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This week’s episode of The New Stack Context, we delve into an area of computing not usually discussed in cloud native circles: In-memory computing. View in browser »
The New Stack Update

ISSUE 232: In-Memory Computing Meets Cloud Native Computing

Talk Talk Talk

“I think the honeymoon is over, and what we’re realizing is when you take a bunch of people who have nothing else in their life than building the next tech company, you get the kind of tech companies that have been built.”

Add It Up
Site Reliability Engineer: Current vs. Planned Use

Almost three-quarters of Chef users in the 2020 StackOverflow survey don’t want to use it next year. Only IBM DB2, VBA and a couple of other technologies are as “dreaded” in the industry. Puppet’s outlook isn’t that much better.

Over the last several years, Red Hat’s Ansible and now HashiCorp’s Terraform have risen to become two of the top tools used to deploy infrastructure as code. Ansible and Terraform are used by a third of the survey participants that describe site reliability engineering as one of their job roles. Many site reliability engineers (SREs) are clamoring to use Terraform in the upcoming year, while the other three tools are set for declines.

More than half of the SRE respondents also described themselves as DevOps specialists. Among this group, Terraform is also expected to shine in 2020, while a slight increase is predicted for the other three tools. The SREs and DevOps roles are very likely to be using these tools, it is instructive to focus on their technology roadmaps when evaluating the future of various solutions that are sometimes described as infrastructure as code.

The StackOverflow survey did not ask about many other infrastructure-as-code tools, with AWS CloudFormation, Helm, and SaltStack noticeably missing from the questionnaire. These and other tools native to other cloud platforms will be included in The New Stack’s reporting about the viability of multicloud programmable infrastructure.

What's Happening

Kubernetes is becoming boring and that’s a good thing — it’s what’s on top of Kubernetes that counts.

In this The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams asked KubeCon attendees to join him for a short “stack” at our “Virtual Pancake Breakfast and Podcast” to discuss “What’s on your stack?”

The podcast featured guest speakers Janakiram MSV, principal analyst, Janakiram & Associates; Priyanka Sharma, general manager, Cloud Native Computing Foundation; Patrick McFadin, chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra and vice president, developer relations, DataStax; and Bill Zajac, regional director of solution engineering, Dynatrace. The group passed the virtual syrup and talked Kubernetes.

KCCNC 2020 EU Virtual Pancake Breakfast: Why Your K8s ‘Stack’ Should Be Boring

In-Memory Computing Meets Cloud Native Computing

In this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we delve into an area of computing not usually discussed in cloud native circles: In-memory computing. This form of distributed technology has been around for decades. The idea is to band together with the memory of multiple servers, or cloud compute instances, to act as one gigantic pool or memory. Sounds like a good fit with Kubernetes’ scalable computing, yes? Instead of the application waiting for the results of a database query, the data can be more quickly returned to the user — by an order of magnitude by some estimates — by way of an in-memory data store spread out across multiple servers. 

Recently, Mike Yawn, a senior solution architect at Hazelcast contributed a post to TNS explaining how an in-memory technology could make microservices run more smoothly.  Hazelcast offers an in-memory data grid, Hazelcast IMDG, along with stream processing software Hazelcast Jet. 

In his post, Yawn explains, “Just as our application services can be scaled up or down to meet workload demands, our operational data store is also elastically scalable — additional nodes can be added to the data grid, and the software will automatically re-balance the data partitions to take advantage of the increased capacity (when scaling up) or consolidate data onto fewer nodes (when scaling down). Backups of each data partition are automatically maintained so that in the event of an unplanned node outage, no data is lost.”

We wanted to know more about how in-memory could be used with microservices. So we invited him on the show. In the podcast, Yawn talks about replacing the term “operational data store” with “digital integration hub” in the hopes that the terminology will be more welcoming to potential users. While in-memory offers caching just like key-value databases such as Redis, it also offers additional computing capacity, which can help process that data on the fly. 

He also spoke about the growing deployments of Kubernetes among the company’s users, which tend to be on the higher end of enterprise users, such as banks. “We support Kubernetes because our users tell us it's important to them,” Yawn tells us.

Be sure to check out this week’s TNS Context podcast for more info, which will go live, like it does every week, on Friday.

Kubernetes 1.19 Brings Fully Mature Ingress, Secure Computing Mode

Although the release of Kubernetes’ most recent version was a bit delayed, the Kubernetes release team just introduced Kubernetes version 1.19, with several updates that enhance the production readiness of Kubernetes. These improvements include the general availability of Ingress and seccomp features, security improvements, such as TLS 1.3 support, and other enhancements for functionality.

Gitpod Open Sources a ‘Holistic IDE’

Gitpod this week has released an open source version of its integrated developer environment (IDE), which it is calling “a new class of cloud-based IDE that fundamentally changes how software developers build applications. It includes the git repositories, and also everything you do after you check out a certain branch or git repository, that is, generating code, running compilers, downloading dependencies.

David Heinemeier Hansson Wants to Dismantle Silicon Valley’s Startup Culture

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of the Basecamp project management software, has been speaking about dismantling “the myth of Hustle culture.” One of the cherished notions of Silicon Valley is that it is necessary to work 80-90 hours a week to produce an application before the competitor does. But Hansson himself built Basecamp, from Chicago, with 40 hour work weeks.

Party On

Mike Yawn, from Hazelcast, was our guest for this week's Context podcast along with the TNS crew: Libby Clark, Joab Jackson and Richard MacManus.

On The Road
Chaos Conf 2020 // OCT. 06-08 // VIRTUAL

OCT. 06-08 // VIRTUAL

Chaos Conf 2020

Chaos! It’s tine for the gremlins to play. Join The New Stack at Chaos Conference, the world’s largest chaos engineering event. This year’s event will feature talks by Adrian Cockroft, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, Rachel Obstler, VP of Product at PagerDuty, and Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix ProjectThe Unicorn Project, and co-author of Accelerate. Brought to you by Gremlin, Chaos Conference runs online: October 6-8. Register for FREE now

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.
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