these apps being necessary, switching between them and keeping them interconnected and updated is a challenge. They very easily become disorganized which makes using them less efficient. The company ClickUp solves this problem by providing a platform that provides everything a business needs to efficiently operate, all in one place! ClickUp uses a unique hierarchy to see the big picture without missing details, and offers everything from docs, to tasks, to imports and integrations. With everything in one place and easily searchable and organized, ClickUp makes work much easier. In this episode we talk to Zeb Evans, Founder and CEO of ClickUp. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post ClickUp: Workflow Vision with Zeb Evans appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Argo: Kubernetes-Native Tools with Alex Collins 52:38
52:38 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:38
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedKubernetes is an open source container orchestration service released by Google in 2014. It has quickly grown into a platform with a huge community of enthusiasts and professionals. Besides becoming the de facto standard for container orchestration, it has fostered an ecosystem of related tools and services with increasing power and sophistication ( opensource.com ). Argo, a project developed by the company Applatix and acquired by Intuit, is a set of essential Kubernetes-native tools for deploying and running jobs and applications on Kubernetes. All the Argo tools are implemented as controllers and custom resources. Some of these tools are Argo Workflows, Argo Events, Argo CD, and Argo Rollouts ( intuit.com ). In this episode we talk to Alex Collins, Principal Software Engineer at Intuit, about using Argo to manage Kubernetes applications. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Argo: Kubernetes-Native Tools with Alex Collins appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 getoctane.io: Pay-As-You-Go Pricing with Akash Khanolkar 1:16:32
1:16:32 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:16:32
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedPay-as-you-go pricing has become a strong selling point for modern SaaS companies as well as cloud-based companies. Public cloud providers, for example, typically only charge you for only what you use. But implementing this option is challenging because it requires advanced platform analytics. The company Octane is a drop-in metered billing system that gives you flexibility to bill how you want. They offer expressive price plans that bill on usage, include base rates, add-ones, discounts, and trials. Their services can be integrated easily with simple APIs and SDKs, and generate detailed breakdowns of customer usage and spending with customizable reports and dashboards. In this episode we talk to Akash Khanolkar, Co-founder at Octane. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post getoctane.io: Pay-As-You-Go Pricing with Akash Khanolkar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Cloud Run: Serverless Applications with Steren Giannini 46:45
46:45 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:45
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedServerless computing is a cloud computing solution that lets developers deploy applications to containers without managing the servers themselves. Servers and resources are provisioned automatically, pay only for what you use, and experience little to no errors or downtime ( ionos ). Google Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that enables you to run containers that are invocable via requests or events. Cloud Run is serverless, transparent, and easy to use. Common use cases include web services like REST APIs, data processing, automation, and modernization ( cloud.google.com ). In this episode, we talk with Steren Giannini, Senior Product Manager at Google. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Cloud Run: Serverless Applications with Steren Giannini appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Fly.io: Geographic App Deployment with Kurt Mackey 1:02:48
1:02:48 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:02:48
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedLatency is the time it takes to get from point A to point B. In programming, this might be the time from a user selecting their photos library to the pictures reaching their computer screen from the database. Fly.io is a simple platform for running full-stack apps and databases close to your users. Some available features include provisioning CPU, memory and storage based on your app’s demand, zero-configuration private networking and global load balancing, metrics and alerting, and managing SSL certificates at any scale. Fly.io beta is launching highly available PostgreSQL clusters with a single command and creating read replicas in different cities. In this episode, we talk with Kurt Mackey, Social Media Manager at Fly.io. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Fly.io: Geographic App Deployment with Kurt Mackey appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Okteto: Cloud-Native Applications on Kubernetes with Ramiro Berreleza 1:01:28
1:01:28 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:01:28
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedKubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system. It makes managing container clusters possible as well as deploying code changes to these containers. Microservice architecture is widely used today in large part because of Kubernetes. However, using it can require a large time commitment due to its learning curve. The company Okteto empowers developers to innovate and deliver cloud-native applications faster than ever. Okteto CLI lets developers deploy realistic replicas of their stack on Kubernetes and updates it for continuous deployments. It also manages different code environments, self-service access, and container scaling automatically. In this episode, we talk with Ramiro Berreleza, Founder and CEO of Okteto, about managing Kubernetes clusters with Okteto. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Okteto: Cloud-Native Applications on Kubernetes with Ramiro Berreleza appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Shoreline: Fleet Automation with Anurag Gupta 50:57
50:57 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:57
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedIn today’s containerized world, it’s common to encounter similar issues with known solutions across multiple pods. For most people there are 2 solutions: go pod-by-pod finding and fixing the problem, or do that while also spending months trying to automate that process. This is significant time and manual labor. The company Shoreline orchestrates real-time debugging and automated repair across fleets. Shoreline makes it easy to define metrics, alarms, actions, and bots from the CLI that take action like draining and terminating nodes tagged for retirement or finding TLS certificates that are close to expiring. For unknown issues, Shoreline lets you debug across every pod from a single CLI rather than SSHing pod-by-pod, like running a command to grep for errors. In this episode, we talk with Anurag Gupta, Founder and CEO of Shoreline. Full disclosure: Shoreline is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Shoreline: Fleet Automation with Anurag Gupta appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Apache Pulsar is a cloud-native, distributed messaging and streaming platform originally created at Yahoo! and now a top-level Apache Software Foundation project (pulsar.apache.org). Pulsar is used by many large companies like Yahoo!, Verizon media, Tencent, and Splunk. The company DataStax, an open, multi-cloud stack for modern data apps, has added to their product stack Astra Streaming Beta, their cloud native messaging and event streaming service that’s built on top of Apache Pulsar. Astra Streaming provides tools for streaming, queueing, and stream processing as a natural complement to their other services like Astra DB. You can integrate high quality video services with added features like injecting machine learning and viewing real-time analytics. In this episode we talk with Jonathan Ellis, CTO and co-founder at DataStax. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Pulsar Revisited with Jonathan Ellis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Dynatrace for DevOps and SRE with Aloïs Reitbauer 1:03:24
1:03:24 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:03:24
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe company Dynatrace provides intelligent observability, continuous automation, and causation-based AI to help Cloud Ops, DevOps, and SRE teams transform faster, innovate more, and deliver better business outcomes. They offer application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, cloud automation, application security, and much more. While being an industry leader in simplifying complex cloud applications, Dynatrace is continuously innovating and bringing a wide array of solutions to the market. Who is Dynatrace for and what can it really do for software development and DevOps teams? In this episode we get to know Dynatrace better with their VP, Chief Technical Strategist and Head of Innovation Lab, Aloïs Reitbauer. Aloïs drives product innovation at Dynatrace and knows more about their products than most. We discuss the use cases and benefits of Dynatrace as well as its involvement with open source projects. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Dynatrace for DevOps and SRE with Aloïs Reitbauer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Corey Quinn is guest hosting on Software Engineering Daily this week, presenting a Tour of the Cloud. Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he helps companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. If you’re looking to lower your AWS bill or negotiate a new contract with AWS, you can learn more about The Duckbill Group’s services at https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ . Corey is also the host and creator of Last Week in AWS, which publishes newsletters and podcasts covering topics to help you stay up to date on all things AWS and insightful conversations with experts in the world of cloud computing all delivered lovingly with Corey’s infamous snark. Subscribe at https://www.lastweekinaws.com and follow Corey on Twitter @QuinnyPig. In this episode, Corey Quinn interviews Salman Paracha, Group Vice President, Cloud Engineering at Oracle. The post Oracle Cloud with Salman Paracha appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Corey Quinn is guest hosting on Software Engineering Daily this week, presenting a Tour of the Cloud. Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he helps companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. If you’re looking to lower your AWS bill or negotiate a new contract with AWS, you can learn more about The Duckbill Group’s services at https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ . Corey is also the host and creator of Last Week in AWS, which publishes newsletters and podcasts covering topics to help you stay up to date on all things AWS and insightful conversations with experts in the world of cloud computing all delivered lovingly with Corey’s infamous snark. Subscribe at https://www.lastweekinaws.com and follow Corey on Twitter @QuinnyPig. In this episode, Corey Quinn interviews John Allspaw, Founder and Principal of Adaptive Capacity Labs. The post Digital Ocean with John Allspaw appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Corey Quinn is guest hosting on Software Engineering Daily this week, presenting a Tour of the Cloud. Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he helps companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. If you’re looking to lower your AWS bill or negotiate a new contract with AWS, you can learn more about The Duckbill Group’s services at https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ . Corey is also the host and creator of Last Week in AWS, which publishes newsletters and podcasts covering topics to help you stay up to date on all things AWS and insightful conversations with experts in the world of cloud computing all delivered lovingly with Corey’s infamous snark. Subscribe at https://www.lastweekinaws.com and follow Corey on Twitter @QuinnyPig. In this episode, Corey Quinn interviews Liz Fong-Jones, who is Principal Developer Advocate for SRE and Observability at Honeycomb and who worked at Google prior to that. The post GCP with Liz Fong-Jones appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Corey Quinn is guest hosting on Software Engineering Daily this week, presenting a Tour of the Cloud. Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he helps companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. If you’re looking to lower your AWS bill or negotiate a new contract with AWS, you can learn more about The Duckbill Group’s services at https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ . Corey is also the host and creator of Last Week in AWS, which publishes newsletters and podcasts covering topics to help you stay up to date on all things AWS and insightful conversations with experts in the world of cloud computing all delivered lovingly with Corey’s infamous snark. Subscribe at https://www.lastweekinaws.com and follow Corey on Twitter @QuinnyPig. In this episode, Corey Quinn interviews Troy Hunt, who is a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP. Troy also runs “Have I Been Pwned” which checks to see if you have an email or password that has been compromised in a data breach. The post Azure with Troy Hunt appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Corey Quinn is guest hosting on Software Engineering Daily this week, presenting a Tour of the Cloud. Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he helps companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. If you’re looking to lower your AWS bill or negotiate a new contract with AWS, you can learn more about The Duckbill Group’s services at https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ . Corey is also the host and creator of Last Week in AWS, which publishes newsletters and podcasts covering topics to help you stay up to date on all things AWS and insightful conversations with experts in the world of cloud computing all delivered lovingly with Corey’s infamous snark. Subscribe at https://www.lastweekinaws.com and follow Corey on Twitter @QuinnyPig. In this episode, Corey Quinn interviews Pete Cheslock, Chief Product Officer at Allma, about AWS. Prior to that Pete was Corey’s colleague at The Duckbill Group. The post AWS with Pete Cheslock appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Special Edition Repeat: AWS Analysis with Corey Quinn 1:06:42
1:06:42 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:06:42
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedNext week Corey Quinn will be guest hosting on Software Engineering Daily, presenting a Tour of the Cloud. Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he helps companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. If you’re looking to lower your AWS bill or negotiate a new contract with AWS, you can learn more about The Duckbill Group’s services at https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ . Corey is also the host and creator of Last Week in AWS, which publishes newsletters and podcasts covering topics to help you stay up to date on all things AWS and insightful conversations with experts in the world of cloud computing all delivered lovingly with Corey’s infamous snark. Subscribe at https://www.lastweekinaws.com and follow Corey on Twitter @QuinnyPig. Amazon Web Services changed how software engineers work. Before AWS, it was common for startups to purchase their own physical servers. AWS made server resources as accessible as an API request, and has gone on to create higher-level abstractions for building applications. For the first few years of AWS, the abstractions were familiar. S3 provided distributed, reliable object storage. Elastic MapReduce provided a managed Hadoop system. Kinesis provided a scalable queue. Amazon provided developers with managed alternatives to complicated open source software. More recently, AWS has started to release products that are unlike anything else. A perfect example is AWS Lambda, the first function-as-a-service platform. Other newer AWS products include Ground Station, a service for processing satellite data and AWS DeepRacer, a miniature race car for developers to build and test machine learning algorithms on. As AWS has grown into new categories, the blog announcements of new services and features have started coming so frequently that it is hard to keep track of it all. Corey Quinn is the author of “ Last Week in AWS ”, a popular newsletter about what is changing across Amazon Web Services. Corey joins the show to give his perspective on the growing, shifting behemoth that is Amazon Web Services–as well as the other major cloud providers that have risen to prominence. He’s also the host of the Screaming in the Cloud podcast , which you should check out if you like this episode. The post Special Edition Repeat: AWS Analysis with Corey Quinn appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and migration of applications with local system interdependencies ( aws.amazon.com ). In this episode we talk with Joshua Burgin, General Manager, AWS Outposts at Amazon Web Services. Joshua owns strategy, roadmaps, customer experience, pricing and demand generation for the AWS Outposts business, including full P&L responsibility. Joshua was previously a Senior Director, Technology Platform and Services at Zynga and a Senior Manager, Product Management at RPI before that. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post AWS Outpost Engineering with Joshua Burgin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Portainer: Container Management with Neil Cresswell 50:24
50:24 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:24
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRunning applications in containerized environments involves regularly organizing, adding and replacing containers. This complex job may involve managing clusters of containers in different geographic locations with different configuration requirements. Platforms like Kubernetes are great for managing this complexity, but include steep learning curves to efficiently get anything off the ground. The company Portainer provides a universal container management tool that works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm, and Azure ACI. It enables managing containers without knowing platform-specific code and best practices. Instead, deploying containerized applications is done through a simple Graphical User Interface. Once deployed, you can observe and monitor the apps and govern security settings all through Portainer. In this episode, we talk to Neil Cresswell, CEO and Co-Founder of Portainer.io, based in Auckland New Zealand. Neil is a career consultant, having spent 25 years in the roles of systems engineering, IT consulting, and more recently IT management. Neil started his career with 12 years at IBM as his foundation, where he had a leading role in Server, Storage, and Virtualisation systems engineering. Portainer has now grown into an entity of its own right, and using Neil’s knowledge of the CIO’s requirements, knowledge of the technology, and knowledge of infrastructure management, Neil has crafted Portainer into a strong contender in the container management space. Neil now runs the Portainer.io business and is responsible for the overall product strategy and the team entrusted to deliver on that strategy. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Portainer: Container Management with Neil Cresswell appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Data Mechanics: Data Engineering with Jean-Yves Stephan 46:19
46:19 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:19
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedApache Spark is a popular open source analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Applications can be written in Java, Scala, Python, R, and SQL. These applications have flexible options to run on like Kubernetes or in the cloud. The company Data Mechanics is a cloud-native Spark platform for data engineers. It runs continuously optimized Apache Spark workloads on a managed Kubernetes cluster within the user’s cloud account. They boast a 50%-75% cost reduction from cloud providers by dynamically scaling applications based on load and automatically tuning app configurations based on the historical Spark pipeline runs. Their Kubernetes clusters are deployed within user accounts so user data never leaves the environment and they handle the cluster management. In this episode we talk to Jean-Yves Stephan, Co-Founder and CEO at Data Mechanics. Jean-Yves previously worked as a Software Engineer then a Tech Lead Manager at Databricks. We discuss big data engineering in Spark and the unique advantages of using Data Mechanics to make Spark development easier and more cost effective. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Data Mechanics: Data Engineering with Jean-Yves Stephan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Temporal Product: Managing State with Ryland Goldstein 53:56
53:56 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked53:56
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMicroservice architecture has become very common over the past few years because of the availability of containers and container orchestrators like Kubernetes. While containers are overall positive for scaling apps and making them more available, they’ve also introduced hurdles like persisting data and state, and container restarts or pod failures. Development teams put significant work into designing applications that take these hurdles into account because without precautions you can lose valuable data or crash your app. The company Temporal provides tools for both building complex microservices as well as for apps that use microservices. They use 2 primary function types: workflow and activity. Workflow functions persist all local variables and threads so that if the server the app runs on crashes, it’s picked up on a different server where it left off, down to the line. Activity functions automatically initiate retry logic if the service the function invokes fails for something like its server being down. Temporal provides visibility into end-to-end workflows that can span multiple services. In this episode we talk to Ryland Goldstein, Head of Product at Temporal. Previously, Ryland was the Lead Product Manager at Reshuffle and a Software Engineer Lead at Parallel Machines. We discuss the challenges of managing state in micro services, orchestrating microservices and how Temporal simplifies this process for development teams. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Temporal Product: Managing State with Ryland Goldstein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Bridgecrew: Cloud Security with Barak Schoster 46:45
46:45 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:45
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCloud computing provides tools, storage, servers, and software products through the internet. Securing these resources is a constant process for companies deploying new code to their cloud environments. It’s easy to overlook security flaws because company applications are very complex and many people work together to develop them. Wyze Labs, for example, had millions of users’ data stolen due to a mistake by a single employee. The company Bridgecrew is a cloud security platform helping to prevent mistakes like that from happening. Bridgecrew integrates into developer workloads to automatically find infrastructure errors in cloud accounts, workloads, and infrastructure as code. Their platform also monitors code reviews and build pipelines to prevent errors from being deployed into production. If an error is found then Bridgecrew’s software reverts that code back to its last known correct state. In today’s episode we talk with Barak Schoster, CTO and co-founder at Bridgecrew. Barak previously worked as a senior software architect at RSA Security and as a software architect at Fortscale before that. We discuss cloud security, Infrastructure as Code, and big data architecture. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Bridgecrew: Cloud Security with Barak Schoster appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Speedscale: Automated Testing with Ken Ahrens and Matt LeRay 54:51
54:51 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:51
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedLarge portions of software development budgets are dedicated for testing code. A new component may take weeks to thoroughly test, and even then mistakes happen. If you consider software defects as security issues then the concern goes well beyond an application temporarily crashing. Although even minor bugs can cost companies a lot of time to locate the bug, resolve it, retest it in lower environments, then deploy it back to production. The company Speedscale provides an intelligent, Kubernetes-friendly testing toolkit that runs at build time. Their virtual SRE-bot works inside automated release pipelines to forecast and test real-world conditions the new code will encounter. This process requires no manual scripting because Speedscale uses existing traffic to generate tests and mocks. The feedback is immediate after every build and covers regression, performance, fuzzing, and chaos tests automatically. In this episode we talk with Ken Ahrens and Matt LeRay. Ken is a founder and the CEO at Speedscale. Previously Ken worked at New Relic as a senior director, solutions architects. Matt is a founder and CTO at Speedscale. He previously was the VP of Product at Observe, inc. We discuss testing in distributed environments, how Speedscale intelligently tests and mocks during builds, Kubernetes, and their future goals with Speedscale. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Speedscale: Automated Testing with Ken Ahrens and Matt LeRay appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Gold Fig Labs: Cloud Infrastructure Security with Vikrum Nijjar and Greg Soltis 52:16
52:16 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:16
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedIT infrastructure are the components required to operate IT environments, like networks, virtual machines or containers, an operating system, hardware, data storage, etc…. As companies build out different deployment environments with infrastructure configurations, they must maintain the different environments, replicate them, and update them. The management of infrastructure, often automated to some extent, is referred to as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The company Gold Fig Labs helps growing companies better understand their deployed infrastructure beyond the basic IaC principles. Gold Fig Labs developed 2 main tools to deliver the clearest view of infrastructure security and compliance. Their tool Checkup provides periodic security and best practices reports for AWS accounts. The report details specific, actionable, and relevant advice to improve security posture. Their other tool, Introspector, is a unique security and auditing tool that provides in-depth analysis of larger cloud deployments with complex regulatory requirements and custom internal policies. In this episode we talk with Vikrum Nijjar and Greg Soltis. Vikrum is co-founder and CEO at Gold Fig Labs. He was previously an angel investor with Angel and special advisor for Google’s onboarding acquisitions, compliance, and security. Greg is co-founder and CTO at Gold Fig Labs. Previously he was a senior software engineer at Google and a software engineer at Firebase. We discuss the principles of IaC, how Gold Fig Labs helps customers go beyond what IaC intends, and the complexity of cloud infrastructure security and regulatory compliance. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Gold Fig Labs: Cloud Infrastructure Security with Vikrum Nijjar and Greg Soltis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Software-Defined Networking describes a category of technologies that separate the networking control plane from the forwarding plane. This enables more automated provisioning and policy-based management of network resources. Implementing software-defined networking is often the task of Site Reliability Engineers, or SREs. Site reliability engineers work at the intersection of development and operations by bringing software development practices to system administration. Equinix manages co-location data centers and provides networking, security, and cloud-related services to their clients. Equinix is leveraging its status as a market leader in on-prem networking capabilities to expand into cloud and IaaS offerings such as Equinix Metal, which has been referred to as “bare-metal-as-a-service,” and offers integrations with 3rd party cloud technologies with a goal of creating a seamless alternative to modern public clouds for organizations seeking the benefits of colocation. Tim Banks is a Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix and he joins the show to talk about what Equinix offers and how it differs from other cloud providers. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Equinix Infrastructure with Tim Banks appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure are the dominant cloud providers on the market today. But the market is still highly competitive, and there is significant overlap in the services offered by all three large providers. Since all three offer a broad range of services, developers looking to choose a platform for their application must focus on providers’ domains of relative excellence and how those align with their needs. One domain where Google Cloud Platform excels is with its database offerings. Google has data management baked into its organizational DNA, and has been the source of several innovative technologies in the data space such as Spanner, BigTable, and BigQuery. Andi Gutmans is a general manager and VP of engineering for databases at Google. He joins the show today to talk about how Google came to excel at databases and data management, how machine learning and Big Data users in particular can benefit from Google Cloud’s offerings, and how new features such as Database Migration Service are helping Google stay ahead of the curve in a competitive cloud landscape. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Google Cloud Databases with Andi Gutmans appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Vantage: AWS Console Alternative with Ben Schaechter 43:38
43:38 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:38
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedAWS offers over 200 services as part of its IaaS platform, and that number continues to grow. Organizing all of these services, and tracking the costs they incur, can be a significant challenge, often requiring teams of AWS-certified sysadmins working together to get a handle on an enterprise-scale system. Vantage provides an alternative, streamlined AWS console that makes it easier to manage AWS services and track associated costs. Users link their AWS account to Vantage, and it automatically profiles all their services and aggregates the information into a dashboard. Users can customize how their Vantage console appears and allows users to break down service usage by region. Ben Schaechter is the co-founder of Vantage . Before founding Vantage he was a Senior Product Manager at AWS and DigitalOcean. Ben joins the show today to talk about how Vantage helps streamline the AWS experience, and why teams of all sizes can benefit from a better user experience on the AWS platform. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Vantage: AWS Console Alternative with Ben Schaechter appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Earthly: Build Automation with Vlad Ionescu 50:36
50:36 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:36
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedBuild automation tools automate the process of building code, including steps such as compiling, packaging binary code, and running automated tests. Because of this, build automation tools are considered a key part of a continuous delivery pipeline. Build automation tools read build scripts to define how they should perform a build. Common build scripts include Makefile, Dockerfile, and bash. Earthly is a build automation tool that allows you to execute all your builds in containers. Earthly uses Earthfiles, which draws from the best features of Makefile and Dockerfile and provides a common layer between language-specific tooling and the CI build spec. Earthly builds are repeatable, isolated, and self-contained, and will run the same way across different environments such as a CI system or a developer’s laptop. Vlad Ionescu is the Founder and CEO of Earthly Technologies. He was formerly the founder and chief architect at ShiftLeft.io. Vlad joins the show today to talk about why reproducible builds are important, how Earthly simplifies build scripts, and what the long-term vision for Earthly looks like. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Earthly: Build Automation with Vlad Ionescu appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Multi-Prem Software Delivery and Management with Grant Miller 55:20
55:20 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked55:20
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedModern 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Digital Ocean Platform with Cody Baker and Apurva Joshi 55:27
55:27 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked55:27
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCloud 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Serverless Properties with Johann Schleier-Smith 51:47
51:47 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:47
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedServerless 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Cilium: Programmable Linux Networking with Dan Wendlant and Thomas Graf 56:41
56:41 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:41
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCilium is open-source software built to provide improved networking and security controls for Linux systems operating in containerized environments along with technologies like Kubernetes. In a containerized environment, traditional Layer 3 and Layer 4 networking and security controls based on IP addresses and ports, like firewalls, can be difficult to operate at scale because of the volatility of the system. Cilium is eBPF, which is an in-kernel virtual machine which attaches applications directly to code paths in the kernel. In effect, this makes the Linux kernel “programmable” without changing kernel source code or loading modules. Cilium takes advantage of this functionality to insert networking and security functions at the kernel level rather than in traditional Layer 3 or Layer 4 controls. This allows Cilium to combine metadata from Layer 3 and Layer 4 with application-layer metadata such as HTTP method and header values in order to establish rules and provide visibility based on service, pod, or container identity. Isovalent, co-founded by the creator of Cilium, maintains the Cilium Open Source Project and also offers Cilium Enterprise, which is a suite of tools helping organizations adopt Cilium and overcome the hurdles of building a secure, stable cloud-native application. Dan Wendlant and Thomas Graf are the co-founders of Isovalent. Thomas, the firm’s CTO, was the original creator of the Cilium open-source project and spent 15 years working on the Linux kernel prior to founding Isovalent. Dan, Isovalent’s CEO, has also worked at VMWare and Nicira. They join the show today to talk about why Cilium and Cilium Enterprise are a great choice for organizations looking to build cloud-native applications. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Cilium: Programmable Linux Networking with Dan Wendlant and Thomas Graf appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 OpsLevel: Service Ownership Platform with John Laban and Kenneth Rose 53:30
53:30 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked53:30
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMicroservices 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Cloud-Native Applications with Cornelia Davis (Repeat) 50:31
50:31 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:31
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOriginally 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes vs. Serverless with Matt Ward (Repeat) 46:29
46:29 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:29
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOriginally 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Microservice Routing with Tobias Kunze Briseño 47:01
47:01 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked47:01
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMicroservices route requests between each other. As the underlying infrastructure changes, this routing becomes more complex and dynamic. The interaction patterns across this infrastructure requires operators to create rules around traffic management. Tobias Kunze Briseno is the founder of Glasnostic, a system for ensuring resilience of microservice applications. Tobias joins the show to talk about microservice routing and traffic management, and what he has built with Glasnostic. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Microservice Routing with Tobias Kunze Briseño appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Edge Handlers with Mathias Biilmann Christensen 48:05
48:05 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked48:05
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedNetlify is a cloud provider for JAMStack applications. To make those applications more performant, Netlify has built out capacity for edge computing–specifically “edge handlers”. Edge handlers can be used for a variety of use cases that need lower latency or other edge computing functionality. Matt Biilmann Christensen is the CEO of Netlify and joins the show to talk through the engineering behind edge handlers. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Edge Handlers with Mathias Biilmann Christensen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Cloud resources can get out of control if proper management constraints are not put in place. Cloud Custodian enables users to be well managed in the cloud. It is a YAML DSL that allows you to easily define rules to enable a well-managed cloud infrastructure giving security and cost optimization. Kapil Thangavelu works on Cloud Custodian and he joins the show to talk about modern cloud management and what he is building with Cloud Custodian. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Cloud Custodian with Kapil Thangavelu appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Sysbox: Containerization Runtime with Cesar Talledo 45:01
45:01 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked45:01
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedContainers and virtual machines are two ways of running virtualized infrastructure. Containers use less resources than VMs, and typically use the runc open source container runtime. Sysbox is a containerization runtime that offers an alternative to runc, and allows for the deployment of Docker or Kubernetes within a container. Cesar Talledo is the founder of Nestybox, a company built around the Sysbox runtime. He joins the show to talk about container runtimes and his new company. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Sysbox: Containerization Runtime with Cesar Talledo appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Gitpod: Cloud Development Environments with Johannes Landgraf and Sven Efftinge 38:26
38:26 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked38:26
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedDevelopment environments are brittle and hard to manage. They lack the kind of fungibility afforded by infrastructure-as-code. Gitpod is a company that allows developers to describe development environments as code to make them easier to work with, and enabling a more streamlined GitOps workflow. Johannes Landgraf and Sven Efftinge are creators of Gitpod and they join the show to discuss the product and the motivation for building it. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Gitpod: Cloud Development Environments with Johannes Landgraf and Sven Efftinge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Ray is a general purpose distributed computing framework. Ray is used for reinforcement learning and other compute intensive tasks. It was developed at the Berkeley RISELab, a research and development lab with an emphasis on practical applications. Ion Stoica is a professor at Berkeley, and he joins the show to talk about the present and future of the Ray framework. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Ray Ecosystem with Ion Stoica appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Tailscale: Private Networks with David Crawshaw 36:55
36:55 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked36:55
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedA private network connects servers, computers, and cloud instances. These networked objects are often separated by firewalls and subnets that create latency and complication. David Crawshaw is the CTO of Tailscale , a company that works to make private networks easier to build and simpler to configure and maintain. David joins the show to talk about private networks and the implementation of Tailscale. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Tailscale: Private Networks with David Crawshaw appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 TornadoVM: Accelerating Java with GPUs with Juan Fumero 43:11
43:11 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:11
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe Java ecosystem is maturing. The GraalVM high performance runtime provides a virtual machine for running applications in a variety of languages. TornadoVM extends the Graal compiler with a new backend for OpenCL. TornadoVM allows the offloading of JVM applications onto heterogeneous hardware. Juan Fumero works on TornadoVM. He joins the show to talk about the use case for TornadoVM, the design, and the engineering that underlies the system. We also talk about the overall Java ecosystem. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post TornadoVM: Accelerating Java with GPUs with Juan Fumero appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Every software company works off of several different development environments–at the very least there is staging, testing, and production. Every push to staging can be spun up as an application to be explored, tinkered with, and tested. These ad hoc spin-ups are known as release apps. A release app is an environment for engineers to play with, and potentially throw away or promote to production. Release apps have been made easier due to technologies such as infrastructure-as-code, continuous integration, and Kubernetes. Tommy McClung is the co-founder of Release App , a company that makes it easy to spin up release environments for your software. Tommy joins the show to discuss release workflows, and his work building Release App. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Release Apps with Tommy McClung appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Access Control Management with Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie 48:32
48:32 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked48:32
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedAcross a company, there is a wide range of resources that employees need access to. Documents, S3 buckets, git repositories, and many others. As access to resources changes across the organization, a history of the changes to permissions can be useful for compliance and monitoring. Indent is a system for simplifying access management across infrastructure. Indent allows users within an organization to request access to resources, and keeps logs of the changes to who can access those resources. Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie are the founders of Indent, and they join the show to talk through the application of access control management, and the architecture of Indent itself, which has numerous interesting engineering decisions within it. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Show Notes: Indent job opportunities The post Access Control Management with Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Cortex: Microservices Management with Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta 54:28
54:28 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:28
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedManaging microservices becomes a challenge as the number of services within the organization grows. With that many services comes more interdependencies–downstream and upstream services that may be impacted by an update to your service. One solution to this problem: a dashboard and newsfeed system that lets you see into the health and changes across your services. With this kind of system, you can avoid accidentally shipping code that will impact other service owners. It can also help with testing, giving you an end-to-end picture for how a test can impact other services. Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta are co-founders of Cortex, a system for managing your services. Anish and Ganesh join the show to talk about their work building Cortex, and the value that it provides to the companies that use it. In a previous show we covered a company called Effx, which does something similar. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Cortex: Microservices Management with Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 GitHub Mobile with Brian Lovin and Ryan Nystrom 47:11
47:11 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked47:11
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedGitHub has been a social network for developers for many years. Most social networks are centered around mobile applications, but GitHub sits squarely in a developer’s browser-based desktop workflow. As a result, the design of a mobile app for GitHub is less straightforward. GitHub did acquire a popular mobile client called GitHawk, which was developed by Ryan Nystrom. Since joining GitHub, Ryan has worked on a new mobile app for GitHub, along with a team of engineers including Brian Lovin. Ryan and Brian both join the show to discuss GitHub mobile, and how they designed, architected, and built the app. There is no company quite like GitHub–a social network combined with a version control system that provides a critical utility. All this made for an interesting episode about a one-of-a-kind mobile product. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post GitHub Mobile with Brian Lovin and Ryan Nystrom appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A service mesh provides routing, load balancing, policy management, and other features to a set of services that need to communicate with each other. The mesh can simplify operations across these different services by providing an interface to configure them. There are lots of different vendors who offer service mesh technology: AWS has AppMesh, Google has Istio (which is open source), Buoyant has Linkerd (which is also open source), and HashiCorp has Consul Connect. Unfortunately, these service meshes do not all play well together. And at a large enough company, different teams will be setting up different service meshes. So it would be useful for services in those different meshes to be able to communicate with each other. Luke Kysow is an engineer at HashiCorp where he works on Consul Connect, and he joins the show to discuss service mesh usage, adoption, and possible strategies for maintaining multiple service meshes within a single organization. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Multimesh with Luke Kysow appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
AWS has over 150 different services. Databases, log management, edge computing, and lots of others. Instead of being overwhelmed by all of these products, an engineering team can simplify their workflow by focusing on a small subset of AWS services–the defaults. Daniel Vassalo is the author of The Good Parts of AWS . An excerpt from the book: “ The cost of acquiring new information is high and the consequence of deviating from a default choice is low, so sticking with the default will likely be the optimal choice. A default choice is any option that gives you very high confidence that it will work.” Having confidence in your workflow–even if it is a simple workflow–has advantages. S3, EC2, Elastic Load Balancers: for simple web applications, this is really all you need to build your business. Daniel Vassallo worked at AWS for more than 8 years before leaving to become an entrepreneur and author. He joins the show to talk about what the good parts of AWS are, and his strategy for building applications with that subset of services. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Good Parts of AWS with Daniel Vassallo appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Kubernetes continues to mature as a platform for infrastructure management. At this point, many companies have well-developed workflows and deployment patterns for working with applications built on Kubernetes. The complexity of some of these deployments may be daunting, and when a new employee joins a company, that employee needs to get quickly onboarded with the custom dev environment. Environment management is not the only issue with Kubernetes development. When a service gets updated, that update needs to be live and usable as fast as possible. When Kubernetes-related errors occur, those problems need to be easily accessible in a UI for triage. Dan Bentley is the CEO of Windmill Engineering, a company that makes a set of Kubernetes tools called Tilt. Dan joins the show to talk about the workflow for deploying Kubernetes infrastructure and the role of Tilt, the product he has been working on. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Tilt: Kubernetes Tooling with Dan Bentley appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
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 appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Distributed Systems Research with Peter Alvaro 48:27
48:27 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked48:27
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedEvery software company is a distributed system, and distributed systems fail in unexpected ways. This ever-present tendency for systems to fail has led to the rise of failure testing, otherwise known as chaos engineering. Chaos engineering involves the deliberate failure of subsystems within an overall system to ensure that the system itself can be resilient to these kinds of unexpected failures. Peter Alvaro is a distributed systems researcher who has published papers on a range of subjects, including debugging, failure testing, databases, and programming languages. He works with both academia and industry. Peter joins the show to discuss his research topics and goals. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Distributed Systems Research with Peter Alvaro appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Amazon’s virtual server instances have come a long way since the early days of EC2. There are now a wide variety of available configuration options for spinning up an EC2 instance, which can be chosen from based on the workload that will be scheduled onto a virtual machine. There are also Fargate containers and AWS Lambda functions, creating even more options for someone who wants to deploy virtualized infrastructure. The high demand for virtual machines has led to Amazon moving down the stack, designing custom hardware such as the Nitro security chip, and low level software such as the Firecracker virtual machine monitor. AWS also has built Outposts, which allow for on-prem usage of AWS infrastructure. Anthony Liguori is an engineer at AWS who has worked on a range of virtualization infrastructure: software platforms, hypervisors, and hardware. Anthony joins the show to talk about virtualization at all levels of the stack. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post AWS Virtualization with Anthony Liguori appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service with Vikram Sreekanti 52:45
52:45 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:45
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedServerless computing is a way of designing applications that do not directly address or deploy application code to servers. Serverless applications are composed of stateless functions-as-a-service and stateful data storage systems such as Redis or DynamoDB. Serverless applications allow for scaling up and down the entire architecture, because each component is naturally scalable. And this pattern can be used to create a wide variety of applications. The functions-as-a-service can handle the compute logic, and the data storage systems can handle the storage. But these applications do not give the developer as much flexibility as an ideal serverless system might. The developer would need to use cloud-specific state management systems. Vikram Sreekanti is the creator of Cloudburst, a system for stateful functions as a service. Cloudburst is architected as a set of VMs that can execute functions-as-a-service that are scheduled onto them. Each VM can utilize a local cache, as well as an autoscaling key-value store called Anna which is accessible to the Cloudburst runtime components. Vikram joins the show to talk about serverless computing and his efforts to build stateful serverless functionality. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service with Vikram Sreekanti appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When a developer spins up a virtual machine on AWS, that virtual machine could be purchased using one of several types of cost structures. These cost structures include on-demand instances, spot instances, and reserved instances. On-demand instances are often the most expensive, because the developer gets reliable VM infrastructure without committing to long-term pricing. Spot instances are cheap, spare compute capacity with lower reliability, that is available across AWS infrastructure. Reserved instances allow a developer to purchase longer term VM contracts for a lower price. Reserved instances can provide significant savings, but it can be difficult to calculate how much infrastructure to purchase. Aran Khanna is the founder of Reserved.ai, a company that builds cost management tools for AWS. He joins the show to talk about the landscape of cost management, and what he is building with Reserved.ai. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Reserved Instances with Aran Khanna appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Google Cloud Networking with Lakshmi Sharma 43:57
43:57 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:57
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedA large cloud provider has high volumes of network traffic moving through data centers throughout the world. These providers manage the infrastructure for thousands of companies, across racks and racks of multitenant servers, and cables that stretch underseas, connecting network packets with their destination. Google Cloud Platform has grown steadily into a wide range of products, including database services, machine learning, and containerization. Scaling a cloud provider requires both technical expertise and skillful management. Lakshmi Sharma is the director of product management for networking at Google Cloud Platform. She joins the show to discuss the engineering challenges of building a large scale cloud provider, including reliability, programmability, and how to direct a large hierarchical team. We’re looking for new show ideas, so if you have any interesting topics, please feel free to reach out via twitter or email us at jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Google Cloud Networking with Lakshmi Sharma appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A cloud provider gives developers access to virtualized server infrastructure. When a developer rents this infrastructure via an API call, a virtual server is instantiated on physical machines. That virtual server needs to be made addressable through the allocation of an IP address to make it reachable from the open Internet. When the virtual server starts to receive too much traffic, that traffic needs to be load balanced with another virtual server. The backend networking code that runs a cloud provider needs to be fast, secure, and memory-efficient. Languages that fit that description include C++, Rust, and Go. Digital Ocean’s low-level networking code is mostly written in Go. Sneha Inguva is an engineer with Digital Ocean who has written and spoken about writing networking applications using Go. She joins the show to talk about her work at Digital Ocean, including the implementation of a DHCP server, a network server that assigns IP addresses and other parameters to devices that sit on that network. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Go Networking with Sneha Inguva appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Replicated Software Delivery with Grant Miller and Marc Campbell 1:03:24
1:03:24 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:03:24
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedDistributed systems are required to run most modern enterprise software. Application services need multiple instances for scalability and failover. Large databases are sharded onto multiple nodes. Logging services, streaming frameworks, and continuous integration tools all require the orchestration of more than one server. Deploying a distributed system has historically been difficult because the nodes of the system must be managed by the underlying infrastructure. If I have a distributed database that I want to deploy, the complexity of that deployment is going to be different depending on whether I am running on AWS, or VMware, or my own bare metal server infrastructure. Heterogeneous server infrastructure makes it hard to sell distributed applications that get deployed to that infrastructure. A vendor that is selling a distributed database would need to figure out how to make their database work on the infrastructure of any given customer. Kubernetes has simplified the process of deploying a distributed application. Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that has steadily grown in popularity, to the point where the ecosystem is mature and the software is stable. Now that the software industry has a reliable, portable means of deploying a distributed application, the enterprise software market is becoming easier to enter for companies that sell a distributed application. Replicated is a company that builds products for software delivery. Replicated allows for the distribution and updating of applications that would have been hard to deploy in the past. Grant Miller and Marc Campbell are the CEO and CTO of Replicated, and they join the show to talk about the modern enterprise software market, and the process of delivering software to companies that might otherwise have trouble consuming it. Full disclosure: Replicated is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We have partnered with SafeGraph for the SafeGraph Data Hackathon Challenge . We are giving away $4000 in cash prizes, as well as SE Daily and SafeGraph swag. SafeGraph is a geospacial data company which curates a dataset of more than 6 million points of interest. SafeGraph provides a high volume of location data–and you build apps and data science projects with that data. If you have been looking for a creative opportunity to explore large data sets with the potential to win $4000 in cash prizes, this is a great opportunity. The hackathon is hosted on FindCollabs. To enter, go to FindCollabs.com and sign up. If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons . Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. You can create your own hackathon at FindCollabs.com . The post Replicated Software Delivery with Grant Miller and Marc Campbell appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The ridesharing infrastructure of Lyft has a high volume of traffic that is mostly handled by servers on AWS. When Vicki Cheung joined Lyft in 2018, the company was managing containers with an internally built container scheduler. One of her primary goals at the company was to move Lyft to Kubernetes. In today’s episode, Vicki gives an overview of Lyft infrastructure and the core engineering problems within the company. One subject she touched on was the network communications between the user on a mobile phone and the cloud backend. This was a topic we explored in detail on a previous episode about Envoy Mobile with Matt Klein . Vicki also discussed the broader Kubernetes ecosystem, as well as her time at OpenAI, where she managed infrastructure deployments for scheduling large machine learning jobs. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com . If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons . Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. FindCollabs is a company I started to allow people to find collaborators for their software projects, and our new hackathon product allows you to organize your hackathon participants to make your hackathon as productive as possible. Check it out at FindCollabs.com . The post Lyft Kubernetes with Vicki Cheung appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Packet: Baremetal Infrastructure with Zachary Smith and Nathan Goulding 47:26
47:26 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked47:26
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCloud infrastructure is usually consumed in the form of virtual machines or containers. These VMs or containers are running on a physical host machine that is also running other VMs and containers. This is called multitenancy. Servers across cloud providers such as AWS have a high utilization because there are multiple virtual instances running on each physical server host. Cloud computing has led to a low cost of compute infrastructure. But in some cases, this low cost comes at the price of not being able to control the underlying hardware with as much precision as the user would want. Some users want specific types of hardware. Other users want to be using dedicated hardware that does not risk the “noisy neighbor” problem of sharing a physical server with some other application that is using most of the resources. Packet is a company that provides remote access to baremetal infrastructure. The user experience is similar to that of a cloud provider, but with more control over how a given physical host will be used. Zachary Smith is the CEO of Packet and Nathan Goulding is the chief architect. Zach and Nathan join the show to talk about the business and the engineering behind Packet, as well as the future goals for where they want to take the company. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com . If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons . Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. FindCollabs is a company I started to allow people to find collaborators for their software projects, and our new hackathon product allows you to organize your hackathon participants to make your hackathon as productive as possible. Check it out at FindCollabs.com . The post Packet: Baremetal Infrastructure with Zachary Smith and Nathan Goulding appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Edge Computing Platform with Jaromir Coufal 48:07
48:07 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked48:07
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedEdge computing is the usage of servers that are geographically close to the client device. The first common use case for edge computing was CDNs: content-delivery networks. A content delivery network placed media files such as images and videos on multiple servers throughout the world. These are big files, and they take lots of bandwidth to transfer. By placing them at CDNs, the files would be closer to any user around the world. These early use cases for edge computing were purely about storing large files. But the vast majority of compute still took place at the central application servers. Over time, users have required faster and faster application experiences. Today, an increasing amount of compute has been moved to the edge, in addition to the existing storage applications. More user data is being cached at the edge to make for quicker transactional processing. Machine learning model training and hosting at the edge makes for a faster, more responsive machine learning feedback loop. Jaromir Coufal is an engineer with Red Hat. He joins the show to talk about modern applications of edge computing, and how the demand for edge computing is creating a market opportunity for companies that have lots of servers at the edge, such as telecoms. These telecoms can repurpose their widely distributed telecom infrastructure as edge servers that they can sell usage on. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com . If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons . Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. FindCollabs is a company I started to allow people to find collaborators for their software projects, and our new hackathon product allows you to organize your hackathon participants to make your hackathon as productive as possible. Check it out at FindCollabs.com . The post Edge Computing Platform with Jaromir Coufal appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a virtualized server product that provides the user with scalable compute infrastructure. EC2 was created in 2006 as one of the first three AWS services along with S3 and Simple Queueing Service. Since then, EC2 has provided the core server infrastructure for many of the companies that have been built in the cloud. A large scale virtualization product requires its engineers to have a deep understanding of scheduling and multitenancy. In previous shows, we have touched on subjects such as hypervisors, the noisy neighbor problem, the cold start problem, and other aspects of multitenant infrastructure. To make EC2 successful, these issues must be continuously revisited and resolved at different areas of the stack. Dave Brown joined the EC2 team in 2007, and now leads the EC2 Compute, Networking, and Load Balancing teams as a Vice President. Dave joins the show to discuss the history of EC2 and the canonical problems of virtualized server infrastructure. Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com . The post Amazon EC2 with Dave Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Amazon’s container offerings include ECS (Elastic Container Service), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), and Fargate. Through these different offerings, Amazon provides a variety of ways that a user can manage Kubernetes clusters and standalone container instances. The choice of which containerization system to choose depends on the needs of the user, and the tradeoffs they want to make on control and portability. Amazon’s container products have been designed in the context of a shifting competitive landscape. Kubernetes presents a potential long-term threat to Amazon’s status as the most popular cloud provider. Properly responding to this threat has required Amazon to extend itself into the world of open source, contributing to Kubernetes and having more conversations with customers who want their products to have the high quality user experience of AWS along with the open characteristics of Kubernetes. Abby Fuller is a principal technologist with Amazon who works on containers and Linux. Abby joins the show to describe Amazon’s perspective on containers and Kubernetes. Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com . The post Amazon Kubernetes with Abby Fuller appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When the Kubernetes project was started, Amazon Web Services was the dominant cloud provider. Most of the code that runs AWS is closed source, which prevents an open ecosystem from developing around AWS. Developers who deploy their application onto AWS are opting into a closed, controlled ecosystem, which has both costs and benefits. The software industry has a history of closed and open ecosystems existing at the same time. AWS represented a huge closed ecosystem. With the amount of money at stake in the cloud business, it was only a matter of time before a more open ecosystem emerged. Since the creation of Kubernetes, the world of cloud computing has evolved rapidly. Google and Microsoft have both invested heavily into Kubernetes, and Amazon itself has adapted to the newer competitive landscape with a Kubernetes offering of its own. Amazon has also made efforts to become more publicly involved in open source projects, including Kubernetes. Kelsey Hightower has been a part of the Kubernetes ecosystem since the project was started. He is one of the most recognizable faces in the world of Kubernetes, delivering keynotes, appearing on podcasts, and co-authoring the popular Kubernetes Up and Running . Kelsey joins the show to discuss the progress in the Kubernetes ecosystem, and the competitive dynamics between Kubernetes and AWS. Announcements We are hiring a software engineer who can work across both mobile and web. This role will work on SoftwareDaily.com, our iOS app, and our Android application. We are looking for someone who learns very quickly and can produce high quality code at a fast pace. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com . The post Kubernetes Progress with Kelsey Hightower appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes at Cruise with Karl Isenberg 1:04:35
1:04:35 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:04:35
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCruise is a company that is building a fully automated self-driving car service. The infrastructure of a self-driving car platform presents a large number of new engineering problems. Self-driving cars collect vast quantities of data as they are driving around the city. This data needs to be transferred from the cars onto cloud servers. The data needs to be used for training machine learning models. These models must be tested in a simulated environment, which provides more data to be integrated back into the self-driving system that is deployed to the cars. As the cars drive around the city, they can communicate with custom cloud services to get information about traffic, navigation, and weather. Cloud services are also used for internal tooling that can help with automotive diagnostics, configuration changes, deployments, and security policy management. The software platform used to manage infrastructure at Cruise is a combination of cloud products, open source tools, and custom built infrastructure that is mostly deployed to Kubernetes. Karl Isenberg is an engineer at Cruise, and he joins the show to talk about the engineering requirements of building a self-driving car service, and Cruise’s approach to platform engineering. The post Kubernetes at Cruise with Karl Isenberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Linkerd Market Strategy with William Morgan 59:56
59:56 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked59:56
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Istio Market Strategy with Zack Butcher 1:16:12
1:16:12 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:16:12
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedKubernetes 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 GraalVM Quarkus: Java Acceleration with Guillaume Smet and Emmanuel Bernard 55:17
55:17 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked55:17
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedJava 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Dark Lang with Ellen Chisa and Paul Biggar 1:01:07
1:01:07 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:01:07
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedDark 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Gravity: Distributed Application Delivery with Ev Kontsevoy 1:01:30
1:01:30 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:01:30
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedModern 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 How To Build A Cloud Provider with Anurag Goel 1:10:18
1:10:18 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:10:18
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRender 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – 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 .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A new employee at a software company needs access to a variety of tools. In order to get started working, the employee might need Slack, email, Google Docs, and Amazon Web Services, and all of these require an account with a username and password. Setting up all of these accounts can be time consuming, because the company needs to go into their admin portal and create the accounts. The accounts need to have the right security policies and configuration settings. And when the employee leaves the company, all of these accounts need to be shut down. Okta is a company that builds identity and access management software, such as an “SSO (single-sign on)” tool that allows users to log into all of these different types of accounts using only an Okta login. Okta was started in 2009 and has grown steadily since then, going public in 2017. Hector Aguilar is the president of technology at Okta and he joins the show to talk about the software stack of Okta and how the company has evolved over time as it has become a core infrastructure provider and hired a large engineering team. 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 Okta Engineering with Hector Aguilar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Cloud-Native Applications with Cornelia Davis 49:30
49:30 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked49:30
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedAmazon 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 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-Native Applications with Cornelia Davis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The service mesh abstraction allows for a consistent model for managing and monitoring the different components of a microservices architecture. In the service mesh pattern, each service is deployed with a sidecar container that contains a service proxy. These sidecars are collectively referred to as the “data plane.” Each sidecar provides the service that it is deployed next to with a set of features such as security policy, rate limiting, and monitoring instrumentation. The sidecars in the data plane communicate with a central module called a control plane. In the control plane, an engineer can operate across these individual services at scale, by pushing out updates to them. Kubernetes has made it easier to manage large fleets of microservices, and has led to wider adoption of service mesh. Istio is one of the most popular service mesh products. In today’s show, Varun Talwar returns to the show to describe the state of the Istio project and the process of deploying Istio to a cluster. Varun is the CEO of Tetrate, a company building an enterprise-ready service mesh. Prior to Tetrate, Varun was at Google, where he helped found the gRPC and Istio projects. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. We recently launched GitHub integrations. It’s easier than ever to find collaborators for your open source projects. And if you are looking for some people to start a project with, FindCollabs we have topic rooms that allow you to find other people who are interested in a particular technology, so that you can find people who are curious about React, or cryptocurrencies, or Kubernetes, or whatever you want to build with. Podsheets is an open source podcast hosting platform that we recently launched. We are building Podsheets with the learnings from Software Engineering Daily, and 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. New SEDaily app for iOS and for Android . It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. I’ll be commenting on each episode, so if you hear an episode that you have some commentary on, jump onto the app, or on SoftwareDaily.com to share your thoughts. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe . Altalogy is the company who has been developing much of the software for the newest app, and if you are looking for a company to help you with your mobile and web development, I recommend checking them out. The post Service Mesh Deployment with Varun Talwar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 gVisor Container Isolation with Michael Pratt and Yoshi Tamura 50:10
50:10 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:10
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedSoftware applications running within a host operating system need to be isolated. Isolation prevents security vulnerabilities, such as one application accessing the memory of another. In modern cloud environments, a single physical host might be running multiple virtual machines on top of a hypervisor. Those virtual machines might be divided up into containers. The different virtual machines and containers might be operated by different users, or even different companies. gVisor is a container sandbox runtime open sourced by Google. gVisor runs containers in a new user-space kernel, and provides a container security system with low overhead. gVisor improves on the previous security properties of containers. Michael Pratt and Yoshi Tamura work on gVisor at Google, and they join the show to talk through the purpose of gVisor and the engineering around the project. ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes . If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast , so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS . It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe . Altalogy is the company who has been developing much of the software for the newest app, and if you are looking for a company to help you with your mobile and web development, I recommend checking them out. Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC , Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco. We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post gVisor Container Isolation with Michael Pratt and Yoshi Tamura appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Sheng Liang was the lead developer on the original Java Virtual Machine. Today he works as the CEO of Rancher Labs, a company building a platform on top of Kubernetes. Sheng joins the show to discuss his experiences in the technology industry. The container orchestration wars had many victims. The competing standards for how an enterprise should manage its numerous containers caused several companies to go down a path where they were building infrastructure which eventually had to be replaced. As Sheng discusses in today’s episode, the container orchestration wars almost killed his company. Rancher was originally built on top of a different container orchestrator, and the migration to Kubernetes required a massive rewrite of the Rancher platform. The container orchestration wars were not the first technology battle that Sheng has seen in his career–and it won’t be his last. In today’s show, we discuss the nature of technology wars. Are they necessary? How can a software company minimize the damage caused by a war between competing standards? Sheng was an excellent guest and we didn’t cover nearly as many subjects as I wanted to, so we will have to do another show in the future! ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes . If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast , so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS . It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC , Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Infrastructure Wars with Sheng Liang appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes Operators with Rob Szumski 1:02:48
1:02:48 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:02:48
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedKubernetes has made distributed systems easier to deploy and manage. As Kubernetes has become reliable, engineers have started to look for higher level abstractions we can define on top of Kubernetes. An operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application. Operators are useful for spinning up distributed systems such as Kafka, Redis, or MongoDB. These data systems are complicated, stateful applications with lots of failure domains. The operator framework enables a developer to deploy one of these complicated applications with less fear of the system crashing, or entering an erroneous state. Rob Szumski is an engineer at Red Hat. He joins the show to discuss Kubernetes, the operator pattern, and his time at CoreOS, which was acquired by Red Hat. ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes . If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast , so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS . It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC , Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Kubernetes Operators with Rob Szumski appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Render: High Level Cloud with Anurag Goel 1:13:29
1:13:29 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:13:29
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCloud computing was popularized in 2006 with the launch of Amazon Web Services. AWS allowed developers to use remote server infrastructure with a simple set of APIs. But even with AWS, it was still not simple to deploy and manage a web application. In 2007, Heroku launched a platform built on top of AWS. Heroku focused on the developer experience by optimizing for users who were deploying Ruby on Rails applications. Since then, Heroku has expanded into other forms of managed infrastructure, including other application frameworks like NodeJS, and databases like Postgres. Heroku was the first popular “layer 2” cloud provider. Twelve years later, it is probably still the most popular. But there have been many other cloud providers built on top of AWS, including Netlify, Zeit, Spotinst, and Firebase. Layer 1 cloud providers are Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, and other raw infrastructure providers. These companies provide a great service in their low cost, commodity infrastructure. But the layer 1 providers are not optimizing for developer experience. They need to cater to a broad set of developers, some of whom want to work at a low level. A layer 2 cloud provider can build an opinionated solution that serves a subset of the overall cloud market particularly well. Render is a layer 2 cloud provider that optimizes for specific developer workflows, such as deploying a NodeJS web server, a static site, or a Docker container. Anurag Goel is the founder of Render, and he joins the show to discuss the strategy and the economics of Render. Anurag was also one of the early employees at Stripe, and he discusses his experience and learnings from working at the company. The post Render: High Level Cloud with Anurag Goel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Google Cloud was started with a vision of providing Google infrastructure to the masses. In 2008, it was not obvious that Google should become a cloud provider. Amazon Web Services was finding success among startups who needed on-demand infrastructure, but the traditional enterprise market was not yet ready to buy cloud resources. Googlers liked the idea of becoming a cloud provider. But was it the right time to enter the market? Google’s advertising business was a large and growing cash cow. Executives within Google were not sure how much capital and effort should be allocated into an infrastructure business. When Google decided to go into the cloud business, Joe Beda was one of the engineers who helped lead the effort, and joins the show as today’s guest. Google’s internal server infrastructure is managed by Borg, a system for allocating resources to applications. Google Cloud runs on Borg, and there were a number of early engineering challenges to building the necessary functionality into Borg for running a cloud provider on top of it. One example of a technical challenge that Google faced was the refactoring of Borg to run Google Cloud workloads. The requirements for public infrastructure are different than those of internal Googlers. Inside of Google, developers deploy their applications to containers running on bare metal. Outside of Google, developers want to create virtual machines. Borg needed to be refactored in order to instantiate VMs. Google solved this technical problem, as well as many other challenges, and Google Cloud slowly gained momentum in the market. But AWS remained the default choice for profitable enterprise workloads. It wasn’t until the container orchestration wars that Google found an opportunity to jump on a market segment that offered strong differentiation. By open sourcing Kubernetes and presenting a clear vision for where the project was going, Google shifted the battlefield of the public cloud toward a competitive landscape where it has many advantages. Kubernetes also provided many other technology companies with an opportunity to get into the cloud market, creating a collaborative, multi-company ecosystem that has accelerated the pace of software faster than anyone expected. Joe Beda has been instrumental in the evolution of the cloud native ecosystem. In today’s episode, Joe gives his memories on Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and his Kubernetes company Heptio, which he sold to VMware. ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes . If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast , so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS . It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC , Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Kubernetes Vision with Joe Beda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Containers are made to fail gracefully. When your container shuts down due to a hardware or software failure, your distributed application should be able to tolerate that failure. One simple way to be able to tolerate such a failure is to make all of your application logic “stateless.” If your application does not maintain state, then shutting it down in the middle of a computation is not a problem–you can just restart the application, restart your computation, and get the same result. But applications need to maintain state. We need to use databases and in-memory systems to manage long-lived user sessions and other interactions. A database is not just an on-disk abstraction–a database requires an application server to be accepting network traffic. We can run those database applications within containers. There is a fundamental tension between stateful applications and the idea that containers are meant to tolerate failure gracefully. Saad Ali is an engineer at Google, and he returns to the show to discuss Kubernetes storage and state management. He gave a keynote at KubeCon EU , which I spoke to him about. ANNOUNCEMENTS Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC , Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. FindCollabs is the company I am building, we launched several new features recently. If you have a cool project you are working on, I would love to see it. I check out every project that gets posted to FindCollabs, and I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast New Software Daily app for iOS . You can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe The post Kubernetes Storage with Saad Ali appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud provider by a large margin. Amazon established its lead by being first to market in 2006, with Google and Microsoft taking several years to catch up to the huge business opportunity of the cloud. Since 2008, Google Cloud has been working on cloud products for developers. It started with App Engine, which is widely used internally at Google, but has not had overwhelming public adoption. Over the last eleven years, Google has refined its understanding of how customers want to buy public cloud resources. Google Cloud products like Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, and BigTable have given Google parity with many of the AWS public cloud offerings. Although Google has caught up to AWS in terms of products, the enterprise market has continued to choose AWS as its default. AWS is widely perceived as having more experience in running enterprise workloads, and a better responsiveness to customers. In order to keep Amazon from running away with the cloud market entirely, Google needed to shift the competitive landscape to different territory. Kubernetes provided the paradigm shift that Google needed. The market for cloud providers has changed completely due to Kubernetes. When Google open sourced Kubernetes, it created a common codebase for software companies to build software for managing distributed systems. In the span of five years, Kubernetes has turned the world of cloud products into a world resembling the open source Linux ecosystem. This is a remarkable shift, and every infrastructure software vendor is still figuring out its strategy for adapting. Adam Glick is the head of modern infrastructure and serverless marketing at Google. With Craig Box, he hosts the Kubernetes Podcast from Google, an excellent show about recent developments and evergreen concepts within the world of Kubernetes. Prior to Google, Adam worked at AWS for 3 years and Microsoft for twelve years. He has seen each of the major cloud providers up close and has a deep awareness for how each company thinks. We had a great conversation about the cloud native landscape, podcasting, and developer marketing. ANNOUNCEMENTS Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC , Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. FindCollabs is the company I am building, we launched several new features recently. If you have a cool project you are working on, I would love to see it. I check out every project that gets posted to FindCollabs, and I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast New Software Daily app for iOS . You can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe The post Kubernetes Market with Adam Glick appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Service Mesh Interface with Lachlan Evenson 57:24
57:24 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked57:24
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedContainers offer a lightweight abstraction for running a server. Cloud providers are able to manage billions of containers from different users, allowing for economies of scale so that each user can pay less. Today, there is a variety of ways that users can deploy containers on a cloud provider. These containers can run in managed Kubernetes clusters, in functions-as-a-service, or in long-lived standalone container instances. User preferences are getting more sophisticated, with some users showing an interest in Knative, an open source serverless system originally created at Google. Whichever container deployment system you choose, your application and its multiple servers need a way to route traffic, measure telemetry, and configure security policy. A service mesh abstraction can help serve these use cases. Lachlan Evenson has worked in containers and Kubernetes since before the container orchestration wars. He was an engineer at Deis, a company which built an open source platform-as-a-service running on top of containers and Kubernetes. Deis was acquired by Microsoft, where Lachlan now works as principal program manager of Container Compute. Lachlan joins the show to discuss containers, Kubernetes, and the Service Mesh Interface, an interoperable service mesh layer that Microsoft launched with Buoyant. ANNOUNCEMENTS New Software Daily app for iOS . Use the app to access all 1000+ episodes in one place; find all shows related to a particular technology (such as streaming data, cryptocurrencies, Kubernetes, or learning to program); connect with other listeners through the comments section; access our transcripts and our related links; everything in the app is free, though you can also become an ad-free listener and support the show for $10/month or $100/year at softwaredaily.com/subscribe We are booking sponsorships, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Service Mesh Interface with Lachlan Evenson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Multicloud Future with Bassam Tabbara 1:03:16
1:03:16 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:03:16
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedEach cloud provider offers a different set of services which are not always compatible with each other. What are the challenges of building an application that interoperates with multiple different clouds? The first issue is API compatibility. Most cloud providers have a managed SQL offering, a bucket storage system, and server abstractions like virtual machines and containers. But these tools might have different APIs on each cloud. The code that you wrote to save your application data to Amazon S3 might have to be rewritten if you decide to switch your bucket storage to a different provider. Another issue that interferes with cloud interoperability is the degree of integration on a particular cloud. If I build my application for AWS, I might be heavily integrated with Amazon’s Identity and Access Management policy system and AWS logging. Each cloud provider makes it particularly easy to connect to their integrated solutions. There is also the problem of services on one cloud that simply do not map to a service on any other cloud. Google Cloud Bigtable does not have an equivalent service on Amazon. Microsoft CosmosDB does not have an equivalent service on Digital Ocean. As developers, this irritates us. We want to be able to deploy our application to any cloud. We want to be able to move applications easily from one cloud to another. And we want to mix tools from different clouds together as easily as we import a library. Bassam Tabbara is the CEO of Upbound, a company focused on making multicloud applications easier to deploy and operate. I spoke to Bassam at KubeCon EU 2019, and he described the problems of multicloud deployments and the opportunities for the cloud native ecosystem to become more cross-compatible. ANNOUNCEMENTS Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC , Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. FindCollabs is the company I am building, we launched several new features recently. If you have a cool project you are working on, I would love to see it. I check out every project that gets posted to FindCollabs, and I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast New Software Daily app for iOS . You can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe The post Multicloud Future with Bassam Tabbara appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Kubernetes has evolved from a nascent project within Google to a thriving ecosystem of cloud providers, open source projects, and engineers. Tim Hockin is a principal software engineer who has been with Google for 15 years. Tim joins the show to talk about the early days of the Kubernetes projects, and the engineering efforts that are under way five years into the project. At KubeCon EU 2019, two of the prevalent subjects of discussion were service mesh and serverless–particularly the Knative project. Tim gave his perspective for how projects that are adjacent to Kubernetes are developed within the community. ANNOUNCEMENTS New Software Daily app for iOS . Use the app to access all 1000+ episodes in one place; find all shows related to a particular technology (such as streaming data, cryptocurrencies, Kubernetes, or learning to program); connect with other listeners through the comments section; access our transcripts and our related links; everything in the app is free, though you can also become an ad-free listener and support the show for $10/month or $100/year at softwaredaily.com/subscribe We are booking sponsorships, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Kubernetes Development with Tim Hockin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Google’s cloud business was long regarded as a place where startups could build a business, but not established enterprises. For serious workloads, enterprises chose Amazon almost unanimously. This phenomenon of Amazon as the default was described by a phrase that harkened back to the days of IBM’s dominance: “nobody ever got fired for choosing AWS.” With the rise of Kubernetes, Google has established a reputation as a reliable provider of container orchestration. As enterprises look to roll out Kubernetes workloads, Google is convincing many of them to work with Google Kubernetes Engine. Kubernetes is one part of the changes which fall under the description of “digital transformation”. As these enterprises build out their digital transformation strategy, they are also looking for a strategy around multicloud, on-prem, policy management, and consulting partnerships. Anthos is a platform where enterprises manage the resources and configuration of their cloud deployments, as well as a system to partner with services integrators and independent software vendors. Aparna Sinha works on Anthos, Google Kubernetes Engine, and other projects at Google. In today’s show we discuss the process of digital transformation, as well as the tactics for how a digital transformation is actually implemented. We also talked about GKE on-prem, and the kinds of tooling needed by on-prem application deployments. ANNOUNCEMENTS New Software Daily app for iOS . Use the app to access all 1000+ episodes in one place; find all shows related to a particular technology (such as streaming data, cryptocurrencies, Kubernetes, or learning to program); connect with other listeners through the comments section; access our transcripts and our related links; everything in the app is free, though you can also become an ad-free listener and support the show for $10/month or $100/year at softwaredaily.com/subscribe We are booking sponsorships, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Google Anthos with Aparna Sinha appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Service Mesh Wars with William Morgan 1:21:39
1:21:39 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:21:39
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedA service mesh is an abstraction that provides traffic routing, policy management, and telemetry for a distributed application. A service mesh consists of a data plane and a control plane. In the data plane, a proxy runs alongside each service, with every request from a service being routed through the proxy. In the control plane, an application owner can control the behavior of the proxies distributed throughout the application. As the Kubernetes ecosystem has developed, the service mesh abstraction has become an increasingly desirable component of a “cloud native” application stack. As companies enthusiastically adopt Kubernetes, they eventually find themselves with a large distributed system that is difficult to operate. A service mesh simplifies some of these operational difficulties, as we have explored in numerous previous episodes. The Kubernetes community has grown to include lots of enterprises, and those enterprises want to adopt service mesh. But today, many of them are afraid to adopt the technology because there are multiple competing products, and it is unclear which one the community will centralize around–or if the community will end up supporting multiple products. Over the next few weeks, we will be airing interviews from KubeCon EU 2019 in Barcelona. These interviews are a window into the world of the Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem, which is transforming the world of infrastructure software. The most prominent theme across these shows was that of service mesh. Why was service mesh such an important topic? Because the battle for service mesh supremacy is a classic technology competition between a giant incumbent and a startup with far fewer resources. The Kubernetes ecosystem is beautifully engineered to allow for a marketplace of warring ideas where the most worthy competitor wins out–but in some cases there is room for multiple products to occupy different subsections of the market. Across these episodes, one theme we will explore is the governance and the diplomacy of these competing solutions, and how the Kubernetes ecosystem is structured to allow for harmonious resolution to technology battles. It is tempting to look at this competition between service meshes as winner-take-all. But as of late May 2019, we do not yet know if it will be winner-take-all. In order to predict how the service mesh wars will play out, the best we can do is to look at historical examples. Container orchestration wars was a winner-take-all market. Container orchestration was a problem of such depth, such technical complexity and integration, that there had to be a single winner for the ecosystem to marshall around. During the container orchestration wars, as Mesos and Docker Swarm and HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes fought for supremacy, many large enterprises made bets on container orchestration systems that were not Kubernetes. When the dust settled, Kubernetes was the victor, and these large enterprises who had adopted orchestration systems other than Kubernetes begrudgingly began thinking about how to migrate to Kubernetes. But during the orchestration wars, many more enterprises were sitting out altogether. They did not choose Kubernetes or Mesos or Swarm. They chose to wait. Enterprise technologists are smart, and they can tell when a technology is immature. Although many enterprises wanted an orchestration system to manage their Docker containers, they did not want to insert a heavy abstraction that they would have to tear out later on. Once Kubernetes won the orchestration wars, enterprise dollars piled into the space. The cloud native community has grown faster than anyone expected, because we solved the collective action problem of centralizing on a container orchestrator. From enterprises to cloud providers to ISVs to podcasters, we share the same vision for Kubernetes: it is the Linux for distributed systems. Within the Kubernetes ecosystem, the thought leadership tries not to pick winners. It is better for everyone if the winners are decided through competition. In order to foster competition, interfaces into Kubernetes can provide a layer of standardization along which different products can compete. Enterprises can buy into an interface without buying into any particular product. Examples include the container networking interface (CNI) and the container storage interface (CSI). Every Kubernetes application wants storage and networking, but these Kubernetes applications do not want to be locked into a particular provider. Since there is a standardized interface for networking and storage, these applications can swap out one storage provider for another, or one networking provider for another. How does this relate to service mesh? In the service mesh market, Buoyant was first to market with its open source project Linkerd. Today’s guest William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant. Over the last four years, Linkerd has slowly grown a following of dedicated users who run the open source service mesh in production. Over the last four years, Linkerd has changed from its initial technology of the embedded JVM service proxy developed at Twitter to a Rust-based sidecar data plane and a Go-based control plane. Buoyant’s dedicated focus to the service mesh space has won over much of the community, as was evidenced by Linkerd becoming the predominant apparel brand at Kubecon EU 2019: Linkerd hats and t-shirts were everywhere at the conference. Why did Linkerd become trendy? Ironically, because of a competing service mesh whose launch strategy was widely seen as an affront to the spirit of the cloud native community. Istio was created within Google, and launched with a set of brittle partnerships with IBM and other companies. Istio careened into the Kubernetes ecosystem with violent fanfare, trumpeting itself as the cloud native service mesh du jour through endless banner ads, marketing email campaigns, and KubeCon programming. Any listener to this podcast knows I am as gullible as any technologist. I’m an idealist–and I wanted to believe that Istio represented the service mesh equivalent of Kubernetes. It’s from Google, it launched with a bunch of impressive logos, and it has an inspiring vision. Looks cloud native, smells cloud native, must be cloud native, right? Unfortunately, Istio’s early marketing aggrandizements were disconnected from the nascent realities of the project. Istio was buggy and difficult to set up. Istio quickly developed a reputation as Google-manufactured vaporware: nice idea, not nearly ready for production. For Linkerd, the timing could not have been better. Istio’s romantic vision of an operating plane for routing traffic, managing security policy, and measuring network telemetry had seduced the enterprise masses. With their cravings unmet by Istio, these enterprises surveyed the market and quickly found their way to Linkerd, the humble service mesh next door, who had been waiting patiently all along. The tide has turned against Istio, and towards Linkerd. But the service mesh wars have just begun. And as easy as it is to criticize Istio, the project is not only vaporware. Istio has a vision for a detailed operating plane that will evolve together with Envoy, a service proxy sidecar developed at Lyft. Perhaps Istio’s early embers had too much marketing gasoline poured on them initially, but the project could still succeed. Google is the most sophisticated, well-resourced company in the world–and judging from Google’s adjacent strategic messaging around Anthos and other strategic initiatives, the company has already decided that Istio will be around for the long haul. As a community, we should be grateful to witness the folly of Istio’s carpet-bomb marketing strategy. It is validation for the earnest resilience of the cloud native community, that even under the omnipresent duress of Google marketing, the community was able to collectively reject the Istio Kool Aid. This should come as no surprise. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation resides within the Linux Foundation, and the Kubernetes ecosystem has been ordained with the ardent technical purity of Linus Torvalds. The CNCF was formed under the looming shadow of AWS. The CNCF was seeded with the donation of Kubernetes by Google. Much like the Linux community was positioned as a rebellious movement in reaction to Microsoft’s dominance, the Kubernetes community represents a fervent desire to open up the market to cloud providers beyond the tight-lipped, proprietary dominion of Amazon. With such a deep spirit of insubordination, it is no surprise that the community has rejected Istio like a set of loosely coupled organs rejecting a foreign skin attempting to layer itself across them. Even though the CNCF was founded by Google, the community was formed in spite of big centralized clouds, not as a marketing vessel for their products which may or may not be open source. Microsoft seems to understand this fact better than Google, at least in the domain of service mesh. The day after this interview with William, Microsoft announced the Service Mesh Interface (SMI), a project it partnered with Buoyant and other companies on to create a minimal spec for what a service mesh should offer to a Kubernetes deployment. The SMI presents a safe buy-in point for enterprises who want a service mesh, but do not want to get caught in the evangelistic crossfire of Istio and Linkerd. It is in this environment that we begin our next series of shows on the current cloud native ecosystem. Thanks to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for putting together an amazing podcasting zone at KubeCon, and allowing me to conduct these interviews. ANNOUNCEMENTS New Software Daily app for iOS . Use the app to access all 1000+ episodes in one place; find all shows related to a particular technology (such as streaming data, cryptocurrencies, Kubernetes, or learning to program); connect with other listeners through the comments section; access our transcripts and our related links; everything in the app is free, though you can also become an ad-free listener and support the show for $10/month or $100/year at softwaredaily.com/subscribe We are booking sponsorships, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Service Mesh Wars with William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Netflix started with a DVD-by-mail product. The software infrastructure and operations practices needed for the DVD business were very different from those needed by a streaming video company. Since the early days of Netflix, CEO Reed Hastings knew that the company would evolve to becoming a streaming video platform. But he did not know when the technology would be advanced enough to support video streaming, and he did not know how users would consume it. Greg Burrell has worked at Netflix for 14 years. Greg was one of the first engineers to start working on video streaming, which Netflix first attempted to implement with a set top box that downloaded movies and played them on your television. After evolving this strategy, Netflix arrived at the current model of video streaming through apps on browsers and mobile devices. As the company pivoted from DVD-by-mail to video streaming, Netflix encountered multiple challenges across engineering, operations, and communications across the company. At the time, there was no “DevOps” movement. There were not established continuous delivery practices. The available cloud technologies were immature and low level. Greg joins the show to describe the evolutionary arc of Netflix’s engineering process. Greg also presents a model for software development that he describes as “Full Cycle Development”. At Netflix, engineering teams of full cycle developers work without dedicated operations or testing teams. It is a sophisticated approach to engineering management. I spoke to Greg at the Fullstack Tech Radar Day , a software conference in Tel-Aviv put on by Tikal , an engineering community based out of Israel and San Francisco. This was a great conference, and we’ll be airing some additional content from it in the coming weeks. ANNOUNCEMENTS New Software Daily app for iOS . Use the app to access all 1000+ episodes in one place; find all shows related to a particular technology (such as streaming data, cryptocurrencies, Kubernetes, or learning to program); connect with other listeners through the comments section; access our transcripts and our related links; everything in the app is free, though you can also become an ad-free listener and support the show for $10/month or $100/year at softwaredaily.com/subscribe We are booking sponsorships, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Netflix Early Days with Greg Burrell appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Alex Balazs is the Intuit Chief Architect and has been working at the company for almost twenty years. Intuit’s products include QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint. These applications are used to file taxes, manage business invoices, conduct personal accounting, and other critical aspects of a user’s financial life. Because the applications are managing money for users, there is not much room for error. When Intuit was started, the company made desktop software. In his time at Intuit, Alex played a key role in rearchitecting the monolithic desktop applications to be resilient, reliable web applications. Intuit originally managed this software on their own servers. Since then, Intuit has migrated to the cloud using AWS. Alex joins the show to discuss his experience scaling Intuit, his strategy for cloud migration, and his evaluation criteria for questions of build versus buy. RECENT UPDATES: The FindCollabs Open has started. It is our second FindCollabs hackathon, and we are giving away $2500 in prizes. The prizes will be awarded in categories such as machine learning, business plan, music, visual art, and JavaScript. If one of those areas sounds interesting to you, check out findcollabs.com/open! The FindCollabs Podcast is out! We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ The post Scaling Intuit with Alex Balazs appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes Virtualization with Paul Czarkowski 56:27
56:27 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:27
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedModern server infrastructure usually runs in a virtualized environment. Virtual servers can exist inside of a container or inside of a virtual machine. Containers can also run on virtual machines. Kubernetes has allowed developers to manage their multiple containers, whether those containers are running in VMs or on bare metal (servers without VMs). As organizations expand their Kubernetes deployments, the overhead of those deployments is becoming a relevant concern. So-called “Kubesprawl” can occur within organizations due to a lack of best practices on when new clusters should be spun up or spun down, and when clusters should be shared by teams or shared by services. Paul Czarkowski is a principal technologist with Pivotal. He joins the show to discuss virtualization, Kubernetes, and the state of the cloud native ecosystem. RECENT UPDATES: FindCollabs is a company I started recently The FindCollabs Podcast is out! FindCollabs is hiring a React developer FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm , Kitspace , and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the most helpful community member award both go to Vynce Montgomery , who will receive both the SE Daily Towel and the SE Daily Old School Bucket Hat We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses Ne w version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service The post Kubernetes Virtualization with Paul Czarkowski appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
RECENT UPDATES: FindCollabs is a company I started recently The FindCollabs Podcast is out! FindCollabs is hiring a React developer FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm , Kitspace , and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the most helpful community member award both go to Vynce Montgomery , who will receive both the SE Daily Towel and the SE Daily Old School Bucket Hat We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses Ne w version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service Google’s strategy for cloud computing is centered around providing open source runtime systems and a high quality developer experience. Google is highly differentiated in its approach to the cloud. To understand Google’s strategy, it is useful to first set the context for the current competitive environment of cloud providers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) popularized cloud computing in 2006. AWS was first to market, which has given the company a large competitive advantage over the rest of the industry. It took Google several years to realize how big the public cloud market was, and how good the economics of running a cloud provider could be. Microsoft also realized the opportunity several years after AWS was started. The multi-year lead that AWS had on getting to market has given the company tremendous leverage. Because AWS is the most widely trusted, accepted default in the market, AWS is able to deepen that relationship more and more over time, despite the fact that the proprietary APIs of AWS create a level of lock-in that bears some resemblance to the lock-in of Microsoft Windows or Oracle’s relational database systems. The brief history of software gives us examples of what is supposed to happen next. When a large company is operating a proprietary developer platform, the open source software ecosystem reflexively comes out with an alternative, open source solution that is better than the proprietary system, right? We saw this with the Linux project, which channeled the developer resentment of the proprietary Windows operating system software into the development of the best server operating system to date: Linux. The difference between Microsoft Windows in the 90s and AWS today is that, for the most part, developers do not resent AWS. AWS keeps its prices low, and embodies a spirit of innovation despite the fact that AWS is partly built around a repeated process of taking open source projects, packaging them up into cloud services, and integrating them closely with other AWS tools, making it harder to move away from AWS. In its pioneering offerings of managed services, AWS made it easier to set up tools that had previously been impossible for less-experienced developers to operate. Distributed systems became approachable. Companies like Netflix, Lyft, and Heroku were built on the simplified operational model of AWS. AWS also innovates outside of this business model of repackaging open source projects. When AWS pioneered the function-as-a-service model, they created an easy way to scale stateless computation. They presented the developer world with an entirely new compute model: event-driven programming, with services communicating to each other via functional glue code running in cheap, transient containers. There is strong criticism of the event-driven, AWS Lambda-bound “serverless” compute model. And those critics make a valid point: AWS Lambda is a proprietary API. To build your app around an event-driven architecture glued together with Lambda functions is to lock yourself tightly to Amazon infrastructure. But the critics of this model do not seem to be the ones who are actually locked in. Critics of Amazon’s proprietary strategy tend to be those with a strong incentive to be critical. Another common criticism of AWS comes from commercial open source companies such as Redis Labs and Elastic, which are vendors of the Redis open source in-memory data system, and the open source Elasticsearch search and retrieval system respectively. These vendors argue that AWS has violated the spirit of open source by repackaging open source software as profitable software and failing to contribute back to the open source ecosystem with commensurate open source contributions. AWS has repackaged both Redis and Elasticsearch as AWS Elasticache and Amazon Elasticsearch Service respectively. These vendors frame their relationship to AWS as zero sum, and are turning to licensing changes as their strategy of choice for creating a new defensible moat against AWS. In various Internet forums, the indignant commercial open source software vendors and AWS have both made their cases to the developer community. If you are a developer who just wants to build your software, these arguments are an unsettling distraction. In addition to worrying about fault tolerance and durability guarantees and cost management, you now have to worry about licensing. And as you observe these circumstances, with open source vendors accusing cloud providers of improper behavior, you might begin to wonder: what actually are the rules of open source? By what set of commandments are we judging who is good and who is bad? And who is to judge what is fair or unfair activity by Amazon, which was the first company to prove to all of us just how influential cloud computing could be? This is the competitive landscape of the cloud circa April 2019, when I attended Google Cloud Next, Google’s annual cloud developer conference. Throughout the conference, the optimism and playful spirit of Google was present everywhere. There were colorful shapes and cartoonish diagrams that looked like building blocks made for children. In the expo hall, there were food pillars from which free candy and salted snacks could be grabbed all day long. On one side of the expo hall, a demonstration from IKEA showed how the company was partnering with Google to run its furniture business more like a software company. Stretching across the expo hall in a carpeted distance of multiple football fields, the various vendors showed off their latest wares in a bazaar of multicloud, hybrid cloud, and Kubernetes-compliant sales pitches. Over the last decade, large enterprises have opened up their wallets more and more, realizing just how valuable cloud infrastructure can be for their businesses. The more they spend, the more efficient their workers become, and the faster their businesses can improve. For modern enterprise, the cloud is the closest thing to magic that we have. Knowledge workers are becoming unshackled from the painful, slow pace of early technological corporatism. The cloud can empower all of us–and rather than replacing our jobs with machines, the cloud will allow us to better express our humanity within our work. The twin forces of consumer mobile computing on the client side and cloud computing on the server side are compounding faster than we can measure. Five years ago, a common analogy was to compare the smartphone to a “remote control for your life”. Today the smartphone feels more like a magic wand than a remote control. We can summon tremendous forces from the magical cloud by merely speaking the right command into our wand-like smartphone. Someday even the world of Harry Potter may look antiquated relative to our reality. Why carry around a wand when you can use your Airpods to cast your spells via hands-free voice command? The cloud’s magical effects on corporate enterprise operations are exciting to watch. I go to a lot of conferences, and I prefer to walk around the expo hall rather than to go to any sessions. At the expo hall, you see the distance between vendor hype and the realities of the enterprise. From my vantage point, that distance gets shorter every year: enterprises truly are adopting DevOps, continuous delivery, machine learning, and data platforms. From insurance companies to banks to farming companies to furniture outlets: the “digital transformation” is actually happening. This is great for consumers, and great for employees at the large corporations that are being digitally transformed. What is it like to work at a large, 100 year old enterprise that is going through digital transformation? It is certainly much more appealing than it was a decade ago. The servile, bureaucratic, rent-seeking hierarchies of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s are slowly being refurbished into enterprises where bottoms-up innovation, individualism, and artistic energy are assets rather than liabilities. We are moving out of the age of boring cubicle industrialism towards a vision in which work is truly creative and fulfilling for every member of the corporation. And Google evangelizes this ideal stronger than any other company in the world. With the tremendous cash flows from its advertising business, Google reinvests heavily into its employee base. Many employees at Google have worked there for a decade and show no intention of leaving, having found a job, but more importantly a culture and an engineering environment that is unrivaled. Speaking subjectively: my sense is that Google’s internal engineering tools are the best in the world. For many years, Google has been the strongest magnet for talent in the realm of Internet infrastructure and machine learning. In terms of sophistication, the rest of the software industry has been playing catch-up to Google since the days of the MapReduce paper. Speaking of the MapReduce paper: even back in 2004, Google was willing to share its findings with the outside world. Google was tactical about which innovations it would open up about, but it does seem that Google has truly tried to embody some of the publishing philosophies of academia. Google’s early investments in an academic-like environment have borne considerable fruit. The curiosity and cross-institutional collaboration enabled by Google’s willingness to speak openly about its research have made Google a refuge for academics, including today’s guest Eric Brewer. Beyond its considerable contributions as a publisher of computer science theory, Google has also become the model software engineering practitioner. Google has scaled its internal tools to make its thousands of developers highly productive. Given its success with its internal developers, it should come as no surprise that Google has strong opinions about the best way to build services for external developers. I have often wondered what it is actually like to work within Google as an engineer. I have worked at Amazon, and seen their internal tooling. At Amazon, the level of tooling gave engineers tremendous leverage. But from talking to more experienced engineers, my sense is that nobody holds a candle to the internal tools of Google. Drishti CTO Krish Chaudhury was a recent guest on this podcast . He spent nearly a decade at Google working on computer vision projects. Today he is building his own computer vision company. When I asked him if we yet had “Google Infrastructure for Everyone”, he sighed deeply and wistfully before answering with an unequivocal “no”. This hints at what Google wants to do with its cloud. Google does not think of Google Cloud as commodity cloud computing services. The vision for Google Cloud is to be the premier cloud, the deluxe set of services and hardware that provides “Google Infrastructure For Everyone”. This is a moonshot, and in order to accomplish it, Google will need to forego certain short term opportunities for cash grabs. But it is undoubtedly a more fiscally wise strategy for Google to optimize growth of the 2029 Q3 cloud market rather than that of 2019 Q3. From a conglomerate standpoint, Google already has a cash cow. Google has won today’s war, and it only makes sense to focus on tomorrow’s. In Google’s approach to the cloud, we see a cultural distinction between Amazon and Google. The cultures of Amazon and Google are partly deliberate, but partly driven by the nature of their businesses’ respective revenue streams. Amazon built its e-commerce business in a low-margin, highly competitive environment. Amazon won its customers over through a slow process of building trust. In its delivery of physical goods, Amazon formed close relationships with customers. Amazon would repeatedly listen to these customers and use that feedback to improve their products. This “flywheel” of iterative improvement is the core engine that keeps Amazon improving incrementally. Amazon also has made far-flung, ambitious investments–but the size and scope of Amazon’s moonshots were constrained for many years by its lack of any singularly large cash cow. Fire Phone notwithstanding, Amazon’s moonshots have often been thrifty asymmetric bets, requiring minimal upfront investment but presenting huge potential payoff. Google, on the other hand, has been in a much more luxurious financial position for most of its life. Google has a high margin advertising business that accounts for ~84% of its revenues, subsidizing everything else in Google (and Alphabet). Because it has such a big cash cow in a totally different area of the business, Google can afford to take an extremely long-term approach to its vision for the cloud. For Google, the goal is not to maximize the profit margins of the cloud over the next two years. Google can afford to think of cloud profitability in the increment of decades. In the business of cloud computing, Google has turned the weakness of being a late mover into a wide set of strengths. The AWS console presents its users with a sprawling array of possibilities. Google Cloud has a lower surface area. Google is more opinionated about the right way to do things–and it is easier for Google to build in an opinionated fashion because there are fewer legacy customers and edge cases to support. AWS supports the majority of the market, so it is in a position where it must keep those customers happy in order to hold onto its moat. So what are Google’s strong opinions about the way that a cloud should operate? Google’s espoused vision is that of the “open cloud”: a cloud environment where organizations could easily move workloads from one cloud provider to another. If we take the purest, most aspirational interpretation of “open cloud”, the full stack would be open source. Identity and access management systems would be portable as well, and cloud providers would work together to reduce the switching costs between each other, even in cases of data gravity. As virtuous as the idea of the “open cloud” sounds, it is also strategically convenient for Google. Since it lags behind Amazon and Microsoft in terms of adoption, a gradual shift towards a widely standardized open cloud would theoretically make it easier for Google to recover market share as the cloud market matures. Whatever Google’s true motives are, the “open cloud” strategy has been tremendously bountiful to the developer community. By open sourcing Kubernetes and pouring resources into it, Google brought an end to the painful, wasteful container orchestration wars. In its donation of Kubernetes to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (which it also is a heavy financial donor to), Google created an ostensibly open, positive sum environment for the rivaling cloud providers to congregate productively. In the area of machine learning, Google open sourced TensorFlow and invested heavily into tutorials, documentation, YouTube videos, and other resources. Google built JavaScript libraries and auditability and visualization tools. Google has marshalled an entire ecosystem around TensorFlow. Some of Google’s commercial open source efforts have had less favorable results. The Istio service mesh project seems to have been promoted with the same playbook that Kubernetes and TensorFlow followed, but with a less usable tool. In Istio, we see Google’s expertise in marketing perhaps taken too far. Why is Istio a problematic case study? Because, despite the fact that there are multiple open source service mesh products on the market with significant production usage, Istio has managed to make so much noise about itself that it is convincing the market that the battle for service mesh superiority is a foregone conclusion–in spite of widespread reports that Istio is currently difficult to operate and not ready for production workloads. From the blog posts, to the KubeCon programming to the expo hall hype, the cloud native developer community has been hammered with the same messaging about service mesh: Istio is the best, don’t bother with the rest. Perhaps Google is just doing us all a favor with Istio. Maybe it really will be the best service mesh, it’s just not quite there yet. Maybe Google is just ironing out the kinks, and the marketing roadmap happened to proceed at a faster pace than the engineering roadmap. Or maybe I have been talking too much to the other service mesh companies. Honestly I don’t really know how these meshes trade off against each other, though I have certainly asked previous guests for comparisons. And it’s so early in the huge space that has been bucketed within the category of “service mesh” that maybe Google is acting with best intentions and trying to get out ahead of another container orchestration war. Speaking as a developer who prefers to work on application abstractions far above the world of security policy and load balancing and canarying, I would personally be fine with Google running it’s open source marketing playbook with Istio, winning everyone over, and saving our energy for more productive deliberations. I am fine with Google picking winners where it deems such actions appropriate. But this gets at a tension of the “open cloud”. What kind of openness are we really talking about here? If I can’t see the strategic roadmap of Google Cloud or the backroom conversations, is it still open? When the open source repos remain in Google’s control, is that open source, or marketing? When Google tinkers with an operating system like Fuscia in the open, but we are left to speculate as to why they are working on it, or what purpose it serves, is that open source or marketing? If Google is such an open cloud, why not open source a detailed ten year strategic roadmap, and pass the buck to Amazon to do the same? In any case, I’m not passing judgment on whether Google has done something morally wrong by pushing Istio so hard. I just think it was strategically unwise. With Istio, Google made it a little too obvious just how much narrative control it has over the public developer market. Perhaps this narrative control should come as no surprise. Of all the major clouds, Google is the most well-versed in open source. From its contributions to Linux to its maintenance of a complicated Android ecosystem, Google knows how to play its cards in the game of open source diplomacy. In battle, a classic strategy for competing with a rival that has an advantage is to force that rival onto territory that you are more familiar with. There are many historical cases where a small army was able to defeat a large army due to its ability to maneuver the battle front to a favorable environment. Through its open cloud strategy, this is exactly what Google is doing. Google is open sourcing the best way that it knows how to build and run infrastructure software. This is happening slowly but steadily. To some extent, the other major providers including Amazon will have no choice but to follow Google into a battleground that was built by Google. And as developers, we will get to reap all the rewards of this competition. Our infrastructure will become more standardized, more fault tolerant, cheaper, better designed, and easier to use. And who knows, maybe someday we will actually be able to easily move workloads from one cloud to another. To the extent that I am a software engineering journalist, I feel inclined to scrutinize all of the cloud providers. But to the extent that I am an engineer and a business person, I feel only admiration and love for the cloud providers. Cloud computing has brought the cost of starting an Internet business down to zero. Cloud computing has opened up my eyes to a world of creative possibilities that knows no boundaries, and for that I will always be a fan of all of the rivaling cloud companies because they all have played a role in creating the current software landscape. Eric Brewer is a Google Fellow and VP Infrastructure. He is well-known for his work on the CAP theorem, a distributed systems concept that formalized the tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance in a distributed system. At Google, Eric is as much a strategist and product creator as he is a theoretician. He has worked on database systems such as Spanner, machine learning systems such as TensorFlow, and container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes and GKE. Eric joins the show to talk about Google’s philosophy as a cloud provider, and how his understanding of distributed systems has evolved since joining the company. The post Cloud with Eric Brewer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Intricately: Mapping the Internet with Fima Leshinsky 55:28
55:28 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked55:28
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRECENT UPDATES: FindCollabs is a company I started recently The FindCollabs Podcast is out! FindCollabs is hiring a React developer FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm , Kitspace , and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the most helpful community member award both go to Vynce Montgomery , who will receive both the SE Daily Towel and the SE Daily Old School Bucket Hat We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses Ne w version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service Intricately is a company that maps the breadth and depth of cloud infrastructure usage. Using a combination of clever algorithms, data engineering, and web crawlers, Intricately derives information about how different companies spend money on infrastructure. Fima Leshinsky is the CEO and co-founder at Intricately. In his previous job at Akamai, he began to study how a cloud provider such as Akamai could figure out how much its competitors were charging certain customers. Since CDN infrastructure is a commodity with reasonably low switching cost, a provider that can undercut its competitors significantly can have an edge in the marketplace. From his work at Akamai, Fima felt there was a market opportunity to provide this kind of service to the broader market of cloud providers. There are more cloud providers than ever before, and the kind of data that Intricately aggregates is highly useful to this competitive marketplace. Fima joins the show to talk about the modern landscape of cloud providers, and how to build a system that maps the Internet. The post Intricately: Mapping the Internet with Fima Leshinsky appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 gVisor: Secure Container Sandbox with Yoshi Tamura 44:12
44:12 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked44:12
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRECENT UPDATES: Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses Ne w version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service FindCollabs is hiring a React developer FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm , Kitspace , and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the most helpful community member award both go to Vynce Montgomery , who will receive both the SE Daily Towel and the SE Daily Old School Bucket Hat . The Linux operating system includes user space and kernel space. In user space, the user can create and interact with a variety of applications directly. In kernel space, the Linux kernel provides a stable environment in which device drivers interact with hardware and manage low level resources. A Linux container is a virtualized environment that runs within user space. To perform an operation, a process in a container in user space makes a syscall (system call) into kernel space. This allows the container to have access to resources like memory and disk. Kernel space must be kept secure to ensure operating system integrity–but Linux includes hundreds of syscalls. Each syscall represents an interface between the user space and kernel space. Security vulnerabilities can emerge from this wide attack surface of different syscalls, and most applications only need a small number of syscalls to perform their required functionality. gVisor is a project to restrict the number of syscalls that the kernel and user space need to communicate. gVisor is a runtime layer between the user space container and the kernel space. gVisor reduces the number of syscalls that can be made into kernel space. The security properties of gVisor make it an exciting project today–but it is the portability features of gVisor that hint at a huge future opportunity. By inserting an interpreter interface between containers and the Linux kernel, gVisor presents the container world with the opportunity to run on operating systems other than Linux. There are many reasons why it might be appealing to run containers on an operating system other than Linux. Linux was built many years ago, before the explosion of small devices, smart phones, IoT hubs, voice assistants and smart cars. To be more speculative, Google is working on a secretive new operating system called Fuscia. gVisor could be a layer that allows workloads to be ported from Linux servers to Fuscia servers. Yoshi Tamura is a product manager at Google with a background in containers and virtualization. He joins the show to talk about gVisor and the different kinds of virtualization. The post gVisor: Secure Container Sandbox with Yoshi Tamura appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Observability Engineering with James Burns 1:02:35
1:02:35 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:02:35
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRECENT UPDATES: Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses Ne w version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service FindCollabs is hiring a React developer FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm , Kitspace , and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the most helpful community member award both go to Vynce Montgomery , who will receive both the SE Daily Towel and the SE Daily Old School Bucket Hat Twilio is a communications infrastructure company with thousands of internal services and thousands of request per second. Each request generates logs, metrics, and distributed traces which can be used to troubleshoot failures and improve latency. Since Twilio is used for 2-factor authentication and text message relaying, Twilio is critical infrastructure for most applications that implement it. The service must remain highly available even in times of peak application traffic, or outages at a particular cloud provider. When he was at Twilio, James Burns worked on platform infrastructure and observability. James was at Twilio from 2014 to 2017, a time in which the company experienced rapid scalability. His work encompassed site reliability, monitoring, cost management and incident response. He also led chaos engineering exercises called “game days”, in which the company deliberately caused infrastructure to fail in order to ensure the reliability of failover systems and to discover problematic dependencies. James joins the show to talk about his time at Twilio and his perspectives on how to instrument and observe complex applications. Full disclosure: James now works at LightStep, which is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Observability Engineering with James Burns appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
RECENT UPDATES: Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses Ne w version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service FindCollabs is hiring a React developer FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm , Kitspace , and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the most helpful community member award both go to Vynce Montgomery , who will receive both the SE Daily Towel and the SE Daily Old School Bucket Hat . Google’s options for running serverless workloads started with App Engine. App Engine is a way to deploy an application in a fully managed environment. Since the early days of App Engine, managed infrastructure has matured and become more granular. We now have serverless databases, queueing systems, machine learning tools, and functions as a service. Developers can create fully managed, event-driven, highly scalable systems with less code and less operations. Different cloud providers are taking different approaches to offering serverless runtimes. Google’s approach involves the open source Knative project and a hosted platform for running Knative workloads called Cloud Run. Steren Giannini is a product manager at Google working on serverless tools. He joins the show to discuss Google’s serverless projects and the implementation details in building them. The post Serverless Runtimes with Steren Giannini appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
RECENT UPDATES: FindCollabs $5000 Hackathon Ends Saturday April 15th, 2019 Ne w version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service Software Daily is looking for help with Android engineering, QA, machine learning, and more A software application requires compute and storage. Both compute and storage have been abstracted into cloud tools that can be used by developers to build highly available distributed systems. In our previous episode, we explored the compute side. In today’s episode we discuss storage. Application developers store data in a variety of abstractions. In-memory caches allow for fast lookups. Relational databases allow for efficient retrieval of well-structured tables. NoSQL databases allow for retrieval of documents that may have a less defined schema. File storage systems allow the access pattern of nested file systems, like on your laptop. Distributed object storage systems allow for highly durable storage of any data type. Amazon S3 is a distributed object storage system with a wide spectrum of use cases. S3 is used for media file storage, archiving of log files, and data lake applications. S3 functionality has increased over the years, developing different tiers of data retrieval latency and cost structure. AWS S3 Glacier allows for long-term storage of data at a large cost reduction, in exchange for increased latency of data access. Kevin Miller is the general manager of Amazon Glacier at Amazon Web Services. He joins the show to talk about the history of storage, the different options for storage in the cloud, and the design of S3 Glacier. The post AWS Storage with Kevin Miller appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Upcoming event: FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 On Amazon Web Services, there are many ways to run an application on a single node. The first compute option on AWS was the EC2 virtual server instance. But EC2 is a large abstraction compared to what many people need for their nodes–which is a container with a smaller set of resources to work with. Containers can be run within a managed cluster like ECS or EKS, or run on their own as AWS Fargate instances, or simply as Docker containers running without a container orchestration tool. Beyond the option of explicit container instances, users can run their application as a “serverless” function-as-a-service such as AWS Lambda. Functions-as-a-service abstract away the container and let the developer operate at a higher level, while also providing some cost savings. Developers use these different compute options for different reasons. Deepak Singh is the director of compute services at Amazon Web Services, and he joins the show to discuss the use cases and tradeoffs of these options. Deepak also discusses how these tools are useful internally to AWS. ECS and Lambda are high-level APIs that are used to build even higher level services such as AWS Batch, which is a service for performing batch processing over large data sets. The post AWS Compute with Deepak Singh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Uber Infrastructure with Prashant Varanasi and Akshay Shah 1:02:31
1:02:31 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:02:31
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedUpcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Uber’s infrastructure supports millions of riders and billions of dollars in transactions. Uber has high throughput and high availability requirements, because users depend on the service for their day-to-day transportation. When Uber was going through hypergrowth in 2015, the number of services was growing rapidly, as was the load across those services. Using a cloud provider was a risky option, because the costs could potentially grow out of control. Uber made a decision early on to invest in physical hardware in order to keep costs at a reasonable level. In the last 3 years, Uber’s infrastructure has stabilized. The platform engineering team has built systems for monitoring, deployment, and service proxying. Developing and maintaining microservices within Uber has become easier. Prashant Varanasi and Akshay Shah are engineers who have been with Uber for more than three years. They work on Uber’s platform engineering team, and their current focus is on the service proxy layer, a sidecar that runs alongside Uber services providing features such as load balancing, service discovery, and rate limiting. Prashant and Akshay join the show to talk about Uber infrastructure, microservices, and the architecture of a service proxy. We also talk in detail about the benefits of using Go for critical systems infrastructure, and some techniques for profiling and debugging in Go. The post Uber Infrastructure with Prashant Varanasi and Akshay Shah appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Upcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Google has been building large-scale scheduling systems for more than fifteen years. Google Borg was started around 2003, giving engineers at Google a unified platform to issue long-lived service workloads as well as short-lived batch workloads onto a pool of servers. Since the early days of Borg, the scheduler systems built by Google have matured through several iterations. Omega was an effort to improve the internal Borg system, and Kubernetes is an open source container orchestrator built with the learnings of Borg and Omega. A scheduling system needs to be able to accept a wide variety of workload types and find compute resources within a cluster to schedule those workloads onto. There is a wide variety of potential workloads that could be scheduled–batch jobs, stateful services, stateless services, and daemon services. Different workloads can have different priority levels. A high priority workload should be able to find compute resources quickly, and a low priority workload can wait longer to find resources. Brian Grant is a principal engineer at Google. He joins the show to talk about his experience building workload schedulers and designing APIs for engineers to interface with those schedulers. The post Workload Scheduling with Brian Grant appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Peloton: Uber’s Cluster Scheduler with Min Cai and Mayank Bansal 46:48
46:48 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:48
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedUpcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Google’s Borg system is a cluster manager that powers the applications running across Google’s massive infrastructure. Borg provided inspiration for open source tools like Apache Mesos and Kubernetes. Over the last decade, some of the largest new technology companies have built their own systems that fulfill the roles of cluster management and resource scheduling. Netflix , Twitter, and Facebook have all spoken about their internal projects to make distributed systems resource allocation more economical. These companies find themselves continually reinventing scheduling and orchestration, with inspiration from Google Borg and their own internal experiences running large numbers of containers and virtual machines. Uber’s engineering team has built a cluster scheduler called Peloton. Peloton is based on Apache Mesos, and is architected to handle a wide range of workloads: data science jobs like Hadoop MapReduce; long running services such as a ridesharing marketplace service; monitoring daemons such as Uber’s M3 collector ; and database services such as MySQL. Min Cai and Mayank Bansal are engineers at Uber who work on Peloton. When they set out to create Peloton, they looked at the existing schedulers in the ecosystem, including Kubernetes, Mesos, Hadoop’s YARN system, and Borg itself . Both Min and Mayank join the show today to give a brief history of distributed systems schedulers and discuss their work on Peloton. They have been working in the world of distributed systems schedulers for many years–including experiences building core Hadoop infrastructure and virtual machine schedulers at VMware. The post Peloton: Uber’s Cluster Scheduler with Min Cai and Mayank Bansal appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Cloud computing started to become popular in 2006 with the release of Amazon EC2, a system for deploying applications to virtual machines sitting on remote data center infrastructure . With cloud computing, application developers no longer needed to purchase expensive server hardware. Creating an application for the Internet became easier, cheaper, and simpler. As the cloud has become popular, new ways of deploying applications have emerged. A developer with a web app has so many different options. You can host your app on an Amazon EC2 server, which will require you to manage cloud infrastructure in case your server crashes. You can deploy your app to Heroku, which gives your cloud deployment better uptime guarantees for a higher price than Amazon EC2. Or you can use Linode, or Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. There is such a large market for cloud computing that the world of cloud providers serves more niches every year. In past episodes we have explored a variety of different cloud providers, and the markets they target. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is for managing complex distributed systems applications, typically with large teams. Firebase is a cloud provider that simplifies the developer experience for applications with small teams. Spotinst is a cloud provider that emphasizes low cost. Zeit is a cloud provider that is built to manage applications through serverless “functions-as-a-service” like AWS Lambda. In today’s episode, Mathias Biilman Christensen, CEO of Netlify , joins the show. Netlify is a cloud provider that was built for modern web projects. Netlify represents the convergence of several trends in software development converging: static site deployment, serverless functions, a desire to have a “no-ops” deployment with minimal management, and the rise of newer tools like GraphQL and Gatsby. Mathias explores these trends in detail, and explores the technical challenges of building Netlify. He was a great guest, capable of talking about difficult backend problems that require writing C++, as well as the frontend world of JavaScript frameworks. One announcement before we begin: we are having a $5000 hackathon. The $5000 hackathon is for a new product we’ve been working on: FindCollabs . FindCollabs is a platform for finding collaborators and building projects. Whether you are an engineer, a musician, a designer, a videographer, or an artist, FindCollabs lets you find people and collaborate. To try out FindCollabs, just go to FindCollabs.com, you can make a project or you can join someone else’s project. And it’s very easy to make these projects–you don’t need to have anything built yet–you need to have a vision for what you want to build. And to find out about the hackathon, go to findcollabs.com/hackathon . We are giving away $5000 in cash to the coolest projects that get built before Sunday April 14th. So I recommend getting started early, finding some people to collaborate with, and building some cool stuff! The post Netlify with Mathias Biilmann Christensen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A Kubernetes cluster presents multiple potential attack surfaces: the cluster itself, a node running on the cluster, a pod running in the node, a container running in a pod. If you are managing your own Kubernetes cluster, you need to be aware of the security settings on your etcd, your API server, and your container build pipeline. Many of the security risks of a Kubernetes cluster can be avoided by using the default settings of Kubernetes, or by using a managed Kubernetes service from a cloud provider or an infrastructure company. But it is useful to know about the fundamentals of operating a secure cluster, so that you can hopefully avoid falling victim to the most common vulnerabilities. Liz Rice wrote the book Kubernetes Security with co-author Michael Hausenblas. Liz works at Aqua Security, a company that develops security tools for containerized applications. In today’s show, Liz gives an overview of the security risks of a Kubernetes cluster, and provides some best practices including secret management, penetration testing, and container lifecycle management. Show Notes Kubernetes Security by Michael Hausenblas, Liz Rice – O’Reilly Media Open Source Security Podcast – Talking about Kubernetes and container security with Liz Rice Keynote: Running with Scissors – Liz Rice, Technology Evangelist, Aqua Security The post Kubernetes Security with Liz Rice appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Replicated: On-Prem Deployments with Grant Miller 55:44
55:44 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked55:44
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCloud computing has been popular for less than twenty years. Large software companies have existed for much longer. If your company was started before the cloud became popular, you probably have a large, data center on your companies premises. The shorthand term for this software environment is “on-prem”. Deploying software to your own on-prem servers can be significantly different than deploying to remote servers in the cloud. In the cloud, servers and resources are more standardized. It is often easier to find documentation and best practices for how to use cloud services. Many of the software vendors who got started in the last decade created their software in the cloud. For example, Readme.io makes it easy for companies to create hosted documentation. Their early customers were startups and other cloud-native companies. All of those companies were happy to consume the software in the cloud. As time went on, Readme found that other customers wanted to use the Readme product as a self-hosted, on-prem service. Readme needed to figure out how to deploy their software easily to the “on-prem” environment. It turns out that this is a common problem. Software vendors who want to sell to on-prem enterprises must have a defined strategy for making those deployments to on-prem infrastructure–and those deployments are not always easy to configure. Replicated is a company that allows cloud-based software to easily deploy to on-prem infrastructure. Grant Miller is the founder of Replicated and he joins the show to discuss on-prem, cloud, and the changing adoption patterns of enterprise software companies. Show Notes Medium – Introducing Replicated, A better way to deploy SaaS on-premise How ReadMe Went From SaaS To On-Premises In Less Than One Week The post Replicated: On-Prem Deployments with Grant Miller appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Knative: Serverless Workloads with Ville Aikas 52:46
52:46 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:46
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedInfrastructure software is having a renaissance. Cloud providers offer a wide range of deployment tools, including virtual machines, managed Kubernetes clusters, standalone container instances, and serverless functions. Kubernetes has standardized the container orchestration layer and created a thriving community. The Kubernetes community gives the cloud providers a neutral ground to collaborate on projects that benefit everyone. The two forces of cloud providers and Kubernetes have led to massive improvements in software quality and development practices over the last few years. But one downside of the current ecosystem is that many more developers learn how to operate a Kubernetes cluster than perhaps is necessary. “Serverless” tools are at a higher level than Kubernetes, and can improve developer productivity–but a risk of using a serverless tool is the potential for lock-in, and a lack of portability. Knative is an open-source serverless platform from Google built on top of Kubernetes. Ville Aikas is a senior staff engineer at Google who has worked at the company for eleven years. With his experience, Ville brings a rare perspective to the subjects of Kubernetes, serverless, and the infrastructure lessons of Google. Ville joins the show to discuss Knative, the motivation for building it, and the future of “serverless” infrastructure. The post Knative: Serverless Workloads with Ville Aikas appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 VMware Kubernetes Strategy with Brad Meiseles 43:48
43:48 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:48
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedVirtualization software allows companies to get better utilization from their physical servers. A single physical host can manage multiple virtual machines using a hypervisor. VMware brought virtualization software to market, creating popular tools for allowing enterprises to deploy virtual machines throughout their organization. Containers provide another improvement to server utilization. A virtual machine can be broken up into containers, allowing multiple services to run within a single VM. Containers proliferated after the popularization of Docker, and the Kubernetes open source container orchestration system grew to be the most common way of managing the large numbers of containers that were running throughout an organization. As Kubernetes has risen to prominence, software infrastructure companies have developed Kubernetes services to allow enterprises to use Kubernetes more easily. VMware’s PKS is one example of a managed Kubernetes service. Brad Meiseles is a senior director of engineering at VMware with more than nine years of experience with the company. He joins the show to discuss virtualization, Kubernetes, containers, and the strategy of a large infrastructure provider like VMware. The post VMware Kubernetes Strategy with Brad Meiseles appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Scaling HashiCorp with Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto 50:20
50:20 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:20
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedHashiCorp was founded seven years ago with the goal of building infrastructure tools for automating cloud workflows such as provisioning, secret management, and service discovery. Hashicorp’s thesis was that operating cloud infrastructure was too hard: there was a need for new tools to serve application developers. Hashicorp founders Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar began releasing open source tools to fulfill their vision of better automation. Terraform, Vagrant, Consul, and other tools created by Hashicorp gained popularity, and Hashicorp began iterating on their business model. Today, Hashicorp makes money by offering enterprise features and support to enterprises such as Pinterest, Adobe, and Cruise Automation. Over the last seven years, enterprise software infrastructure has changed rapidly. First, enterprises moved from script-based infrastructure automation to container orchestration frameworks. Then, the container orchestration world consolidated around Kubernetes. Today, large enterprises are rapidly adopting Kubernetes with a mix of public cloud and on-prem vendors. At the same time, these enterprises are also becoming more willing to consume proprietary tools from the public cloud providers. Hashicorp has benefitted from all of this change. Their different tools fit into a variety of workflows, and are not closely coupled with any particular cloud provider or platform solution. Armon and Mitchell join today’s show to discuss the business model and the product philosophy of HashiCorp. We also touch on service mesh, zero trust networking, and their lessons from the container orchestration wars. The post Scaling HashiCorp with Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database. Prometheus includes a multi-dimensional data model, a query language called PromQL, and a pull model for gathering metrics from your different services. Prometheus is widely used by large distributed systems deployments such as Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. Prometheus gathers metrics from your services by periodically scraping those services. Those metrics get gathered, compressed, and stored onto disk for querying. But Prometheus is designed to store all of its records on one host in one set of files–which limits the scalability and availability of those metrics. Cortex is an open source project built to scale Prometheus. Cortex effectively shards Prometheus by parallelizing the “ingestion” and storage of Prometheus metrics. Cortex can take metrics from multiple Prometheus instances and store them across a distributed NoSQL database like DynamoDB, BigTable, or Cassandra. Bryan Boreham is an engineer at Weaveworks, where he works on deployment, observability, and monitoring tools for containers and microservices. He wrote much of the code for Cortex, and we met up at KubeCon North America to talk about the motivation for creating Cortex, the broader landscape of Kubernetes monitoring, and other approaches to scaling Prometheus. The post Prometheus Scalability with Bryan Boreham appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When a developer provisions a cloud server, that server is called an “instance”. These instances can be used for running whatever workload a developer has, whether it is a web application, a database, or a set of containers. The cloud is cheap to get started on. New applications with few users can often be hosted on infrastructure that is less than $10 per month. But as an application grows in popularity, there is more demand for CPUs and storage. A company will start to buy more and more servers to scale up to the requirements of their growing user base. The costs of running infrastructure in the cloud will increase, and the company will start to look for ways to save money. One common method of saving money is to buy “spot instances”. A spot instance is an instance that is cheaper than “reserved instances” or “on-demand” instances. The reason that there are different instance types is because a giant cloud provider has a highly variable amount of work that is being demanded from that cloud provider. If you are in charge of AWS, you have to make sure that at any given time, you can give server resources to anyone that asks for it. Your data centers need to have physical machines that are ready to go at any time. This means that much of the time, you have server resources that are going unused. If you are a cloud provider, how can you get people to use your compute resources? You can make them cheaper. So a user can come along and buy your compute at the discounted “spot” price. But this presents a problem for the cloud provider. If you start to give away your compute at cheaper prices, and then the overall demand for your cloud resources go up once again, you are going to miss out on profits. As the cloud provider, you need to kick people off of your spot instances, so that you can take those same instances and sell them to people at the higher market prices. And this presents a problem for the user. If you buy a cheap spot instance, that instance is only available until the cloud provider decides to kick you off. You have a tradeoff between cost and availability of your instances. Because of this, spot instances are typically used only for workloads that are not mission critical–workloads that can afford to fail. Spotinst is a company that allows developers to deploy their workloads reliably onto spot instances. Spotinst works by detecting when a spot instance is going to be reclaimed by a cloud provider and re-scheduling the workload from that cloud provider onto a new spot instance. Amiram Shachar is the CEO of Spotinst. He joins the show to talk about the different types of instances across cloud providers, the engineering behind Spotinst, and how the usage of containers and the rise of Kubernetes is changing the business landscape of the cloud. The post Spot Instances with Amiram Shachar appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Chinese Internet companies operate at a massive scale. WeChat has over a billion users and is widely used as the primary means of payment by urban Chinese consumers. Alibaba ships 12 million packages per day, which is four times the amount of Amazon. JD.com, a Chinese ecommerce company, has perhaps the largest production Kubernetes installation in the world. China’s rapid adoption of Internet services, combined with a large population and a growing middle class has led to the creation of Internet giants on par with the social networks, ecommerce sites, and ridesharing startups of the United States. Last November, I attended the first KubeCon China and saw firsthand how the Chinese Internet companies are using open source software to scale their infrastructure. Despite the differences between the US and China, the culture of technologists at KubeCon felt familiar. In some ways, it was just like any other Kubernetes conference that I have attended: large numbers of engineers trying to find the cutting edge of technology, and learning how to solve the problems they are facing back at the office. There were presentations on scaling databases and service meshes and machine learning on Kubernetes. Outside of these presentation halls, there were tables where you could pick up a translation device so that Chinese-only and English-only presentations could be understood by the other nationality. Dan Kohn joins the show to talk about Chinese Internet companies and how they are adopting Kubernetes. Dan is the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, an organization within the Linux Foundation that organizes KubeCon. Before joining the CNCF, Dan worked as an entrepreneur, engineer, and executive at several technology companies. Transcript Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript. Sponsors Mesosphere’s Kubernetes-as-a-service provides single-click Kubernetes deployment with simple management, security features, and high availability to make your Kubernetes deployment easy. To find out how Mesosphere Kubernetes-as-a-Service can help you easily deploy Kubernetes, check out softwareengineeringdaily.com/mesosphere today. Manifold makes your life easier by providing a single workflow to organize your services, connect your integrations, and share with your team. While Manifold is completely free to use, if you head over to manifold.co/sedaily you’ll get a coupon code for $10 which you can use to try out any service on the Manifold marketplace. Datadog is a cloud-scale monitoring platform for infrastructure and applications. And with Datadog’s new Live Container view, you can see every container’s health, resource consumption, and running processes in real time. See for yourself by starting a free trial and get a free Datadog T-shirt! softwareengineeringdaily.com/ datadog . Get ready to build content-rich websites and professional web applications with Wix Code. Store and manage unlimited data with built-in databases, create dynamic pages, make custom forms and take full control of your site’s functionality with Wix Code APIs and JavaScript. Plus, now you can get 10-percent off your Premium plan. Go to Wix.com/SED . The post Kubernetes in China with Dan Kohn appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Amazon Web Services changed how software engineers work. Before AWS, it was common for startups to purchase their own physical servers. AWS made server resources as accessible as an API request, and has gone on to create higher-level abstractions for building applications. For the first few years of AWS, the abstractions were familiar. S3 provided distributed, reliable object storage. Elastic MapReduce provided a managed Hadoop system. Kinesis provided a scalable queue. Amazon provided developers with managed alternatives to complicated open source software. More recently, AWS has started to release products that are unlike anything else. A perfect example is AWS Lambda, the first function-as-a-service platform. Other newer AWS products include Ground Station, a service for processing satellite data and AWS DeepRacer, a miniature race car for developers to build and test machine learning algorithms on. As AWS has grown into new categories, the blog announcements of new services and features have started coming so frequently that it is hard to keep track of it all. Corey Quinn is the author of “ Last Week in AWS ”, a popular newsletter about what is changing across Amazon Web Services. Corey joins the show to give his perspective on the growing, shifting behemoth that is Amazon Web Services–as well as the other major cloud providers that have risen to prominence. He’s also the host of the Screaming in the Cloud podcast , which you should check out if you like this episode. The post AWS Analysis with Corey Quinn appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Zeit: Serverless Cloud with Guillermo Rauch 1:03:29
1:03:29 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:03:29
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedServerless computing is a technique for deploying applications without an addressable server. A serverless application is running on servers, but the developer does not have access to the server in the traditional sense. The developer is not dealing with IP addresses and configuring instances of their different services to be able to scale. Just as higher level languages like C abstracted away the necessity of a developer to work with assembly code, serverless computing gives a developer more leverage by letting them focus on business logic while a serverless platform takes care of deployment, uptime, autoscaling, and other aspects of cloud computing that are fundamental to every application. “Serverless” can several different things: backend-as-a-service products like Firebase , functions-as-a-service like AWS Lambda , and high-level APIs such as Twilio . Zeit is a deployment platform built for serverless development. In Zeit, users model a GitHub repository in terms of the functions within their application. Zeit deploys the code from those functions onto functions-as-a-service and allows you to run your code across all the major cloud providers. Guillermo Rauch is the founder of Zeit, and he joins the show to discuss his vision for the company and the platform as it looks today. Guillermo was previously on the show to discuss Socket.io , which he created. The post Zeit: Serverless Cloud with Guillermo Rauch appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Functions-as-a-service allow developers to run their code in a “serverless” environment. A developer can provide a function to a cloud provider and the code for that function will be scheduled onto a container and executed whenever an event triggers that function. An “event” can mean many different things. It is a signal that something has changed within your application. When you save a file to an Amazon S3 bucket, that creates an event. When a user signs up for your app, that can create an event. Functions-as-a-service are allowing people to build applications completely out of managed cloud infrastructure. Apps can be fully “serverless”, with managed databases, queueing systems, and APIs tied together by event-triggered functions. Today, there is not a consistent format for events across different applications and cloud providers. This makes it more difficult to stitch together events across these different environments. Ideally, events would be lightweight, easy to deserialize, and easy to interoperate with. The Cloud Events specification is a project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with the goal of creating a standard format for events. Doug Davis is the CTO for developer advocacy of containers at IBM. He joins the show to discuss how events and event-based programming works, and the need for a common format across cloud events. The post Cloud Events with Doug Davis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Most applications today are either deployed to on-premise environments or deployed to a single cloud provider. Developers who are deploying on-prem struggle to set up complicated open source tools like Kafka and Hadoop. Developers who are deploying to a cloud provider tend to stay within that specific cloud provider, because moving between different clouds and integrating services across clouds adds complexity. Ben Hindman started the Apache Mesos project when he was working in the Berkeley AMPLab. Mesos is a scheduler for resources in a distributed system, allowing compute and storage to be scheduled onto jobs that can use those resources. In his time at the AMPLab, Ben collaborated with Matei Zaharia, creator of Apache Spark. Ben founded Mesosphere based off of his work on Apache Mesos, and since 2013 he has been building a company to bring it to market. In the meantime, several market forces have influenced the enterprise market. Enterprise businesses built on virtual machines and on-prem hardware are trying to migrate to containers, Kubernetes, and Spark. Cloud providers like Google and Microsoft have risen to prominence in addition to Amazon’s continued growth, and enterprises are increasingly willing to adopt multiple clouds. I spoke with Ben Hindman at Kubecon North America. Today, the company that he co-founded works to provide tools for managing these changes in infrastructure. In our conversation, we talked about the necessary mindset shifts for taking a research project and turning it into a highly successful product. We also talked about the newer trends in infrastructure–why enterprises will want multicloud deployments and how serverless APIs and backends will make the lives of developers much easier. The post Multicloud with Ben Hindman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In a cloud infrastructure environment, failures happen regularly. The servers can fail, the network can fail, and software bugs can crash your software unexpectedly. The amount of failures that can occur in cloud infrastructure is one reason why storage is often separated from application logic. A developer can launch multiple instances of their application, with each instance providing a “stateless” environment for serving API requests. When the application needs to save state, it can make a call out to a managed cloud infrastructure product. Managed cloud databases provide a reliable place to manage application state. Managed object storage systems like Amazon S3 provide a reliable place to store files. The pattern of relying on remote cloud services does not work so well for on-prem and hybrid cloud environments. In these environments, companies are managing their own data centers and their own storage devices. As companies with on-prem infrastructure adopt Kubernetes, there is a need for ways to manage on-prem storage through Kubernetes. Saad Ali is a senior engineer at Google, where he works on Kubernetes. He is also a part of the Kubernetes Storage Special Interest Group. Saad joins the show talk about how Kubernetes interacts with storage, and how to manage stateful workloads on Kubernetes. We discuss the basics of Kubernetes storage, including persistent volumes and the container storage interface. The post Stateful Kubernetes with Saad Ali appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Crossplane: Multicloud Control Plane with Bassam Tabbara 51:05
51:05 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:05
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCloud providers created the ability for developers to easily deploy their applications to servers on data centers. In the early days of the cloud, most of the code that a developer wrote for their application could run on any cloud provider, whether it was Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. These cloud providers were giving developers the same Linux server that they would expect from an on-premise deployment. Early cloud applications such as Netflix , Airbnb , and Uber took advantage of this cloud infrastructure to quickly scale their businesses. In the process, these companies had to figure out how to manage open source distributed systems tools such as Hadoop and Kafka. Cloud servers were easy to create, but orchestrating them together to build distributed systems was still very hard. As the cloud providers matured, they developed higher level systems that solved many of the painful infrastructure problems. Managed databases, autoscaling queueing systems, machine learning APIs, and hundreds of other tools. Examples include Amazon Kinesis and Google BigQuery. These tools are invaluable because they allow a developer to quickly build applications on top of durable, resilient cloud infrastructure. With all of these managed services, developers are spending less time on infrastructure and more time on business logic. But managed services also lead to a new infrastructure problem—how do you manage resources across multiple clouds? A bucket storage system like Amazon S3 has different APIs than Google Cloud Storage. Google Cloud PubSub has different APIs than Amazon Kinesis. Since different clouds have different APIs, developers have trouble connecting cloud resources together, and it has become difficult to migrate your entire application from one cloud provider to another. Crossplane is an open source control plane for managing resources across multiple clouds. Crossplane’s goal is to provide a single API surface for interfacing with all the parts of your application, regardless of what cloud they are on. Crossplane is a project that was started by Upbound, a company with the goal of making multicloud software development easier. Bassam Tabbara is the CEO of Upbound, and he joins the show to talk about multi cloud deployments, Kubernetes federation, and his strategy for building a multi cloud API. The post Crossplane: Multicloud Control Plane with Bassam Tabbara appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Google Early Days with John Looney Holiday Repeat 1:05:21
1:05:21 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:05:21
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOriginally posted on 16 June 2017. John Looney spent more than 10 years at Google. He started with infrastructure, and was part of the team that migrated Google File System to Colossus, the successor to GFS. Imagine migrating every piece of data on Google from one distributed file system to another. In this episode, John sheds light on the engineering culture that has made Google so successful. He has very entertaining stories about clusterops and site-reliability engineering. Google’s success in engineering is due to extremely high standards, and a culture of intellectual honesty. With the volume of data and throughput that Google responds to, 1-in-a-million events are likely to occur. There isn’t room for sloppy practices. John now works at Intercom, where he is adjusting to the modern world of Google infrastructure for everyone. This conversation made me feel quite grateful to be an engineer in a time where everything is so much cheaper, so much easier, and so much more performant than it was in the days when Google first built everything from scratch. I had a great time talking to John, and hope he comes back on the show again in the future because it felt like we were just scratching the surface of his experience. The post Google Early Days with John Looney Holiday Repeat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Service Proxying with Matt Klein Holiday Repeat 51:22
51:22 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:22
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOriginally posted on 14 February 2017. Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the ridesharing company Lyft, every internal service runs a tool called Envoy. Envoy is a service proxy. Whenever a service sends or receives a request, that request goes through Envoy before meeting its destination. Matt Klein started Envoy, and he joins the show to explain why it is useful to have this layer of standardization between services. He also gives some historical context for why Envoy was so helpful to Lyft. The post Service Proxying with Matt Klein Holiday Repeat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Software products are distributed across more and more servers as they grow. With the proliferation of cloud providers like AWS, these large infrastructure deployments have become much easier to create. With the maturity of Kubernetes , these distributed applications are more reliable. Developers and operators can use a service mesh to manage the interactions between services across this distributed application. A service mesh is a layer across a distributed microservices application that consists of service proxy sidecars running alongside each service in a cluster, along with a central control plane for communicating with those sidecar proxies. A service mesh has many uses. Every request and response within the application gets routed through the service proxy, which can improve observability, traffic control to different instances, and circuit breaking in case of an instance failure. The central control plane can be used manage network policy throughout the whole system. We have done shows about each of the different components of a service mesh system, including different types of service proxies, as well as the service meshes built on top of these proxies. Linkerd, which is made by the startup Buoyant, was the first service mesh product to come to market, and it has the most production use, with customers like Expedia and Monzo bank. Istio is a more recent service mesh which uses the Envoy service proxy. Istio came out of Google and is also supported by IBM—setting up a classic competition between a startup and the large incumbents. William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant, and he joins the show to talk about the use cases and adoption of service mesh. He also talks about the business landscape of the service mesh category, and how to compete with giant cloud providers. The post Linkerd Service Mesh with William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Not every company wants to move to the public cloud. Some companies have already built data centers, and can continue to operate their business with their own servers. Some companies have compliance issues with the public cloud, and want to operate their own servers to avoid legal risk. Operating a data center is not easy. Operating systems need to be updated and security vulnerabilities need to be patched. Servers fail, and their workloads need to be automatically scheduled onto other servers to avoid downtime. In contrast to classic on-prem data center management, the cloud provides many benefits: automatic updates, an infinite pool of resources, fully programmable infrastructure as code. In the cloud, developers can provision infrastructure with an API request. Continuous delivery pipelines can be spun up at the click of a button. This tooling makes it dramatically easier for developers to move quickly, and for a business to move faster. Companies that operate their own data center want to be able to have these benefits of the cloud while still controlling their own infrastructure. Today’s guest Bob Fraser works at HPE on OneView, a tool for managing on-prem infrastructure like a cloud. Bob describes the difficulties of managing legacy on-prem infrastructure, and the advantage of building a management layer on top of data center infrastructure to make it more programmable. We’ve done lots of shows recently about Kubernetes in the context of cloud computing. Today’s show outlines how modern on-prem infrastructure can be managed like a cloud. Full disclosure: HPE is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post On-Prem Cloud with Bob Fraser appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Cloud computing changed the economics of running a software company. Before the cloud, a software company had to purchase physical machines which often required thousands of dollars paid up front. The cloud allowed developers to deploy their applications for free, to operate a business for cheap, and to scale without hiring a dedicated team to manage the servers. Building in the cloud is cheap, but scaling in the cloud can get expensive. A growing company can often save money by changing which cloud instances and services they use. Reducing the number of server instances, changing the size of compute instances, and changing rules around auto scaling. By using monitoring, dashboards, and regular analysis of where money is spent, a business can find thousands of dollars of wasted spend per month. There are also broad strategic decisions around cost. One area to study is the use of “managed” services like Amazon DynamoDB, Google BigQuery, and Amazon Lambda. These services are proprietary, and can lead to lock-in. Sometimes they can be quite expensive. But they can save developers hours of time because they are easy to use, and provide high uptime guarantees. Ran Rothschild works at DoIT International, a company that helps businesses figure out how to save money on their cloud infrastructure. He joins the show to discuss the places where the most money is wasted and how startups can manage their infrastructure in a cost-effective manner. He also tells some stories about significant overspend. Full disclosure: DoIT International is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Cloud Costs with Ran Rothschild appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Schedulers with Adrian Cockcroft Holiday Repeat 54:51
54:51 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:51
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOriginally published on July 6, 2016. Scheduling is the method by which work is assigned to resources to complete that work. At the operating system level, this can mean scheduling of threads and processes. At the data center level, this can mean scheduling Hadoop jobs or other workflows that require the orchestration of a network of computers. Adrian Cockcroft worked on scheduling at Sun Microsystems, eBay, and Netflix. In each of these environments, the nature of what was being scheduled was different, but the goals of the scheduling algorithms were analogous–throughput, response time, and cache affinity are relevant in different ways at each layer of the stack. Adrian is well-known for helping bring Netflix onto Amazon Web Services, and I recommend watching the numerous YouTube videos of Adrian talking about that transformation. The post Schedulers with Adrian Cockcroft Holiday Repeat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The software release process is a barrier between written code and a live production environment that affects users. A software release process can involve a variety of different practices. Code might be tested for bugs using automation and manual testing. Static analysis tools can look at the code for potential memory leaks. A software release might go out to a small percentage of the total user base before it gets deployed to the entire audience. At some organizations, a software release can be slow and painful. The release might be bottlenecked by a manual approval step, which slows down developers from quickly deploying their own changes. If a consistent version history of software is not maintained, a release can be hard to roll back in the event of an error. In the case of a large, monolithic architecture, a release can be scary, because it can be hard to understand how the monolithic codebase functions. This set of challenges within the release process lowers the quality of software, and can make it frustrating to build software. The release process is just one area of software development that many organizations have a desire to smooth out. Over the past ten years, a set of technologies and philosophies have provided improvements to the software development process. DevOps, continuous delivery, microservices, cloud providers, and serverless tools all make it easier for a company to focus on its core competency and release software faster. Baruch Sadogursky is an author of Liquid Software , a book about continuous updates and DevOps. Liquid Software describes an idealized vision of what today’s architecture could aspire to. The focus of the book is continuous updates, which allow for rapidly improving, evolving software quality. Baruch joins the show to discuss how software has changed in the last twenty years, and how the future of software development could look. Full disclosure: Baruch works at JFrog, which is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Liquid Software with Baruch Sadogursky appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Fission: Serverless on Kubernetes with Soam Vasani 1:03:14
1:03:14 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:03:14
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedServerless computing abstracts away the idea of a server node. Serverless lets programmers treat compute resources as high-level, reliable APIs, rather than unreliable, low-level compute nodes that might fail. Serverless dramatically improves the efficiency of programmers. Instead of thinking of a database as a set of servers that need to be sharded and replicated, the programmer can think of a database as a place to read and write data. Instead of modeling an application as a large monolith running on an application server in a container or a VM, the programmer can think of their application as a decoupled set of functions. Serverless computing is a natural evolution of software engineering in a world with cloud providers. The first version of FaaS came out of AWS with their Lambda service, which allows users to run functions in the cloud. Those functions are scheduled onto a physical server somewhere in an Amazon data center. They are executed, and they return the result. With AWS Lambda, programmers got a new abstraction to model their applications with. But it requires the use of a closed-source API. Lambda is not open source, and this makes some developers reluctant to integrate with it too tightly. Fission is an open source framework for serverless functions built on Kubernetes. Fission allows developers to deploy functions-as-a-service without being locked in to any specific cloud provider. Soam Vasani is the creator of Fission and an engineer at Platform9. In a previous episode, Soam talked about the architecture for Fission and the design choices for solving the cold start and scheduling problems. Soam joins the show today to discuss how serverless applications have evolved since last spoke more than a year ago. He also talks about how Fission itself has evolved, and the features that an open source serverless platform needs to have in order to compete with a fully developed cloud provider. Full disclosure: Platform9 is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Fission: Serverless on Kubernetes with Soam Vasani appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Matt Klein has worked for three rapidly growing Internet companies. At AWS, he worked on EC2, the compute-as-a-service product that powers a large percentage of the Internet. At Twitter, he helped scale the infrastructure in the chaotic days before Twitter’s IPO. Today he works at Lyft, building systems to allow for ride sharing infrastructure to work more safely and reliably. Hypergrowth Internet companies are faced with quickly growing demands on their software. The demands on the software expose problems with the core infrastructure. Simultaneously, the company tries to ramp up its hiring process. More engineers get hired, and the institutional knowledge within the company starts to weaken. Documentation gets out of date. Senior engineers burn out and leave the company. When a company starts growing quickly, communications can break down. A hypergrowth company can suffer from a lack of “human scalability”. Matt Klein has observed these challenges at AWS, Twitter, and Lyft. In his article “The Human Scalability of ‘DevOps’” , he explains why these problems manifest and what can be done to alleviate them. In a previous show, Matt discussed the engineering challenges at Lyft that led him to create Envoy , a service proxy. This episode covers some broad technical topics–DevOps, site reliability engineering, platform engineering–but the episode is mostly about how a hypergrowth company can manage culture, hiring, and engineering organization. Matt is a very fun guest to have because he questions some of the strange practices that have been widely adopted by successful companies. Internet companies are a very new phenomenon, and the management tactics that they have adopted are not well proven–so it is great to have someone like Matt provide a fresh perspective on ways that companies can scale their technology and their organization more effectively. Show Notes The human scalability of “DevOps” – Matt Klein – Medium How to scale DevOps: Recipes for larger organizations A Beginner’s Guide to Scaling DevOps – DZone DevOps DevOps vs. SRE: What’s the Difference Between Them, and Which One Are You? | OverOps Blog How do I do DevOps at Scale? – Plutora Five Top Tips for DevOps At Scale – DevOps.com Scaling DevOps at Pearson – DevOps.com In praise of fungible developers | Echo One The post Scaling Lyft with Matt Klein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Flogo: Event-Driven Ecosystem with Leon Stigter and Matt Ellis 44:25
44:25 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked44:25
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedA smart security camera takes in a high volume of video images and processes those images using a set of machine learning models. Those models can be used to identify interesting snippets of movement throughout the day, and decide which of those snippets to keep. Some of the video snippets might contain movement of birds–but other video snippets might contain footage of intruders. As the video stream is processed on the smart security camera, and machine learning models are used to classify the entities in the video stream, some of the data gets thrown out as useless. Some of the data gets sent to the cloud for additional processing. Some of the data might trigger an alert that there is an intruder on the premises. Each piece of video data is an “event”. These events are processed and acted upon. Modern applications are highly interactive, and have lots of “events”. Other examples of event data streams are website traffic data, self-driving car data, time-series logging data, and video game session data. Building applications that respond to these high volumes of events requires us to program triggers to react to data streams, actions to take in response to the data streams, and workflows to orchestrate what the overall picture of our application is doing as the application is consuming this large data stream. Flogo is an event-driven ecosystem for building applications around streams of events. Leon Stigter and Matt Ellis work on Flogo at TIBCO, and they join the show to discuss event-driven application development and their work on Flogo. They also talk about the constraints of machine learning applications at the edge, and how event processing systems like Flogo can be used to handle large data streams on edge devices. The post Flogo: Event-Driven Ecosystem with Leon Stigter and Matt Ellis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
DevSecOps emphasizes moving security out of a siloed audit process and distributing security practices throughout the software supply chain. In the past, software development usually followed a waterfall development process. Each step in building software was serialized, one after another. First, software was planned. Then it was built. Then it was tested. Finally, the software received a security audit at the end. If a security vulnerability was not discovered during that audit, it was likely that the software would be released with the vulnerability. With continuous delivery, we can be continuously checking for security. Every new release can be tested against a battery of automated security tests. The open source libraries we use can be scanned to make sure they are up-to-date with patched versions. Static analysis can discover memory leaks and buffer overrun vulnerabilities. Edward Thomson is the principal program manager for Azure DevOps at Microsoft. He joins the show to talk about how an organization can adopt DevSecOps and introduce security practices into continuous delivery pipelines. We also talk more philosophically about security–defining the most common security risks of a software company today, from “shadow IT infrastructure” to phishing. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. We recently launched a new podcast: Fintech Daily! Fintech Daily is about payments, cryptocurrencies, trading, and the intersection between finance and technology. You can find it on fintechdaily.co or Apple and Google podcasts. We are looking for other hosts who want to participate. If you are interested in becoming a host, send us an email: host@fintechdaily.co The post DevSecOps with Edward Thomson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Deepak Singh is the director of compute services at AWS, where he works on cloud products relating to containers, Linux, and High Performance Computing. In today’s show, Deepak describes how the market for containers and serverless has evolved, and how Amazon thinks about product strategy. Back in 2014, Docker containers were becoming a popular way to deploy and manage application infrastructure. Containers allowed people to take advantage of their servers in a more economical way. Containers let developers move faster by quickly setting up and tearing down small composable units of software. As these containers grew in number within software companies, companies started figuring out that they needed tooling to manage and orchestrate all these containers. Infrastructure software companies realized that there would be a big business in providing orchestration software to developers who needed to manage these high volumes of containers. This led to the “ container orchestration wars ”, in which a variety of companies such as Red Hat, CoreOS, Docker, and Mesosphere all began to offer platforms for managing containerized applications. During the container orchestration wars, many large enterprises such as banks and telcos resisted picking any specific container orchestration system because there was no clear winner. Enterprises were hesitant to place a large bet on an infrastructure orchestration tool that might go out of fashion. Amazon had a large number of customers that wanted to orchestrate their containers, but it was unclear how the market for open source container orchestration was going to unfold. Around this time, Amazon created ECS, a closed-source container orchestration system. In the following years, Kubernetes was released and became the most popular container orchestrator. Amazon released EKS, a managed Kubernetes service. They also released AWS Lambda for running serverless functions and AWS Fargate for spinning up long-lived container instances. Deepak and I discuss the history of containers at Amazon, but we also discuss how developer preferences are changing towards managed services, and how AWS is able to continually build off of its own tools to build higher and higher level services for developers. Show Notes AWS Fargate – Run containers without having to manage servers or clusters Amazon ECS Features – run containers in production AWS re:Invent 2017: Containers on AWS – State of the Union (CON201) – YouTube Amazon ECS – run containerized applications in production Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes | AWS News Blog Amazon Container Services – Highly Scalable, Easy to Use Container Management and Registry Services Amazon EKS – Managed Kubernetes Service What is Docker? | AWS How to Deploy Docker Containers – AWS The post AWS Containers with Deepak Singh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The Windows operating system is one of the most widely used pieces of software in history. Windows was started before there was any alternative to a monolithic codebase, because Microsoft was building software before the Internet was widely used by consumers. Networked computers gave rise to web applications, and software engineers began to rethink how to build everything. Software development got reimagined with agile. Monolithic codebases got broken up into service-oriented architecture. Instead of going to a store to buy a box with software in it, users downloaded software from the Internet, and that software was regularly updated. Software that is regularly updated needs to be regularly tested. Instead of a single round of testing for every round of boxed software that was shipped to a store, continuous testing and delivery gradually became the norm. The process of releasing and operating software became its own set of engineering challenges–which was tackled by the “operations” or “sys admin” team at a software company. Now there were two different sets of engineers–those who were developing the software and those who were operating the software. The incentives of these two types of engineers were not completely aligned. The software developers wanted to build software quickly and release new features. The operators wanted things to release software slowly, because if something broke then the operators were the first line of defense for fixing it. These problems between development and operations gave rise to the “DevOps” movement, in which developers and operations started working more closely together and sharing responsibilities. Incentives became aligned, and new types of software was created to facilitate more harmonious relationships between developers and operations–for example, continuous delivery pipelines . Today, most enterprises are still undergoing a transformation from monolithic software release cycles to continuous delivery. This is often referred to as a “DevOps Transformation”. A DevOps Transformation requires the entire organization to reorient itself around faster software release cycles. This can be a painful process, and we have covered it in many past shows . Hearing case studies from enterprises can be helpful for figuring out how to reorient your own enterprise. Microsoft is a useful case study in shifting towards DevOps. Windows is perhaps the biggest monolithic codebase in history. The fact that Microsoft could rearchitect Windows to be easier to work with should provide some reassurance to other enterprises who are currently undergoing their own migrations. Martin Woodward has been at Microsoft for 13 years and he joins the show to talk about how software delivery within the company has evolved. We discussed the move from boxed software delivery to delivery via the cloud, and focused on a few specific, longstanding products such as Windows. Martin has been part of the effort to build Azure DevOps, which is a product that offers similar tools to the ones Microsoft built internally for DevOps as a service. We also talk about the specific difficulties that enterprises often have when moving toward DevOps. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post DevOps at Microsoft with Martin Woodward appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Internet of Things is a concept that describes lots of devices that you interact with regularly being connected to the Internet and networked together. Technologists have been dreaming of the world of IoT for many years, where our connected refrigerator can detect that we are out of food, and automatically order more food. Or our connected bathroom can scan us for diseases and recommend treatment. The bright future of IoT is slowly coming together. Hardware prototyping is getting cheaper. Voice interfaces and machine learning are creating new mediums for communicating with devices. Platforms like Kickstarter are allowing developers to validate the market for their products and raise the necessary capital to build their product. Android Things is a developer platform for IoT applications based on the Android Operating system. Android Things consists of hardware devices and software tools that reduce common IoT problems such as software updates and security patches. Wayne Piekarski is a staff developer advocate at Google, and he joins the show to talk about the state of IoT and why Google built Android Things. Show Notes Prototype Manufacturing with Jeff McAlvay Android Things | Android Developers Android Things 1.0 Features and APIs | Android Things | Android Developers Introduction to Android Things – YouTube Introducing Android Things 1.0 – YouTube What’s new in Android Things (Google I/O ’18) – YouTube Build with Android Things Android Things: Everything you need to know about Google’s plan to disrupt IoT Android Developers Blog: Say Hello to Android Things 1.0 Android Things 1.0 launches, Google promises 3 years of updates for every device | Ars Technica Android Things 1.0 fixes the biggest pain points in building IoT devices Into Android Things with zero IoT knowledge. – Elye – Medium The post Android Things with Wayne Piekarski appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Unity and WebAssembly with Brett Bibby 1:01:14
1:01:14 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:01:14
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedUnity is a game engine for building 2-D and 3-D experiences, augmented reality, movies, and other applications. Unity is cross-platform, so that applications can be written once and deployed to iOS, Android, web, and other surfaces. Unity has been around for 13 years, and has grown in popularity with the rise in gaming and game development. Brett Bibby is VP of engineering at Unity, and he joins the show to describe how Unity applications are built. Since Unity SDKs allow Unity code to run across all the different platforms, this requires writing and maintaining native code libraries for each of these devices. When asm.js came out, Unity developers were able to deploy 3-D games to the web–these were some of the first examples of asm.js being used. Asm.js is a small, performant subset of JavaScript that other languages could compile down into. So in this case, Unity programs in C# were running in the browser after being compiled down into asm.js. Since then, WebAssembly has improved the tooling further, allowing a high-performance compilation path for non-JavaScript programs. After exploring the basics of Unity, Brett described how Unity works with WebAssembly, and the potential for creative applications of Unity both on and off the web. Show Notes Unity (game engine) – Wikipedia WebGL – Wikipedia Unity for Mobile AR | Unity Multi-platform Handheld AR in 2018 – Unity Blog Unity – Multiplatform – VR-AR – Unity Get real with creating AR games and apps in Unity – Unity WebGL: WebAssembly and Feature Roadmap – Unity Blog Unity at GDC keynote – Unity 2018 (nested prefabs & more) w. Brett Bibby (VP of Engineering) – YouTube Unity – Multiplatform – Publish your game to over 25 platforms The post Unity and WebAssembly with Brett Bibby appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Front is a shared inbox application that has seen rapid adoption within companies. Front allows multiple members of a company to collaborate together on a conversation–whether that conversation is in email, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger. This is useful when a customer email needs to be shared between the sales and engineering teams, or when a single email address is shared between different members of the same team, such as “contact@softwareengineeringdaily.com”. This might sound like a niche problem, but it is actually a problem faced somewhere within every single company. Because the problem of shared inbox is so prevalent, the company has grown its user base quickly, scaling the team as well as the infrastructure. The sensitivity of the data (emails) that Front is handling means that security is paramount. And as users of Front rely on it more and more as a central point of communication, uptime and consistency needs to be maintained. Laurent Perrin is the CTO at Front, and he joins the show to describe the software architecture and product strategy for Front. It was a fascinating show, and we covered the full stack. On the backend, Front pulls emails into S3 buckets and maintains the schema of the inbox in a SQL database. The desktop Front client is written in Electron, which is a way to write desktop applications in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. We also talked about the system for keeping the communications “real-time”–it’s important that users are aware of what each other is doing, since you don’t want to be preparing a response to an email at the same time I am. Show Notes Front App – Funding Rounds | Crunchbase This startup pitch deck helped Front raise $66 million in 5 days – Business Insider Front – FrontApp Inc Tech Stack | StackShare Front | Manage email as a team Front Blog — Email, Customer Support and Startups Blog Front raises $66 million to replace Microsoft Outlook | TechCrunch Front (@FrontApp) | Twitter The post Front Engineering with Laurent Perrin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Android on Chrome with Shahid Hussain and Stefan Kuhne 48:05
48:05 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked48:05
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedGoogle has two consumer operating systems: Android and Chrome. The Android operating system has been widely deployed on mobile devices. Chrome is an operating system for laptops and tablets, originally based around the Chrome browser. For several years, these two ecosystems were mostly separate–you could not run Android apps on a Chrome operating system. Shahid Hussain and Stefan Kuhne are engineers at Google who worked on support for Android apps on ChromeOS. The implementation of Android on Chrome involves running the Android OS in a Linux container on the host Chrome operating system. In today’s episode, Shahid and Stefan compare the Android and Chrome operating system platforms. They explain why Google has two different consumer operating systems, and the advantages of allowing Android apps to deploy to Chrome. Shahid and Stefan also talk about the challenges of porting mobile applications to ChromeOS. Android apps are made to run on small screens and tablets. In order to make them run on ChromeOS, the applications need to support running on a desktop or laptop. Show Notes Chrome OS – Wikipedia Shahid Hussain (@shahidhussain) | Twitter What’s new in Android apps for Chrome OS (Google I/O ’18) – YouTube Install Android apps on your Chromebook – Chromebook Help Chromium OS – The Chromium Projects Chromium OS FAQ – The Chromium Projects Optimize apps for Chrome OS | Android Developers The power of Chrome OS! – YouTube Posts containing ‘chromeos score:5’ – Stack Overflow google chrome os – What will be the side-loading and debugging mechanism for Android apps on ChromeOS? – Stack Overflow Apps for Chrome OS overview | Android Developers The post Android on Chrome with Shahid Hussain and Stefan Kuhne appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Google’s central system for managing to compute resources is called Borg. On Borg, millions of Linux containers process a wide variety of workloads. When a new application is spun up, Borg provides that application with the resources it needs. Workloads at Google usually fall into one of two distinct categories: long-running application workloads (such as Gmail) and batch workloads (such as a MapReduce job). In the early days of Google, the long-lived workloads were scheduled onto a system called “BabySitter” and the batch workloads were scheduled onto a system called “Global Work Queue.” Borg was the first cluster manager at Google designed to service both long-running and batch workloads from a single system. The second cluster manager at Google was Omega, a project that was created to improve the engineering behind Borg. The innovations of Omega improved the efficiency and architecture of Borg. More recently, Kubernetes was created as an open source implementation of the ideas pioneered in Borg and Omega. Google has also built a Kubernetes as a service offering that companies use to run their infrastructure in the same way that Google does. Brian Grant is an engineer at Google who has seen the iteration of all three cluster management systems that have come out of Google. He joins the show to discuss how the workloads at Google have changed over time, and how his perspective on how to build and architect distributed systems has evolved. Full disclosure: Google is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Google Cluster Evolution with Brian Grant appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A message broker is an architectural component that sends messages between different nodes in a distributed system. Message brokers are useful because the sender of a message does not always know who might want to receive that message. Message brokers can be used to implement the “publish/subscribe” pattern, and by centralizing the message workloads within the pub/sub system, it lets system operators scale the performance of the messaging infrastructure by simply scaling that pub/sub system. Derek Collison has worked on messaging infrastructure for 25 years. He started at TIBCO, then spent time at Google and VMWare. When he was at VMWare, he architected the open source platform Cloud Foundry. While working on Cloud Foundry, Derek developed NATS, a messaging control plane. Since that time, Derek has started two companies–Apcera and Synadia Communications. In our conversation, Derek and I discussed the history of message brokers, how NATS compares to Kafka and his ideas for how NATS could scale in the future to become something much more than a centralized message bus. The post NATS Messaging with Derek Collison appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Stripe Observability Pipeline with Cory Watson 1:02:12
1:02:12 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:02:12
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedStripe processes payments for thousands of businesses. A single payment could involve 10 different networked services. If a payment fails, engineers need to be able to diagnose what happened. The root cause could lie in any of those services. Distributed tracing is used to find the causes of failures and latency within networked services. In a distributed trace, each period of time associated with a request is recorded as a span. The spans can be connected together because they share a trace ID. The spans of a distributed trace are one element of observability. Others include metrics and logs. Each of these components of observability makes its way into services like Lightstep and Datadog. The path traveled by different elements of observability is called the observability pipeline. In an episode last year, Cory Watson explained how observability works at Stripe. In today’s episode, Cory describes how observability is created and aggregated. It’s a useful discussion for anyone working at a company that is figuring out how to instrument their systems for better monitoring. The post Stripe Observability Pipeline with Cory Watson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Monitoring Kubernetes with Ilan Rabinovitch 46:32
46:32 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:32
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMonitoring a Kubernetes cluster allows operators to track the resource utilization of the containers within that cluster. In today’s episode, Ilan Rabinovitch joins the show to explore the different options for setting up monitoring, and some common design patterns around Kubernetes logging and metrics gathering. Ilan is the VP of product and community at Datadog. Earlier in his career, Ilan spent much of his time working with Linux and taking part in the Linux community. We discussed the similarities and differences between the evolution of Linux and that of Kubernetes. In previous episodes, we have explored some common open source solutions for monitoring Kubernetes–including Prometheus and the EFK stack. Since Ilan works at Datadog, we explored how hosted solutions compare to self-managed monitoring. We also talked about how to assess different hosted solutions–such as those from a large cloud provider like AWS versus vendors that are specifically focused on monitoring. Full disclosure: Datadog is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Monitoring Kubernetes with Ilan Rabinovitch appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Go is a language designed to improve systems programming. Go includes abstractions that simplify aspects of low level engineering that are historically difficult—concurrency, resource allocation, and dependency management. In that light, it makes sense that the Kubernetes container orchestration system was written in Go. Erik St. Martin is a cloud developer advocate at Microsoft, where he focuses on Go and Kubernetes. He also hosts the podcast “Go Time,” and has written a book on Go called Go In Action . Recently, Erik helped build the virtual Kubelet project, which allows Kubernetes nodes to be backed by services outside of that cluster. If you want your Kubernetes cluster to leverage abstractions such as serverless functions and standalone container instances, you can use Virtual Kubelet to treat these other abstractions as nodes. Erik also discussed his experience using Kubernetes at Comcast—which was a great case study. Near the end of the show, he also talked about organizing Gophercon, a popular conference for Go programmers—if you are organizing a conference or thinking about organizing one, it will be useful information to you. Full disclosure: Microsoft, where Erik works, is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Go Systems with Erik St. Martin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Tammy Butow has worked at Digital Ocean and Dropbox, where she built out infrastructure and managed engineering teams. At both of these companies, the customer base was at a massive scale. At Dropbox, Tammy worked on the database that holds metadata used by Dropbox users to access their files. To call this metadata system simply a “database” is an understatement–it is actually a multi-tiered system of caches and databases. This metadata is extremely sensitive–this is metadata that tells you where the objects across Dropbox are located–so it has to be highly available. To encourage that reliability, Tammy helped institute chaos engineering–inducing random failures across the Dropbox infrastructure, and making sure that the Dropbox systems could automatically respond to those failures. If you are unfamiliar with the topic, we have covered chaos engineering in two previous episodes of Software Engineering Daily. Tammy now works at Gremlin, a company that does chaos engineering as a service. In this show we talked about her experiences at Dropbox, and how to institute chaos engineering across databases. We also explored how her work at Gremlin–a smaller startup–compares to Dropbox and Digital Ocean, which are larger companies. Show Notes Tammy Butow Chaos Engineering Bootcamp Information to run your own Chaos Day How to Create a Kubernetes Cluster on Ubuntu 16.04 with kudeadm and Weave Net | Gremlin Community The post Database Chaos with Tammy Butow appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Site Reliability Management with Mike Hiraga 43:12
43:12 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:12
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedSoftware engineers have interacted with operations teams since the software was being written. In the 1990s, most operations teams worked with physical infrastructure. They made sure that servers were provisioned correctly and installed with the proper software. When software engineers shipped bad code that took down a software company, the operations teams had to help recover the system—which often meant dealing with the physical servers. During the 90s and early 2000s, these operations engineers were often called “sysadmins,” “database admins” (if they worked on databases), or “infrastructure engineers.” Over the last decade, virtualization has led to many more logical servers across a company. Cloud computing has made infrastructure remote and programmable. The progression of infrastructure led to a change in how operations engineers work. Since infrastructure can be interacted with through code, operations engineers are now writing a lot more code. The “DevOps” movement can be seen through this lens. Operations teams were now writing software—and this meant that software engineers could now work on operations. Both software engineers and operators could create deployment pipelines, monitor application health, and improve the system scalability—all through written code. Site reliability engineering (or SRE) is a newer point along the evolutionary timeline of operations. Web applications can be unstable sometimes, and SRE is focused on making a site work more reliably. This is especially important for a company that makes business applications that other companies rely on. Mike Hiraga is the head of site reliability engineering at Atlassian. Atlassian makes several products that many businesses rely on—such as JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, and Bitbucket. Since the infrastructure is at a massive scale, Mike has a broad set of experiences from his work managing SRE at Atlassian. One particularly interesting topic is Atlassian’s migration to the cloud. Atlassian was started in 2002, before the cloud was widely used, and they have more recently made a push to move applications into the cloud. Full disclosure: Atlassian is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily—and they are hiring, so if you are looking for a job, check out Atlassian jobs, or send me an email directly and I’m happy to introduce you to the team. The post Site Reliability Management with Mike Hiraga appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Steve Herrod led engineering at VMWare as the company scaled from 30 engineers to 3,000 engineers. After 11 years, he left to become a managing director for General Catalyst, a venture capital firm. Since he has both operating experience and a wide view of the technology landscape as an investor, he is well-equipped to discuss a topic that we have been covering on Software Engineering Daily: the integration of cloud and edge computing. Today, we think of the cloud as a network of large data centers operated by big players like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. The cloud is where most of the computation across the world takes place. My smartphone and laptop are “edge” devices. They are lightweight computers that don’t perform much complex processing. I would not be able to run a large production database or a 3 terabyte MapReduce job on my laptop. The current division of labor makes sense in this world of smart clouds and low-power, low-bandwidth devices. But the devices are getting cheaper, smarter, and more proliferate. Cars, drones, security cameras, sensors, and other devices can serve as points of computation that are geographically between the edge devices and the cloud. With more devices between you and the cloud, there is an opportunity to put computation on those devices. Everyone knows that cloud and edge computing will become intermingled in the coming years. But predicting just how it will play out is nearly impossible. And as an investor, if you bet on something too early, you get the same result as someone who was wrong altogether. A good analogy for the “cloud and edge” space of investments might be the “smart home.” Everyone knows the smart home is coming eventually, but it’s very hard to tell how long it will be before smart home systems are in widespread use–so it is an open question of how to invest in the space. Summer internship applications to Software Engineering Daily are also being accepted. If you are interested in working with us on the Software Engineering Daily open source project full-time this Summer, send an application to internships@softwareengineeringdaily.com . We’d love to hear from you. If you haven’t seen what we are building, check out softwaredaily.com , or download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android . These apps have all 650 of our episodes in a searchable format–we have recommendations, categories, related links and discussions around the episodes. It’s all free and also open source–if you are interested in getting involved in our open source community, we have lots of people working on the project and we do our best to be friendly and inviting to new people coming in looking for their first open source project. You can find that project at Github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . The post Cloud and Edge with Steve Herrod appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
On Software Engineering Daily, we have been covering the “serverless” movement in detail. For people who don’t use serverless functions, it seems like a niche. Serverless functions are stateless, auto-scaling, event-driven blobs of code. You might say “serverless sounds kind of cool, but why don’t I just use a server? It’s a paradigm I’m used to.” Serverless is exciting not because of what it adds but because of what it subtracts. The potential of serverless technology is to someday not have to worry about scalability at all. Today, we take for granted that if you start a new company, you are building it on cloud infrastructure. The problem of maintaining server hardware disappeared for 99% of startups, which unlocked a wealth of innovation. The cloud also simplified scalability for most startups–but there are still plenty of companies that struggle to scale. Significant mental energy is spent on the following questions: How many database replicas do I need? How do I configure my load balancer? How many nodes should I put in my Kafka cluster? Serverless functions are important because they are auto-scaling component that sits at a low level. This makes it easy to build auto scaling systems on top of them. Auto scaling databases, queueing systems, machine learning tools, and user applications. And since the problem is being solved at such a low level, the pricing competitions will also take place at the low level, meaning that systems built on serverless functions will probably see steep declines in costs in the coming years. Serverless computing could eventually become free or nearly free, with the major cloud providers using it as a loss leader to onboard developers to higher level services. All of this makes for an exciting topic of discussion, that we will be repeatedly covering. Today’s show is with Eduardo Laureano, the principal program manager of Azure Functions. It was a fantastic conversation and we covered applications of serverless, improvements to the “cold start problem,” and how the Azure Functions platform is built and operated. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Meetups for Software Engineering Daily are being planned! Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup if you want to register for an upcoming Meetup. In March, I’ll be visiting Datadog in New York and Hubspot in Boston, and in April I’ll be at Telesign in LA. Summer internship applications to Software Engineering Daily are also being accepted. If you are interested in working with us on the Software Engineering Daily open source project full-time this Summer, send an application to internships@softwareengineeringdaily.com . We’d love to hear from you. The post Serverless Systems with Eduardo Laureano appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Earlier this year we did several shows about Cloud Foundry, followed by several shows about Kubernetes. Both of these projects allow you to build scalable, multi-node applications–but they serve different types of users. Cloud Foundry encompasses a larger scope of the application experience than Kubernetes. Kubernetes is lower level and is actually being used within newer versions of Cloud Foundry to give Cloud Foundry users access to the Kubernetes abstractions. Recording those shows gave me a wide understanding of how infrastructure is managed and how it has evolved. Today’s episode provides more context on Cloud Foundry–how the project got started, how people use it, and where Cloud Foundry is going. Today’s guest Mike Dalessio is a VP of engineering on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and we had a great time talking about his work. Engineering leadership is a fine art, and conversations with engineering leaders are consistently interesting–this was no exception. The post Cloud Foundry Overview with Mike Dalessio appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Over 12 years of engineering, Box has developed a complex architecture of services. Whenever a user uploads a file to Box, that upload might cause 5 or 6 different services to react to the event. Each of these services is managed by a set of servers, and managing all of these different servers is a challenge. Sam Ghods is the cofounder and services architect of Box. In 2014, Sam was surveying the landscape of different resource managers, deciding which tool should be the underlying scheduler for deploying services at Box. He chose Kubernetes because it was based on Google’s internal Borg scheduling system. For years, engineering teams at companies like Facebook and Twitter had built internal scheduling systems modeled after Borg. When Kubernetes arrived, it provided an out-of-the-box tool for managing infrastructure like Google would. In today’s episode, Sam describes how Box began its migration to Kubernetes, and what the company has learned along the way. It’s a great case study for people who are looking at migrating their own systems to Kubernetes. The post Box Kubernetes Migration with Sam Ghods appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When Box started in 2006, the small engineering team had a lot to learn. Box was one of the earliest cloud storage companies, with a product that allowed companies to securely upload files to remote storage. This was two years before Amazon Web Services introduced on-demand infrastructure, so the Box team managed their own servers, which they learned how to do as they went along. In the early days, the backup strategy was not so sophisticated. The founders did not know how to properly set up hardware in a colocated data center. The front-end interface was not the most beautiful product. But the product was so useful that eventually, it started to catch on. Box’s distributed file system became the backbone of many enterprises. Employees began to use it to interact with and share data across organizations. The increase in usage raised the stakes for Box’s small engineering team. If Box’s service went down, it could cripple an enterprise’s productivity, which meant that Box needed to hire experienced engineers to build resilient systems with higher availability. And to accommodate the growth in usage, Box needed to predict how much hardware to purchase, and how much space in a data center to rent–a process known as capacity planning. As Box went from 3 engineers to 300, the different areas of the company went from being managed by individuals to teams, to entire departments with VPs and C-level executives. Jeff Quiesser is an SVP at Box, and one of the co-founders. He joins the show today to describe how Box changed as the company scaled. We covered engineering, management, operations, and culture. In previous shows, we have explored the stories of companies like Slack, Digital Ocean, Giphy, Uber, Tinder, and Spotify. It’s always fun to hear how a company works–from engineering the first product to enterprises with millions of users. To find all of our episodes about how companies are built, download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android . These apps have all 650 of our episodes in a searchable format–we have recommendations, categories, related links, and discussions around the episodes. It’s all free and also open source–if you are interested in getting involved in our open source community, we have lots of people working on the project and we do our best to be friendly and inviting to new people coming in looking for their first open source project. You can find that project at Github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . The post Scaling Box with Jeff Quiesser appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Load Testing Mobile Applications with Paulo Costa and Rodrigo Coutinho 57:32
57:32 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked57:32
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedApplications need to be ready to scale in response to high-load events. With mobile applications, this can be even more important. People rely on mobile applications such as banking, ride sharing, and GPS. During Black Friday, a popular ecommerce application could be bombarded by user requests–you might not be able to complete a request to buy an item at the Black Friday discount. If you attend the Superbowl, and then try to catch an Uber after leaving, all the other people around you might be summoning a car at the same time, and the system might not scale. In order to prepare infrastructure for high volume, mobile development teams often create end-to-end load tests. After recording incoming mobile traffic, that mobile traffic can be replicated and replayed, to measure a backend’s response to the mobile workload. Paulo Costa and Rodrigo Coutinho are engineers at OutSystems, a company that makes a platform for building low-code mobile applications. In this episode, Paulo and Rodrigo discuss the process of performing end-to-end scalability testing for mobile applications backed by cloud infrastructure. We talked about the high level process of architecting the load test, and explored the tools used to implement it. Full disclosure: OutSystems is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Load Testing Mobile Applications with Paulo Costa and Rodrigo Coutinho appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Over the last decade, computation and storage have moved from on-premise hardware into the cloud data center. Instead of having large servers “on-premise,” companies started to outsource their server workloads to cloud service providers. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of devices at the “edge.” The most common edge device is your smartphone, but there are many other smart devices that are growing in number–drones, smart cars, Nest thermostats, smart refrigerators, IoT sensors, and next generation centrifuges. Each of these devices contains computational hardware. Another class of edge devices is the edge server. Edge servers are used to facilitate faster response times than your core application. For example, Software Engineering Daily uses a content delivery network for audio files. These audio files are distributed throughout the world on edge servers. The core application logic of Software Engineering Daily runs on a WordPress site, and that WordPress application is distributed too far fewer servers than our audio files. “Cloud computing” and “edge computing” both refer to computers that can serve requests. The “edge” is commonly used to refer to devices that are closer to the user–so they will deliver faster responses. The “cloud” refers to big, bulky servers that can do heavy duty processing workloads–such as training machine learning models or issuing a large distributed MapReduce query. As the volume of computation and data increases, we look for better ways to utilize our resources, and we are realizing that the devices at the edge are underutilized. In today’s episode, Kenton Varda explains how and why to deploy application logic to the edge. He works at Cloudflare on a project called Cloudflare Workers, which is a way to deploy JavaScript to edge servers, such as the hundreds of data centers around the world that are used by Cloudflare for caching. Kenton was previously on the show to discuss protocol buffers, a project he led while he was at Google. To find that episode, and many other episodes about serverless, download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android . These apps have all 650 of our episodes in a searchable format–we have recommendations, categories, related links, and discussions around the episodes. It’s all free and also open source–if you are interested in getting involved in our open source community, we have lots of people working on the project and we do our best to be friendly and inviting to new people coming in looking for their first open source project. You can find that project at Github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . The post Serverless at the Edge with Kenton Varda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Linkedin Resilience with Bhaskaran Devaraj and Xiao Li 45:02
45:02 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked45:02
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedHow do you build resilient, failure tested systems? Redundancy, backups, and testing are all important. But there is also an increasing trend towards chaos engineering–the technique of inducing controlled failures in order to prove that a system is fault tolerant in the way that you expect. In last week’s episode with Kolton Andrus, we discussed one way to build chaos engineering as a routine part of testing a distributed system. Kolton discussed his company Gremlin, which injects failures by spinning up a Gremlin container and having that container induce network failures, memory errors, and filled up disks. In this episode, we explore another insertion point for testing controlled failures, this time from the point of view of Linkedin. Linkedin is a social network for working professionals. As Linkedin has grown, the increased number of services has led to more interdependency between those services. The more dependencies a given service has, the more partial failure cases there are. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with having a lot of service dependencies–this is just the way we build modern applications. But it does suggest that we should try to test the failures that can emerge from so many dependencies. Bhaskaran Devaraj and Xiao Li are engineers at Linkedin and are working on a project called Waterbear, with the goal of making the infrastructure more resilient. Linkedin’s backend system consists of a large distributed application with thousands of microservices communicating with each other. Most of those services communicate over Rest.li, a proxy for standardizing interactions between services. Rest.li can assist with routing, AB testing, circuit breaking, and other aspects of service-to-service communication. This proxy can also be used for executing controlled failures. As services are communicating with each other, creating a controlled failure can be as simple as telling your proxy not to send traffic to downstream services. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry, we will explain it in more detail. In this episode, Bhaskaran and Xiao describe their approach to resilience engineering at Linkedin–including the engineering projects and the cultural changes that are required to build a resilient software architecture. The post Linkedin Resilience with Bhaskaran Devaraj and Xiao Li appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The number of ways that applications can fail is numerous. Disks fail all the time. Servers overheat. Network connections get flaky. You assume that you are prepared for such a scenario because you have replicated your servers. You have the database backed up. Your core application is spread across multiple availability zones. But are you really sure that your system is resilient? The only way to prove that your system is resilient to failure is to experience failure and to make swift responsiveness to failure an integral part of your software. Chaos engineering is the practice of routinely testing your system’s resilience by inducing controlled failures. Netflix was the first company to discuss chaos engineering widely, but more and more companies are starting to work it into their systems, and finding it tremendously useful. By inducing failures in your system, you can discover unknown dependencies, single points of failure, and problematic state conditions that can cause data corruption. Kolton Andrus worked on chaos engineering at Netflix and Amazon, where he designed systems that would test system resiliency through routine failures. Since then, he founded Gremlin, a company that provides chaos engineering as a service. In a previous episode, Kolton and I discussed why chaos engineering is useful, and he told some awesome war stories about working at Amazon and Netflix. In this show, we explore how to build a chaos engineering service–which involves standing up Gremlin containers that institute controlled failures. To find the previous episode I recorded with Kolton, as well as other supplementary materials described in this show, download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android . These apps have all 650 of our episodes in a searchable format–we have recommendations, categories, related links, and discussions around the episodes. It’s all free and also open source–if you are interested in getting involved in our open source community, we have lots of people working on the project and we do our best to be friendly and inviting to new people coming in looking for their first open source project. You can find that project at Github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . The post Chaos Engineering with Kolton Andrus appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 How to Change an Enterprise’s Software and Culture with Zhamak Dehghani 52:36
52:36 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:36
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOn this show, we spend a lot of time talking about CI/CD, data engineering, and microservices. These technologies have only been widely talked about for the last 5-10 years. That means that they are easy to adopt for startups that get founded in the last 5-10 years, but not necessarily for older enterprises. Within a large enterprise, it can be challenging to make significant changes to how technology is used. Many of the listeners might even take it for granted that your source code is in git–but if you work at an enterprise that started building software in 1981, you might be moving source code around on FTP servers or floppy disks. The difficulty of changing the technology within an enterprise gets compounded by culture. Culture develops around specific technologies. That is one interpretation of “Conway’s Law”–that the way an organization uses software informs an organization’s communication structure. This is no surprise–if your organization manages code using FTP servers and floppy disks, it will slow down your innovation. Zhamak Dehghani is an engineer at ThoughtWorks, where she consults with enterprises to modernize their software and culture. She works off of a blueprint that describes specific steps that an enterprise can take towards modernizing: continuous integration; building a data pipeline; building a system of experimentation. In some ways, this conversation fits nicely with our shows about DevOps a few years ago. Full disclosure: ThoughtWorks is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. To find all of our shows about DevOps, as well as links to learn more about the topics described in the show, download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android . These apps have all 650 of our episodes in a searchable format–we have recommendations, categories, related links, and discussions around the episodes. It’s all free and also open source–if you are interested in getting involved in our open source community, we have lots of people working on the project and we do our best to be friendly and inviting to new people coming in looking for their first open source project. You can find that project at Github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . The post How to Change an Enterprise’s Software and Culture with Zhamak Dehghani appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
After two weeks of episodes about Kubernetes, our in-depth coverage of container orchestration is drawing to a close. We have a few more shows on the topic before we move on to cover other aspects of the software. If you have feedback on this thematic format (whether you like it or not), send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com Today’s episode fits nicely into some of the themes we have covered recently–Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and the changing landscape of managed services. Sean McKenna works on all three of these things at Microsoft. We spent much of our time discussing the use cases of container instances versus Kubernetes. Container instances are individual managed containers–so you could spin up an application within a container instance without having to deal with the Kubernetes control plane. Container instances might be described as “serverless containers,” since you do not have to program against the underlying VM at all. This begs the question–why would you want to use a managed Kubernetes service if you could just use individual managed containers? Sean explores this question and gives his thoughts on where this ecosystem is headed. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Serverless Containers with Sean McKenna appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In 2011, platform-as-a-service was in its early days. It was around that time that Gabe Monroy started a container platform called Deis, with the goal of making an open-source platform-as-a-service that anyone could deploy to whatever infrastructure they wanted. Over the last six years, Gabe had a front-row seat to the rise of containers, the variety of container orchestration systems, and the changing open source landscape. Every container orchestration system consists of a control plane, a data plane, and a scheduler. In the last few weeks, we have been exploring these different aspects of Kubernetes in detail. Last year, Microsoft acquired Deis, and Gabe began working on the Azure services that are related to Kubernetes–Azure Container Service, Kubernetes Service, and Container Instances. In this episode, Gabe talks about how containerized applications are changing, and what developments might come in the next few years. Kubernetes, functions-as-a-service, and container instances are different cloud application runtimes, with different SLAs, interfaces, and economics. Gabe provided some thoughts on how different application types might use those different runtimes. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Container Instances with Gabe Monroy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Oliver Gould worked at Twitter from 2010 to 2014. Twitter’s popularity was taking off, and the engineering team was learning how to scale the product. During that time, Twitter adopted Apache Mesos and began breaking up its monolithic architecture into different services. As more and more services were deployed, engineers at Twitter decided to standardize communications between those services with a tool called a service proxy. A service proxy provides each service with features that every service would want: load balancing, routing, service discovery, retries, and visibility. It turns out that lots of other companies wanted this service proxy technology as well, which is why Oliver left Twitter to start Buoyant, a company that was focused on developing software around the service proxy–and eventually the service mesh. If you are unfamiliar with service proxies and service mesh, check out our previous shows on Linkerd , Envoy , and Istio . Kubernetes is often deployed with a service mesh. A service mesh consists of two parts: the data plane and the control plane. The “data plane” refers to the sidecar containers that are deployed to each of your Kubernetes application pods. Each sidecar has a service proxy. The “control plane” refers to a central service that aggregates data from across the data plane and can send communications to the service proxies sitting across that control plane. The Linkerd service mesh was built in Java, and the project started before Kubernetes had become the standard for container orchestration. More recently, Buoyant built Conduit, a service mesh built using Rust and Go. In this episode, we explore how to design a service mesh and what Oliver learned in his experience building Linkerd and Conduit. The post Service Mesh Design with Oliver Gould appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Modern applications store most of their data on hosted storage solutions. We use hosted block storage to back databases, hosted object storage for objects such as videos, and hosted file storage for file systems. Using a cloud provider for these storage systems can simplify scalability, durability, and availability–it can be less painful than taking care of storage yourself. One downside: the storage systems offered by the cloud providers are not open source. The APIs might vary from provider to provider. Wiring your application to a particular storage service on a particular cloud could tightly couple you to that cloud. Rook is a project for managing storage, built on Kubernetes. If you use a Rook cluster for your storage, you can port that storage model to any cloud, and have a consistent API for object, block, and file storage. In this episode, Bassam Tabbara describes the state of cloud storage, and why he started the Rook project. The post Kubernetes Storage with Bassam Tabbara appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes State Management with Niraj Tolia 49:14
49:14 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked49:14
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedA common problem in a distributed system: how do you take a snapshot of the global state of that system? Snapshot is difficult because you need to tell every node in the system to simultaneously record its state. There are several reasons to take a snapshot. You might want to take a picture of the global state for the purposes of debugging. Or you might want to take a comprehensive snapshot of your system (including the database) and port your system from one cloud to another. Or you might just need to take a snapshot for disaster recovery. When a Kubernetes application is deployed, its initial configuration is described in config files. After a deployment, the state of the application might change–some nodes die, some services get scaled up. At any given time, the current state of a Kubernetes cluster is described by etcd, a distributed key-value store. Niraj Tolia is CEO of Kasten, a company that provides data management, backups, and disaster recovery for Kubernetes applications. Niraj joins the show to describe how Kubernetes deployments manage state, and what the modern business environment is around Kubernetes. The post Kubernetes State Management with Niraj Tolia appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In the last four years, CoreOS has been at the center of enterprise adoption of containers. During that time, Brian Harrington (or “Redbeard”) has seen a lot of deployments. In this episode, Brian discusses the patterns he has seen among successful Kubernetes deployments–and the pitfalls of the less successful. How should you manage configuration? How can you avoid IP address overlap between containers? How should you log and monitor your Kubernetes cluster–and whose responsibility is it to set all that stuff up? Brian also discusses the motivation for multi-cloud deployments, and how to implement multi-cloud Kubernetes. CoreOS offers a distributed systems management tool called Tectonic, which uses Kubernetes for container orchestration. In a time where there are lots of options to choose from when it comes to managed Kubernetes providers, it was great to hear Brian describe some of the architectural decisions for building Kubernetes into Tectonic. The post Kubernetes Operations with Brian Redbeard appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A backend application can have hundreds of services written in different programming frameworks and languages. Across these different languages, log messages are produced in different formats. Some logging is produced in XML, some are produced in JSON, some is in other formats. These logs need to be unified into a common format and centralized for any developer who wants to debug. The popularity of Kubernetes is making it easier for companies to build this kind of distributed application, where different services of different languages are communicating over a network, with a variety of log message types. Fluentd is a tool for solving this problem of log collection and unification. In today’s episode, Eduardo Silva joins the show to describe how Fluentd is deployed to Kubernetes, and what the role of Fluentd is within a Kubernetes logging pipeline. We also discuss the company where Eduardo works–Treasure Data. The story of Treasure Data is unusual. The team started out doing log management but has found itself moving up the stack, into marketing analytics, sales analytics, and customer data management. This story might be useful for anyone who is an open-source developer thinking about how to evolve your project into a business. The post FluentD with Eduardo Silva appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Kubernetes has become the standard way of deploying new distributed applications. Most new internet businesses started in the foreseeable future will leverage Kubernetes (whether they realize it or not). Many old applications are migrating to Kubernetes too. Before Kubernetes, there was no standardization around a specific distributed systems platform. Just like Linux became the standard server-side operating system for a single node, Kubernetes has become the standard way to orchestrate all of the nodes in your application. With Kubernetes, distributed systems tools can have network effects. Every time someone builds a new tool for Kubernetes, it makes all the other tools better. And it further cements Kubernetes as the standard. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM each have a Kubernetes-as-a-service offering, making it easier to shift infrastructure between the major cloud providers. We are likely to see Digital Ocean, Heroku, and longer tail cloud providers offer a managed, hosted Kubernetes eventually. In this editorial, I explore the following questions: Why is this happening? What are the implications for developers? How are cloud providers affected? What are the new business models that are possible in a Kubernetes-standardized world? Software Standards Standardized software platforms are both good and bad. Standards allow developers to have expectations around how their software will run. If a developer builds something for a standardized platform, they can make smart estimations about the total addressable market for that piece of software. If you write a program in JavaScript, you know that it will run in everyone’s browser. If you create a game for iOS, you know that everyone with an iPhone will be able to download it. If you build a tool for profiling garbage collection in .NET, you know that there is a large community of Windows developers with memory issues who can buy your software. Standardized proprietary platforms can lead to massive profit returns for the platform provider. In 1995, Windows was such a good platform that Microsoft could sell a CD in a cardboard box for $100. In 2018, the iPhone is so good that Apple can take 30% from all app sales on its platform. Proprietary standards lead to fragmentation. Your iPhone app does not run on my Kindle Fire. I can’t use your Snapchat augmented reality sticker on Facebook Messenger. My favorite digital audio workstation only runs on Windows–so I have to keep a Windows computer around just to make music. When developers see this fragmentation, they groan. They imagine the greedy capitalists, who are making money at the expense of software quality. Developers think, “why can’t we all just get along? Why can’t we have things be open and free?” Developers think, “we don’t need proprietary standards. We can have open standards.” Growth of Apache, part of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) Stack This happened with Linux. These days, new server side applications are mostly in Linux. There was a time when that was controversial (see the far left hand side of chart above). More recently, we saw a newer open standard with Docker. Docker gave us an open, standardized way of packaging, deploying, and distributing a single node. This was hugely valuable! But for all of the big problems that Docker solved, it highlighted a new problem–how should we be orchestrating these nodes together? After all–your application is not just a single node. You know you want to be deploying a Docker container–but how are your containers communicating with each other? How are you scaling up instances of these containers? How are you routing traffic between container instances? Container Orchestration After Docker became popular, a scramble of open source projects and proprietary platforms emerged to solve the problem of container orchestration. Mesos, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes each offered a different set of abstractions for managing containers. Amazon ECS offered a proprietary managed service that took care of installation and scaling of Docker containers for AWS users. Some developers did not adopt any orchestration platform, and used BASH, Puppet, Chef, and other tools to script their deployments. Whether a developer was deploying their container by using an orchestration platform or a script, Docker sped up development, and made things more harmonious between developers and operations. As more developers deployed containers with Docker, the importance of the orchestration platform was becoming clear. A container is as fundamental to a distributed system as an object is to an object oriented program . Everyone wanted to be using a container platform, but there was a struggle between these platforms, and it was hard to see which would come out on top–or if it would be a decades long struggle, like iOS vs. Android. This struggle between the different container orchestration platforms was causing fragmentation–not because any of the popular orchestration frameworks were proprietary (Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos are all open source), but because each container orchestration community had invested so much in their own system. So, from 2013 – 2016, there was some anxiety among Docker power users. Choosing a container orchestration framework is a huge bet–and if you chose the wrong orchestration system, it would be like opening a movie store and choosing HD DVD over Blu-ray . These pictures of container ships falling over never get old. Image: Huffington Post The war between container orchestrators felt like a winner-take-all affair. And as in any war, there was a fog that was hard to see through. When I was reporting on container orchestration wars, I recorded podcast after podcast with container orchestration experts , where I would ask some form of the question, “so, which container orchestration system is going to win?” I did this until someone I respect told me that asking about who was going to “win the orchestration wars” was a less interesting question than evaluating the technical tradeoffs between the orchestrators. Looking back, I regret buying into the narrative of a war between container orchestrators. As the debates about container orchestrators raged on, the smartest people in the room were mostly having calm, scientific discussions–even when reporters like me were getting worked up, and thinking that this was a story about tribalism. The conflicts between container orchestrators were not about tribalism–they were more about differences of opinion, and developer ergonomics. OK, maybe the container orchestration war wasn’t only about differences of opinion. There is a boatload of money to be made in this space. We are talking about contracts with billion dollar legacy organizations–banks, and telcos, and insurance companies–who are making their way onto the cloud. If you are in the business of helping telcos move onto the winning platform, business is good. If you champion the wrong platform, you end up with a warehouse full of HD-DVDs. The time where the conflict was the worst was near the end of 2016, when there were rumors about Docker potentially forking, so that Docker the company could change the Docker standard to fit better with their container orchestration system Docker Swarm –but even in those times, it would have made sense to be an optimist. Creative destruction is painful, but it is a sign of progress–and in the struggle for container orchestration dominance, there was a ton of creative destruction. And when the dust cleared around the end of 2016, Kubernetes was the clear winner. Today, with Kubernetes becoming the safe choice, CIOs feel more comfortable adopting container orchestration at their enterprises–which makes vendors feel more comfortable investing in Kubernetes-specific tools to sell to those CIOs. This brings us to the present: The open source developers are rowing in the same direction, excited about what to build. Major enterprises (both new and legacy) are buying into Kubernetes. The major cloud providers are ready with low-cost Kubernetes-as-a-service. The numerous vendors of monitoring, logging, security, and compliance software are thrilled because the underlying software stack that they have to integrate with is becoming more predictable. Going Multicloud Today, the most lucrative provider of proprietary backend developer infrastructure is Amazon Web Services. Developers do not view AWS resentfully, because AWS is innovative, empowering, and cheap. If you are paying AWS a lot of money, that probably means your business is doing well. With AWS, developers do not feel the level of lock-in that was administered by the dominant proprietary platforms of the 90s. But there is some lock-in. Once you are deeply embedded in the AWS ecosystem, using services like DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Container Service, or Amazon Kinesis, it becomes a daunting task to move away from Amazon. With Kubernetes creating an open, common layer for infrastructure, it becomes theoretically possible to “lift and shift” your Kubernetes cluster from one cloud provider to another. If you decided to lift-and-shift your application, you would have to rewrite parts of your application to stop using the Amazon-specific services (like Amazon S3). For example, if you wanted an S3 replacement that would run on any cloud, you could configure a Kubernetes cluster with Rook , and start to store objects on Rook with the same APIs that you would use to store them on S3. This is a nice option to have, but I have not yet heard of anyone actually lifting and shifting their application away from a cloud– except for Dropbox , and their migration was so epic it took two and a half years . Certainly there is someone out there other than Dropbox who spends so much money on Amazon S3 that they will consider spinning up their own object store, but it would be a huge effort to do such a migration. (Kubernetes can be used for lifting and shifting–but more likely will be used to have familiar operating layer in different clouds) Kubernetes probably won’t be a tool for widespread lifting and shifting any time soon. A more likely scenario is that Kubernetes will become a ubiquitous control plane, that enterprises will use on multiple clouds. NodeJS is a useful analogy. Why do people like NodeJS for their server side applications? It’s not necessarily because Node is the fastest web server. It’s because people like to use the same language on both the client and the server. Just like NodeJS lets you move between your client and server code without having to switch languages, Kubernetes will let you switch between clouds without having to change how you think about operations. On each cloud, you will have some custom application code running on Kubernetes that interacts with the managed services provided by that cloud. Companies want to be multi-cloud–partly for disaster recovery, but also because there is actual upside to having access to managed services on the different clouds. One emerging pattern is to split infrastructure between AWS for user traffic and Google Cloud for data engineering. One company that uses this pattern is Thumbtack : At Thumbtack, the production infrastructure on AWS serves user requests. The log of transactions that occur get pushed from AWS to Google Cloud, where the data engineering occurs. On Google Cloud, the transaction records are queued in Cloud PubSub, a message queueing service. Those transactions are pulled off the queue and stored in BigQuery, a system for storage and querying of high volumes of data. BigQuery is used as the data lake to pull from when orchestrating machine learning jobs. These machine learning jobs are run in Cloud Dataproc, a managed service that runs Apache Spark. After training a model in Google Cloud, that model is deployed on the AWS side, where it serves user traffic. On the Google Cloud side, the orchestration of these different managed services is done by Apache Airflow, an open source tool that is one of the few pieces of infrastructure that Thumbtack does have to manage themselves on Google Cloud. Today, Thumbtack uses AWS for serving user requests and Google Cloud for data engineering and queueing in PubSub. Thumbtack trains its machine learning models in Google, and deploys them to AWS. This is just the way things are today. Thumbtack might eventually use Google Cloud for user-facing services as well. (a multi-cloud data engineering pipeline from a Japanese company) More companies will gradually move towards multiple clouds–and some of them will manage a unique Kubernetes cluster on each cloud. You might have a GKE Kubernetes cluster on Google to orchestrate workloads between BigQuery, Cloud PubSub, and Google Cloud ML, and you might have an Amazon EKS cluster to orchestrate workloads between DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, and your production NodeJS application. Cloud providers are not replaceable commodities. The services provided by the different clouds will get increasingly exotic and differentiated. Enterprises will benefit from having access to the different services on the different cloud providers. Distributed Systems Distribution Services like Google BigQuery and AWS Redshift are popular because they give you a powerful, scalable, multi-node tool with a simple API. Developers often choose these managed services because they are so easy to use. You don’t see these types of paid tools for single nodes. I don’t pay for NodeJS, or React, or Ruby on Rails. Tools for a single node are much easier to operate than tools for a distributed system. It’s harder to deploy Hadoop across servers than to run a Ruby on Rails application on my laptop. With Kubernetes, this is going to change. If you are using Kubernetes, you can use a distributed systems package manager called Helm. This is like npm for Kubernetes applications. If you are using Kubernetes, you can use Helm to easily install a complicated multi-node application, no matter what cloud provider you are on. Here’s a description of Helm: Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications — Helm Charts helps you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. Charts are easy to create, version, share, and publish — so start using Helm and stop the copy-and-paste madness. A package manager for distributed systems. Amazing! Let’s take a look at what I can install. Not pictured: WordPress, Jenkins, Kafka Distributed systems are hard to set up. Ask anyone who has set up their own Kafka cluster. Helm is going to make installing Kafka as easy as installing a new version of Photoshop on your MacBook. And you will be able to do this on any cloud . Before Helm, the closest thing to a distributed systems package manager (that I am aware of) was the marketplace that you find on AWS or Azure , or the Google Cloud Launcher . Here again we see how proprietary software can lead to fragmentation. Before Helm, there was no standard, platform-agnostic way of one-click installing Kafka. You can find a way to one-click install Kafka on AWS, Google, or Azure. But each of these installations had to be written independently, for that specific cloud provider. And to install Kafka on Digital Ocean, you need to follow a 10-step tutorial . Helm represents a cross-platform system for distributing multi-node software on any Kubernetes instance. You could use an application installed with Helm in any cloud provider or on your own hardware. You could easily install Apache Spark or Cassandra–systems that are notoriously difficult to set up and operate. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes–but it also looks like the beginnings of an app store for Kubernetes. With an app store, you could sell software for Kubernetes. What kind of software could you sell? You could sell enterprise distributions of distributed systems platforms like Cloudera Hadoop, Databricks Spark, and Confluent Kafka. New monitoring systems like Prometheus and multi-node databases like Cassandra that are hard to install. Maybe you could even sell higher-level, consumer-grade software like Zendesk. The idea of a self-hosted Zendesk sounds crazy, but someone could build that, and sell it in the form of a proprietary binary, at the cost of a flat fee instead of a subscription. If I sell you a $99 Zendesk-for-Kubernetes, and you can easily run it on your Kubernetes cluster on AWS, you are going to end up saving a lot of money on support ticketing software. Enterprises often run their own WordPress to manage a company blog. Is the software for Zendesk that much more complicated than WordPress? I don’t think so–but enterprises are much more scared of managing their own help desk software than managing their own blogging software. I run a pretty small business but I subscribe to a LOT of different software-as-a-service tools. An expensive WordPress host, an expensive CRM for advertising sales, MailChimp for the newsletter. I pay for these services because they are super reliable and secure, and they are complex multi-node applications. I wouldn’t want to host my own. I wouldn’t want to support them. I don’t want to be responsible for technical troubleshooting when my newsletter fails to send. I want to run less software . In contrast, I’m not afraid that my single-node software is going to break. Software that I use from a single node tends to be much less expensive because I don’t have to buy it as a “service”. The software that I use to write music has a 1-time fixed cost. Photoshop has a 1-time fixed cost. I pay for the electricity to run my computer, but other than that I have no ongoing capital expense to run Photoshop. When multi-node applications are as reliable as single-node applications, we will see changes in the pricing models. Maybe someday I will be able to purchase a Zendesk-for-Kubernetes. The Zendesk-for-Kubernetes will give me everything I need from a help desk–it will spin up an email server, it will give me a web frontend to manage tickets. And if anything goes wrong, I can pay for support when I need it. Zendesk is a fantastic service–but it would be cool if it had a fixed pricing model Metaparticle With Kubernetes, it becomes easier to deploy and manage distributed applications. With Helm, it becomes easier to distribute those applications to other users. But it’s still pretty hard to develop distributed systems. This was the focus of a recent CloudNative Con/KubeCon Keynote by Brendan Burns, called “This Job is Too Hard: Building New Tools, Patterns, and Paradigms to Democratize Distributed Systems Development” . In his presentation, Brendan presented a project called Metaparticle. Metaparticle is a standard library for cloud-native development, with the goal of democratizing distributed systems. In an introduction to Metaparticle , Brendan wrote: Cloud native development is bespoke, complicated and limited to a small number of expert developers. Metaparticle changes this by introducing a set of utilities in familiar programming languages that meet the developer where they are and enables them to begin to develop cloud-native systems using familiar language features. Metaparticle builds on top of Kubernetes primitives to make distributed synchronization easier as well. It supplies language independent modules for locking and leader election as easy-to-use abstractions in familiar programming languages. After decades of distributed systems research and application, patterns have emerged about how we build these systems. We need a way to do locking of a variable, so that two nodes will not be able to write to that variable in a nondeterministic fashion. We need a way to do master election, so that if the master node dies, the other nodes can pick a new node to orchestrate the system. Today, we use tools like etcd and Zookeeper to help us with master election and locking–and these tools have an onboarding cost. Brendan illustrates this with the example of Zookeeper, which is used by both Hadoop and Kafka to do master election. Zookeeper takes significant time and effort to learn how to operate. During the construction of both Hadoop and Kafka, the founding engineers of those projects engineered their systems to work with Zookeeper to maintain a master node. If I am writing a system to do distributed mapreduce, I would like to avoid thinking about node failures and race conditions. Brendan’s idea is to push those problems down into a standard library–so the next developer who comes along with a new idea for a multi-node application has an easier time. Important meta-point: metaparticle is built with the assumption that you are on Kubernetes. This is a language-level abstraction that is built with an assumption about the underlying (distributed) operating system–which once again brings us back to standards. If everyone is on the same distributed operating system, we can make big assumptions about the downstream users of our projects. This is why my mind is blown by Kubernetes. It is a layer of standards across a world of heterogeneous systems. Serverless Workloads Functions as a service (often called “serverless” functions) are a powerful, cheap abstraction that developers can use alongside Kubernetes, on top of Kubernetes, and in some cases instead of Kubernetes altogether. Let’s quickly review the modern landscape of serverless applications, and then consider the relationship between serverless and Kubernetes. Quick review on functions as a service : Functions as a service are deployable functions that run without an addressable server. Functions as a service deploy, execute, and scale with a single call by the developer. Until you make that call to the serverless function, your function is not running anywhere–so you are not using up resources other than the database that is storing your raw code. When you call a function as a service, your cluster will take care of scheduling and running that function. You don’t have to worry about spinning up a new machine and monitoring that machine, and spinning the machine down once it becomes idle. You just tell the cluster that you want to run a function, and the cluster executes it and returns the result. When you “deploy” a serverless function, the function code is not actually deployed. Your code sits in a database in plain text. When you call the function, your code is being taken out of the database entry, loaded onto a Docker container, and executed. (diagram from https://medium.com/openwhisk/uncovering-the-magic-how-serverless-platforms-really-work-3cb127b05f71 ) AWS Lambda pioneered this idea of a function-as-a-service in 2014 . Since then, developers have been thinking of all kinds of use cases. For a comprehensive list of how developers are using serverless, there is a shared Google Doc created by the CNCF Serverless Working Group (34 pages at the time of this article) . From my conversations on Software Engineering Daily, these functions as a service have shown at least two clear applications: Compute that can scale up quickly and cheaply in response to bursty workloads (for example, Yubl’s social media scalability case study ) Event-driven “glue code” with variable workload frequency (for example, an event sourcing model with a variety of database consumers) To create a FaaS platform, a cloud provider provisions a cluster of Docker containers called invokers. Those invokers wait to get blobs of code scheduled onto them. When you make a request for your code to execute, there is a period of time that you have to wait for that code to be loaded onto an invoker and executed. This time spent waiting is the “cold start” problem. The cold start problem is one of the tradeoffs that you make if you decide to run part of your application on FaaS. You don’t pay for the uptime of a server that isn’t doing any work–but when you want to call your function, you have to wait for your code to be scheduled onto an invoker. On AWS there are invokers designated for whatever requests for AWS Lambda come in. On Microsoft Azure there are invokers designated for Azure Functions requests. On Google Cloud there are invokers reserved for Google Cloud Functions. For most developers, using the function-as-a-service platforms from AWS, Microsoft, Google, or IBM will be fine. The costs are low, and the cold start problem is not problematic for most applications. But some developers will want to get costs even lower. Or they might want to write their own scheduler that defines how code gets scheduled onto invoker containers. These developers can roll their own serverless platform. Open source FaaS projects such as Kubeless let you provision your own serverless cluster on top of Kubernetes. You can define your own pool of invokers. You can determine how containers are scheduled against jobs. You can decide on how to solve the cold start problem for your own cluster. The open source FaaS for Kubernetes are just one type of resource scheduler. They are just a preview of other custom schedulers we will see on top of Kubernetes. Developers are always building new schedulers in order to build more efficient services on top of those schedulers. So–what other types of schedulers will be built on top of Kubernetes? Well, as they say, the future is already here, but it’s only available as an AWS managed service. AWS has a new service called Amazon Aurora Serverless–which is a database that scales storage and compute up and down automatically. From Jeff Barr’s post about AWS Serverless Aurora : When you create an Aurora Database Instance, you choose the desired instance size and have the option to increase read throughput using read replicas. If your processing needs or your query rate changes you have the option to modify the instance size or to alter the number of read replicas as needed. This model works really well in an environment where the workload is predictable, with bounds on the request rate and processing requirement. In some cases the workloads can be intermittent and/or unpredictable, with bursts of requests that might span just a few minutes or hours per day or per week. Flash sales, infrequent or one-time events, online gaming, reporting workloads (hourly or daily), dev/test, and brand-new applications all fit the bill. Arranging to have just the right amount of capacity can be a lot work; paying for it on steady-state basis might not be sensible. Because storage and processing are separate, you can scale all the way down to zero and pay only for storage. I think this is really cool, and I expect it to lead to the creations of new kinds of instant-on, transient applications. Scaling happens in seconds, building upon a pool of “warm” resources that are raring to go and eager to serve your requests. We are not surprised that AWS can build something like this, but it’s hard to imagine how it could emerge as an open source project—until Kubernetes. This is the type of system that random developers could build on top of Kubernetes. If you wanted to build your own serverless database on top of Kubernetes, you’ve got a number of scheduling problems to solve. You need different resource tiers for networking, storage, logging, buffering, and caching. For each of those different resource tiers, you need to define how resources will get scheduled to scale up and down in response to demand. Just like Kubeless offers a scheduler for the small bits of functional code, we might see other custom schedulers that people use as building blocks for bigger applications. And once you actually build your serverless database, perhaps you could sell it on the Helm app store as a $99 one-time purchase. Conclusion I hope you have enjoyed this tour through some Kubernetes history and speculation about the future. As 2018 begins, here are some of the areas we’d like to explore this year: How do people manage deployment of machine learning models on Kubernetes? We did a show with Matt Zeiler where he discussed this, and it sounded complicated. Is Kubernetes used for self-driving cars? If so, do you deploy one single cluster to manage the entire car? What does a Kubernetes IoT deployment look like? Does it make sense to run Kubernetes across a set of devices with intermittent network connections? What are the new infrastructure products and developer tools that will be built with Kubernetes? What are the new business opportunities? Kubernetes is a fantastic tool for building modern application backends–but it is still just a tool. If Kubernetes fulfills its mission, it will eventually fade into the background. There will come a time when we talk about Kubernetes like we talk about compilers or operating system kernels. Kubernetes will be lower level plumbing that is not in the purview of the average application developer. But until then, we’ll continue to report on it. The post The Gravity of Kubernetes appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Kubernetes has become the standard system for deploying and managing clusters of containers. But the vision of the project goes beyond managing containers. The long-term goal is to democratize the ability to build distributed systems. Brendan Burns is a co-founder of the Kubernetes project. He recently announced an open-source project called Metaparticle, a standard library for cloud-native development: Metaparticle builds on top of Kubernetes primitives to make distributed synchronization easier… It supplies language-independent modules for locking and leader election as easy-to-use abstractions in familiar programming languages. After decades of distributed systems research and application, patterns have emerged about how we build these systems. We need a way to lock a variable so that two nodes will not be able to write to that variable in a non-deterministic fashion. We need a way to do a master election so that if the master node dies, the other nodes can pick a new node to orchestrate the system. We know that just about every distributed application needs locking and leader election–so how can we build these features directly into our programming tools, rather than bolting them on? With Kubernetes providing a standard operating system for distributed applications, we can start to build standard libraries that assume we have access to underlying Kubernetes primitives . Instead of calling out to external tools like Zookeeper and etcd, a standard library like Metaparticle will abstract them away. An example: if I am writing a system to do distributed mapreduce, I would like to avoid thinking about node failures and race conditions. Brendan’s idea is to push those problems down into a standard library–so the next developer who comes along with a new idea for a multi-node application has an easier time. Brendan Burns currently works as a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, and he joins the show to discuss why it is still hard to build distributed systems and what can be done to make it easier. This is the second time we have had Brendan on the show. The first time he came on, he discussed the history of Kubernetes and some of the design decisions of the system. This episode was more about the future. Full disclosure: Microsoft (where Brendan is employed) is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Show Notes Get a free digital copy of Brendan’s new O’Reilly book, Designing Distributed Systems : http://aka.ms/sedaily The post Kubernetes Vision with Brendan Burns appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 High Volume Distributed Tracing with Ben Sigelman 57:54
57:54 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked57:54
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedYou are requesting a car from a ridesharing service such as Lyft. Your request hits the Lyft servers and begins trying to get you a car. It takes your geolocation, and passes the geolocation to a service that finds cars that are nearby, and puts all those cars into a list. The list of nearby cars is sent to another service, which sorts the list of cars by how close they are to you, and how high their star rating is. Finally, your car is selected, and sent back to your phone in a response from the server. In a “microservices” environment, multiple services often work together to accomplish a user task. In the example I just gave, one service took geolocation and turned it into a list, another service took a list and sorted it, and another service sent the actual response back to the user. This is a common pattern: Service A calls service B, which calls service C, and so on. When one of those services fails along the way, how do you identify which one it was? When one of those services fails to deliver a response quickly, how do you know where your latency is coming from? The solution is distributed tracing. To implement distributed tracing, each user level request gets a request identifier associated with it. When service A calls service B, it also hands off the unique request ID, so that the overall request can be traced as it passes through the distributed system (and if that doesn’t make sense–don’t worry, we explain it again during the show). Ben Sigelman began working on distributed tracing when he was at Google and authored the “Dapper” paper. Dapper was implemented at Google to help debug some of the distributed systems problems faced by the engineers who work on Google infrastructure. A request that moves through several different services spends time processing each of those services. A distributed tracing system measures the time spent in each of those services–that time spent is called a span . A single request that has to hit 20 different services will have 20 spans associated with it. Those spans get collected into a trace . A trace can be evaluated to look at the latencies of each of those services. If you are trying to improve the speed of a distributed systems infrastructure, distributed tracing can be very helpful for choosing where to focus your attention. The published Google papers of ten years ago often turn out to be the companies of today. Some examples include MapReduce (which formed the basis of Cloudera), Spanner (which formed the basis of CockroachDB), and Dremel (which formed the basis of Dremio). Today, a decade after he started thinking about distributed tracing, Ben Sigelman is the CEO of Lightstep, a company that provides distributed tracing and other monitoring technologies. Lightstep’s distributed tracing model still bears a resemblance to the same techniques described in the paper–so I was eager to learn the differences between open source versions of distributed tracing (such as OpenZipkin) and enterprise providers such as Lightstep. The key feature of Lightstep that we discussed: garbage collection. If you are using a distributed tracing system, you could be collecting a lot of traces. You could collect a trace for every single user request. Not all of these traces are useful–but some of them are very useful. Maybe you only want to keep track of traces that take an exceptionally long latency. Maybe you want to keep every trace in the last 5 days and destroy them over time. So, the question of how to manage the storage footprint of those traces was as interesting as the discussion of distributed tracing itself. Beyond the distributed tracing features of his product, Ben has a vision for how his company can provide other observability tools over time. I spoke to Ben at Kubecon–and although this conversation does not talk about Kubernetes specifically, this topic is undoubtedly interesting to people who are building Kubernetes technologies. The post High Volume Distributed Tracing with Ben Sigelman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Since Kubernetes came out, engineers have been deploying clusters to Amazon. In the early years of Kubernetes, deploying to AWS meant that you had to manage the availability of the cluster yourself. You needed to configure etcd and your master nodes in a way that avoided having a single point of failure. Deploying Kubernetes on AWS became simpler with an open-source tool called kops (short for Kubernetes Operations). Kops automates the provisioning and high-availability deployment of Kubernetes. In late 2017, AWS released a managed Kubernetes service called EKS. EKS allows developers to run Kubernetes without having to manage the availability and scaling of a cluster. The announcement of EKS was exciting because it means that all of the major cloud providers are officially supporting Kubernetes. Arun Gupta is a principal open-source technologist at AWS, and he joins the show to explain what is involved in deploying and managing a Kubernetes cluster. Arun describes how to operate a Kubernetes cluster, including logging, monitoring, storage, and updates. If you are convinced that you want to use Kubernetes, but you aren’t sure yet how you want to deploy it, this will be useful information for you. We also discussed how Amazon built EKS, and some of the architectural decisions they made. AWS has had a managed container service called ECS since 2014. The development of ECS was instructive for the AWS engineers who built EKS. Amazon wanted to make EKS able to integrate with both open source tools and the Amazon managed services. The post Kubernetes on AWS with Arun Gupta appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A single user request hits Google’s servers. A user is looking for search results. In order to deliver those search results, that request will have to hit several different internal services on the way to getting a response. These different services work together to satisfy the user’s request. All of these services need to communicate efficiently, they need to scale, and they need to be secure. Services need to have a consistent way of being “observable”–allowing logging and monitoring. Services need to have proper security. Since every service wants these different features (like communication, load balancing, security), it makes sense to build these features into a common system that can be deployed to every server. Louis Ryan has spent his years at Google working on service infrastructure. During that time, he has seen massive changes in the way traffic flows through Google. First, the rise of Android, and all of the user traffic from mobile phones. And second, the rise of the Google Cloud Platform, which meant that Google was now responsible for nodes deployed by users outside of Google. These two changes–mobile and cloud–led to an increase in the amount of traffic and the type of traffic. All of this traffic leads to more internal services communicating with each other. How does service networking change in such an environment? Google’s adaptation to the new networking conditions is to introduce a “service mesh”. A service mesh is a network for services. It provides observability, resiliency, traffic control, and other features to every service that plugs into it. Each service needs to plug into the service mesh. In Kubernetes, services connect to the mesh through a sidecar. Let me explain the term “sidecar.” Kubernetes manages its resources in pods, and each pod contains a set of containers. You might have a pod that is dedicated to responding to any user that is requesting a picture of a cat. Within that pod, you not only have the container that serves the cat picture–you also have other “sidecar” containers that help out an application container. You could have a sidecar that gets deployed next to your application container that handles logging, or a sidecar that helps out with monitoring, or network communications. If you are using the Istio service mesh, that means that you are using a sidecar called Envoy. Envoy is a sidecar called a “service proxy” that provides configuration updates, load balancing, proxying, and lots of other benefits. If we get all that out of Envoy, why do we need a separate abstraction of a “service mesh”? Because it helps to have a tool that aggregates and centralizes all the different communications among these proxies. Every service gets a sidecar for a service proxy. Every service proxy communicates with the centralized service mesh. Louis Ryan joins this episode to explain the motivations for building the Istio service mesh, and the problems it solves for Kubernetes developers. For the next two weeks, we are covering exclusively the world of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a project that is likely to have as much impact as Linux–and it is very early days. Whether you are an expert in Kubernetes or you are just starting out, we have lots of episodes to fit your learning curve. To find all of our old episodes about Kubernetes (including a previous show about Istio), download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or for Android . In other podcast players, only the most 100 recent episodes are available, but in our apps you can find all 650 episodes–and there is also plenty of content that is totally unrelated to Kubernetes! The post Istio Motivations with Louis Ryan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Docker was released in 2013 and popularized the use of containers. A container is an abstraction for isolating a well-defined portion of an operating system. Developers quickly latched onto containers as a way to cut down on the cost of virtual machines–as well as isolate code and simplify deployments. Developers began deploying so many containers that they needed a centralized way to manage the containers. Then came the rise of the container orchestration framework. A container orchestration framework is used to manage operating system resources. Twitter had been using the open-source orchestration framework Apache Mesos to manage resources since 2010. So when developers started looking for a way to manage containers, many of them chose Mesos. Meanwhile, another container orchestration system came onto the scene: Docker Swarm. Swarm is a tool for managing containers that came from the same people who originally created Docker. Shortly thereafter, Kubernetes came out of Google. Google had been using containers internally with their cluster manager Borg. Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that was built with the lessons of managing resources at Google. The reason I recount this history (as I have in a few past episodes) is to underscore that there were a few years where there was a lot of debate around the best container orchestration system to use. Some people preferred Swarm, some preferred Mesos, and some preferred Kubernetes. Because of the lack of standardization, the community of developers who were building infrastructure in this space were put in a tough position: should you pick a specific orchestration framework, and go all in, building only tools for that one framework? Should you try to build tools to be compatible with all three frameworks, and attempt to satisfy Kubernetes, Mesos, and Swarm users? Or should you sit out altogether and build nothing? The fracturing of the community led to healthy debates, but it slowed down innovation because different developers were moving in different directions. Today, the container community has centralized: Kubernetes has become the most popular container orchestration framework. With the community centralizing on Kubernetes, developers are able to comfortably bet big on open source projects like Istio, Conduit, Rook, Fluentd, and Helm, each of which we will be covering in the next few weeks. The centralization on Kubernetes also makes it easier to build enterprise companies, who are no longer trying to think about which container orchestration to support. There is a wide array of Kubernetes-as-a-service providers offering a highly available runtime–and a variety of companies offering observability tools to make it easier to debug distributed systems problems. Despite all of these advances–Kubernetes is less usable than it should be. It still feels like operating a distributed system. Hopefully someday, operating a Kubernetes cluster will be as easy as operating your laptop computer. To get there, we need improvements in Kubernetes usability. Today’s guest Joe Beda was one of the original creators of the Kubernetes project. He is a founder of Heptio, a company that provides Kubernetes tools and services for enterprises. I caught up with Joe at KubeCon 2017, and he told me about where Kubernetes is today, where it is going, and what he is building at Heptio. Full disclosure–Heptio is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. For the next two weeks, we are covering exclusively the world of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a project that is likely to have as much impact as Linux. Whether you are an expert in Kubernetes or you are just starting out, we have lots of episodes to fit your learning curve. To find all of our old episodes about Kubernetes, download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or for Android . In other podcast players, only the most 100 recent episodes are available, but in our apps, you can find all 650 episodes–and there is also plenty of content that is totally unrelated to Kubernetes! The post Kubernetes Usability with Joe Beda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes in the Enterprise with Aparna Sinha 52:17
52:17 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:17
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedEnterprises want to update their technology faster. One way an enterprise can accelerate the adoption of new tools is to move more aggressively towards the cloud. By giving internal developers access to the cloud, it becomes easier to provision new servers–allowing for rapid experimentation, test environments, and scalability. In previous shows we have explored how large enterprises successfully learn to move their technology faster. Much of this process is rooted in being able to experiment quickly–which requires well-defined testing procedures, and the ability to quickly provision and destroy infrastructure. Many enterprises have large on-premise infrastructure deployments. An enterprise’s movement towards the cloud can be made complex by this existing set of servers. In today’s show, Aparna Sinha discusses how Kubernetes is useful for enterprises–and how it can improve development speed, experimentation, and observability. Aparna is the leader of the product team for Kubernetes and Container Engine at Google. Much of her job is centered around understanding what would be useful to enterprises who are choosing a cloud provider. The open source version of Kubernetes is useful on its own, but most enterprises choose a managed provider of Kubernetes–such as Google Kubernetes Engine–to help with support and onboarding . Full disclosure: Google is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Kubernetes in the Enterprise with Aparna Sinha appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Git is a distributed file system for version control. Git is extremely reliable, fast, and secure, owing to the fact that it is one of the oldest pieces of open source software. But even battle-tested software can have vulnerabilities. In this episode, we explore a subtle git vulnerability that could have potentially led to git users executing malicious scripts when they intended to simply pull a repository. Today’s guest Edward Thomson is a program manager at Microsoft, and a maintainer of libgit2, a C implementation of git. He also writes about git and hosts the podcast All Things Git . He is passionate about git development, which gave me a deeper perspective on something that I just consider a tool. But the only reason that tool is so good–the only reason it fades into the background–is because there are people that are passionate enough to work on it on a regular basis. We also spent some time talking about the vulnerabilities that can spread through shared code environments–particularly in the realm of git, npm, and PHP. And we touched on how deployment workflows around git and Kubernetes are changing. Full disclosure: Microsoft, where Edward works, is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Git Vulnerability with Edward Thomson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Shopify runs more than 600,000 small business websites. When Shopify was figuring out how to scale, the engineering teams did not have a standard workflow for how to deploy and manage services. Some teams used AWS, some teams used Heroku, some teams used other infrastructure providers. To manage all those stores effectively, Shopify has built its own platform-as-a-service on top of Kubernetes called Cloudbuddies. Cloudbuddies was inspired by Heroku, and it allows engineers at Shopify to deploy services in an opinionated way that is perfect for Shopify. Niko Kurtti is a production engineer at Shopify, and he joins the show to describe Shopify’s infrastructure–how they run so many stores, how they distribute those stores across their infrastructure, and the motivation for building their own internal platform on top of Kubernetes. Show Notes Shopify’s Journey to Kubernetes and PaaS: Niko Kurtti at QCon NY The post Shopify Infrastructure with Niko Kurtti appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Function Platforms with Chad Arimura and Matt Stephenson 46:48
46:48 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:48
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“Serverless” is a word used to describe functions that get deployed and run without the developer having to manage the infrastructure explicitly. Instead of creating a server, installing the dependencies, and executing your code, the developer just provides the code to the serverless API, and the serverless system takes care of the server creation, the installation, and the execution. Serverless was first offered with the AWS Lambda service but has since been offered by other cloud providers. There have also been numerous open source serverless systems. On SE Daily, we have done episodes about OpenWhisk, Fission, and Kubeless. All of these are built on the Kubernetes container management system. Kubernetes is an open-source tool used to build and manage infrastructure, so it is a useful building block for higher level systems. Chad Arimura is the VP of serverless at Oracle, where he runs the Fn project, an open source serverless platform built on top of Kubernetes. In the past, he ran Iron.io, a message broker platform. Matt Stephenson also joins the show–he is a senior principal software engineer at Oracle and has experience from Amazon and Google, where he worked on Google App Engine (which was arguably one of the first “serverless” platforms). We discussed why there are so many different serverless tools built on Kubernetes, and the tradeoffs that these serverless tools are exploring. The post Function Platforms with Chad Arimura and Matt Stephenson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When you interact with your bank, it probably feels different than when you interact with a software technology company. That’s because the biggest banks in the world were started before software became such a universally important tool. Their core competency is banking–not consumer software. Today, most banks make consumer-facing software. But these banks were not founded by engineers. The software development process at a typical bank does not look like the software development process at a software company like Netflix. Monzo is a digital bank that focuses on high quality engineering. Since it was started in 2015, Monzo has always thought of itself as a software company. This gives it certain advantages over older banks. Today’s guest Richard Dingwall is an engineer at Monzo, and he joins the show to describe Monzo’s software architecture, the engineering strategy, and its migration to Kubernetes. Richard has prior experience at several different banks and financial institutions. The post Build a Bank: Monzo with Richard Dingwall appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Rust is a systems programming language with a distinct set of features for safety and concurrency. In previous shows about Rust, we explored how Rust can prevent crashes and eliminate data races through its approach to type safety and memory management. Rust’s focus on efficiency and safety makes it a promising language for networking code. Tokio is a set of networking libraries built on Rust. Tokio enables developers to write asynchronous IO operations by way of its multithreaded scheduler. Tokio’s goal is to make production-ready clients and servers easy to create by focusing on small, reusable components. Carl Lerche is an engineer at Buoyant, a company that makes the popular Linkerd and Conduit service mesh systems. Kubernetes developers deploy service mesh to their distributed applications as sidecar proxies. These proxies need to be low-latency and highly reliable. In that light, it makes sense that Conduit (the more recent service mesh from Buoyant) is built using Rust. Carl joins the show to describe why Rust is useful for building networked services. The post Rust Networking with Carl Lerche appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A database stores data to an underlying section of storage. If you are an application developer, you might think of your persistent storage system as being the database itself–but at a lower level, that database is writing to block storage, file storage, or object storage. A container orchestration system manages application containers. If you want to run WordPress (a blogging platform) on Kubernetes, that means you also need to run a database to store your blog posts in a persistent way. To run a database, you need to have an underlying storage medium–which could be a disk that is at your on-prem data center, or block storage on a disk at a cloud provider. Kubernetes is not the only container orchestrator. There’s also Cloud Foundry, Mesos, Docker Swarm, and several others. Each of these container orchestrators needs to be able to run a variety of persistent workloads (such as a MySQL database or a Kafka cluster). Each of these persistent workloads needs to be able to use different types of backing storage. With the range of container orchestrators and the range of backing storage types, a problem arises. Every storage type would have to write custom code to connect to each container orchestrator. The solution to this is the CSI: the container storage interface. The CSI is an interface layer between the container orchestrator and the backing storage system. In today’s episode, Jie Yu from Mesosphere describes the motivation for the CSI, and gives an overview for its design principles. There are great lessons here for anyone working with containers or distributed systems in general. Show Notes Stripe: Designing Robust and Predictable APIs with Idempotency The post Container Storage with Jie Yu appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Container Native Development with Ralph Squillace 48:46
48:46 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked48:46
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedContainers have improved deployments and resource utilization. Kubernetes created a platform to manage those containers and orchestrate them into distributed applications. In today’s episode, we explore tools that improve the workflow of the application developer who is working with Kubernetes, including Helm, Draft, and Brigade. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, which allows users to find, share, and use software that is built for Kubernetes. The unit of installation for Helm users is a Helm Chart. Installing a Helm Chart can simplify the deployment of a database, load balancer, or continuous integration tool. Draft is a tool for simplifying the containerization process. When a developer runs Draft, a Dockerfile is created to containerize the application, and a Helm Chart is created to enable the application to be easily deployed. Brigade is a tool for creating and running Kubernetes workflows. Brigade allows for event-driven scripting on top of Kubernetes. Chatops, continuous integration systems, and complex big data pipelines can all be defined with Brigade. Brigade is exciting because it is a higher level tool on top of Kubernetes–in some ways similar to the “serverless on Kubernetes” systems we have covered in the past. Ralph Squillace is a principal program manager with Microsoft, where he works on containers, Linux, and cloud products. Ralph joins the show to talk about how developing with containers has changed in the last few years, and how it will continue to evolve in the near future. The post Container Native Development with Ralph Squillace appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Deploying software to a container presents a different security model than deploying an application to a VM. There is a smaller attack surface per container, but the container is colocated on a node with other containers. Containers are meant to have a shorter lifetime than VMs, so there are generally fewer consequences if a container needs to be destroyed and rebuilt due to a potential security vulnerability. Maya Kaczorowski works on container security at Google. In a recent talk at KubeCon , Maya discussed the runtime security of containers on Kubernetes. Maya joins the show to discuss container security, and what it means to software developers and operators. Maya also gives guidelines for evaluating the security of your own cluster. We talked about the security benefits of a managed Kubernetes provider and also explored how some container security vendor software works. The post Container Security with Maya Kaczorowski appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Voice interfaces are a newer form of communicating with computers. Alexa is a voice interface platform from Amazon. Alexa powers the Amazon Echo, as well as Alexa-enabled cars, refrigerators, and dishwashers. Any developer can build a device with a voice interface using a Raspberry Pi. Paul Cutsinger works on Echo and Alexa at Amazon. He’s focused on growing the market of developers who are building voice interfaces. In this episode, Paul describes how to design and implement a voice application for the Amazon Alexa platform. The market for voice powered apps is so new, and there has yet to be a “killer app.” If you like to tinker on new platforms, you will like this episode–and I was surprised by how easy it sounds to build a voice app. Personally, I use voice interfaces all the time–to set timers, to find out how to tell if a cucumber has gone bad, to ask what temperature to cook a potato at. Sometimes, when I am lying in bed trying to get to sleep, I will ask my nearest device to read me a Wikipedia article. These are great use cases, but I’m sure we will see something much more groundbreaking in the future. The post Alexa Voice Design with Paul Cutsinger appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Gloo is a function gateway built on top of the popular open source project Envoy. The goal of Gloo is to decouple client-facing APIs from upstream APIs. Gloo is similar to an API gateway, which is a tool that software companies can use to collect all their APIs and one place and impose security, monitoring, and other standards around those APIs. The goal of Gloo is to provide all the tools necessary to glue together traditional and cloud-native applications. Idit Levine is the CEO of Solo.io, a company that is building Gloo and several other projects. The post Gloo: Function Gateway with Idit Levine appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Mesos is a system for managing distributed systems. The goal of Mesos is to help engineers orchestrate resources among multi-node applications like Spark. Mesos can also manage lower level schedulers like Kubernetes. A common misconception is that Mesos aims to solve the same problem as Kubernetes, but Mesos is a higher level abstraction. Ben Hindman co-founded Mesosphere to bring the Mesos project to market. Large enterprises like Uber, Netflix, and Yelp use Mesosphere for resource management. Before he started the company, Ben worked in the Berkeley AMP Lab, a research program where the Spark and Tachyon projects were also born. At this point, he has spent significant time in both academia and industry. This conversation spans distributed systems theory, history, and practice. Ben and I spoke at KubeCon 2018 in Copenhagen–which was an amazing conference. We were both amazed at how big the audience for Kubernetes has gotten, and the pace at which the technology is advancing. Today, Kubernetes is mostly used for scheduling containerized applications that engineers have built themselves. But there will be higher level tools that use Kubernetes as a building block. Much like Zookeeper was used as a building block for Hadoop, Kubernetes will be used to build serverless applications and distributed databases. Once you are using a distributed database built on Kubernetes, you don’t want to think about the container orchestration–you want to think about the raw storage and CPU requirements for that database. This is one reason why Mesos is so compelling. Since Kubernetes creates an increased cardinality of distributed systems, it’s good to know that there is a framework built to manage those higher level applications. The post Cluster Schedulers with Ben Hindman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When I buy a mattress online, I pay for it with my credit card. Behind the scenes, a complex series of transactions occur between a payment gateway, the credit card company, and a few banks. There are problems with this process–it is slow, complex, and involves the synchronization of several different parties. Some consumers will not want to purchase the mattress because they do not have cash, and the lending rates they get offered are higher than they are willing to spend. If these consumers were presented with more intelligent loan rates, the lender could still make money, the mattress company could still make money, and the consumer would get a new mattress. It’s a missed opportunity all around. Affirm is a consumer financial services company. Their first product offers loans to consumers making purchases. In today’s episode, Affirm CTO Libor Michalek explains how Affirm decided to build this product, and what they have done to scale it. The conversation took me by surprise. Affirm was started by Max Levchin, who was a co-founder of PayPal. I assumed that when Affirm was created, they already knew exactly what they were going to build–because Affirm is a payments company and Max has had knowledge of the payments industry going back two decades. In reality, Affirm started out with more vague ideas around what they were building. They spent some time running small experiments as they looked for product/market fit–just like a bootstrapped startup would have. It was inspiring to know that even an experienced team is willing to go through the humble process of searching for a product within a space they are deeply familiar with. We didn’t get to all the questions I was planning to explore, but I hope to do another show about Affirm in the future. Show Notes Affirm Careers Page The post Affirm Engineering with Libor Michalek appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Superpedestrian Robotic Wheel / Infrastructure at HubSpot Meetup Talks 1:02:30
1:02:30 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:02:30
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedSuperpedestrian is a robotic bicycle wheel that learns how you pedal and personalizes your bicycle ride. The engineering challenges of Superpedestrian are at the intersection of robotics, software, and real-time analytics. The first half of today’s show is about Superpedestrian. Goss Nuzzo Jones and Matt Cole are engineers at Superpedestrian. The slides for their presentation are also in the show notes . The second half of today’s show is about HubSpot, a massive business with lots of infrastructure challenges. Thomas Petr explained how HubSpot’s engineering has matured, and some of the scaling problems they have tackled. Last month, we had three Software Engineering Daily Meetups: in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. At each of these Meetups, listeners from the SE Daily community got to meet each other and talk about software–what they are building and what they are excited about. I was happy to be in attendance at each of these, and I am posting the talks given by our presenters. The audio quality is not perfect on these, but there are also no ads. Thank you to HubSpot for hosting this Meetup–they have beautiful offices and if you are looking for a job (or if you want to host a technology Meetup in the Boston area) I strongly recommend checking them out. We’d love to have you as part of our community. We will have more Meetups eventually, and you can be notified of these by signing up for our newsletter. Come to SoftwareDaily.com and get involved with the discussion of episodes and software projects. You can also check out our open source projects–the mobile apps, and our website. The post Superpedestrian Robotic Wheel / Infrastructure at HubSpot Meetup Talks appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Alexis Le-Quoc started Datadog in 2010, after living through the Internet boom and bust cycle of the late 90s and early 2000s. In 2010, cloud was just starting to become popular. There was a gap in the market for infrastructure monitoring tools, which Alexis helped fill with the first version of Datadog. Since 2010, the number of different cloud infrastructure products has proliferated. There were new databases, queueing systems, virtualization and containerization tools. Web 2.0 took off, and thousands of new Internet businesses got started. Many of these businesses used Datadog to monitor their increasingly wide range of infrastructure configurations–and Datadog began to scale. On today’s show, Alexis tells the story of how Datadog grew from its first product into a variety of tools–infrastructure monitoring, logging, and application performance monitoring. Monitoring is a unique challenge–there is a ton of data, the data is latency sensitive, and the data is operationally important. These engineering constraints provide for a great conversation. Alexis is the CTO of Datadog, and we talked about cloud providers, building a business, infrastructure, and how to scale engineering management. Full disclosure: Datadog is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Building Datadog with Alexis Le-Quoc appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes Distributions with Brian Gracely and Michael Hausenblas 56:24
56:24 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:24
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedKubernetes is an open source container management system. Kubernetes is sometimes described as “the Linux of distributed systems” and this description makes sense: the large numbers of users and contributors in the Kubernetes community is comparable to the volume of Linux adopters in its early days. There are many different distributions of Linux: Ubuntu, Red Hat, Chromium OS. These different operating system distributions were created to fulfill different needs. Linux is used for Raspberry Pis, Android phones, and enterprise workstations. These different use cases require different configurations of an operating system. Similarly, there are different distributions of Kubernetes because there are different types of distributed systems. The internal infrastructure of a cloud provider might use one type of Kubernetes to serve users running application containers. A network of smart security cameras might be networked together with a different distribution of Kubernetes. Brian Gracely and Michael Hausenblas join the show today to discuss Kubernetes distributions. Brian and Michael work at Red Hat, which helps maintain OKD (formerly “Origin”), the Red Hat Community Distribution of Kubernetes, upon which Red Hat OpenShift is based. OpenShift is a platform as a service that enterprises use to deploy and manage their applications. Full disclosure: Red Hat is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Show Notes Brian Gracely, Author at OpenShift Blog Michael Hausenblas 12 Kubernetes distributions leading the container revolution | InfoWorld Find the Perfect Kubernetes Distribution – The New Stack Kubernetes distributions vs. the open source option Cloud Native Computing Foundation Launches Certified Kubernetes Program with 32 Conformant Distributions and Platforms – Cloud Native Computing Foundation Enterprise Kubernetes – Red Hat OpenShift An Introduction to Enterprise Kubernetes The coming of the Kubernetes distributions · More than seven CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape Kubernetes Distributions and ‘Kernels’ – Tim Hockin & Michael Rubin, Google – YouTube The post Kubernetes Distributions with Brian Gracely and Michael Hausenblas appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Continuous Delivery Pipelines with Abel Wang 43:44
43:44 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:44
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedContinuous integration and delivery allows teams to move faster by allowing developers to ship code independently of each other. A multi-stage CD pipeline might consist of development, staging, testing, and production. At each of these stages, a new piece of code undergoes additional tests, so that when the code finally makes it to production, the developers can be certain it won’t break the rest of the project. In a company, the different engineers working on a software project are given the permissions to ship code through a continuous delivery pipeline. Employees at a company have a strong incentive not to push buggy code to production. But what about open source contributors? What does the ideal continuous delivery workflow look like for an open source project? Abel Wang works on Azure Pipelines, a continuous integration and delivery tool from Microsoft. Azure Pipelines is designed to work with open source projects as well as companies. Abel joins the show to talk about using continuous integration and delivery within open source, and the process of designing a CI/CD tool that can work in any language and environment. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of SE Daily. Show Notes Create a CI/CD pipeline for your app with the Azure DevOps Project | Microsoft Docs Define a multi-stage CD release process | Microsoft Docs Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery | Visual Studio Team Services Build and deploy your app – examples | Microsoft Docs Extensions for Visual Studio family of products | Visual Studio Marketplace What is Continuous Integration? – Azure DevOps | Microsoft Docs What is Continuous Delivery? – Azure DevOps | Microsoft Docs Deploy a Docker container app to an Azure web app | Microsoft Docs Getting started with Azure DevOps Projects to setup CI/CD pipeline for ASP.NET Core & Containers | Microsoft Build 2018 | Channel 9 The post Continuous Delivery Pipelines with Abel Wang appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A company runs a variety of distributed systems applications such as Hadoop for batch processing jobs, Spark for data science, and Kubernetes for container management. These distributed systems tools can run on-prem, in a cloud provider, or in a hybrid system that uses on-prem and cloud infrastructure. Some enterprises use VMs, some use bare metal, some use both. Mesosphere is a company that was started to abstract the complexity of resource management away from the application developer. Instead of a developer managing virtual machines, provisioning cloud infrastructure, or wiring all that infrastructure together to run distributed applications, the developer spins up distributed applications like Kubernetes, Spark, or Jenkins on top of Mesosphere, and Mesosphere provisions the machines on the underlying infrastructure. Using Kubernetes on top of Mesos allows you to separate resource provisioning from the actual container orchestration. In a previous episode, we explored how Netflix uses Mesos with a container orchestrator on top to simplify the resource management of microservice application containers as well as data science workloads. Chris Gaun is a product manager at Mesosphere who helped build Kubernetes-as-a-service. In today’s show, he describes why it is useful to have separate layers for resource provisioning and container orchestration. He also talks about the difficulties of manually installing Kubernetes, and why Mesosphere built a Kubernetes-as-a-service product. Full disclosure: Mesosphere is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Orchestrating Kubernetes with Chris Gaun appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes Continuous Deployment with Sheroy Marker 48:33
48:33 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked48:33
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedEngineering organizations can operate more efficiently by working with a continuous integration and continuous deployment workflow. Continuous integration is the process of automatically building and deploying code that gets pushed to a remote repository. Continuous deployment is the process of moving that code through a pipeline of environments, from dev to test to production. At each stage, the engineers feel increasingly safe that the code will not break the user experience. When a company adopts Kubernetes, the workflow for deploying software within that company might need to be refactored. If the company starts to deploy containers in production, and managing those containers using Kubernetes, the company will also want to have a testing pipeline that emulates the production environment using containers and Kubernetes. Sheroy Marker is the head of technology at ThoughtWorks products, where he works on GoCD, a continuous delivery tool. Sheroy joins the show to talk about how Kubernetes affects continuous delivery workflows, and the process of building out Kubernetes integrations for GoCD. We also discussed the landscape of continuous delivery tools–why there are so many continuous delivery tools, and the question of how to choose a continuous delivery product if you are implementing CD. Continuous delivery tooling is in some ways like the space of monitoring, logging, and analytics–there are lots of successful products in the market. Full disclosure: ThoughtWorks and GoCD are sponsors of Software Engineering Daily. The post Kubernetes Continuous Deployment with Sheroy Marker appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Kubernetes Impact with Clayton Coleman 1:05:16
1:05:16 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:05:16
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedKubernetes is in production clusters around the world with hundreds of thousands of containers. Kubernetes provides a distributed systems management environment for small startups and giant enterprises with applications ranging from microservices to machine learning pipelines. Because the use cases are already so wide-ranging, and the project has had so much adoption, the focus of many of the Kubernetes core contributors is stability. Clayton Coleman joins the show to talk about the impact that Kubernetes is having on software engineering and the efforts of the community to improve stability. Clayton is the lead engineer for OpenShift, a platform-as-a-service from Red Hat. Autoscaling, monitoring, and etcd are a few of the topics we discuss. Improvements to each of these areas are making Kubernetes easier to work with. There is a possibility that the Prometheus monitoring system will get pulled into Kubernetes itself, and we explore the pros and cons of this architectural decision. From his experience working on OpenShift, Clayton also has a lot to share around the idea of a platform-as-a-service. Platform-as-a-service tooling can make enterprises significantly more productive, serving as a layer between a cloud provider and a developer that is shipping application code. Cloud providers can be complex to learn how to work with. As enterprises adopt cloud more aggressively, they are using platform-as-a-service tools as an interface for developers to work with those clouds in a more opinionated way. Kubernetes is used as a foundation for platforms like OpenShift, because Kubernetes can orchestrate resources on a cloud in a way that makes it easier for a deployment to be multicloud, or portable between clouds. In our previous episode with Clayton 2 years ago, we covered the basics of OpenShift and the developments that were occurring around Kubernetes at the time. In today’s show we go deeper into how the Kubernetes ecosystem is evolving, and his personal experience working on OpenShift. Full disclosure: Red Hat (where Clayton works) is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Kubernetes Impact with Clayton Coleman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The main user interfaces today are the smartphone, the laptop, and the desktop computer. Some people today interact with voice interfaces, augmented reality, virtual reality, and automotive computer screens like the Tesla. In the future, these other interfaces will become more common. Developers will want to be able to expose their applications to these new interfaces. For example, let’s say I am a developer who builds a podcast playing app. I have a website and a mobile app, but what if I want to expose that app to a voice interface? Or, what if I want to expose a specific piece of functionality from that app, to make shortcuts easier? Android Slices are user interface components that expose pieces of application functionality to Google Search, Google Assistant, and other applications. Jason Monk is a software engineer who works on Android Slices at Google. Jason joins the show to discuss how mobile user interfaces are changing, the motivation behind Android Slices, and the engineering behind this newer building block for Android developers. The post Android Slices with Jason Monk appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Back in 2014, platform-as-a-service was becoming an increasingly popular idea. The idea of PaaS was to sit on top of infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, and simplify some of the complexity of these infrastructure providers. Heroku had built a successful businesses from the idea of platform-as-a-service, and there was a widely held desire in the developer community to have an “open source Heroku.” One project that was working towards the idea of an open source platform-as-a-service was Deis. Deis made it easier for people to deploy and manage their applications, and it simplified some of the hard parts of container management. When Kubernetes came out, Deis got refactored to use Kubernetes under the hood for container orchestration. Deis was one of the first projects to use Kubernetes as a tool to build a platform-as-a-service, and the team that was working on Deis got very early exposure to the process of building a platform on top of Kubernetes. Michelle Noorali was one of the engineers on the Deis team. When Deis got acquired by Microsoft, Michelle was working on Helm, a package manager for distributed systems. Helm allows developers to deploy distributed applications on top of Kubernetes more easily. A few examples of distributed applications that can be deployed using Helm are Kafka, Prometheus, and IPFS. One reason Helm is so useful is that distributed systems are notoriously hard to configure and run. Since joining Microsoft, Michelle has continued to work on Helm. She is also a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee and the board of the CNCF. Michelle joins the show to talk about her early experiences building PaaS and her perspective on the Kubernetes ecosystem. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Helm with Michelle Noorali appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Building software today is much faster than it was just a few years ago. The tools are higher level, and abstract away tasks that would have required months of development. Much of a developer’s time used to be spent optimizing databases, load balancers, and queueing systems in order to be able to handle the load created by thousands of users. Today, scalability is built into much of our infrastructure by default. We have had several years of infrastructure with automatic scalability, and some of the more recent advances in developer tooling are about convenience, and faster development time. Developers are spending less time dealing with the ambiguous idea of a “server” and more time interacting with well-defined APIs and data sources. A few examples are AppSync from Amazon Web Services and Firebase from Google. These tools are like databases with rich interactive functionality. Instead of having to create a server to listen to a database for changes and push notifications to users in response to those changes, AppSync and Firebase can be programmed to have this kind of functionality built in. There are many other examples of high level APIs, rich backends, and developer productivity tools that lead to shorter development time. What does this mean for developers? It means we can build much faster. We can prototype quickly for low amounts of money–without sacrificing quality. We can spend more time focusing on design, user experience, and business models and less time focusing on keeping the application up and running. Nader Dabit is a developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, and he returns to the show to discuss modern tooling, and how that tooling changes the potential for high output and fast iteration among developers. It is a strategic, philosophical discussion of how to build modern software. Show Notes State of React Native 2018 The post Build Faster with Nader Dabit appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Food gets thrown away from restaurants, homes, catering companies, and any other place with a kitchen. Most of this food gets thrown away when it is still edible, and could provide nutrition to someone who is hungry. Just like Airbnb makes use of excess living capacity, OLIO was started to connect excess food with people who want to eat that food. There are numerous challenges with this idea. How do you control quality and ensure the food is safe? How do you make money as a business? How do you solve the chicken and egg problem, and make sure that you get hungry users and people with food to give away at the same time? Lloyd Watkin is a software engineer at OLIO, and he joins today’s episode to describe how the platform works, how it is built, and how the company plans to scale their large base of volunteers. It’s a fascinating set of operational and engineering issues. The post OLIO: Food Sharing with Lloyd Watkin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
At Google, the job of a site reliability engineer involves building tools to automate infrastructure operations. If a server crashes, there is automation in place to create a new server. If a service starts to receive a high load of traffic, there is automation in place to scale up the instances of that service. In order to create an automated response to an infrastructure problem, a site reliability engineer needs insights into that infrastructure. Every service needs tools around monitoring, alerting, debugging, and distributed tracing. One benefit of working at a large company like Google is that an engineer building a new product gets this kind of tooling by default. If I am hacking on a project at home, I have to set up all kinds of tools to help me diagnose and resolve problems. Setting up this tooling takes time, and requires expertise. Stackdriver is a set of tools and instrumentation that allows developers to monitor, debug, and inspect infrastructure. Stackdriver is based on the internal observability tools built for Google. Mark Carter is a group product manager at Google , and he joins the show to discuss site reliability engineering and the creation of Stackdriver. The post Infrastructure Monitoring with Mark Carter appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 GitOps: Kubernetes Continuous Delivery with Alexis Richardson 42:03
42:03 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked42:03
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedContinuous delivery is a way of releasing software without requiring software engineers to synchronize during a release. Over the last decade, continuous delivery workflows have evolved as the tools have changed. Jenkins was one of the first continuous delivery tools and is still in heavy use today. Netflix’s open sourced Spinnaker has also been widely adopted. As Kubernetes has grown in popularity, some engineers have developed a workflow around Kubernetes and Git known as GitOps. GitOps treats Git as the source of truth for deployments. Under GitOps, when a divergence occurs between your git repository’s configuration files and the state of your production infrastructure, your infrastructure should automatically adjust its state to align with the state defined in git. Alexis Richardson is the CEO of Weaveworks, a company that has built tooling around GitOps. He joins the show to describe how GitOps works, and explain how it compares to other methods for continuous delivery. The post GitOps: Kubernetes Continuous Delivery with Alexis Richardson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Klarna is a payments company headquartered in Sweden. Since being established in 2005 it has grown to handling $21 billion in online sales in 2017. Roughly 40% of all e-commerce sales in Sweden go through Klarna. Klarna’s original differentiator was that it allowed users to checkout of e-commerce stores without entering in credit card information. Instead, the user enters an email address and registers with Klarna. This allows Klarna to assume the risk of the transaction, in place of the credit card company. Klarna’s clever payment method became very popular, and 13 years later Klarna is a bank with a variety of financial services and payment methods. Marcus Granstrom is a director of engineering at Klarna. His work ranges from product development to systems architecture to management. His cross functional role has some similarity to Raylene Yung from Stripe, who is also an engineering director at a payments company, and was on the show yesterday. Marcus walked me through the life of a payment hitting Klarna’s servers, and this served as a nice starting point for a conversation about Klarna’s infrastructure, their product, and their engineering practices. The post Klarna Engineering with Marcus Granström appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Stripe is a payments API that allows merchants to transact online. Since the creation of the payments API, Stripe has expanded into adjacent services such as fraud detection, business management, and billing. These other verticals leverage the existing customer base and infrastructure that Stripe has developed from the success of their payments business. Raylene Yung is the head of payments at Stripe. She joins the show to talk about her work, which includes elements of engineering, product development, design, and management. All of these dimensions of her job came up in our conversation, which made for a wide ranging conversation. This interview comes in the context of Stripe’s rapid growth. The organization is changing, and Raylene explored the questions that Stripe is asking itself internally about org structure. Namely: what is the tradeoff between a defined, hierarchical structure of direct reports versus a decentralized, flat org structure? Is there any advantage to making roles highly defined (such as “senior infrastructure software engineer”)? Or is it better to let people have fluid roles, and self-assemble? Raylene was willing to explore these questions–and I found her answers highly useful and thought provoking. The post Stripe Engineering with Raylene Yung appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Java programs compile into Java bytecode. Java bytecode executes in the Java Virtual Machine, a runtime environment that compiles that bytecode further into machine code, and optimizes the runtime by identifying “hot” code paths and keeping those hot code paths executing quickly. The Java Virtual Machine is a popular platform for building languages on top of. Languages like Scala and Clojure compile down to Java bytecode, and can take advantage of the garbage collection system and the code path optimizations of the JVM. But when Scala and Clojure compile into Java bytecode, the code “shape”–the way that the programs are laid out in memory–is not the same as when Java programs compile into Java bytecode. Executing bytecode that comes from Scala will have certain performance penalties relative to a functionally identical program written in Java. GraalVM is a system for interpreting languages into Java bytecode that can run efficiently on the JVM. Any language can be interpreted into an abstract syntax tree that the GraalVM can execute using the JVM. Languages that can run on GraalVM include JavaScript, R, Ruby, and Python. Thomas Wuerthinger is a senior research director at Oracle and the project lead for GraalVM. He joins the show to explain the motivation for GraalVM, the architecture of the project, and the future of language interoperability. It was an exciting discussion and I learned a lot about the Java ecosystem. The post GraalVM with Thomas Wuerthinger appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“Edge computing” is a term used to define computation that takes place in an environment outside of a data center. Edge computing is a broad term. Your smartphone is an edge device. A self-driving car is an edge device. A security camera with a computer chip is an edge device. These “edge devices” have existed for a long time now, but the term “edge computing” has only started being used more recently. Why is that? It is mostly because the volume of data produced by edge devices, and the type of computation that we want from edge devices is changing. We want to develop large sensor networks to enable smart factories, and smart agriculture fields. We want our smartphones to have machine learning models that get updated as frequently as possible. We want to use self-driving cars, and drones, and smart refrigerators to develop elaborate mesh networks–and perhaps even have micropayments between machines, so that computation can be offloaded from edge devices to a nearby mesh network for a small price. Kubernetes is a tool for orchestrating distributed, containerized computation. Just as Kubernetes is being widely used for data center infrastructure, it can also be used to orchestrate computation among nodes on-premise at a factory, or in a smart agriculture environment. In today’s episode, Venkat Yalla from Microsoft joins the show to talk about Kubernetes at the edge, and how Internet of things applications can use Kubernetes for their deployments today–and what the future might hold. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a sponsor of SE Daily. The post Edge Kubernetes with Venkat Yalla appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In the first 10 years of cloud computing, a set of technologies emerge that every software enterprise needs; continuous delivery, version control, logging, monitoring, routing, data warehousing. These tools were built into the Cloud Foundry project, a platform for application deployment and management. As we enter the second decade of cloud computing, another new set of technologies is emerging as useful tools. Serverless functions allow for rapid scalability at a low cost. Kubernetes offers a control plane for containerized infrastructure. Reactive programming models and event sourcing make an application more responsive and simplify the interactions between teams who are sharing data sources. The job of a cloud provider is to see new patterns in software development and offer tools to developers to help them implement those new patterns. Of course, building these tools is a huge investment. If you’re a cloud provider, your customers are trusting you with the health of their application. The tool that you build has to work properly and you have to help the customers figure out how to leverage the tool and resolve any breakages. Onsi Fakhouri is the senior VP of R&D for cloud at Pivotal, a company that provides software and support for Spring, Cloud Foundry, and several other tools. I sat down with Onsi to discuss his strategy for determining which products Pivotal chooses to build. There is a multitude of engineering and business elements that Onsi has to consider when allocating resources to a project. Cloud Foundry is used by giant corporations like banks, telcos, and automotive manufacturers. Spring is used by most enterprises that run Java, including most of the startups that I have worked at in the past. Cloud Foundry has to be able to run on-premise and in the cloud providers like AWS, Google and Microsoft. Pivotal also has its own cloud, Pivotal Web Services, and all of these stakeholders have different technologies that they would like to see built. Onsi’s job is to determine which ones have the highest net impact and make a decision on those and allocate resources towards them. I interviewed Onsi at Spring One Platform, which is a conference that is organized by Pivotal who, full disclosure, is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. This week’s episodes are all conversations from that conference, and if there’s a conference that you think I should attend and do coverage at, let me know. Whether you like this format or not, I would love to get your feedback. We have some big developments coming for Software Engineering Daily in 2018 and we want to have a closer dialogue with the listeners. Please send me an email, jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com or join our Slack channel. The post Cloud R&D with Onsi Fakhouri appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform as a service for deploying and managing web applications. Cloud Foundry is widely used by enterprises who are running applications that are built using Spring, a popular web framework for Java applications, but developers also use Cloud Foundry to manage apps built in Ruby, Node and any other programming language. Cloud Foundry includes routing, message brokering, service discovery, authentication and other application level tooling for building and managing a distributed system. Some of the standard tooling in Cloud Foundry was adopted from Netflix open-source projects, such as Hystrix, which is the circuit breaker system; and Eureka, which is the service discovery server and client. When a developer deploys their application to Cloud Foundry, the details of what is going on are mostly abstracted away, which is by design. When you’re trying to ship code and iterate quickly for your organization, you don’t want to think about how your application image is being deployed to underlying infrastructure. You don’t want to think about whether you’re deploying a container or a VM, but if you use Cloud Foundry enough, you might have become curious about how Cloud Foundry schedules and runs application code. BOSH is a component of Cloud Foundry that sits between the infrastructure layer and the application layer. Cloud Foundry can be deployed to any cloud provider because of BOSH’s well-defined interface. BOSH has the abstraction of a stem cell, which is a versioned operating system image wrapped in packaging for whatever infrastructure as a service is running underneath. With BOSH, whenever a VM gets deployed no your underlying infrastructure, that VM gets a BOSH agent. The agent communicates with the centralized component of BOSH called the director. This role of director is the leader of the distributed system. Rupa Nandi is a director of engineering at Pivotal where she works on Cloud Foundry. In this episode we talked about scheduling an infrastructure, the relationship between Spring and Cloud Foundry and the impact of Kubernetes, which Cloud Foundry has integrated with so that users can run Kubernetes workloads on Cloud Foundry. I interviewed Rupa at SpringOne Platform, a conference that is organized by Pivotal who, full disclosure, is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily, and this week’s episode are all conversations from that conference. Whether you like this format or don’t like this format, I would love to get your feedback. We have some big developments coming for Software Engineering Daily in 2018 and we want to have a closer dialogue with the listeners. Please send me an email, jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com or join our Slack channel. We really want to know what you’re thinking and what your feedback is, what you would like to hear more about, what you’d like to hear less about, who you are. The post Cloud Foundry with Rupa Nandi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Google Docs is used by millions of people to collaborate on documents together. With today’s technology, you could spend a weekend coding and build a basic version of a collaborative text editor. But in 2004 it was not so easy. In 2004 Steve Newman built a product called Writely, which allowed users to collaborate on documents together. Initially, Writely was hosted on a single server that Steve managed himself. All of the reads and writes to the documents went through that single server. Writely rapidly grew in popularity, and Steve went through a crash course in distributed systems as he tried to keep up with the user base. In 2006, Writely was acquired by Google, and Steve spent his next four years turning Writely into Google Docs. Eventually he moved onto other projects within Google—“Cosmo” and “Megastore Replication.” When Steve left the company in 2010, he took with him the lessons of logging and monitoring that keep Google’s infrastructure observable. Large organizations have terabytes of log data to manage. This data streams off the servers that are running our applications. That log data gets processed in a “metrics pipeline” and turned into monitoring data. Monitoring data aggregates log data in a more presentable format. Most of the log messages that get created will never be seen with human eyes. These logs get aggregated into metrics, then compressed, and (in many cases) eventually thrown away. Different companies have different sensitivity around their logs, so some companies may not garbage collect any of their logs! When a problem occurs in our infrastructure, we need to be able to dig into our terabytes of log data and quickly find the root cause of a problem. If our log data is compressed and stored on disk, it will take longer to access it. But if we keep all of our logs in memory, it could get expensive. To review: if I want to build a logging system from scratch today I need to build: a metrics pipeline for converting log data into monitoring data; a complicated caching system, a way to store and compress logs; a query engine that knows how to ask questions to the log storage system; a user interface so I don’t have to inspect these logs via command line… The list of requirements goes on and on—which is why there is a huge industry around log management. And logging keeps evolving! One example we covered recently is distributed tracing, which is used to diagnose requests that travel through multiple endpoints. After Steve Newman left Google, he started Scalyr, a product that allows developers to consume, store, and query log messages. I was looking forward to talking to Steve about data engineering, and the query engine that Scalyr has architected, but we actually spent most of our conversation talking about the early days of Writely, and his time at Google—particularly the operational challenges of Google’s infrastructure. Full disclosure: Scalyr is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post High Volume Logging with Steve Newman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Duolingo is a language learning platform with over 200 million users. On a daily basis millions of users receive customized language lessons targeted specifically to them. These lessons are generated by a system called the session generator. Andre Kenji Horie is senior engineer at Duolingo. He wrote about the process of rewriting the session generator, moving from Python to Scala and changing architecture at the same time. In this episode Adam Bell talks with him about the reasons for the rewrite, what drove them to move to Scala and the experience of moving from one technology stack to another. Show Notes Rewriting Doulingo’s Engine in Scala Jobs at Duolingo The post Scala at Duolingo with Andre Kenji Horie appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Ten years ago, if you wanted to build software, you probably needed to know how to write code. Today, the line between “technical” and “non-technical” people is blurring. Website designers can make a living building sites for people on WordPress or Squarespace–without knowing how to write code. Salesforce integration experts can help a sales team set up complicated software–without knowing how to write code. Shopify experts can set up an ecommerce store to your exact specifications–without knowing how to write code. WordPress, Squarespace, Salesforce, and Shopify are all fantastic services–but they are not compatible with each other. I can’t install a WordPress plugin on Salesforce. Now imagine this from the point of view of plugin creators. Plugin creators make easy ways to integrate different pieces of software together. Take PayPal as an example. PayPal wants to make it easy for software builders to integrate with their API. One plugin that PayPal has is a button that says “Pay with PayPal.” If I am a developer at PayPal, and I am building a button that people should be able to easily put on their webpage so that their users can pay with PayPal, I have to create a button that is compatible with WordPress, and Squarespace, and Wix, and Weebly, and GoDaddy, and Blogger, and all the other website builders that I might want to integrate with. In 2014, Zack Bloom started a company called Eager. Eager was a cloud app marketplace which allowed app developers to make flexible plugins that non-technical users could drag and drop into their site without technical expertise. In order for these non-technical users to add any apps from the Eager marketplace to their webpage, they had to drop in a line of JavaScript–which is, unfortunately, a significant hurdle for a nontechnical user. Eager proved to be a useful distribution mechanism for plugin developers who could write a plugin once and get distributed to multiple plugin marketplaces. But Eager was not as widely used as a way to directly drag and drop plugins onto sites. The question was: how do you build a marketplace for non-technical users to add plugins to any website without forcing the non-technical user to write code? How do you make editing any website as easy as a WYSIWYG editor? The CDN turns out to be the perfect distribution platform for these kinds of apps. Users already integrate with a CDN, so the CDN can do the work of inserting the code that allows the plugins to be added to a user’s webpage. Because of the opportunity for the integration between a plugin marketplace and a CDN, Eager was acquired by Cloudflare, and Eager became Cloudflare apps. Zack Bloom joins the show today to discuss the motivations for his company, the engineering behind building a cloud app marketplace, and the acquisition process of his company Eager. The post Cloud Marketplace with Zack Bloom appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Scalable Multiplayer Games with Yan Cui 1:06:35
1:06:35 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:06:35
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRemember when the best game you could play on your phone was Snake? In 1998, Snake was preloaded on Nokia phones, and it was massively popular. That same year Half-Life won game of the year on PC. Metal Gear Solid came out for Playstation. The first version of Starcraft also came out in 1998. In 1998, few people would have anticipated that games with as much interactivity as Starcraft would be played on mobile phones twenty years later. Today, mobile phones have the graphics and processing power of a desktop gaming PC from two decades ago. But one thing still separates desktop gaming from mobile gaming: the network. With desktop gaming, users have a reliable wired connection that keeps their packets moving over the network with speeds that let them compete with other users. With mobile gaming, the network can be flaky. How do we architect real-time strategy games that can be played over an intermittent network connection? Yan Cui is an engineer at Space Ape Games, a company that makes interactive multiplayer games for mobile devices. In a previous episode, Yan described his work re-architecting a social networking startup where the costs had gotten out of control. Yan has a skill for describing software architecture and explaining the tradeoffs. When architecting a multiplayer mobile game, there are many tradeoffs to consider. What do you build and what do you buy? Do you centralize your geographical deployment to make it easier to reconcile conflicts, or do you spread your server deployment out globally? What is the interaction between the mobile clients and the server? The question of interaction between client and server for a mobile game has lessons that are important for anyone building a highly interactive mobile application. For example, think about Uber. When I make a request for a car, I can look at my phone and see the car on the map, slowly approaching me. The driver can look at his phone and see if I move across the street. This is accomplished by synchronizing the data from the driver’s phone and my phone in a centralized server, and sending the synchronized state of the world out to me and the driver. How much data does the centralized server need to get from the mobile phones? How often does it need to make those requests? The answers to these questions will vary based on bandwidth, device type, phone battery life, and other factors. There are similar problems in mobile game engineering, when users are in different players on a virtual map. They are fighting each other, trying to avoid enemies, trying to steal power ups from each other. Mobile games can be even more interactive than a ridesharing app like Uber, so the questions of data synchronization can be even harder to answer. On Software Engineering Daily, we have explored the topic of real-time synchronization in our past shows about the infrastructure of Uber and Lyft. To find these old episodes, you can download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android . In other podcast players, you can only access the most recent 100 episodes. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help. Show Notes Yan Cui’s new video course: AWS Lambda in Motion The post Scalable Multiplayer Games with Yan Cui appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Decentralized Objects with Martin Kleppmann 1:15:27
1:15:27 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:15:27
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe Internet was designed as a decentralized system. Theoretically, if Alice wants to send an email to Bob, she can set up an email client on her computer and send that email to Bob’s email server on his computer. In reality, very few people run their own email servers. We all send our emails to centralized services like Gmail, and connect to those centralized services using our own client—a browser on our laptop or a mobile application on our smart phone. Gmail is popular because nobody wants to run their own email server—it’s too much work. With Gmail, our emails our centralized, but centralization comes with convenience. Similar centralization happened with online payments. If Alice wants to send $5 to Bob, she needs to go through centralized banking infrastructure. Alice tells her bank to send $5 from her bank account to Bob’s bank account. This is not how it works in the physical world. if Alice wants to pay cash to Bob, she doesn’t have to go and meet him at a physical bank. She just takes out a $5 bill from her wallet and hands it to him. The invention of Bitcoin proved that digital wallets and peer-to-peer payments are possible. But running your own wallet is like running your own email server. It is inconvenient, and so we trade decentralization for convenience once again. We use services like Coinbase, where users buy and sell cryptocurrencies in a centralized provider. There are people in the cryptocurrency community who hate the idea of Coinbase. These people keep their cryptocurrency spread out on their own hardware wallets. Some of these people also run their own email servers. Are these people just adding unnecessary inconvenience to their lives for no reason? No. These are smart, successful people. They don’t like to waste time. So what are they doing running their own email servers? Distributed systems theory teaches the risk of centralized computer systems. If you have a single server that all your communication has to be routed through, your computer network will stop functioning if that server dies. Today, civilization is reliant on centralized computer systems. This is fundamentally dangerous. The 2008 financial crisis proved how risky it is to centralize our money in the hands of a few people. The Equifax breach proved how risky it is to centralize our identity in the hands of a few people. What happens if Dropbox runs out of money and has to shut down? What happens if all of the data centers at Amazon Web Services get wiped simultaneously? What happens if Coinbase gets hacked and every user at Coinbase loses all their money? We have seen centralized systems collapse. The people who are running their own email servers are not crazy. Even if Gmail disappears tomorrow, they will still have access to their emails. With the example of email, we see that deploying and managing a decentralized system is possible. Decentralization is a desirable feature of computer systems. So how do we make more of our applications decentralized? The cypherpunks were working for decades to make decentralized money a reality. Satoshi Nakamoto invented the blockchain, and we now have a computer science construct that enables decentralized money. The blockchain also enables many other decentralized applications. By solving a specific problem, Satoshi came up with a general solution. This is how progress often happens in computer science. In order to fix a system, we create a new tool. That tool can be applied to other systems that we don’t anticipate. The blockchain is a tool that solves one set of problems in distributed systems. Conflict-free replicated data types are another type of tool. Conflict-free replicated data types (or CRDTs for short) are objects that can be mutated by multiple users at the same time without creating data corruption. The most common example of a conflict-free replicated data type is the shopping cart. Let’s say Alice and Bob share an account on an ecommerce web site. Alice is building a house, and she wants to buy some tools online. Alice has a shopping cart with a hammer in it. Bob logs into the ecommerce web site from a different computer at the same time Alice is logged in. Bob just wants to buy a tuxedo—he doesn’t know why Alice left a hammer in the shopping cart, so he clicks a button to remove all the items from the shopping cart. At the exact same moment, Alice clicks from her computer to add a drill to the shopping cart. The server receives both requests: Bob wants to delete all items in the shopping cart, Alice wants to add a drill to the shopping cart. Both requests occurred at the exact same time, but we have to decide how to process them in some order. This is a situation known as a conflict. Which request should execute first? Should the resulting shopping cart be empty? Should the shopping cart only have a drill in it? In either case, Alice or Bob is going to be disappointed—there is no way to avoid that. But we need some way to resolve the conflict deterministically. We do not want to have to send a message to both Alice and Bob that says “sorry, our shopping cart cannot handle your request. Please try again later.” We need the shopping cart to be a conflict-free shopping cart—and today’s episode is about the different techniques that can be used for conflict resolution. The shopping cart is a simple example where user collaboration leads to conflicts. Imagine all the other ways you collaborate with other users: chat systems like Slack, social networks like Facebook, document systems like Google Docs. One way to resolve a conflict is through a technique called operational transform. Operational transform requires all the operations in the distributed system to be funneled through a centralized server. When a conflict occurs, the centralized server detects the problem and figures out how to resolve it. Google Docs uses operational transform to resolve the frequent conflicts that occur when two users are sharing a text document. But operational transform only works if you have a centralized server. An alternative solution is conflict-free replicated data types, which maintain each user’s replica of the data in a format that allows the client copies to resolve conflicts in a peer-to-peer fashion—without a centralized server. Last example: Alice and Bob are now collaborating on a document that uses a CRDT data structure under the hood. Whenever they send their local changes to each other, any conflicts that occur can be resolved directly on the client. Alice and Bob can collaborate on a document just like they can send emails to each other. With CRDTs, we can build decentralized, collaborative applications. But CRDTs are hard to use. Just like with blockchain technology, we don’t yet have the simple, elegant abstractions that let inexperienced programmers build peer-to-peer applications without the fear of conflicts. Martin Kleppman is a distributed systems researcher and the author of Data Intensive Applications . Martin is concerned by the centralization of our computer networks, and he works on CRDT technology in order to make it easier for people to build peer-to-peer applications. Most of the people who know how to build systems with CRDTs are distributed systems PhDs, database experts, and people working at huge internet companies. How do you make developer-friendly CRDTs? How do you allow random hackers to build peer-to-peer applications that avoid conflicts? Start by making a CRDT out of the most widely used, generalizable data structure in modern application development: the JSON object. In today’s episode, Martin and I talk about conflict resolution, CRDTs, and decentralized applications. This is Martin’s second time on the show, and his first interview is the most popular episode to date. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes for this episode, or you can find it in the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android . In other podcast players, you can only access the most recent 100 episodes. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help. The post Decentralized Objects with Martin Kleppmann appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Developers can build networked applications today without having to deploy their code to a server. These “serverless” applications are constructed from managed services and functions-as-a-service. Managed services are cloud offerings like database-as-a-service, queueing-as-a-service, or search-as-a-service. These managed services are easy to use. They take care of operational burdens like scalability and outages. But managed services typically solve a narrow use case. You can’t build an application entirely out of managed services. Managed services are scalable and narrow. Functions-as-a-service are scalable and flexible . With managed services, you make remote calls to a service with a well-defined API. With functions-as-a-service, you can deploy your own code. But functions-as-a-service execute against transient, unreliable compute resources. They aren’t a good fit for low latency computation, and the code you run on them should be stateless. Managed services and functions-as-a-service are the perfect complements. Managed services provide you with well-defined server abstractions that every application needs—like databases, search indexes, and queues. Functions as a service offer flexible “glue code” that you can use to create custom interactions between the managed services. The term “serverless” is used to describe the applications that are built entirely with managed services and functions as a service. Serverless applications are dramatically simpler to build and easier to operate than cloud applications of the past. The costs of managed services can get expensive, but the costs of functions as a service can cost 1/10th of what it might take to run a server that is handling your requests. Whether the size of your bill will increase or decrease as your company becomes “serverless” is less of an issue than the fact that your employees will be more productive: serverless applications have less operational burden, so developers spend more time architecting and implementing software. It has been 5 years since the Netflix infrastructure team was talking about the aspirational goal of a “no-ops” software culture . Your software should be so well-defined that you do not need regular intervention of ops staff to reboot your servers and reconfigure your load balancers. Serverless is a newer way of moving operational expense into capital expense. Today’s guest Randall Hunt is a senior technical evangelist with Amazon Web Services. He travels around the world meeting developers and speaking at conferences about AWS Lambda, the functions as a service platform from Amazon. Randall has given some excellent talks about how to architect and build serverless applications (which I will add to the show notes), and today we explore those application patterns further. Show Notes Serverless Services – Randall Hunt Randall Hunt at AWS Summit Seoul Serverless, What is it Good For? Randall Hunt The post Serverless Applications with Randall Hunt appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Serverless Scheduling with Rodric Rabbah 1:04:52
1:04:52 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:04:52
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedFunctions as a service are deployable functions that run without an addressable server. Functions as a service scale without any work by the developer. When you deploy a function as a service to a cloud provider, the cloud provider will take care of running that function whenever it is called. You don’t have to worry about spinning up a new machine and monitoring that machine, and spinning the machine down once it becomes idle. You just tell the cloud provider that you want to run a function, and the cloud provider executes it and returns the result. Functions as a service can be more cost effective than running virtual machines or containerized infrastructure, because you are letting the cloud provider decide where to schedule your function, and you are giving the cloud provider flexibility on when to schedule the function. The developer experience for deploying a serverless function can feel mysterious. You send a blob of code into the cloud. Later on, you send a request to call that code in the cloud. The result of the execution of that code gets sent back down to you. What is happening in between? Rodric Rabbah is the principal researcher and technical lead in serverless computing at IBM. He helped design IBM Cloud Functions, the open source functions-as-a-service platform that IBM has deployed and operationalized as IBM Cloud Functions . Rodric joins the show to explain how to build a platform for functions as a service. When a user deploys a function to IBM Cloud Functions, that function gets stored in a database as a blob of text, waiting to be called. When the user makes a call to the function, IBM Cloud Functions takes it from the database and queues the function in Kafka, and eventually schedules the function onto a container for execution. Once the function has executed, IBM Cloud Functions stores the result in a database and sends that result to the user. When you execute a function, the time spent scheduling it and loading it onto a container is known as the “cold start problem”. The steps of executing a serverless function take time, but the resource savings are significant. Your code is just stored as a blob of text in a database, rather than sitting in memory on a server, waiting to execute. In his research for building IBM Cloud Functions, Rodric wrote about some of the tradeoffs for users who build applications with serverless functions. The tradeoffs exist along what Rodric calls “the serverless trilemma.” In today’s episode, we discuss why people are using functions-as-a-service, the architecture of IBM Cloud Functions, and the unsolved challenges of building a serverless platform. Full disclosure: IBM is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Show Notes IBM Cloud Functions Apache OpenWhisk The post Serverless Scheduling with Rodric Rabbah appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Are we a media company or a technology company? Facebook and the New York Times are both asking themselves this question. Facebook originally intended to focus only on building technology–to be a neutral arbiter of information. This has turned out to be impossible. The Facebook newsfeed is defined by algorithms that are only as neutral as the input data. Even if we could agree on a neutral data set to build a neutral newsfeed, the algorithms that generate this news feed are not public, so we have no way to vet their neutrality. Facebook is such a powerful engine for distribution, it has allowed for a rise in the number of publishers who can get their voice heard. As a result, large media companies have lost market share because Facebook has replaced their distribution. The New York Times has always been a media company–but the standards for media consumption have shot up. Millions of people produce content for free, and that content is distributed through high quality experiences like Twitter, YouTube, Medium, and Facebook. When a page takes too long to load on NewYorkTimes.com, it doesn’t matter how good the content is–the user is going to navigate away before they read anything. Today, the New York Times has built out an experienced engineering team. In a previous episode, we reported how the Times uses Kafka to make its old content more accessible. In today’s show, we talk about how the Times uses React and GraphQL to improve the performance and the developer experience of engineers who are building software at the New York Times . Scott Taylor and James Lawrie are software engineers at the New York Times . In this episode, they explain how the New York Times looks at technology. The user experience on New York Times rivals that of a platform company like Facebook, and this is assisted by technologies originally built at Facebook: React, Relay, and GraphQL. The post React and GraphQL at New York Times appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 How IBM Runs Its Cloud with Jason McGee 1:00:48
1:00:48 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:48
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCloud computing changed the economics of running a software company. A cloud is a network of data centers that offers compute resources to developers. In the 1990s, software companies purchased servers–an upfront capital expense that required tens of thousands of dollars. In the early 2000s, cloud computing started, and turned that capital expense into an operational expense. Instead of a huge bulk purchase of servers, a software developer can pay as they go–which is so much easier on the budget than the bulk purchase. This transformation of capital expense to operational expense significantly lowered the barrier to entry to starting software companies: cloud computing created an economic boom that continues to today, and shows no signs of slowing down. Of course, the upfront capital expense did not disappear. It got aggregated into the cloud providers. Instead of individual software companies buying servers like they did in the 90’s, cloud providers buy thousands of servers and build data centers around the world. Because the of the aggregation, cloud providers get economies of scale–it is much cheaper for a single cloud provider to buy 1000 servers than for 1000 software companies to buy 1 server. The first wave of cloud computing was all about deploying our applications to servers that run in cloud data centers. The next wave of cloud computing is moving more and more of our application logic into managed services. In the first wave of cloud computing, we had to spin up a server to run our database. We needed a server for our search engine, and our load balancer. The logical unit of a server comes with the risk that the server will crash, or will be hacked, or will develop a bug that is difficult to solve. Managed services abstract away the notion of a server. Database-as-a-service, search-as-a-service, load balancing-as-a-service; these services are reliable lego blocks that we can build entire applications out of. Developers pay a premium for a managed service–but they are happy to pay that premium because it represents a promise that this service will not crash, will not be hacked due to a software vulnerability, and will not develop bugs that are the responsibility of the developer. Developers are very happy to pay higher unit prices for these managed services than they pay for raw servers. And cloud providers are very happy to develop these managed services–because it turns the infrastructure-as-a-service business into a software-as-a-service business. Software-as-a-service has better margins, better retention, and better competitive differentiation than infrastructure-as-a-service. As a developer, I’m looking forward to building applications completely out of specialized managed services. But we are still pretty far from that time. Today, developers still need to write their own application logic and their own backend services. But there are a set of tools that allow developers to write their own services while getting some of the resiliency and scalability of managed services. These tools are functions as a service and Kubernetes. Functions as a service let developers deploy stateless application logic that is cheap and scalable. Functions as a service still have some problems to overcome in the areas state management, function composition, usability, and developer education. Kubernetes is a tool for managing containerized infrastructure. Developers put their apps into containers on Kubernetes, and Kubernetes provides a control plane for deployment, scalability, load balancing, and monitoring. So–all of the things that you would want out of a managed service become much easier when you put applications into Kubernetes. This is why Kubernetes has become so popular–and it is why Kubernetes itself is being offered as a managed service by many cloud providers–including IBM. For the last decade, IBM has been building out its cloud offerings–and for two of those years, Jason McGee has been CTO of IBM Cloud Platform. In this episode, Jason discusses what it is like to build and manage a cloud, from operations to economics to engineering. If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about engineering cloud services at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Digital Ocean. To find all of our old episodes, you can download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android . In other podcast players, you can only access the most recent 100 episodes. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help. The post How IBM Runs Its Cloud with Jason McGee appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Thumbtack is a marketplace for real-world services. On Thumbtack, people get their house painted, their dog walked, and their furniture assembled. With 40,000 daily marketplace transactions, the company handles significant traffic. On yesterday’s episode, we explored how one aspect of Thumbtack’s marketplace recently changed, going from asynchronous matching to synchronous “instant” matching. In this episode, we zoom out to the larger architecture of Thumbtack, and how the company has grown through its adoption of managed services from both AWS and Google Cloud. The word “serverless” has a few definitions. In the context of today’s episode, serverless is all about managed services like Google BigQuery, Google Cloud PubSub, and Amazon ECS. The majority of infrastructure at Thumbtack is built using services that automatically scale up and down. Application deployment, data engineering, queueing, and databases are almost entirely handled by cloud providers. For the most part, Thumbtack is a “serverless” company. And it makes sense–if you are building a high-volume marketplace, you are not in the business of keeping servers running. You are in the business of improving your matching algorithms, your user experience, and your overall architecture. Paying for lots of managed services is more expensive than running virtual machines–but Thumbtack saves money from not having to hire site reliability engineers. Nate Kupp leads the technical infrastructure team, and we met at QCon in San Francisco to talk about how to architect a modern marketplace. This was my third time attending QCon and as always I was impressed by the quality of presentations and conversations I had there. They were also kind enough to set up some dedicated space for podcasters like myself. The most widely used cloud provider is AWS, but more and more companies that come on the show are starting to use some of the managed services from Google. The great news for developers is that integration between these managed services is pretty easy. At Thumbtack, the production infrastructure on AWS serves user requests. The log of transactions that occur get pushed from AWS to Google Cloud, where the data engineering occurs. On Google Cloud, the transaction records are queued in Cloud PubSub, a message queueing service. Those transactions are pulled off the queue and stored in BigQuery, a system for storage and querying of high volumes of data. BigQuery is used as the data lake to pull from when orchestrating machine learning jobs. These machine learning jobs are run in Cloud Dataproc, a managed service that runs Apache Spark. After training a model in Google Cloud, that model is deployed on the AWS side, where it serves user traffic. On the Google Cloud side, the orchestration of these different managed services is done by Apache Airflow, an open source tool that is one of the few pieces of infrastructure that Thumbtack does have to manage themselves on Google Cloud. To find out more about the Thumbtack infrastructure, check out the video of the talk Nate gave at QCon San Francisco, or check out the Thumbtack Engineering Blog . The post Thumbtack Infrastructure with Nate Kupp appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The labor market is moving online. Taxi drivers are joining Uber and Lyft. Digital freelancers are selling their services through Fiverr. Experienced software contractors are leaving contract agencies to join Gigster. Online labor marketplaces create market efficiency by improving the communications between buyers and sellers. Workers make their own hours, and their performance is judged by customers and algorithms, rather than the skewed perspective of a human manager. These marketplaces for human labor are in different verticals, but they share a common problem: how do you most efficiently match supply and demand? Perfect marketplace matching is an unsolved problem. Hundreds of computer science papers have been written about the problems of stable matching, which often turn out to be NP-Complete. The stock market has been attempting to automate marketplace matching for decades, and inefficiencies are discovered every year. Today’s show is about matching buyers and sellers on Thumbtack, a marketplace for local services. For the first seven years, Thumbtack was building liquidity in its 2-sided market. During those years, the model for job requests was as follows: let’s say I was on Thumbtack looking for someone to paint my house. I would post a job that would say I am looking for house painters. The workers on Thumbtack that paint houses could see my job and place a bid on it. Then I would choose from the bids and get my house painted. This was the “asynchronous” model. The actions of the buyer and seller were not synchronized. There was a significant delay between the time when the buyer posted a job and the time when a seller places a bid, and then another delay before the buyer selects from the sellers. Thumbtack recently moved to an “instant matching” model. After gathering data about the people selling services on the platform, Thumbtack is now able to avoid the asynchronous bidding process. In the new experience, a buyer goes on the platform, requests a house painter, and is instantly matched to someone who has a history of accepting house painting tasks that fit the parameters of the buyer. From the user’s perspective, this is a simple improvement. From Thumbtack’s perspective, there was significant architectural change required. In the asynchronous model, the user requests lined up in a queue, and were matched with pros who placed bids on the items in that queue. In the instant matching model, a user request became more like a search query–the parameters of that request hit an index of pros and returns a response immediately. Xing Chen is an engineer from Thumbtack, and joins the show to describe the rearchitecture process–how Thumbtack went from an asynchronous matching system to synchronous, instant matching. We also explore some of the other architectural themes of Thumbtack, which we dive into in further detail in tomorrow’s episode about scaling Thumbtack’s infrastructure, which uses both AWS and Google Cloud. On Software Engineering Daily, we have explored the software architecture and business models of different labor marketplaces–from Uber to Fiverr. To find these old episodes, you can download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android. In other podcast players, you can only access the most recent 100 episodes. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help. The post Marketplace Matching with Xing Chen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Facebook serves interactive content to billions of users. Google serves query requests on the world’s biggest search engine. Uber handles a significant percentage of the transportation within the United States. These services are handling radically different types of traffic, but many of the techniques they use to balance loads are similar. Vivek Panyam is an engineer with Uber, and he previously interned at Google and Facebook. In a popular blog post about load balancing at scale , he described how a large company scales up a popular service. The methods for scaling up load balancing are simple, but effective–and they help to illustrate how load balancing works at different layers of the networking stack. Let’s say you have a simple service where a user makes a request, and your service sends them a response with a cat picture. Your service starts to get popular, and begins timing out and failing to send a response to users. When your service starts to get overwhelmed, you can scale up load by creating another service instance that is a copy of your cat picture service. Now you have two service instances, and you can use a layer 7 load balancer to route traffic evenly between those two service instances. You can keep adding service instances as the load scales and have the load distributed among those new instances. Eventually, your L7 load balancer is handling so much traffic itself that you can’t put any more service instances in front of it. So you have to set up another L7 load balancer, and put an L4 load balancer in front of those L7 load balancers. You can scale up that tier of L7 load balancers, each of which is balancing traffic across a set of your service instances. But eventually, even your L4 load balancer gets overwhelmed with requests for cat pictures. You have to set up another tier, this time with L3 load balancing… In this episode, Vivek gives a clear description for how load balancing works. We also review the 7 networking layers before discussing why there are different types of load balancers associated with the different networking layers. The post Load Balancing at Scale with Vivek Panyam appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
As a system becomes more complex, the chance of failure increases. At a large enough scale, failures are inevitable. Incident response is the practice of preparing for and effectively recovering from these failures. An engineering team can use checklists and runbooks to minimize failures. They can put a plan in place for responding to failures. And they can use the process of post mortems to reflect on a failure and take full advantage of the lessons of that failure. Emil Stolarsky is a production engineer at Shopify where his role shares many similarities with that of Google’s site reliability engineers . In this episode, Emil argues that the academic study of emergency management and industries such as aerospace and transportation have a lot to teach software engineers about responding to production problems. In this interview with guest host Adam Bell, Emil argues that we need to move beyond tribal knowledge and incorporate practices such as an incident command system and rigorous use of checklists. Emil suggests that we need to move beyond a mindset of “move fast and break things” and toward a place of more deliberate preparation. Show Notes Incident Response Insights Talk The Human Side Of Post Mortems The post Incident Response with Emil Stolarsky appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
There is a quote from Jeff Bezos: “70% of the work of building a business today is undifferentiated heavy lifting. Only 30% is creative work. Things will be more exciting when those numbers are inverted.” That quote is from 2006, before Amazon Web Services had built most of their managed services. In 2006, you had no choice but to manage your own database, data warehouse, and search cluster. If your server crashed in the middle of the night, you had to wake up and fix it. And you had to deal with these engineering problems in addition to building your business. Technology today evolves much faster than in 2006. That is partly because managed cloud services make operating a software company so much smoother. You can build faster, iterate faster, and there are fewer outages. If you are an insurance company or a t-shirt manufacturing company or an online education platform, software engineering is undifferentiated heavy lifting. Your customers are not paying you for your expertise in databases or your ability to configure load balancers. As a business, you should be focused on what the customers are paying you for, and spending the minimal amount of time on rebuilding software that is available as a commodity cloud service. Rich Archbold is the director of engineering at Intercom, a rapidly growing software company that allows for communication between customers and businesses. At Intercom, the engineering teams have adopted a philosophy called Run Less Software . Running less software means reducing choices among engineering teams, and standardizing on technologies wherever possible. When Intercom was in its early days, the systems were more heterogeneous. Different teams could choose whatever relational database they wanted–MySQL or Postgres. They could choose whatever key/value store they were most comfortable with. The downside of all this choice was that engineers who moved from one team to another team might not know how to use the tools at the new team they were moving to. After switching teams, you would have to figure out how to onboard with those new tools, and that onboarding process was time that was not spent on effort that impacted the business. By reducing the number of different choices that engineering teams have, and opting for managed services wherever possible, Intercom ships code at an extremely fast pace with very few outages. In our conversation, Rich contrasts his experience at Intercom with his experiences working at Amazon Web Services and Facebook. Amazon and Facebook were built in a time where there was not a wealth of managed services to choose from, and this discussion was a reminder of how much software engineering has changed because of cloud computing. To learn more about Intercom, you can check out the Inside Intercom podcast . The post Run Less Software with Rich Archbold appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 High Volume Event Processing with John-Daniel Trask 57:28
57:28 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked57:28
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedA popular software application serves billions of user requests. These requests could be for many different things. These requests need to be routed to the correct destination, load balanced across different instances of a service, and queued for processing. Processing a request might require generating a detailed response to the user, or making a write to a database, or the creation of a new file on a file system. As a software product grows in popularity, it will need to scale these different parts of infrastructure at different rates. You many not need to grow your database cluster at the same pace that you grow the number of load balancers at the front of your infrastructure. Your users might start making 70% of their requests to one specific part of your application, and you might need to scale up the services that power that portion of the infrastructure. Today’s episode is a case study of a high-volume application: a monitoring platform called Raygun. Raygun’s software runs on client applications and delivers monitoring data and crash reports back to Raygun’s servers. If I have a podcast player application on my iPhone that runs the Raygun software, and that application crashes, Raygun takes a snapshot of the system state and reports that information along with the exception, so that the developer of that podcast player application can see the full picture of what was going on in the user’s device, along with the exception that triggered the application crash. Throughout the day, applications all around the world are crashing and sending requests to Rayguns servers. Even when crashes are not occurring, Raygun is receiving monitoring and health data from those applications. Raygun’s infrastructure routes those different types of requests to different services, queues them up, and writes the data to multiple storage layers–ElasticSearch, a relational SQL database, and a custom file server built on top of S3. John-Daniel Trask is the CEO of Raygun and he joins the show to describe the end-to-end architecture of Raygun’s request processing and storage system. We also explore specific refactoring changes that were made to save costs at the worker layer of the architecture. This is useful memory management strategy for anyone working in a garbage collected language. If you would like to see diagrams that explain the architecture and other technical decisions, the show notes have a video that explains what we talk about in this show . Full disclosure: Raygun is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post High Volume Event Processing with John-Daniel Trask appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
As the gig economy grows, that growth necessitates innovations in the online infrastructure powering these new labor markets. In our previous episodes about Uber , we explored the systems that balance server load and gather geospacial data. In our coverage of Lyft , we studied Envoy, the service proxy that standardizes communications and load balancing among services. In shows about Airbnb , we talked about the data engineering pipeline that powers economic calculations, user studies, and everything else that requires a MapReduce. In today’s episode, we explore the business and engineering behind another online labor platform: Fiverr. Fiverr is a marketplace for digital services. On Fiverr, I have purchased podcast editing, logo creation, music lyrics, videos, and sales leads. I have found people who will work for cheap, and quickly finish a job to my exact specification. I have discovered visual artists who worked with me to craft a music video for a song I wrote. Workers on Fiverr post “gigs”–jobs that they can perform. Most of the workers on Fiverr specialize in knowledge work, like proofreading or gathering sales leads. The workers are all over the world. I have worked with people from Germany, the Philippines, and Africa through Fiverr. Fiverr has become the leader in digital freelancing. The staggering growth of Fiverr’s marketplace has put the company in a position similar to an early Amazon. There is room for strategic expansion, but there is also an urgency to improve the infrastructure and secure the market lead. Gil Sheinfeld is the CTO at Fiverr, and he joins the show to explain how the teams at Fiverr are organized to fulfill the two goals of strategic, creative growth and continuous improvement to the platform. One engineering topic we discussed at length was event sourcing. Event sourcing is a pattern for modeling each change to your application as an event. Each event is placed on a pub/sub messaging queue, and made available to the different systems within your company. Event sourcing creates a centralized place to listen to all of the changes that are occurring within your company. For example, you might be working on a service that allows a customer to make a payment to a worker. The payment becomes an event. Several different systems might want to listen for that event. Fiverr needs to call out to a credit card processing system. Fiverr also needs to send an email to the worker, to let them know they have been paid. Fiverr ALSO needs to update internal accounting records. Event sourcing is useful because the creator of the event is decoupled from all of the downstream consumers. As the platform engineering team works to build out event sourcing, communications between different service owners will become more efficient. The post Fiverr Engineering with Gil Sheinfeld appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Serverless Event-Driven Architecture with Danilo Poccia 53:05
53:05 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked53:05
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedIn an event driven application, each component of application logic emits events, which other parts of the application respond to. We have examined this pattern in previous shows that focus on pub/sub messaging, event sourcing, and CQRS. In today’s show, we examine the intersection of event driven architecture and serverless architecture. Serverless applications can be built by combining functions-as-a-service (like AWS Lambda) together with backend as a service tools like DynamoDB and Auth0. Functions-as-a-service give you cheap, flexible, scalable compute. Backend as a service tools give you robust, fault-tolerant tools for managing state. By combining these sets of tools, we can build applications without thinking about specific servers that are managing large portions of our application logic. This is great–because managing servers and doing load balancing and scaling is painful. With this shift in architecture, we also have to change how data flows through our applications. Danilo Poccia is the author of AWS Lambda In Action , a book about building event-driven serverless applications. In today’s episode, Danilo and I discuss the connection between serverless architecture and event driven architecture. We start by reviewing the evolution of the runtime unit–from physical machines to virtual machines to containers to functions as a service. Then, we dive into what it means for an application to be “event driven.” We explore how to architect and scale a serverless architecture, and we finish by discussing the future of serverless–how IoT and edge computing and on-premise architectures will take advantage of this new technology. The post Serverless Event-Driven Architecture with Danilo Poccia appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Netflix Serverless-like Platform with Vasanth Asokan 52:47
52:47 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:47
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe Netflix API is accessed by developers who build for over 1000 device types: TVs, smartphontes, VR headsets, laptops. If it has a screen, it can probably run Netflix. On each of these different devices, the Netflix experience is different. Different screen sizes mean there is variable space to display the content. When you open up Netflix, you want to efficiently browse through movies. The frontend engineers who are building different experiences for different device types need to make different requests to the backend to fetch the right amount of data. This was the engineering problem that Vasanth Asokan and his team at Netflix was tasked with solving: how do you enable lots of different frontend engineers to get whatever they need from the backend? This problem led to the development of a “serverless-like platform” within Netflix, which Vasanth wrote about in a few popular articles on Medium . This platform enables frontend developers to write and deploy backend scripts to fetch data, decoupling the responsibilities of frontend engineers and backend engineers. The tight coupling of frontend and backend engineering was problematic to the development velocity of Netflix. We have done many shows about Netflix engineering, covering topics like data engineering, user interface design, and performance monitoring. To find these old episodes, you can download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android . With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help. The post Netflix Serverless-like Platform with Vasanth Asokan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Serverless Authentication with Bobby Johnson 54:11
54:11 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:11
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedServerless architecture is software that runs without an addressable server. Serverless is made possible by two types of technology: platform as a service providers like Auth0, and functions as a service like AWS Lambda. With both of these technologies, we can program logic that runs without being deployed to a server. Functions as a service are cheap and scalable. Write your code for a Serverless function, and the cloud provider will cheaply deploy and execute that function on some server somewhere. The difficult part is maintaining state. Since Serverless compute instances are ephemeral, you aren’t dealing with a system that will keep track of your state—it is going to disappear eventually. The ephemeral nature of Serverless code requires us to shift our thinking—but the dramatic cost and simplified scalability make it well worth the effort. Serverless functions can add complexity in exchange for lower price. Serverless “platform as a service” often lowers complexity at a slightly higher price. A Serverless database like Firebase handles database scaling and gives you a nice web interface. A Serverless machine learning platform like Google CloudML gives your models scalability and controlled deployment. A Serverless authentication service like Auth0 manages your authentication. In addition to authentication, Auth0 has built a set of tools to allow SaaS companies to extend their platforms into a sandboxed code execution environment. Bobby Johnson is an engineer at Auth0, and he joins the show to describe the toolbox that Auth0 has developed: authentication, webtasks, and extensibility–and how the world of “serverless” architecture is evolving. Full disclosure, Auth0 is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Serverless Authentication with Bobby Johnson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Augmented reality applications are slowly making their way into the world of the consumer. Pokemon Go created the magical experience of seeing Pokemon superimposed upon the real world. IKEA’s mobile app lets you see how a couch would fit into your living room, which has a significant improvement on the furniture buying process. Augmented reality applications can have even more dramatic impact on industrial enterprises. Have you ever set up a factory? You might need to build a conveyor belt. You might need to put together the parts of a giant machine that extrudes steel. You might need to fix a silicon wafer fabrication machine. It takes an expert to set up these heavy, complicated machines. ScopeAR is a company that builds augmented reality tools. One of the ScopeAR products allows users to telepresence with each other to collaborate on the construction and maintenance of heavy machinery. Imagine I am setting up my factory, and I have a complicated piece of machinery (let’s say a conveyor belt) in front of me. I have never constructed a conveyor belt before. I put on a HoloLens, and set up a VoIP call with an expert who has experience with that piece of machinery, and they point out what I need to do by superimposing 3-D arrows, text, and other instructions on my field of vision. They can share my experience and help guide me through the process. This is such a flexible tool–you can imagine applications for augmented reality assistance being useful in medicine, construction, education and other fields. Scott Montgomerie is the CEO of ScopeAR and in today’s episode, we talk about the state of AR, how the AR tools from Apple and Google compare, and how the similarity between tools used for mapping the world in AR relate to the tools used to map the world by autonomous cars. Scott was a great guest, and I hope to have him back on in the future. We have done some great shows about how to build augmented reality and virtual reality applications. To find these old episodes, you can download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android . In other podcast players, you can only access the most recent 100 episodes. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help. Shout out to today’s featured contributor Edgar Pino. He is working on a real-time chat application for Software Engineering Daily, so that we can have chat rooms for people to discuss the episodes easily. Innovative work! The post Augmented Reality with Scott Montgomerie appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Elastic Load Balancing with Ranga Rajagopalan 57:02
57:02 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked57:02
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedComputational load is the amount of demand that is being placed on a computer system. “Load” can take the form of memory, CPU, network bandwidth, disk space, and other finite resources. When we design systems, we need to prepare for high-load events. On a social network, people are much more active in the mornings. On an e-commerce site, Black Friday causes many more users to come online for discount shopping. Our distributed application must be able to scale in response to these spikes in traffic. Cloud computing has changed the popular software architecture patterns, and load balancing has changed along with it. With on-demand, infinite infrastructure, we don’t need to worry about ordering servers and provisioning. With infrastructure as code, it becomes simpler to manage lots of deployable units–so we can break up our monolith into microservices, and have hundreds or thousands of virtual machines or containers running. Enterprises that were started before cloud computing have large on-premise server deployments–but today, many of them also use the cloud. The cloud can be used to augment their classic on-prem deployments with cloud platform-as-a-service features. The cloud can also be used as a reliable way to scale during high load events. Today, a common architectural pattern is to have your application broken up into services. Each of those services has multiple instances. When the load on a particular service is under lots of demand, you create more instances to handle the increased load. How do you monitor the load on each service? How do you know when to spin up new instances of the service? Load analysis and load balancing across different services can be implemented by placing “agents” throughout your infrastructure. These agents gather data about services and service instances, and route that data to a centralized place. The centralized “control plane” can be used to make decisions about load-balancing and traffic routing. Ranga Rajagopalan worked on networking at Cisco for a decade before co-founding Avi Networks as CTO. Avi Networks builds modern load balancing software, and in today’s episode, Ranga describes the requirements of load balancing. We talked about the evolution of network infrastructure, the impact of the cloud, and the technical decisions that his team has made when architecting Avi Networks. Full disclosure: Avi Networks is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Elastic Load Balancing with Ranga Rajagopalan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
It’s 9pm at night, and you are hungry. You order a pizza from Domino’s. You live on a street that’s dark, and so you have installed a smart lightbulb in front of your mailbox that lights up the address. When the pizza at Domino’s is ready, you want the lightbulb on your mailbox to light up so that the delivery person can read your address when they arrive in front of your house with the pizza. The Internet should make it possible to have this kind of event-driven, connected world. Anything that is connected to the Internet should be able to send signals to anything else on the Internet, so that our lives gradually become more automated. This is what IFTTT does. Users of IFTTT can easily create applets to wire different services together. You can use IFTTT to trigger an email whenever three of your friends retweet something on Twitter. You can use IFTTT to flash the lights in your house when Bitcoin hits new market highs. You can use IFTTT to order a pizza whenever Bitcoin crashes. IFTTT makes it easy to connect different services together, and a lot of work goes into the infrastructure that enables these billions of events to process correctly. Nicky Leach from IFTTT’s engineering team joins the show to describe how IFTTT allows for integrations between services that were not built to integrate–and he talks about the scheduling, data engineering, and monitoring of the company’s software stack. The post IFTTT Architecture with Nicky Leach appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Quantum Computing Introduction with Zlatko Minev 54:32
54:32 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:32
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedComputer chips have physical limitations. When transistors get too small, electrons start to behave in ways that make the hardware modules less reliable. Our reliable technological progress has been enabled by Moore’s Law: the idea that the number of components we can fit on a chip doubles roughly every 12-18 months. We can’t keep shrinking the size of these components, because physics is no longer complying. Quantum computing allows us to operate on qubits rather than bits, giving us better parallelism and continued reliable technological progress. Quantum computing is still mostly an area of research rather than production systems–but it is rapidly approaching usability, and Zlatko Minev joins the show to explain how quantum computing works, and why software engineers should care. Zlatko is a PhD candidate at the Yale Quantum Information Lab. Today he describes how qubits work, which algorithms quantum computing impacts, and which parts of modern computer architecture will work on a quantum computer. We may have to throw out the Von Neumann architecture when it comes to quantum! The post Quantum Computing Introduction with Zlatko Minev appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
How would you build a system for indexing and monitoring the entire Internet? Start by breaking the Internet up into IP address ranges. Give each of those address ranges to servers distributed around the world. On each of those servers, iterate through your list of IP addresses, sending packets to them. Depending on what sorts of packets those IP addresses respond to, and what those responses are, you can build a map of the devices on the Internet: what is running on those devices, and what they respond to. Qadium is a company that indexes and monitors devices on the Internet, to help organizations understand the devices that are within corporate networks. If you are a large corporation, Qadium can probably do a better job of figuring out your Internet footprint than you can. Matt Kraning is the CTO of Qadium, and in today’s show he describes the process by which Qadium maps the Internet. Matt used to work on data infrastructure at DARPA, and has deployed Hadoop in Afghanistan–so the infrastructure of Qadium seems relatively manageable. Our data conversations in this episode spam from talking about Storm and Hadoop to Google BigQuery, BigTable, and DataFlow. The post Internet Monitoring with Matt Kraning appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Scala is a functional and object oriented programming language built on the JVM. Scala Native takes this language, loved by many, and brings it to bare metal. Scala Native is an optimizing ahead-of-time compiler and lightweight managed runtime designed specifically for Scala. Denys Shabalin is a Research Assistant at the EPFL and the primary creator of Scala Native. In this episode, Adam Bell interviews Denys about the motivations behind the Scala Native project, how it was implemented and future directions. He also briefly touches on how Scala Native made cold compilation times of Scala code twice as fast. If you are interested in functional programming, compiler design, or want to learn some interesting tidbits about garbage collector design and trade offs you will like this episode. In past shows, we have covered many newer programming languages, and new twists on old programming languages. We’ve talked about ScalaJS, Swift on the Server, and Rust at Mozilla. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android to hear all of our old episodes. They are easily organized by category, and as you listen, the SE Daily app gets smarter, and recommends you content based on the episodes you are hearing. If you don’t like this episode, you can easily find something more interesting by using the recommendation system. The mobile apps are open sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . If you are looking for an open source project to hack on, we would love to get your help! We are building a new way to consume software engineering content. We have the Android app, the iOS app, a recommendation system, and a web frontend–and more projects are coming soon. If you have ideas for how software engineering media content should be consumed, or if you are interested in contributing code, check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily , or join our Slack channel (there’s a link on our website)–or send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com Show Notes Scala Native Scala Goes Native Talk Bootstrapping the Web with Scala Native The post Scala Native with Denys Shabalin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Tinder Engineering Management with Bryan Li 50:21
50:21 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:21
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedTinder is a rapidly growing social network for meeting people and dating. In the past few years, Tinder’s userbase has grown rapidly, and the engineering team has scaled to meet the demands of increased popularity. On Tinder, you are presented with a queue of suggested people that you might match with, and you swipe left or right to indicate that you like or dislike them. Creating that queue of suggestions is a complex engineering problem. Many factors go into the suggestions that Tinder gives you: geotargeting, food preferences, your favorite band, your photos, and the people you have swiped on in the past. Bryan Li is an engineering manager at Tinder, and he joins the show to describe the interaction between the mobile client, backend servers, and the offline analytics and machine learning. We also talk about managing different teams and how to reorganize smoothly as a company grows. If you like this episode, we have done other shows about scaling companies like Uber, New Relic, and Giphy. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and Android to hear all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. If you don’t like this episode, you can easily find something more interesting by looking at the recommendation engine in the app. The mobile apps are open sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . If you are looking for an open source project to hack on, we would love to get your help! The Software Engineering Daily open source community is building a new way to consume software engineering content. We have the Android app, the iOS app, a recommendation system, and a web frontend. If you are interested in contributing, check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily –or send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Tinder Engineering Management with Bryan Li appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Video Infrastructure with Matt McClure and Jon Dahl 52:34
52:34 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:34
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedPlaying a video on the Internet seems simple. You press play, the video gets delivered, and boom–you are watching Game of Thrones, right? It’s a bit more complicated. Unless you have built an application that involves video, you probably have not dealt with the world of codecs, bitrates, and streaming. Depending on the bandwidth between the user and the server, you might want to use different compression rates. Think about all of the different use cases–different connection speeds, device types, operating systems, video players, cloud providers. As a developer, you just want videos in your application to play quickly and reliably. But it takes a lot of engineering, monitoring, and re-engineering to get it right. Matt McClure and Jon Dahl are the founders of Mux, a company that makes video infrastructure technologies. Previously they built Zencoder, a product for encoding and delivering video. This episode was a fascinating discussion of why building video products for the modern Internet is still so hard. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS to hear all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that. The iOS app is the first project to come out of the Software Engineering Daily Open Source Project. There are more projects on the way, and we are looking for contributors–if you want to help build a better SE Daily experience, check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. We are working on an Android app, the iOS app, a recommendation system, and a web frontend. Help us build a new way to consume software engineering content at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily . The post Video Infrastructure with Matt McClure and Jon Dahl appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Tinder is a popular dating app where each user swipes through a sequence of other users in order to find a match. Swiping left means you are not interested. Swiping right means you would like to connect with the person. The simple premise of Tinder has led to massive growth, and the app is now also used to discover new friends and create casual meetings. Every social network knows–if you are not growing, then you are dying. Growth is so important to Tinder, they have a large engineering organization devoted to five facets of growth: new users, activation, retention, dropoff, and anti-spam. These five segments cover the entire Tinder user lifecycle, and there is a sub-team in charge of each of the five areas. No matter what kind of Tinder user you are, there are growth engineers focused on your experience. Alex Ross is the director of engineering for the growth team at Tinder. His job requires a mix of data science, data engineering, psychology, and setting proper KPIs (key performance indicators). Each subteam has KPIs that determine how well they are doing with growth–and if the wrong KPI is set, it can create bad incentives. For example, a growth team that is focused only on getting users to spend more time engaging with Tinder would have an incentive to create so-called “dark patterns” that trigger addiction. If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about data science and data engineering. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS to hear all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that. The post Tinder Growth Engineering with Alex Ross appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Spotify is a streaming music company with more than 50 million users. Whenever a user listens to a song, Spotify records that event and uses it as input to learn more about the user’s preferences. Listening to a song is one type of event–there are hundreds of others. Opening the Spotify app, skipping a song, sharing a playlist with a friend–all of these are events that provide valuable insights to Spotify. These are not the only types of events that Spotify cares about. There are also events that occur at the infrastructure level–for example a logging server that runs out of disk space. There are events that are relevant to all the users on Spotify–for example a new album release from Taylor Swift. An “event” is an object that needs to be registered within a system. Since there are so many events on a platform like Spotify, delivering and processing them reliably requires significant investment. Modern Internet companies are built by connecting cloud services, databases, and internal tools together. These different systems might respond to different events in different ways. Each system subscribes to the types of events that it wants to hear. Since there are so many events, and they might be received at uneven bursts, a modern architecture has a scalable queueing system to buffer events. To put an event on the queue, the event producer “publishes” that event to the queue. The event is then received by each “subscriber.” That’s why queueing is often known as pub/sub–publish/subscribe. Igor Maravic is an engineer with Spotify. In this episode, he explains why pub/sub is a key element of Spotify’s infrastructure–and he describes the migration that Spotify has made from Apache Kafka to Google Cloud Pubsub. If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about cloud infrastructure. You can check out our back catalog by downloading the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS , where you can listen to all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that. The post Spotify Event Delivery with Igor Maravic appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Applications built in the cloud are often serving requests from all around the world. A user in Hong Kong could have written to a database entry at the moment just before a user in San Francisco and a user in Germany simultaneously try to read from that database. If the user in San Francisco is allowed to see a different database entry than the user in Germany, that database is not strongly consistent. Strongly consistent databases work such that two users who read the same entry at the same time will receive the same result. Weakly consistent or “eventual consistent” databases are suitable for applications where transaction ordering is not important–photo sharing apps and ecommerce shopping carts, for example. Bank accounts, on the other hand, often need to be strongly consistent. CockroachDB is a scalable, survivable, strongly consistent database. Alex Robinson is an engineer at Cockroach Labs and he joins the show to explain the data model for CockroachDB and how it maintains strong consistency. The post Cloud-Native SQL with Alex Robinson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When a user experiences an error in an application, the engineers who are building that application need to find out why that error occurred. The root cause of that error may be on the user’s device, or within a piece of server-side logic, or hidden behind a black box API. To fix a complex error, we need a stack trace of contextual information so that we can correlate events across all layers of an application. James Smith is the CEO of Bugsnag, a company that makes crash reporting and error tracking software. In this episode, he describes how to diagnose errors in modern applications. He also explains how the company functions and how Bugsnag itself is built. The product consumes and stores millions of events which makes for a good discussion of software architecture. Full disclosure: Bugsnag is a sponsor of SE Daily. The post Error Diagnosis with James Smith appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Facebook was rapidly outgrowing its infrastructure in 2009. Classic data center design was not up to the task of the rapid influx of new users and data, photos, and streaming video hitting Facebook’s servers. A small team of engineers spent the next two years designing a data center from the ground up to be cheaper, more energy efficient, and more ergonomic for the engineers who worked within. That data center design was open sourced in 2011. Intel, Rackspace, and Goldman Sachs were the first three large organizations to join Facebook in the Open Compute Project, an effort to bring the benefits of open source collaboration to data centers. Steve Helvie works on the Open Compute Project and he joins the show to describe how the project has evolved in the last six years–how it has affected data center design and the implications for the future. The post Open Compute Project with Steve Helvie appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Serverless Continuous Delivery with Robin Weston 55:56
55:56 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked55:56
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedServerless computing reduces the cost of using the cloud. Serverless also makes it easy to scale applications. The downside: building serverless apps requires some mindset shift. Serverless functions are deployed to transient units of computation that are spun up on demand. This is in contrast to the typical model of application delivery–the deployment of an application to a server or a container that stays running until you shut it down. Robin Weston develops large projects with AWS Lambda, and he joined me for a discussion of how to build applications for serverless environments and how to do continuous delivery with serverless functions. One big appeal for continuous delivery fans is that serverless deployments are often smaller–the user is deploying something as small as a function. Full disclosure: ThoughtWorks GoCD is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Show Notes Serverless Architectures and Continuous Delivery by Robin Weston Robin Weston at Pipeline Conf The post Serverless Continuous Delivery with Robin Weston appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
After raising $18 million, social networking startup Yubl made a series of costly mistakes. Yubl hired an army of expensive contractors to build out its iOS and Android apps. Drama at the executive level hurt morale for the full-time employees. Most problematic, the company was bleeding cash due to a massive over-investment in cloud services. This was the environment in which Yan Cui joined Yubl. The startup did have traction. There were social media stars who would announce on Twitter that they were about to go on Yubl, and Yubl would be hit by an avalanche of traffic. 50,000 users suddenly logging on to interact with their favorite celebrity was a significant traffic spike. How do you deal with a traffic pattern like that? Serverless computing. AWS Lambda allowed the company to scale up quickly in a cost efficient manner. Yan began refactoring the entire backend infrastructure to be more cost efficient, heavily leveraging AWS Lambda. Unfortunately, Yan’s valiant effort was not enough to save the company. But there are some incredible engineering lessons from this episode–how to build cost-effective, scalable infrastructure. It’s also a case study worth looking at if you work at a startup, whether or not you are an engineer. The post Serverless Startup with Yan Cui appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Platform Continuous Delivery with Andy Appleton 50:18
50:18 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:18
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedContinuous delivery is a model for deploying small, frequent changes to an application. In a continuous delivery workflow, code changes that are pushed to a repository set off a build process that spins up a new version of the application. Testing is performed against that new build before advancing it to production, merging it with the existing codebase. Many continuous delivery products are getting built today because it is a wide open space–much like cloud providers or monitoring tools. There are subjective product and engineering decisions to be made depending on the audience for the product. Heroku Flow is a continuous delivery platform built on top of Heroku, a platform as a service. Andy Appleton is an engineer at Heroku and he joins the show to describe how Heroku Flow was built. Two years of work went into the project from initial conception to launch. Full disclosure: Heroku is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Platform Continuous Delivery with Andy Appleton appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning where a program learns how to take actions in an environment based on how that program has been rewarded for actions it took in the past. When program takes an action, and it receives a reward for that action, it is likely to take that action again in the future because it was positively reinforced. Michal Kempka is a computer scientist work works on VizDoom, an AI research platform for reinforcement learning, with co-creators Marek Wydmuch, Grzegorz Runc, Jakub Toczek, Wojciech Jaśkowski. VizDoom is based on the first-person dungeon game Doom. In VizDoom, an autonomous agent navigates through a maze avoiding enemies. Reinforcement learning is a widely used tool for machine learning, and we will be doing more shows in the future that explain how it works in further detail. Show Notes Cornell University Library: VizDoom The post Reinforcement Learning with Michal Kempa appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Apparel Machine Learning with Colan Connon and Thomas Bell 50:01
50:01 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:01
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedIn its most basic definition, machine learning is a tool that makes takes a data set, finds a correlation in that data set, and uses that correlation to improve a system. Any complex system with well-defined behavior and clean data can be improved with machine learning. Several precipitating forces have caused machine learning to become widely used: more data, cheaper storage, and better tooling. Two pieces of tooling that have been open sourced from Google help tremendously: Kubernetes and TensorFlow. Kubernetes is not a tool for machine learning, but it simplifies distributed systems operations, unlocking more time for engineers to focus on things that are not as commodifiable–like tweaking machine learning parameters. TensorFlow is a framework for setting up machine learning systems. Machine learning should affect every aspect of our lives–including tuxedo fitting. Generation Tux is a company that allows customers to rent apparel that historically has required in-person fitting. Using machine learning, they have developed a system that allows customers to get fit for an outfit without entering a brick-and-mortar store. In this episode, Colan Connon and Thomas Bell from Generation Tux join to explain how Generation Tux adopted Kubernetes and TensorFlow, and how the company’s infrastructure and machine learning pipeline work. The post Apparel Machine Learning with Colan Connon and Thomas Bell appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Every software company backs up critical data sources. Backing up databases is a common procedure, whether a company is in the cloud or on-prem. Backing up virtual machine instances is less common. Rubrik is a company that is known for building backup infrastructure for enterprises. Their main product is an appliance that sits on prem at an enterprise and stores snapshots of virtual machines running within the enterprise. If a virtual machine dies, Rubrik can quickly restore the VM snapshot. The appliance also backs up to the cloud. Kenny To is a founding engineer at Rubrik, and he joins the show to discuss backups and how Rubrik is engineered. Enterprises that start backing up to the cloud through Rubrik start a path towards potentially more cloud services. For enterprises that have not been able to move to the cloud yet, this can be an appealing opportunity. Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Backups with Kenny To appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Software deployment evolves over time. In the 90s, a “deployment” might have meant issuing a new edition of your software via CD-ROM. Today, a deployment is often a multi-stage process. A new software build will undergo automated unit tests and integration tests, before being deployed to users. The deployment might only go out to a small percentage of total users initially, with that percentage going up as the deployment proves not to have bugs. Avi Cavale is the CEO of Shippable, a platform for DevOps. In this episode, we discussed deployments in the context of containers, including a discussion of what has become easier: microservices, feature flagging, and continuous delivery. He also discussed his experience building Shippable. Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Deployment with Avi Cavale appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform. Kafka was originally developed at LinkedIn, and the creators of the project eventually left LinkedIn and started Confluent, a company that is building a streaming platform based on Kafka. Kafka is very popular, but is not easy to deploy and operationalize. That is why Confluent has built a Kafka-as-a-service product, so that managing Kafka is not the job of an on-call DevOps engineer. Neha Narkhede is the CTO of Confluent and she has been on the show twice before to discuss Kafka. In our last episode, we discussed event sourcing and CQRS with Kafka. In this episode, we explore more common enterprise uses for Kafka, and Neha talks about the engineering complexities of building a managed Kafka-as-a-service product. The post Kafka in the Cloud with Neha Narkhede appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Istio Service Mesh with Varun Talwar and Louis Ryan 43:06
43:06 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:06
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedModern software applications are often built out of loosely coupled microservices. These services can be written in different languages, by different people, but communication between services needs to be standardized. For this reason, a service proxy is useful. A service proxy is a sidecar container that sits next to a service and facilitates communications with other services. Once every service has a sidecar proxy, that sidecar can be used as a way to communicate with a centralized control plane. The sidecar can report telemetry data to the control plane, and the control plane can be used to set policies across services, such as rules for scaling and load balancing which might vary from service to service. Istio is an open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Istio is a service mesh that uses Envoy service proxies . If all of this sounds confusing–don’t worry, we’ll explain it all in today’s interview with Varun Talwar and Louis Ryan, who work on Istio at Google. Check out our new topic feeds , in iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. We’ve sorted all 500 of our old episodes into categories like business , blockchain , cloud engineering , JavaScript , machine learning , and greatest hits . Whatever specific area of software you are curious about, we have a feed for you. Check the show notes for more details. The post Istio Service Mesh with Varun Talwar and Louis Ryan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Containers make it easier for engineers to deploy software. Orchestration systems like Kubernetes make it easier to manage and scale the different containers that contain services. The popular container infrastructure powered by Kubernetes is often called “cloud native.” On Software Engineering Daily, we have been exploring cloud native software to get a complete picture of the problems in the space, and the projects that are being worked on as solutions. One area of interest: how should services communicate with each other? What should be standardized? How can you make it easy to identify problems and avoid cascading failures? One solution is the service mesh, a tool that allows services to communicate with each other more safely and effectively. William Morgan was an engineer who helped scale Twitter in the early days when the company was dealing with lots of outages. He was on the show previously to discuss scaling Twitter, and in today’s episode we go into the company that he is running, Buoyant, where he works on building a service mesh called Linkerd. Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com Show Notes Scaling Twitter What’s a Service Mesh and Why Do I Need One? Buoyant is hiring: email william@buoyant.io The post Service Mesh with William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Software architecture address the challenge of communicating and navigating large, complex systems to stakeholders, both technical and non-technical. Over the years software architecture has gone in and out of fashion. Today we discuss why software architecture is important, what it means to have software architecture, and how to properly structure teams and incorporate architecture. Today’s show is guest hosted by David Curry. David sits down with Simon Brown to discuss the importance of having a common language for software systems. Simon is an independent consultant specializing in software architecture, he is the author of Software Architecture for Developers , and founder of Structurizr. If you are interested in hosting a show, check out softwareengineeringdaily.com/host Show Notes Coding the Architecture Software Architecture for Developers book Structurizr The post Software Architecture with Simon Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A self-driving car needs to be able to quickly respond to changes in driving conditions. A factory needs to be able to quickly respond to changes in workplace safety. For these kinds of applications, we need processing power closer to the user of the application. If we put all of our application logic in the cloud, we will have to make a network round trip for every request. Servers in the cloud are powerful, but so are the computers at the edge–smartphones, sensors, drones, cars, and on-prem servers. Edge computing is giving us more computation outside the data center. Olivier Bloch works on Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, a set of services for edge computing. Azure IoT Edge includes on-prem versions of Microsoft Azure technologies. Tools that were previously accessible only in the cloud can be deployed and hosted on premise. Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post IoT Edge with Olivier Bloch appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
John Looney spent more than 10 years at Google. He started with infrastructure, and was part of the team that migrated Google File System to Colossus, the successor to GFS. Imagine migrating every piece of data on Google from one distributed file system to another. In this episode, John sheds light on the engineering culture that has made Google so successful. He has very entertaining stories about clusterops and site-reliability engineering. Google’s success in engineering is due to extremely high standards, and a culture of intellectual honesty. With the volume of data and throughput that Google responds to, 1-in-a-million events are likely to occur. There isn’t room for sloppy practices. John now works at Intercom, where he is adjusting to the modern world of Google infrastructure for everyone. This conversation made me feel quite grateful to be an engineer in a time where everything is so much cheaper, so much easier, and so much more performant than it was in the days when Google first built everything from scratch. I had a great time talking to John, and hope he comes back on the show again in the future because it felt like we were just scratching the surface of his experience. Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Google Early Days with John Looney appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Container Engines with David Aronchick and Chen Goldberg 45:14
45:14 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked45:14
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedKubernetes makes it easier for engineering teams to manage their distributed systems architecture. But it’s still not simple to deploy and operate a Kubernetes cluster. Google Container Engine (GKE) is a managed control plane for Kubernetes. Just as developers can use Google App Engine to easily deploy monolithic apps against a platform as a service, we can use Google Container Engine to deploy microservices against a platform as a service. David Aronchick and Chen Goldberg work on Google Container Engine, and they join the show to explain why platform as a service container engines are useful. Google is not the only cloud provider with a container engine–Amazon ECS and Azure Container Engine also allow you to run containers in a managed fashion. Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Container Engines with David Aronchick and Chen Goldberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
DNS stands for domain name system. This is the naming system that maps the entire internet. It associates information with domain names. More specifically, DNS specifies mappings between numerical IP addresses and domain names. Most engineers know these basic facts about DNS, but they may not know how much engineering a complex company like Etsy or Zappos puts into their DNS configuration. Dynamic DNS allows for intelligent response, so that a resource is served from the most efficient place–even in the face of a DDoS attack, or just routine failure of cloud servers. Phil Stanhope is the VP of technology at Oracle Dyn and he joins the show to explain how modern DNS works and the role of a DNS provider. Full disclosure: Dyn is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post DNS with Phil Stanhope appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
On January 31st 2017, GitLab experienced a major outage of their online repository hosting service. The primary database server experienced data loss due to a combination of malicious spam attacks and engineering mistakes that occurred while trying to respond to those spam attacks. GitLab responded to the event transparently. The company put up a postmortem describing the event in detail. In subsequent posts, GitLab expressed sympathy for the employee who made engineering mistakes that led to the deletion of data. The employee was not judged or disciplined for an understandable error. The response from the developer community was very positive. Engineers know that building cloud services is hard. Engineering is as much about avoiding errors as it is about appropriately responding to the inevitable mistakes. GitLab is a developer platform that combines repository hosting with several other features–issue tracking, code review, and CD. Today’s guest is Pablo Carranza, who works on infrastructure at GitLab. In this episode, he walks us through GitLab’s product, the engineering stack, and a postmortem of the outage. We also discuss working at Amazon, and the importance of postmortems, which I first encountered at Amazon. The post GitLab with Pablo Carranza appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Healthcare is a complex business. Oscar is a company that wanted to build a new insurance provider–but realized that healthcare is so interconnected that in order to build a new insurance provider, realized it actually needed to build an entire healthcare business too, complete with patient management and facilities. Since Oscar is a modern technology company, the focus on customer service, engineering, and data management offers an optimistic view into what healthcare might look like in the near future. Every time a patient interacts with the healthcare system, their insurance provider collects data on that interaction. Isaac Councill helped architect the infrastructure at Oscar that manages and analyzes the patient data. In this show, we talk about the healthcare system, data engineering, and Apache Mesos, which Oscar uses to manage its applications. The post Healthcare Engineering with Isaac Councill appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Microservices Transition with Cassandra Shum 43:24
43:24 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked43:24
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMany companies are transitioning from a monolith to microservices architecture. Tools for cloud computing, containerization, and continuous delivery are making this easier. But there are still technological and organizational challenges that a company will encounter while making this transition. Cassandra Shum is an engineer with ThoughtWorks. She has worked with major financial institutions and other large companies to architect their migrations from monolith to microservices. Also, she regularly puts on workshops to engineers who are seeking to make this migration at the company they work at. In this episode, she describes some of her experiences and recommendations around transitioning from a monolith to microservices. The post Microservices Transition with Cassandra Shum appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Firebase is a backend-as-a-service. The key efficiency of a backend-as-a-service is that it enables developers to go from having a 3-tier architecture (client, server, database) to a 2-tier architecture (client, backend-as-a-service). The team who started Firebase built it as a pivot. They had started a social network, and then they realized there wasn’t a good backend for chat tools. And so they started a chat-as-a-service tool, for people who wanted to include chat in their applications. And that led them to the fundamental realization that chat is actually representative of a broader category of real-time synchronization problems. Firebase was eventually acquired by Google. Doug Stevenson is a senior developer advocate with Google and the host of Meet Firebase, a YouTube talk show about Firebase. It was a pleasure to sit down for a conversation with him, especially because I recently started using Firebase in my own application as a backend for real-time chat. The post Firebase with Doug Stevenson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Spring Framework is an application framework for Java and JVM languages. Spring was originally built around dependency injection, but grew to become an entire ecosystem of tools and plugins for Java developers. Spring was originally released 15 years ago, and since then a lot has changed around application development. For example, many engineers deploy applications to the cloud in microservices architectures. The expectations around frameworks has also changed, with the rise of Django, Ruby on Rails, and NodeJS. Spring Boot takes an opinionated view of building production-ready Spring applications. By taking an opinionated view, Spring Boot gets engineers up and running faster than the traditional Spring framework. Josh Long is a Spring Developer Advocate at Pivotal and he joins the show to discuss Spring Boot and the history of the Spring Framework. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup . We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey . The post Spring Boot with Josh Long appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Microservices Practitioners with Austin Gunter and Richard Li 52:45
52:45 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:45
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe word “microservices” started getting used after a series of events–companies were moving to cloud virtual machines. Those VMs got broken up into containers, and the containers can fit to the size of the service. Services that are more narrowly defined take up smaller containers, and can be packed more densely into the virtual machines–hence the term “microservices.” As this change to software architecture has occurred, the DevOps movement has encouraged organizations to have better relationships between development and operations. Continuous deployment leads to fewer painful outages. Improved monitoring tools make it easier for developers to take on some of the pain that was previously centralized in operations. Several months ago, I attended the Microservices Practitioner Summit , which brings together engineers who are working with microservices at their companies. The conference was organized by Austin Gunter and Richard Li of Datawire. In this episode, they joined me for a conversation about microservices. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup . The post Microservices Practitioners with Austin Gunter and Richard Li appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Search is a common building block for applications. Whether we are searching Wikipedia or our log files, the behavior is similar: a query is entered and the most relevant documents are returned. The core data structure for search is an inverted index. Elasticsearch is a scalable, resilient search tool that shards and replicates a search index. Philipp Krenn from Elastic joins the show today to discuss how search works and how Elasticsearch scales. We use Wikipedia as a running example for how a query is processed and how documents are stored. If you’ve ever wondered how search works–or if your company uses Elasticsearch and you want to know more about it–this is a great episode for you. The post Elasticsearch with Philipp Krenn appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
There are various standards at play when creating and consuming Application Program Interfaces (APIs). These standards, though, are mostly technical and mostly lower-level than the content of the API. Andy Beier has experienced the broad range of API quality in his role with Domo in creating integrations with other businesses. He has made standardization of good practices in creating APIs his mission, with an emphasis on making the right information easily accessible without having to download more than necessary. He has traveled to meet with leaders in the field to promote standards and to make APIs easier to create and to consume. In this episode, Andy joins Dave Rael for a conversation about API design standards, what makes for a good API, and steps in moving the broader technical community toward more useful and secure APIs. The post API Design Standards with Andy Beier appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted. Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without making the user feel much pain. But how can we test that our response will work before an actual catastrophe occurs? Kolton Andrus is CEO of Gremlin, a company that works on failure injection as a service. Gremlin is based on ideas around planned failure that Kolton learned from his years at Amazon and Netflix. We ended up talking as much about the culture of Netflix and Amazon as we did about how and why to build failure injection. It’s always nice to share war stories with other people who have worked at Amazon because the culture is so distinct. If you want to know more about Amazon’s culture, check out the episode tomorrow with Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store . The post Failure Injection with Kolton Andrus appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Software Psychology with Bjorn Freeman Benson 49:11
49:11 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked49:11
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedDesigners and software engineers need to communicate with each other. From Apple to Slack to Uber, the emphasis on visual design within a product is rising in importance. Much like development and operations siloes have been bridged with the DevOps movement, design and engineering teams are working more closely together to align the vision of the designers with the realities of code. InVision is a product for prototyping designs and product workflows. I categorize InVision with high-level productivity tools like Trello, Asana, and github. When teams start using InVision, it often becomes an integral part of the entire product workflow. A designer will mock up their product vision on InVision and share it with the rest of the team for criticism and commentary. Since the product is the perfect bridge between engineers and designers, InVision the company is expanding as a platform. Bjorn Freeman-Benson is the CTO at InVision and his task is to scale the 100% remote engineering team while developing new product features. Bjorn describes himself as a software psychologist. We talked about the psychology of managing engineers and the technical challenges of building a large, popular web app for technology products. The post Software Psychology with Bjorn Freeman Benson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
If you are building a service that processes payments, your software architecture has a lot of requirements. Not only do you need to be highly available, consistent, and fast–you need to be PCI compliant. In this episode, we explore the infrastructure of Stripe with Evan Broder, who has been with the company for five years. Stripe started as a small payments company catering to developers with a monolithic code base. Some of those aspects of Stripe have changed, and others have stayed the same. In our last episode, we covered how observability works at Stripe. In this episode, we explore what is being observed–the actual infrastructure itself, and how different engineers are organized around managing the infrastructure. In tomorrow’s episode, we’ll talk to Michael Manapat, about Stripe’s machine learning pipeline for detecting and preventing fraudulent transactions. Throughout these episodes, you will get a sense for how Stripe’s engineering culture works. We hope to do more experimental series like this in the future. Please give us feedback for what you think of the format by sending us email, joining the Slack group, or filling out our listener survey . All of these things are available on softwareengineeringdaily.com. The post Stripe Infrastructure with Evan Broder appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Observability allows engineers to understand what is going on inside their systems. In its most raw form, observability comes from log data. Modern systems have many layers of logs–virtualized cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, the container runtime itself, and the application logic running within the container. With all of these layers, it is not practical for a developer to have to sift through layers of logs every time a bug occurs in production, or a deployment fails integration tests. Higher level observability tools include charts, distributed tracing tools, and monitoring services. With proper observability, developers can save time during incident response. Day-to-day software development becomes safer and more comfortable. Stripe is a payments company for developers. This episode is the first in a series of episodes profiling different aspects of the company. Our guest Cory Watson leads the observability team at Stripe. In subsequent episodes, we will explore infrastructure and machine learning at Stripe. Throughout these episodes, you will get a sense for how Stripe’s engineering culture works. We hope to do more experimental series like this in the future. Please give us feedback for what you think of the format by sending us email, joining the Slack group, or filling out our listener survey . All of these things are available on softwareengineeringdaily.com . The post Stripe Observability with Cory Watson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Using CQRS to Make Controllers Lean with Derek Comartin 44:44
44:44 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked44:44
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCommand Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) is a powerful concept that has the potential to make for reliable and maintainable systems. It is also broadly misunderstood and means different things to different people. Derek Comartin learned about the idea after viewing some talks by Greg Young and has since successfully applied the approach with great success and it has transformed the way he views features, business requirements, and dependencies. The result is a system that is easier to maintain and faster to enhance. Among his key lessons are that slices are better than layers, mediators improve dependency management, and cohesion is better applied to business concerns than to technical ones. In this episode, Derek joins Dave Rael for a conversation about CQRS and applying it to make your code your own and to separate it from technical concerns in order to make your software development operation work better and faster. The post Using CQRS to Make Controllers Lean with Derek Comartin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Load testing measures performance of a system undergoing a large volume of requests. Before an application is pushed to production, engineers will often load test their software to ensure it is resilient in the face of high traffic. As web applications have changed, the requirements around load testing have changed as well. External APIs, internal undocumented APIs, and proprietary databases are black boxes that you might not be able to test reliably with unit tests or integration tests. Having an end-to-end load testing system can provide a measure of insurance against unknown unknowns before users start engaging with a production version. Mark Gilbert works on performance engineering at Apica, and he joins the show to discuss how load testing software is built and when engineers should use it. Full disclosure: Apica is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Load Testing with Mark Gilbert appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Parse and Operations with Charity Majors 1:00:01
1:00:01 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:01
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedParse was a backend as a service company built in 2011 before being acquired by Facebook in 2013. Building a backend as a service for developers requires walking a thin line between giving engineers lots of control and preventing those engineers from shooting themselves in the foot. While she was at Parse, Charity Majors learned about the operational burdens of managing a service with high uptime requirements and deeply technical edge cases that could take down a user’s entire system. Charity took the lessons in systems engineering that she learned at Parse and cofounded Honeycomb.io, a service for observability and monitoring. Honeycomb is described as a tool for your systems like an IDE is to your code. Parse was eventually shut down because the service did not have a place in the strategic plans of Facebook. Charity and I also discussed the lessons learned from how the Parse acquisition panned out–a useful conversation for anyone who is considering selling a company or acquiring a startup. The post Parse and Operations with Charity Majors appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Heroku Autoscaling with Andrew Gwozdziewycz 54:45
54:45 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:45
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWhen an application is using all of its available resources, that application needs to be scaled. Scaling an application means giving it more resources–typically servers. Autoscaling is an engineering practice where an application is automatically given more or less resources based on how healthy the application performance is at a given time. Applications on Heroku have access to autoscaling. Heroku users don’t need to worry about provisioning new servers manually because the platform does it for them. In this episode, we explore how Heroku built autoscaling. Andrew Gwozdziewycz [@apgwoz] is an operational experience engineer with Heroku. As he describes, autoscaling requires frequent health checks of an application. Since thousands of applications are running on Heroku, a metrics pipeline using Kafka and Cassandra supports the high volume of health check data. That data feeds into the decision process for when an application needs to scale. Full disclosure: Heroku is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Heroku Autoscaling with Andrew Gwozdziewycz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In the mid 90s, data warehousing might have meant “using an Oracle database.” Today, it means a wide variety of things. You could be stitching together a big data pipeline using Kafka, Hadoop, and Spark. You could be using managed tools like BigQuery from Google. How did we get from the simple days of Oracle databases to the wealth of options available today? Mark Rittman writes and podcasts about data engineering and data warehousing on his site Drill to Detail . Today, we explore the past, present, and future of data warehousing and touch on many of the trends that have been explored in recent episodes of Software Engineering Daily. Show Notes Google BigQuery, and Why Big Data is About to Have Its Gmail Moment The post Data Warehousing with Mark Rittman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the ridesharing company Lyft, every internal service runs a tool called Envoy. Envoy is a service proxy. Whenever a service sends or receives a request, that request goes through Envoy before meeting its destination. Matt Klein started Envoy, and he joins the show to explain why it is useful to have this layer of standardization between services. He also gives some historical context for why Envoy was so helpful to Lyft. The post Service Proxying with Matt Klein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Infrastructure with Datanauts’ Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks 44:45
44:45 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked44:45
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedInfrastructure is a term that can mean many different things: your physical computer, the data center of your Amazon EC2 cluster, the virtualization layer, the container layer–on and on. In today’s episode, podcasters Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks discuss the past, present, and future of infrastructure with me. Ethan and Chris host Datanauts, a podcast about infrastructure. In each episode, Datanauts goes deep on a topic such as networking, serverless, or OpenStack. As someone who hosts a similar podcast, I find it entertaining and educational to hear their points of view on a regular basis. If you like Software Engineering Daily, you might like Datanauts. And if you like Datanauts, you will love this episode of Software Engineering Daily. The post Infrastructure with Datanauts’ Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Giphy is a search engine for gifs, the short animated graphics that we see around the Internet. Giphy is also a creative platform where people create new gifs. Every search engine requires the construction of a search index, which is a data structure that responds to search queries efficiently. Since Giphy is a search engine for graphics, there is almost no text inherently associated with the each document. Giphy uses a pipeline of different labeling techniques in order to make a gif indexable by the search engine. In my conversation with Giphy CTO Anthony Johnson, we discuss how to scale a search engine, why Giphy needs to build new techniques for image processing, how human labeling for machine learning is evolving, and the future of Giphy–both as a creative medium and an advertising platform. This was an exciting and wide-reaching interview. Show Notes The Art of Monitoring The post Giphy Engineering with Anthony Johnson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Back in 2008, the range of tools that engineers could use to connect computer systems together were getting quite good. Cloud computing was democratizing access to servers. But the telephony ecosystem was still inaccessible to the average developer. If you needed your program to make a phone call and connect a user to a customer service representative, there was no easy way to do that. Twilio was started to make it easy for developers to connect to telephone systems using simple API calls. This has unlocked many important use cases: from Uber’s communication systems to the widespread adoption of 2-factor authentication. In this episode, Twilio VP of product management Pat Malatack joins the show to explain how the company builds and scales the telephony systems that underpin applications which we use every day. We also talked about how Twilio’s culture shapes how engineering proceeds at the company. Full disclosure: Twilio is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. The post Twilio Engineering with Pat Malatack appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
A company like Pinterest has millions of transactional emails to send to people. The scalability challenges of sending high volumes of email mean that it makes more sense for most companies to use an email as a service product rather than building their own. Chris McFadden is the VP of engineering and cloud operations at SparkPost and he joins the show to explain the architecture of SparkPost’s email as a service product. SparkPost started as an on-premise email technology for large enterprises, and evolved into a SaaS product. In 2014, the company migrated to the cloud, which has changed its infrastructure as well as its operational model. The post Email Infrastructure with Chris McFadden appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Meetup is an online service that allows people to gather into groups and meet in person. Since 2002, the company has been growing and its technology stack has been changing. Today, they are in the process of migrating to the cloud, using both Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Platform. Yvette Pasqua is the CTO of Meetup and she joins the show to explain how Meetup’s technology stack works and how the teams are organized. The discussion of multiple clouds is particularly interesting–Yvette describes GCP and AWS as both having distinct, well-defined use cases at Meetup. The post Meetup Architecture with Yvette Pasqua appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When a useful new technology comes out, companies that are in a position to adopt that new technology can gain an edge over competitors. As our industry grows and moves faster, these kinds of changes are coming faster–some recent examples are Docker, ReactJS, and Kubernetes. Evolutionary architecture supports incremental, guided change as a first principle along multiple dimensions. A company with an evolutionary architecture is structured to evolve in response to changes inside the company (such as a decision to change the product) or outside the company (such as the emergence of Docker). Neal Ford is an architect at ThoughtWorks and one the creators of the evolutionary architecture concept. Neal is the co-chair of O’Reilly’s Software Architecture Conference | April 2-5, 2017 | New York, NY. Neal is also giving a 2-day training at the O’Reilly OSCON conference May 8-9 | Austin, TX. Save 20% with discount code USRG on both. The post Evolutionary Architecture with Neal Ford appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Self-contained systems is an architectural approach that separates the functionality of a system into many independent systems. Each self-contained system is an autonomous web application, and is owned by one team. Communication with other self-contained systems or 3rd party systems is asynchronous where possible. As Eberhard Wolff explains in this episode, self-contained systems is not the same thing as microservices, but they are not mutually exclusive. Organizations often adopt a mix of architectural ideas, and it is worth understanding these different models so you can decide which of them to apply to your own projects. The post Self-Contained Systems with Eberhard Wolff appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Performance Monitoring with Andi Grabner 1:00:23
1:00:23 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:23
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedApplication performance monitoring helps an engineer understand what is going on with an application. An application on a single machine is often monitored by inserting bytecode instructions into the application after it has been interpreted. Distributed cloud applications with functionality broken up across multiple servers often use distributed tracing. Andi Grabner from Dynatrace joins today’s show to explain how monitoring software is built, and how engineers use it to solve problems. Monitoring is core to every business, whether the goal is to understand top-level business processes of to dissect and debug a specific engineering problem. And because monitoring is important at every layer of the stack, there is a plethora of monitoring tools for sale. Sponsors SparkPost provides email delivery services for apps and websites with offerings from free, self-service start-up accounts to sophisticated enterprise support and services. Try SparkPost and send 100,000 emails/month for free at http://pages.sparkpost.com/sedaily MongoDB Atlas is the easiest way to get access to MongoDB without having to run the database yourself. To try MongoDB Atlas today, go to mongodb.com/sedaily and use code goAtlas25 to get $25 in free credit . The post Performance Monitoring with Andi Grabner appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Online marketplaces and social networks often have a trust and safety team. The trust and safety team helps protect the platform from scams, fraud, and malicious actors. To detect these bad actors at scale requires building a system that classifies every transaction on the platform as safe or potentially malicious. Since every social platform has to build something like this, Smyte decided to engineer trust and safety as a service. Josh Yudaken joins the show today to discuss how Smyte engineered its platform to provide machine learning models for any organization that wants to take advantage of Smyte for its trust and safety. The tools we discuss include Kubernetes, RocksDB, and Kafka, and Smyte is solving some problems that have not been solved before, so this is a great episode for anyone interested in data engineering or fraud detection–or how to use cloud services and open source tools in unique ways. Sponsors Build apps that communicate with everyone in the world. Voice & Video, Messaging, and Authentication APIs for every application. Start your Free Trial today and get an additional $10 credit account with account upgrade. Learn more at go.twilio.com/podcast MongoDB Atlas is the easiest way to get access to MongoDB without having to run the database yourself. To try MongoDB Atlas today, go to mongodb.com/sedaily and use code goAtlas25 to get $25 in free credit . The post Antifraud Architecture with Josh Yudaken appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Reactive Microservices with Jonas Boner 1:01:10
1:01:10 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:01:10
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedFor many years, software companies have been breaking up their applications into individual services for the purpose of isolation and maintainability. In the early 2000s, we called this pattern “service-oriented architecture”. Today we call it “microservices”. Why did we change that terminology? Did the services get smaller? Not exactly. Jonas Boner suggests that the movement towards cloud and the increased prevalence of mobile changes how we look at these services–so much that we needed to change the terminology necessary to even talk about them. And once the conversation has shifted to “microservices”, what steps do we need to take to implement them properly? The reactive manifesto is a collection of principles for how to build applications. When the reactive manifesto is applied to the idea of microservices, we get reactive microservices , which Jonas and I discuss in today’s episode. Sponsors MongoDB Atlas is the easiest way to get access to MongoDB without having to run the database yourself. To try MongoDB Atlas today, go to mongodb.com/sedaily and use code goAtlas25 to get $25 in free credit . Build apps that communicate with everyone in the world. Voice & Video, Messaging, and Authentication APIs for every application. Start your Free Trial today and get an additional $10 credit account with account upgrade. Learn more at go.twilio.com/podcast Jamf Now is a cloud-based Mobile Device Management solution for the iPads, iPhones, and Macs in your workplace. Manage your first 3 devices for free. Add more for just $2/device/month. Create your free account today at jamf.com/SEDaily ! The post Reactive Microservices with Jonas Boner appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Some tasks are simple, but cannot be performed by a computer. Audio transcription, image recognition, survey completion–these are simple procedures that almost any human could execute, but the machine learning models have not gotten consistent enough to do them accurately. Scale is an API for human labor, created by Lucy Guo and Alexandr Wang. Similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk, Scale sends small, simple tasks to workers who can complete those tasks. Scale provides an interface that is easy for developers to use, unlike Mechanical Turk, which requires a dashboard. Similar to how Stripe allows developers to build software off of payments systems easily, Scale allows developers to build human-driven, manual tasks into their code–which unlocks a wide range of potential applications, which Lucy and Alexandr discussed with me. Sponsors Build apps that communicate with everyone in the world. Voice & Video, Messaging, and Authentication APIs for every application. Start your Free Trial today and get an additional $10 credit account with account upgrade. Learn more at go.twilio.com/podcast Jamf Now is a cloud-based Mobile Device Management solution for the iPads, iPhones, and Macs in your workplace. Manage your first 3 devices for free. Add more for just $2/device/month. Create your free account today at jamf.com/SEDaily ! MongoDB Atlas is the easiest way to get access to MongoDB without having to run the database yourself. To try MongoDB Atlas today, go to mongodb.com/sedaily and use code goAtlas25 to get $25 in free credit. The post Scale API with Lucy Guo and Alexandr Wang appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Caching is a fundamental concept of computer science. When data is accessed frequently, we put that data in a place where it can be accessed more quickly–we put the data in a cache. When data is accessed less often, we leave it in a place where the access time is slow or expensive. Netflix has a huge variety of data, and a huge variety of access patterns for how that data gets retrieved from storage. In today’s episode, Scott Mansfield gives an overview of Netflix’s caching architecture, including EVCache, the ephemeral, volatile cache built for Netflix’s cloud architecture. As with other episodes about Netflix architecture, this show is a deeply technical case study. The post Netflix Caching with Scott Mansfield appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When you are working on a program, a lot of things are going through your head. In some sense, you become part machine when you are programming. Learnable Programming is a concept that facilitates this, by showing developers what the computer is doing in real time, before compiling. In this episode, Josh Varty, co-founder of Code Connect Inc., talks to Edaena Salinas about incorporating concepts from Learnable Programming into Visual Studio and C# by showing developers what the computer is thinking while they are typing. Code Connect lets a developer immediately see what value a variable is taking, and provide test values to troubleshoot a portion of code to understand how different code paths are going to work. This is instead of having to compile and run the full program. If you have ever thought about making developer tools for an IDE or a programming language, this episode provides some great information. The post Developer Tools with Josh Varty appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Microservices are a widely adopted pattern for breaking an application up into pieces that can be well-understood by the individual teams within the company. Microservices also allow these individual pieces to be scaled independently and updated in isolation. Past Software Engineering Daily episodes have covered the microservice architectures of Twitter, Netflix, Google, Uber, and other companies. In today’s episode, I sit down with Rafael Schloming, who is building tools for microservices at Datawire. The post Microservices with Rafi Schloming appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Slack is a chat client that has reached wide adoption. The rise of Slack has coincided with the rise of chatbots. A chatbot is a simple, conversational interface into a computer program that may have simple functionality, like telling you some simple statistics, or more complex functionality, like helping you manage your continuous integration pipeline. Bot design and engineering is a new field, and a vast array of resources and techniques are available for developers looking to hack on it. Amir Shevat is the director of developer relations at Slack, and is responsible for communicating with developers about the best ways to build bots for Slack. After seeing his talk at O’Reilly Bot Day, I had a number of questions about where we are with bots today and where we are going. I enjoyed this conversation with Amir, and if you aren’t already convinced that bots are an important platform for engineers to understand, this conversation will convince you. The post Slack Bots with Amir Shevat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Amazon Web Services changed the economics of building an internet application. Instead of having to invest tens of thousands of dollars up front for hardware, developers can pay for services over time as their application scales. As AWS has grown to be a gigantic platform, the documentation about how to use cloud infrastructure has become insufficient. As an answer to this, Joshua Levy initiated The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services , an open-source collection of resources available on github. Joshua has experience at a variety of companies, including Viv, the conversational interface that was recently acquired by Samsung. In our conversation, Josh brought his years of experience to the table to explain the risks, benefits, and alternatives of Amazon Web Services. Josh has become a friend over the last year, and if you get the chance to have a conversation with him, I highly recommend it. He will be at the re:Invent conference in Vegas at the end of this month (November) and if you are interested in talking to him about the AWS Open Guide, or anything else, reach out to him. The post AWS Open Guide with Joshua Levy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The blueprint for a typical startup involves investing heavily in cloud services–either from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The high costs can quickly eat away at all of the money that startup has raised. In today’s episode, Avi Freedman outlines some of the infrastructure mistakes that can set back a company severely–cloud jail, hipster tools, and lack of monitorability. Avi is the CEO of Kentik, network traffic, performance, and security visibility company, so he gets lots of perspective on the infrastructure of the average company. We also discussed the business of running a software company, contrasted with the life of a poker player. Avi and I both have some experience playing high-stakes poker, so it was a great opportunity to get his perspective on the parallels between the two fields. The post Infrastructure Mistakes with Avi Freedman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Chat bots are your newest co-worker. Slack, HipChat, and other chat clients allow developers and other team members to communicate more dynamically than the limits of email. Companies have started to add bots to their chat rooms. These bots can give you technical information, restart a server, or notify you that a build has finished. Jason Hand is the author of ChatOps: Managing Infrastructure in Group Chat. He joins the show today to discuss how ChatOps improves development and operations by centralizing lots of functionality in group chat. Edaena Salinas is the host for today’s show. She also hosts the excellent Women In Tech Show –a podcast we highly recommend. Since we are on the subject of bots–we want to thank O’Reilly Media for recently providing Software Engineering Daily a ticket to Bot Day. The post ChatOps with Jason Hand appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Kafka is a distributed log for producers and consumers to publish messages to each other. We’ve done many shows about Kafka as a key building block for distributed systems, but we often leave out the discussion of the complexities of setting up Kafka and monitoring it. Kafka deployments can be a complex piece of software to manage. Tom Crayford is an engineer at Heroku, where he helped engineer the recent Heroku Kafka product, which is a managed version of Apache Kafka. Our conversation explored the use cases of Kafka and how to build Kafka as a cloud service at scale. For more information about Heroku Kafka, check out an upcoming webinar . Full disclosure: Heroku is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. That said, this is a topic I am genuinely interested in–it is often difficult to get cloud providers to talk in detail about how they are architecting their services. The post Managed Kafka with Tom Crayford appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Google Compute Engine is the public cloud built by Google. It provides infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service capabilities that rival Amazon Web Services. Today’s guest Joe Beda was there from the beginning of GCE, and he was also one of the early engineers on the Kubernetes project. Google’s internal systems have made it easy for employees to spin up compute resources, but it was not a simple task to make this internal cloud consumable by the public–not to mention competitive with AWS. In order for a cloud provider to be successful, it needs to offer self-healing, self-managing infrastructure that can run microservices. The post Google Cloudbuilding with Joe Beda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Docker Cloudcasting with Brian Gracely 1:01:53
1:01:53 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:01:53
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCloud computing was something much different in 2011, when Brian Gracely and Aaron Delp started The Cloudcast, a podcast I listen to on a regular basis. The Cloudcast features technical discussions about cloud infrastructure technology, and one of the most recent shows was a monologue by Brian Gracely where he explained his perspective on the industry rumblings about a Docker fork. The utility of a container for so many different purposes leads to different organizations having differing preferences for what use case is optimized for. The impression that I took away from this conversation, as well as the next episode that will air with Joe Beda, is that the diverse opinions and products in the container and orchestration ecosystem is quite healthy. Brian does a great job explaining his perspective on The Cloudcast, and he discusses his beliefs further in this episode. The post Docker Cloudcasting with Brian Gracely appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
When a user of a social network updates her profile, that profile update needs to propagate to several databases that want to know about such an update–search indexes, user databases, caches, and other services. When Neha Narkhede was at LinkedIn, she helped develop Kafka, which was deployed at LinkedIn to help solve this very problem. Using Kafka as an event queue, LinkedIn adopted the CQRS architectural pattern together with event sourcing. Event sourcing is an architectural pattern that allows changes to our application model to be represented as events. Each event is published to an event queue, and is pulled off of the queue by each of the various services that need to consume that event. Event sourcing and the related architectural pattern CQRS allow for a flow of information through an application that is easy to reason about, and has several other desirable properties. In today’s episode, Neha explains how to use Kafka for event sourcing and how related software patterns are improving the architectures of companies like Netflix and Uber. For more information, check out this Confluent blog entry . The post Kafka Event Sourcing with Neha Narkhede appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The intent of the DevOps movement is to get organizations moving faster and more effectively by breaking down siloes, and improving communication. Gene Kim’s book The Phoenix Project illustrated this by telling the fictional story of a company adopting a DevOps mentality. Although that book was fiction, Gene is an experienced engineer, having worked as founder and CTO of Tripwire, a software company that makes security and compliance automation software. In his new book The DevOps Handbook , Gene presents a practical companion to The Phoenix Project . Together with his co-authors, Gene has written a guide for how to move an organization toward DevOps, and in this episode we explore some of the topics from his book. Check out an excerpt from Gene’s book here: DevOps Handbook The post DevOps Handbook with Gene Kim appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
At Netflix, developers write applications with a variety of requirements–from simple requests for a list of movies to more resource-intensive requests like a complex machine learning workflow. Netflix wants developers to be able to request the resources they need from a compute cluster and receive those resources on-demand, without thinking too much about the state of that pool of resources they are drawing from. At the cluster level, this means scheduling the application requests intelligently. Sharma Podila, a distributed systems software architect at Netflix, explains how Netflix has built a cloud native scheduling system on top of Mesos. The post Netflix Scheduling with Sharma Podila appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Monitoring Architecture with Theo Schlossnagle 56:12
56:12 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:12
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedBuilding a monitoring system is a complex distributed systems problem. Events are produced from different points in an application and must be aggregated in order to form metrics. These events are often ingested by a time series database, which forms the backbone of our monitoring system. Theo Schlossnagle is the CEO of Circonus, where he has been working on architecting the company’s monitoring software for six years. In this episode, we talk about how to build a monitoring system and the requirements for the underlying time-series database, as well as what monitoring even is. The post Monitoring Architecture with Theo Schlossnagle appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In order to move software updates from the development team to production, companies do a variety of things. Some teams might email files to each other or use FTP or even floppy disks. Most companies today at least use version control systems like Git together with separate servers for development and production. When code is ready to move to production, a build that is on the development server gets copied over to the production servers, and the production servers begin serving real users. This process is known as deployment, and over the last few decades companies have started deploying more rapidly (even “continuously”), leading to faster iterations and better feedback loops between the software development team and the users of the product. A particularly effective version of this workflow is known as continuous delivery. In today’s episode, David Rice from ThoughtWorks joins the show to give a short history of continuous delivery, and how continuous delivery actually looks in practice. The post Continuous Delivery with David Rice appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Kafka Streams is a library for building streaming applications that transform input Kafka topics into output Kafka topics. In a time when there are numerous streaming frameworks already out there, why do we need yet another? To quote today’s guest Jay Kreps “the gap we see Kafka Streams filling is less the analytics-focused domain these frameworks focus on and more building core applications and microservices that process data streams.” Jay is the CEO of Confluent, a company that is building Kafka technology, and he is one of the original authors of Kafka. We began with a brief history of why Kafka evolved to be the message broker of choice for so many data engineering stacks, then we got into a discussion of streaming–what is streaming? How does Kafka communicate with streaming frameworks? Our conversation concluded with a discussion of Kafka Streams and the future of the Kafka data platform. The post Kafka Streams with Jay Kreps appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Platform as a Service with Sinclair Schuller 56:48
56:48 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:48
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedPlatform as a service can mean different things to different people. The most prominent feature of a PaaS is the ability to abstract away issues that every developer within an organization has to deal with. As an example, developers today don’t need to fear scalability and load balancing issues as much as engineers of the 90’s and early 2000s. We can develop our applications without worrying about the scaling that is going on under the covers. Sinclair Schuller is the CEO of Apprenda and he joins the show today to discuss what is involved in building a PaaS, particularly one targeted at enterprises. His company was started in 2007, just a few years after AWS got started. We also talked about the potential Docker Fork, for which Sinclair had useful business and engineering perspectives. The post Platform as a Service with Sinclair Schuller appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Google builds cloud services for developers, such as PubSub, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Cloud DataStore. On Software Engineering Daily, we’ve done lots of shows about how these types of services are built. In this episode, we are zooming in on the interaction between the developer using a cloud service and the design and engineering of the client APIs. To build a useful cloud service, Google has to make a common way of interacting with that service from any programming language on any device. Jon Skeet is a longtime engineer at Google, and he joins the show to explain how Google uses generated code to make the creation of those APIs more streamlined. We talk about gRPC, protocol buffers, C#, and lots of other topics. The post Cloud Clients with Jon Skeet appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Batch and stream processing systems have been evolving for the past decade. From MapReduce to Apache Storm to Dataflow, the best practices for large volume data processing have become more sophisticated as the industry and open source communities have iterated on them. Dataflow and Apache Beam are projects that present a unified batch and stream processing system. A previous episode with Frances Perry discussed how they work in detail. In today’s episode, Eric Anderson discusses Cloud Dataflow, a service from Google that lets users manage their data processing pipelines without having to spin up individual servers to run them on. Cloud Dataflow–like the “serverless” movement we have done several shows on–represents a growing shift towards cloud providers offering services that abstract away the operational challenges of managing compute nodes. If you have suggestions for topics in this area, please do send me an email. The post Cloud Dataflow with Eric Anderson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Slack is a chat application that is rapidly growing in popularity. The focus of Slack is to create a polished, responsive tool for productivity that cuts down on the emailing, context switching, and useless meetings that take place at a typical enterprise. Keith Adams, the chief architect at Slack, joins the show to explain how those high level principles translate into engineering decisions. Keith previously worked for 7 years at Facebook, contributing heavily to the tools that make PHP easier to develop with at scale. Slack’s core product is also built with PHP, and Keith discusses the similarities and differences between scaling Facebook and Slack. The post Slack’s Architecture with Keith Adams appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Uber has a software architecture with unique requirements. Uber does not have the firehose of user engagement data that Twitter or Facebook has, but each transaction on Uber is both high value and time-sensitive. Users are paying for transportation that they expect to be available and reasonably close by. When Uber’s system is trying to match a rider with a driver, availability is favored over consistency . It is important that the rider can always get some driver, even if it is not the best driver. Ringpop is a system built at Uber to provide scalable, fault-tolerant, application layer sharding. Ringpop consists of a membership protocol, consistent hashing, and forwarding capabilities. Jeff Wolski is a software engineer at Uber working in Ringpop, and he joins the show to explain how Ringpop brings coordination to distributed applications. The post Uber’s Ringpop with Jeff Wolski appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Kubernetes is a cluster management tool open sourced by Google. On Software Engineering Daily, we’ve done numerous shows on how Kubernetes works in theory. Today’s episode is a case study in how to deploy Kubernetes to production at a company with existing infrastructure. GolfNow is a fifteen year-old application written in C# .NET. It is a successful, growing business that is a division of NBC Sports. As GolfNow has grown, it has encountered scalability issues, and the engineering team at GolfNow decided to move its entire monolithic infrastructure to microservices running in Docker containers, managed by Kubernetes. Sheriff Mohamed joins the show today to discuss migrating his company’s application to Kubernetes. It’s a great show for anyone who is moving a large team to Kubernetes, or considering the technology for their application. The post Kubernetes Migration with Sheriff Mohamed appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In a microservices architecture, a user request will often make its way through several different services before it returns a result to the end user. If a user experiences a failed request, the root cause could be in any of the services along that request path. Even more problematic is the challenge of debugging latency in this kind of request chain. Reshmi Krishna joins the show today to discuss distributed tracing, the process of tracking the path of a request through multiple services in order to determine the root cause of latency or errors. A popular tool for distributed tracing is Zipkin, which is largely based off of a paper published by Google called “Dapper”. Reshmi is also speaking at the upcoming O’Reilly Velocity Conference in New York, September 20-22 , so check that out if you are interested in web performance, continuous delivery, or anything else related to web and mobile development. The post Distributed Tracing with Reshmi Krishna appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“Serverless” usually refers to an architectural pattern where the server side logic is run in stateless compute containers that are event-triggered and ephemeral. Mike Roberts has written a series of articles about serverless computing, in which he discusses theories and patterns around serverless architecture. In this episode, Mike and I discuss how to reimagine our software architecture using functions-as-a-service. We go into the costs, benefits, and modern limitations of current serverless platforms like AWS Lambda. The post Serverless Architecture with Mike Roberts appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Unbounded data streams create difficult challenges for our application architectures. The data never stops coming, and we are forced to assume that we will never know if or when we have seen all of our data. Some streaming systems give us the tools to deal partially with unbounded data streams, but we have to complement those streaming systems with batch processing, in a technique known as the Lambda Architecture. Apache Beam is a unified model for defining and executing data processing workflows, and Frances Perry joins the show to explain how Beam provides a way for us to model our data processing, agnostic of whether we choose to run those workflows on Spark, Flink, or Google’s Dataflow. Links Apache Beam Streaming 101 Streaming 102 The Dataflow Model Google Cloud Dataflow Fundamentals of Stream Processing with Beam Mobile Gaming Example Dataflow: Beam and Spark Comparison The post Apache Beam with Frances Perry appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Prometheus is a tool for monitoring our distributed applications. It allows us to focus on the services we are deploying rather than the individual machines that make up instances of that service. The monitoring service itself is a portion of a distributed system that is treated differently than the services we are monitoring. We don’t want to use a consensus-based tool like Zookeeper or Consul because we can’t afford the strong consistency. Brian Brazil’s company Robust Perception is built around Prometheus, and he joins the show to discuss why and how to use Prometheus. The post Prometheus Monitoring with Brian Brazil appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 The Art of Monitoring with James Turnbull 1:02:28
1:02:28 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:02:28
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMonitoring translates machine data into actionable business metrics, and is a key component of a modern software company. James Turnbull’s new book “The Art of Monitoring” describes how organizations can build their monitoring infrastructure. James joins the show today to outline the strategies that a company can use to proactively monitor their systems. We talk about pull- vs. push-based monitoring, events, logging, metrics, and James’s experience as CTO of Kickstarter. The post The Art of Monitoring with James Turnbull appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Lee Atchison spent seven years at Amazon working in retail, software distribution, and Amazon Web Services. He then moved to New Relic, where he has spent four years scaling the company’s internal architecture. From his decade of experience at fast growing web technology companies, Lee has written the book Architecting for Scale , from O’Reilly. As an application scales, it becomes significantly more complicated while at the same time receiving more traffic. The intersection of these two problems leads to a variety of discussions around availability, risk management, and microservices. Lee and I didn’t have time to get through everything in his book Architecting for Scale , but if you enjoy this episode, check out the book. Lee also spoke recently at the O’Reilly Velocity conference in Santa Clara, so you can check out his talk. We are giving away a free ticket to O’Reilly’s Velocity 2016 conference in New York . If you want to be entered to win that ticket, send a tweet about your favorite SE Daily episode about dev ops or web performance, and tag software_daily , as well as #velocityconf. The post Scalable Architecture with Lee Atchison appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Scheduling is the method by which work is assigned to resources to complete that work. At the operating system level, this can mean scheduling of threads and processes. At the data center level, this can mean scheduling Hadoop jobs or other workflows that require the orchestration of a network of computers. Adrian Cockcroft worked on scheduling at Sun Microsystems, eBay, and Netflix. In each of these environments, the nature of what was being scheduled was different, but the goals of the scheduling algorithms were analogous–throughput, response time, and cache affinity are relevant in different ways at each layer of the stack. Adrian is well-known for helping bring Netflix onto Amazon Web Services, and I recommend watching the numerous YouTube videos of Adrian talking about that transformation. The post Schedulers with Adrian Cockcroft appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
In 1999, it took $50,000 to buy a server. Once you bought that server, you had to know how to operate and maintain it. Today, cloud service providers have changed how we build software. Servers, load balancers, networking, storage–these hardware concerns have been turned into software. Don Pezet joins the show today to discuss the fundamentals of a cloud service provider. These are the basics that you need to know about building and maintaining your application in the cloud. Don is a host of IT Pro TV, a company that makes training resources for engineers and operators. The post Cloud Providers with Don Pezet appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Scaling Twitter with Buoyant.io’s William Morgan 56:27
56:27 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:27
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedSix years ago, Twitter was experiencing outages due to high traffic. Back in 2010 Twitter was built as a monolithic Ruby on Rails application. Twitter migrated to a microservices architecture to fix these problems. During this migration, the engineers at Twitter learned how to build and scale highly distributed microservice architectures. William Morgan was an engineer at Twitter during that time, and he is now the CEO of Buoyant.io, a company building open-source microservices infrastructure. Some of the big problems at Twitter were solved at the communication layer, using an RPC library called Finagle. At Buoyant, those lessons are being applied to a project called Linkerd, an RPC proxy. The post Scaling Twitter with Buoyant.io’s William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Manufacturing and Microservices with Cimpress’ Jim Sokoloff and Maarten Wensveen 52:58
52:58 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:58
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMass customization is the process of making customized, personalized products that are accessible to individuals and small businesses. The process involves manufacturing, assembly lines, supply chains, and software at every step along the way. Today’s guests are Jim Sokoloff and Maarten Wensveen, who work on infrastructure and technology at Cimpress, a mass customization platform. Cimpress has t shirt printers, warehousing machines, supply chain management tools, and lots of other computers that come together in the computer-integrated manufacturing process. The company has been around for a few decades, and more recently they have moved to microservices for many of the reasons that have been discussed in previous episodes. If you work at a big company with some monolithic characteristics, this episode might give you some good arguments to bring to your manager about why and how to move to microservices. The post Manufacturing and Microservices with Cimpress’ Jim Sokoloff and Maarten Wensveen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
The unit of computation has evolved from on premise servers to virtual machines in the cloud to containers running in those virtual machines. Serverless computation is another stage in the evolution of computational unit management. With a serverless architecture, a function call to the cloud spins up a transient container, calls the function on that container, and then spins down the container. Ryan Scott Brown joins the show today to discuss the benefits and consequences of serverless computing. With containers and VMs, we still have to worry that the resources we are spinning up in the cloud will run without being utilized. Serverless computing gives us more control over these compute resources, so that we don’t have unused servers that we are paying for. The post Serverless Code with Ryan Scott Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Google’s Site Reliability Engineering with Todd Underwood 53:38
53:38 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked53:38
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedGoogle’s site reliability engineers are responsible for maintaining the highly available services that power the Google software that we all use on a regular basis. O’Reilly recently published the book “Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems”, and the book provides a comprehensive window into how the site reliability engineering role works. Todd Underwood is a director of site reliability engineering. On today’s episode, Todd explains how the role of a SRE relates to devops. We discuss the relationship between the engineers who are developing Google services, and the SREs who are maintaining it. Google’s internal data center operating system “Borg” is also discussed. The post Google’s Site Reliability Engineering with Todd Underwood appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Dropbox has been storing files on Amazon Web Services for 8 years, and Dropbox’s core business is storing files. For the past three years, Dropbox has been working on a project to migrate its file storage from Amazon Web Services to its own custom-built infrastructure. Magic Pocket is the name of Dropbox’s new infrastructure layer, and it gives Dropbox more control and improved economics. James Cowling leads the storage team at Dropbox. In today’s episode, James takes us into the architecture of Dropbox and explains how the team moved all of the user file storage from Amazon S3 to Dropbox’s Magic Pocket infrastructure. Dropbox’s architecture is built with a focus on simplicity–and there are numerous challenges to maintaining that simplicity in the face of an extremely complex problem like this. The post Dropbox’s Magic Pocket with James Cowling appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Distributed Systems Tradeoffs with Camille Fournier 56:15
56:15 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:15
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedDistributed systems products are often marketed with terms like “real-time data” and “hassle-free scaling”, but what do those terms actually mean? Is data in a distributed system ever reliably “real time”? Do we ever have strong enough plans about our scalability strategy to say that scaling will be “hassle free”? Camille Fournier joins us today to discuss distributed systems in practice. Like everything in else in computer science, distributed systems are all about tradeoffs–and picking the right sets of tradeoffs in our distributed system will affect the entire organization that is building that system. We also discuss the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is similar to the Apache Foundation, but specifically for cloud technologies. The CNCF is likely to have strong impact on the way we build software for a long time to come. The post Distributed Systems Tradeoffs with Camille Fournier appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Distributed Systems and Exception Monitoring with Brian Rue 35:54
35:54 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked35:54
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedException monitoring services and log management services are two sides of a gradient. Exception monitoring services capture and aggregate the problems that occur on your application. Log management services aggregate all of your logs, so that you can decide for yourself what constitutes a problem. Brian Rue from Rollbar joins the show today to talk about Rollbar’s exception monitoring architecture, and the competitive landscape of these technology products. Every software engineer wants track the problems with an application, but some developers need more information than others–and that ends up changing how these error aggregation services are architected. This is an interesting conversation on the business of SaaS products for developers, and the architecture of a distributed system designed to monitor and aggregate errors. The post Distributed Systems and Exception Monitoring with Brian Rue appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Google’s Container Management with Brendan Burns 44:58
44:58 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked44:58
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedKubernetes is an open source system for automating deployment, operations, and scaling of containerized applications. Google developed Kubernetes after fifteen years of running containers in production. Brendan Burns is a founder of the Kubernetes project, and he joins us to talk about the lessons learned as Google has built containerized applications to distribute across its massive infrastructure. We talk about Docker, Borg, Kubernetes, and other distributed systems technologies. Applications crash and engineers need to be able to quickly find the root cause of a crash. Apps have become distributed, and debugging workflows have changed. Developers need better tools to identify and troubleshoot problems with their apps. The post Google’s Container Management with Brendan Burns appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“You need to build more things yourself to be highly available, but one of the very good consequences of being bare metal is that the prices are very low compared to what you could get on the cloud provider.” Engineers who want to add search to their application usually deploy Elasticsearch, or write their own search engine that uses TF-IDF. These solutions work well for large documents, but are less effective for large volumes of small records–which is how many modern web and mobile applications are structured. In today’s show, Julien Lemoine discusses how his company Algolia thinks about search. Algolia is a search as a service company that gives developers an easier way to search on their websites and applications. Questions What are the unsolved problems in search? What is TF-IDF, and how is it is used to rank search results? Why did you decide to set up your own servers instead of going to a cloud provider? Why is it useful to divide search into two different aspects? How do you stress-test your system? How did you respond to your recent data center connectivity issue? How do you build a company oriented for the long-term? Links Algolia Elasticsearch tf-idf Bare-metal servers Multitenancy model GAE Chaosmonkey testing strategy ZooKeeper Raft On premise Julien on Twitter The post Search as a Service with Julien Lemoine appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“We’re not always in control of other people’s networks.” CDN stands for content delivery network. A content delivery network is a system of distributed servers that delivers web pages and other web content. Without CDNs, the internet would be much slower, because CDNs function as a caching layer for most web resources. Carl Gustas is an engineer at CacheFly, a popular content delivery network. He joins us today to discuss how CDNs work, and the different methods an engineer can use to take advantage of caching in a CDN. Questions What is a proxy server, and how is it relevant to a CDN? Why is a first hit to a website painful whereas subsequent hits are not? Does a CDN provide resilience from DDOS attacks? Do you use containers in production? What is the replication factor for my files on a CDN? What are the craziest stories you have from managing a CDN for 10 years? Links Ingress point (CDN overview) CDN Delivery edge Cachefly Carl on Twitter The post Managing a CDN with Carl Gustas appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“You write the code, but you don’t run it? That’s just preposterous.” Software applications are constantly generating logs. These logs are necessary to understand how an application is functioning, and logs are key to debugging. As applications have gotten more complex, logging infrastructure has become complex as well. Storing and managing all of our log data is such a big task that several companies have been started to tackle this problem. Today’s guest is Christian Beedgen, CTO at Sumo Logic. Sumo Logic is a cloud-based log management company. We discuss the elastic log-processing platform Sumo Logic has built to help software engineers with log management. It’s a great conversation about distributed systems, machine learning, and debugging applications. Questions How has logging changed for applications in the cloud? What do you mean when you say “log data is big data”? What kinds of elasticity are important in your log architecture? What is the ingestion path for the logs? Are there any interested distributed systems problems at Sumo Logic? Why do you want to replicate three times? How do you use machine learning to improve log management? Can you describe what NoOps is, and how it reflects Sumo Logic’s culture? Links Sumo Logic tail Elastic log processing (video) Multitenant architecture Inverted index Lucene JSON logs NoOps Debate Grows Heated Christian on Twitter The post Logging and NoOps with Christian Beedgen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“As the scale continues to increase, certain effects of architecture become less and less efficient.” When you spend money online, you expect a receipt to come in your email. When you register for a new web site, you need to verify your sign up in your email. These types of emails are called “transactional email” and sending these types of email at scale is a complex engineering task. J.R. Jasperson is the chief architect at SendGrid, a transactional email platform. On this episode, we discuss how email works–from the basics to the massive scale that SendGrid operates on. We also talk about email spam and fraud in detail. Questions Why is transactional email important for software engineers? What are the engineering problems associated with sending lots of emails? Where can emails “fall through the cracks” so to speak? What are the scaling issues you face and how have you dealt with them? How is scaling an email service different from scaling a high-availability website like Netflix? What did you learn from the previous “tech crashes” and how does it reflect on the current climate? What is an engineering problem around email that you would never have encountered in another business? Links Sendgrid SMTP Mail server Amazon SES Kafka Egress filtering “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM” J.R. on Twitter The post Scaling Email with J.R. Jasperson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Automating Infrastructure at HashiCorp with Mitchell Hashimoto 1:00:10
1:00:10 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:10
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“SaaS, whether we want it or not, in enterprise technology or in our data centers, is coming.” Application delivery has become more complex as software architectures have moved into the cloud. Data center infrastructure has turned into code to be manipulated, and software engineering teams are adjusting their strategies. HashiCorp is a company that builds open-source software for application development and deployment. Mitchell Hashimoto is the founder of HashiCorp, and he joins us to discuss a modern approach to application delivery, and the tools HashiCorp is developing. Questions What are the problems HashiCorp is trying to solve? Why does automation become more important as infrastructure becomes more complex? What are the core characteristics to a good development process? How do the changes in the deployment process affect developers? What drives the current shift towards declarative programming? Why did you choose to build your own scheduler? What is Consul? Links Terraform Vagrant OpenStack CloudFormation AMIs Schedulers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming Consul Service discovery Mitchell’s page The post Automating Infrastructure at HashiCorp with Mitchell Hashimoto appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Bootstrapping a SaaS for Developers with Itai Lahan 1:00:53
1:00:53 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:53
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“It’s an amazing era for software developers – we have all this amazing infrastructure behind the scenes that we can build upon.” Ten years ago, building a highly scalable image delivery service would require millions of dollars in upfront costs, and hours of work configuring hardware server infrastructure. Today, it is possible to bootstrap this type of service, with minimal investment. Today’s episode is about building a content delivery network for images and video. Today’s guest is Itai Lahan, CEO of Cloudinary. We discuss Cloudinary’s early product infrastructure, and how they have evolved as a company since then. We also talk in detail about the venture capital landscape of Silicon Valley today, and how to strategize about raising money. Full disclosure, Cloudinary is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Questions How did you begin working on an image CDN? What are the common problems developers have when they are trying to serve images? What did the first architecture of Cloudinary look like? What are the challenges of building APIs and integrations for a variety of different platforms that use your service? What were the first scalability bottlenecks that you hit in the early days? Why did you switch from AWS Cloudfront to Akamai? How do you monitor system health and how are your operational teams segmented? What was the rationale behind bootstrapping your company? Links Cloudinary Carrierwave Nginx AWS cloudfront Solr Akamai WebP Amazon SQS Twilio Itai on Twitter The post Bootstrapping a SaaS for Developers with Itai Lahan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Developer Analytics with Calvin French-Owen 51:21
51:21 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:21
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“Its sort of like the old joke in computer science – what do you do when you have a problem? Well, add a layer of abstraction.” Today’s guest is Calvin French-Owen, the CTO of Segment, a tool that companies use to aggregate their analytics into once place. As Segment has scaled, the company has had to restructure its etire technical architecture. Microservices, containers, Amazon Web Services, and dev ops are a few of the topics that Calvin and I explore in our conversation, so this is a great episode for anyone who is trying to understand the relationships between those different subjects. Segment’s product unifies analytics from different services and puts them into one centralized place. Full disclosure: Segment is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. For most of this episode, we don’t even talk about the product, we talk about the back end engineering behind the product. Questions What tools are used to transfer data to analytics systems? Why is it useful to have a single API to fan out into all the different analytics processed Why did you embrace microservices at Segment, and why was it different from the reasons other companies have adopted them? Why are process level monitoring and program level monitoring worth differentiating? Could you explain the nuance between microservices and microworkers? How do you determine when to write a brand new microservice versus adding new functionality to an old one? How did you do an architectural rebuild while still running the business day-to-day? How should software engineering teams decide whether to build or buy certain aspects of their product? Links Redshift Mode Segment Baremetrics Why Microservices Work For Us Rebuilding Our Infrastructure with Docker, ECS, and Terraform Hashicorp CoreOS Terraform Datadog The post Developer Analytics with Calvin French-Owen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Continuous Delivery and Test Automation with Flo Motlik 54:13
54:13 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:13
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“It’s Friday night and you’re basically out of the office on your way to meet with friends. And you just merge this thing and put it into production because you have that trust – that the system will capture any kind of problem.” Continuous integration and deployment are important tools for modern software development. With continuous integration and deployment, individual engineers can push code without waiting to synchronize with the rest of the team on a big software release. Today on Software Engineering Daily, Flo Motlik, the CTO of Codeship, joins us to discuss continuous integration, dev ops, and microservices. In full disclosure, Codeship is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily, but we would be doing this interview whether or not that was the case, because Flo has a lot to say about software engineering. In this show, we get into conversations and case studies of how software teams take continuous deployment from theory into practice. Questions How does an organization without continuous integration or delivery compare to one with these processes? How should testing strategy be structured to work with a continuous deployment infrastructure? What is a continuous deployment pipeline, and why is it so important? How do you define DevOps? Where did you get the idea to start Codeship? What are the performance benefits of parallelizing tests? Links Codeship Jenkins Product Hunt Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Writing Good Rake Tasks * But Were Afraid to Ask s Lending Crowd Flo’s page Sponsors Wealthfront is the automated investment service that manages your investments online. Check out wealthfront.com/sedaily to get your first $15,000 managed for free, as a listener of Software Engineering Daily. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Continuous Delivery and Test Automation with Flo Motlik appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
This episode is a republication from my interview with Leslie Lamport on Software Engineering Radio. Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a definition: a distributed system is a multiprocessor system in which the time required for interprocess communication is large compared to the time for events within a single processor–in other words, it takes longer for interprocess communication than it does for a process to look at its own memory. Alternatively, a distributed system is one in which processors communicate by sending messages. Leslie goes on to talk about how he became interested in distributed systems, and describes the story behind his paper about the Paxos algorithm. The goal of Paxos is to maintain consensus in an environment with unexpected faults (otherwise known as Byzantine faults). After the discussion of Paxos, Jeff asks Leslie about his recent talk “Thinking for Programmers,” which emphasizes the benefit of having a specification prior to writing actual code. “Specification” can mean a variety of things, but predicates and next-state relationships provide a mathematical rigor that is well-suited to distributed and concurrent systems. The conversation concludes with Jeff asking Leslie about how a programmer can build the mental resolve to work through a difficult problem. The post Distributed Systems with Leslie Lamport appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Engineering Cloud Services with Sam Kottler 47:07
47:07 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked47:07
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“A lot of our customers are kind of AWS refugees who really don’t want all the stuff amazon has, and they just want a really easy to use system that is reliable.” Operating a data center has been turned into a service. For most new companies, managing real-world servers is no longer an issue. But one exception is if your startup is a company offering the data center as a service. In this episode, Jeff and Sam talk about the engineering that goes on at DigitalOcean, and how the company differentiates itself from its competitors. Sam Kottler is an engineering manager at DigitalOcean, and previously worked at Red Hat. Questions What were my options before DigitalOcean was created? If I choose to go with DigitalOcean over AWS, what are the tradeoffs I am making? What happens on DigitalOcean’s end when I spin up a droplet on the online portal? What economies of scale could you get if you moved all droplets from VMs to containers? What happens when the server my droplet is on dies? Can you talk about a distributed systems problem that you’ve dealt with that seemed unbelievable? What’s in the future for DigitalOcean? Links DigitalOcean Google File System paper Twilio How to Debug Anything MySQL Sam on Twitter The post Engineering Cloud Services with Sam Kottler appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Moving to Microservices at SoundCloud with Lukasz Plotnicki 46:54
46:54 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:54
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“You can have a monolith, and it can be a perfectly good thing.” Monoliths versus microservices – the architectural debate continues across the internet. SoundCloud is a popular music company that experienced the rapid development benefits of a monolith, as well as the long-term technical debt. That technical debt has since been relieved by a move towards microservices. In this episode of Software Engineering Daily, Lukasz joins Jeff to talk about the realities of moving from a monolith to a microservices architecture, and walks through the lessons learned at SoundCloud. Lukasz Plotnicki is a consultant and software engineer at ThoughtWorks, which helps clients address their software development challenges and needs. Questions What are the application requirements of SoundCloud? Is there something about Rails that lends towards apps becoming monolithic? How did SoundCloud gradually ease into using microservice architecture? How did the variety of front-end interfaces affect SoundCloud’s monolithic architecture? What is the difference between a BFF and a microservice? What are the downsides of a BFF implementation? What are the lessons the SoundCloud case study has taught you about software architecture? Links SoundCloud BFF @ SoundCloud Thoughtworks Monolithic application How we ended up with microservices The Strangler Pattern Bounded Context Domain-driven design Lukasz on Twitter The post Moving to Microservices at SoundCloud with Lukasz Plotnicki appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“If an engineer is doing something repeatedly over and over again, their mind is immediately going to jump to that place where it’s like ‘Okay how can I make this faster?’ or ‘How can I save myself time?’” Quora is a Q&A website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. Shreyes Seshasai is the Director of Engineering at Quora. Questions Is there a false dichotomy between development velocity and code quality? What does it mean to “move fast at average”? How do you incentivize people to automate? Why does Quora engineering not have pre-commit code reviews? How do you handle testing for desktop, iOS and Android? What are Webnode and Livenode? What is the relationship between engineering and design teams at Quora? Links Moving Fast With High Code Quality Quora’s Approach To Moving Fast Sustainably Tech Talk – webnode2 and LiveNode Amazon Redshift Shreyes on Twitter Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Engineering at Quora with Shreyes Seshasai appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“If you can make a system that can survive this random failure testing, then you will more or likely survive whatever other chaotic conditions exist.” Uber is a transportation and logistics company that manages many aspects of its ride-sharing services through mobile apps and distributed technology. Uber faces unique challenges in rapidly scaling its services internationally, and at one point increased its developer headcount from 200 to over 1000 in less than a year. Matt Ranney is the Chief Systems Architect at Uber and was previously a founder and CTO of Voxer. At QCon San Francisco, he gave a talk called Scaling Uber . Questions How did technical debt accumulate at Uber in the first five years? Why do microservices offer a strategy to help alleviate technical debt? Could you discuss immutable infrastructure? What is Ringpop, and how does it help maintain state? What are the service discovery problems you’ve had while scaling? How have you “embraced the chaos” recently? Links Adopting Microservices at Netflix: Lessons for Architectural Design Ringpop SWIM: Scalable Weakly-consistent Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol Jeff Dean: “Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services” Keynote The Netflix Simian Army Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Scaling Uber with Matt Ranney appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
“Sometimes there’s a misconception that Genie is a job scheduling platform… Genie really represents our extraction layer, from what our computational resources are, to our end user jobs.” Genie is an open-source tool that provides job and resource management for the Hadoop ecosystem in the cloud. Tom Gianos is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix focusing on its big data platform. He is one of the core contributors in charge of maintaining and improving Genie. Questions How fast is the pace of Netflix data collection increasing? What are the differences between running Hadoop in the cloud and running it in a data center? Why is job and resource management so important for a Hadoop ecosystem? What does Netflix do with spare computational resources? What is a bonus cluster? Does Netflix collect more data than it can practically make use of? Links Genie Yarn – Resource Scheduling Layer Hadoop Platform as a Service in the Cloud SE Daily Episode on Presto Spring Boot The post Netflix Genie with Tom Gianos appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Taming Distributed Architecture with Caitie McCaffrey 53:51
53:51 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked53:51
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedDistributed systems programming will always be a world of tradeoffs — there is no silver bullet in the future. But life can be made easier with tactics such as the actor pattern and the use of conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs). Caitie McCaffrey is a distributed systems engineer who currently works at Twitter. She previously worked on Halo 4 at Microsoft and 343 Industries. At QCon San Francisco, she will be hosting the track Taming Distributed Architecture . Questions Describe the service problems on Halo 4 launch day. How did a kill switch help the situation? Why are “implicit assumptions the killer of any distributed system”? Why did you use the actor model to build Halo 4 services? What is a conflict-free replicated data type? Links Halo 4: High Demand with Low Latency and High Availability (YouTube) Caitie McCaffrey’s blog Conflict-free replicated data type Actor pattern The post Taming Distributed Architecture with Caitie McCaffrey appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Origin of DevOps with John and Damon from DevOps Cafe 47:50
47:50 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked47:50
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“DevOps is not a thing. It is a set of problem statements and solution possibilities that are always growing.” The hosts of DevOps Cafe joined Software Engineering Daily for a conversation about DevOps culture and misconceptions. Questions What do software engineers need to know about DevOps? What are the biggest misconceptions around DevOps? Is DevOps ultimately about continuous integration, or containers, or any specific set of technologies? Why is Netflix a good DevOps case study? What isn’t DevOps? Links DevOps Cafe Netflix Culture SlideShare Ops, DevOps, and Noops at Netflix Release It by Michael Nygard Amazon article by New York Times The post Origin of DevOps with John and Damon from DevOps Cafe appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Continuous Delivery with Jenkins Creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi 53:44
53:44 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked53:44
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedJenkins is an extensible open source continuous integration server. Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the primary developer of Jenkins CI and the CTO of CloudBees, a provider of enterprise Jenkins. Questions: How does continuous integration affect DevOps? What has changed in the five years since Jenkins was created? In what ways is Jenkins opinionated? What are the synergies between Docker and Jenkins? What are some common continuous integration patterns and antipatterns? Links: Jenkins Homepage CloudBees Continuous Delivery Thoughtworks Continuous Delivery Continuous Integration Slideshare The post Continuous Delivery with Jenkins Creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Container infrastructure has benefits of security, scalability and efficiency. Containers are a central component of the DevOps movement. Joyent provides simple, secure deployment of containers with bare metal speed on container-native infrastructure Bryan Cantrill is the CTO of Joyent, the father of DTrace and an OS kernel developer for 20 years. Questions: Why are containers relevant to DevOps? Why are containers advantageous to the developer? What is the benefit of running a container on the principal hardware rather than the VM? Do DevOps employees exist? How is DTrace useful for DevOps? What are the societal benefits of global warming? Links: Docker and the Future of Containers in Production Docker and the Future of Containers in Production (SlideShare) Joyent: Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure Bryan Cantrill AMA The post Containers with Bryan Cantrill from Joyent appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
C
Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
1 Hadoop Ops: Rocana CTO Eric Sammer Interview 56:39
56:39 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:39
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRocana applies big data, advanced analytics, and visualizations to dev ops in order to guide users to the root causes of problems. Eric Sammer is the co-founder and CTO of Rocana. At Cloudera, he served as an Engineering Manager responsible for tools and partner integrations. Within that role, he developed many of Cloudera’s best practices for developing large, distributed, data processing infrastructure. Questions include: Does a nondeterministic data center problem ever sink a company? How do you identify salient differences between competing open-source products like Spark/Storm/Samza? How does a developer plug into Rocana? What is the open-source strategy for Rocana’s product? What is the architecture of Rocana? Links: Product overview Rocana on Twitter Cloudera interviews Eric Sammer The post Hadoop Ops: Rocana CTO Eric Sammer Interview appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Welcome to Player FM!
Player FM is scanning the web for high-quality podcasts for you to enjoy right now. It's the best podcast app and works on Android, iPhone, and the web. Signup to sync subscriptions across devices.
Similar to Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily
Technical interviews about software topics.
…
continue reading
S
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Cyber Security Podcast (Stormcast)
1
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Cyber Security Podcast (Stormcast)
Johannes B. Ullrich
2k2k
Daily cybersecurity news for practitioners. Vulnerabilities, defenses, threats, network security insight, research and more to make you sound smarter as you get to the office in the morning. New each weekday.
…
continue reading
"OPB Politics Now" is a weekly podcast that takes a deep dive into the hottest political topics in Oregon and the Northwest. Every Friday, OPB’s political reporters and special guests offer in-depth analysis, discussion and insight into candidates, events and issues.
…
continue reading
Tech News Briefing is your guide to what people in tech are talking about. Every weekday, we’ll bring you breaking tech news and scoops from the pros at the Wall Street Journal, insight into new innovations and policy debates, tips from our personal tech team, and exclusive interviews with movers and shakers in the industry.
…
continue reading
The day's biggest news dissected by the day's newsmakers. Diverse opinions from across the political spectrum. The show that makes you decide, are you the Left, Right or the Centre?
…
continue reading
The 21st Century began with the rise of the Internet and social media. The next decade will mark the rise of the Intelligent Machines. AI will inhabit all our devices from cars and appliances to smart phones and robots. The Intelligent Machines podcast explores the most exciting revolution humanity has ever seen, filled with promise and peril. More than ever we need to understand what these new devices will bring to our lives and how to make best use of them as the 21st century unfolds. On t ...
…
continue reading
Babbage is our weekly podcast on science and technology, named after Charles Babbage—a 19th-century polymath and grandfather of computing. Host Alok Jha talks to our correspondents about the innovations, discoveries and gadgetry shaping the world. Published every Wednesday. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about Economist Podcasts+, including how to get access, please visit our FAQs pa ...
…
continue reading
Windows Weekly is about more than Windows. Veteran Microsoft insiders Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell join Leo for a deep dive into the most valuable company in the world. From consumer to enterprise, AI to Xbox, Windows Weekly is the only Microsoft podcast you'll ever need. Records live every Wednesday at 2:00pm Eastern / 11:00am Pacific / 18:00 UTC.
…
continue reading
Tempers fly as the newsmakers of the week face-off in this award-winning show. Anchored by Sanket Upadhyay, this weekly program has politicians battlling wits with a live audience.
…
continue reading
Player FM - Podcast App
Go offline with the Player FM app!
Go offline with the Player FM app!
