ISSUE 151: Conference Season Planning

“A developer, a marketer, a branding manager, an integrations manager, a business development partner, a domain expert, an event manager, and a technical writer walk into a bar. She orders a glass of wine. After all, it’s been a long day of jet-setting and hand-holding as a developer advocate.”

The number of available options for application deployments and maintenance, whether on-premises or in cloud environments, spells great opportunities. But as microservices, Kubernetes serverless platforms and other options are thrown into the mix, issues of how to manage the enormous complexity involved obviously emerges. A key concern for DevOps, among others, is creating best practices and processes for backups and disaster recovery (DR) in this context.

For this The New Stack Makers podcast, Gou Rao, co-founder and chief technology officer of Portworx, gave an overview of the complexities involved, as well as emerging DR and backup practices.

Conference Season Planning

For the IT industry, January is usually a pretty slow month when it comes to tech conferences to attend. In the upper climes, many folks are just hibernating until the winter passes. So this is a good time, as our own hardware hacker Dr. Torq reminds us, to prepare for events taking place the rest of the year. This week, for his weekly Off-The-Shelf Hacker column, the good doctor offers some practical tips on submitting proposals for conference talks. How do you write a good proposal? What makes for a good talk? How do you anticipate what the audience will want to hear seven months from now? Dr. Torq offers all the good tips.

If you can’t wait until the spring to get your IT learning on, perhaps a virtual conference may fill the gap. On Monday, Jan. 29, TNS supporter Twistlock is holding its own webinar/conference, called Cloud Native Live, which offers a day of instruction on building, running and securing cloud native applications. There are a lot of great speakers on this day-long event. In the main keynote, Pivotal’s Dormain Drewitz will share secrets of enterprises who have successfully adopted the best principles of digital transformation. CI/CD expert Brice Fernandes will explain the GitOps model, identifying best practices and tools to use on this emerging practice. Other speakers include Priyanka Sharma, director of cloud native alliances at GitLab and Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The only thing missing will be the between-session snacks.

The U.S. Department of Defense on How to Detect ‘Agile BS’

Agile is one of the most common development methodologies — and one of the most commonly misimplemented. So it's not surprising that the world of online programmers responded strongly to the release of an informative new document from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) offering advice to managers on how to fine-tune their projects. The Defense Department's "Detecting Agile BS" identifies six signs that a project isn't really using an agile development methodology — for example, a lack of collaboration, with even the end users "missing-in-action throughout development."

How to Rewrite Your Bedrock Application While Remaining Operational

In January 2016, the elastic billing service provider Chargify decided to do a code rewrite. The application was six years old. The company IT executives felt that they had learned enough — and were constrained enough by the existing architecture — that by starting fresh they would actually come out ahead. Here are the lessons they learned.

Database Operators Bring Stateful Workloads to Kubernetes

Last year, Red Hat formally launched the Operator Framework, a way to customize the APIs of Kubernetes for specific applications. With the Operator Framework, originally developed by CoreOS before the company was purchased by Red Hat, users can spin up an application, with all of its specific settings and dependencies, and have Kubernetes handle all the provisioning and scaling. Now we are starting to see more independent software vendors (ISVs) using the Operator Framework to package their own applications. In particular, database management system providers are using the technology to tackle one of the hardest issues with working with Kubernetes, that of managing stateful applications.