One of the most pressing issues we’ve noted is how to fill the vacuum from canceled and postponed conferences. View in browser »

ISSUE 208: Networking in the Time of Pandemics

“When it comes to licensing and security, everyone should be concerned over sporadic and spontaneous individual open source software contributions. For this reason, you regularly see open source program offices involved as a central point for establishing the guard rails around compliance.”

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Tim Pepper, VMware senior staff engineer

Employee Satisfaction + Working Remotely

In response to the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic, large swathes of the world are temporarily being asked to avoid travel, commuting and working in the office. Advocates of telecommuting and remote work have the world’s attention. The results of many surveys show that people believe that flexibility in where they work provides work-life balance but are not en masse seeking 100% remote jobs.

Reality check: only 5% of workers in America primarily work at home according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That figure skyrockets if we think more broadly about business travel, co-working facilities and other reasons employees are separated from co-workers. According to a 2016 Gallup poll, 43% of employees work away from their team members at least some of the time.

In 2019, a 1,000+ survey of US workers conducted by Owl Labs, which sells videoconferencing equipment, showed that 62% work remotely at least part of the time. That study found that offering remote work opportunities influences decisions about changing jobs, but only up to a point. While 45% of on-site workers would take a 5% pay cut to work remotely, that figure drops to a mere 13% if the proposed cut was 10% or more.

As Nicole Hubbard, a developer advocate for HashiCorp, observed, customers constantly face difficulties when trying to secure the communication between their services running inside of a Kubernetes cluster. The dilemma often involves trying to figure out how to lock down communications between the applications inside and outside clusters or with apps between clusters, Hubbard said.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at Palo Alto Networks’ studio in Santa Clara, CA, Hubbard shows how Consul Connect with Envoy can help to securely maintain data communication between different Kubernetes and microservices environments.

Consul is responsible for is defining the roles, defining and tracking what services are available as well as provisioning that information to the data plane so that the data plane knows how to move traffic around, Hubbard said. The data plane is basically a pluggable proxy that receives this information from the control plane and uses it to route data correctly to the correct place.

Networking in the Time of COVID-19

While we all sit out, recover, or help loved ones through the COVID-19 pandemic, we have to grapple with a whole range of second-order effects. One of the most pressing issues we’ve noted is how to fill the vacuum from canceled and postponed conferences, such as KubeCon+CloudNativeCon.

With these cancellations, we lose all the intangibles that conferences provide, including the exchange of knowledge, the broadening of perspectives and, most importantly for some of us, invaluable sales contacts.

In this light, chaos-testing company Gremlin had the right idea, and promptly set up a virtual conference that we all can attend. The conference, called Failover Conf, will be a single-day virtual conference that will focus on maintaining reliability in an online world. It will favor submissions for technical talks that were scheduled from canceled or postponed events such as AWS Summits, Microsoft Ignite Zurich, SREcon, SXSW, and KubeCon. The virtual event will be held on April 21, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., PDT. Talks are now be being solicited, and the full schedule will be available on March 31.

In a similar move, D2IQ (formerly Mesosphere) is ramping up the Kubernetes & Cloud Native Virtual Summit for April 1.

We hear of several other virtual conferences about to be announced, so watch this space for more details.

Docker Defines Roadmap with Developer-Focused API Integrations

It has been nearly four months since Docker sold the Docker Enterprise Technology Platform and all associated intellectual property, alongside three quarters of its employees and all of its enterprise partnerships, to Mirantis. The company is concentrating on Docker Hub a cloud-based library and associated community for container images and Docker Desktop is an integrated developer environment (ISE) for building containers. With API integration, the new approach encourages developers to build out their own toolchain of third-party continuous integration and software development life cycle products.

Open Policy Agent’s Mission to Secure the Cloud

A contributed piece from Manifold’s Jevon MacDonald explores the Open Policy Agent (OPA), an open source tool that enables the enforcement of a wide range of policies across domains and all layers in the stack. This policy engine supplies users with greater control over their environment while eliminating the need to write a different policy language, API, or model for each product and service. Currently a sandbox project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and maintained by the startup Styra, OPA is an under-recognized but very important component of the cloud native stack.

Amazon Web Services Releases a Linux Distribution Built for Containers

Amazon Web Services has unveiled a preview version of Bottlerocket, a Linux-based open source operating system built to host containers. Unlike most distributions, Bottlerocket includes only the packages necessary to host container. It supports all container image formats that conform to the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification.

April 21 // 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. // Virtual
Failover Conf

Failover Conf will be a single-day virtual conference will focus on maintaining reliability in an online world. It will favor submissions for technical talks that were scheduled from canceled or postponed events such as AWS Summits, Microsoft Ignite Zurich, SREcon and SXSW, and KubeCon. The virtual event will be held on April 21, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., PDT. Talks are now be being solicited, and the full schedule will be available on March 31.

The New Stack Makers podcast is available on:

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Technologists building and managing new stack architectures join us for short conversations at conferences out on the tech conference circuit. These are the people defining how applications are developed and managed at scale.