ISSUE 268: The New New Stack

“In 2021, many businesses may be waking up to a microservices hangover. Complicated, redundant implementations; overall increased overheads; lack of governance. These issues are causing technology teams to take a hard look at the promises of microservices.”

Debate continues in the industry about what observability is, and more specifically, what it should offer DevOps, especially those working in operations who are often responsible for detecting those “unknown unknowns” that degrade system performance. In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we discuss how observability should be easier to use and how it can be cost-effective.

Our guests are Bartek Plotka, a principal engineer at Red Hat, as well as the SIG observability tech lead for the Thanos project and a Prometheus maintainer; and Richard Hartmann, community director at Grafana, a Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder and a SIG observability chair member for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

The New New Stack

Over the next few weeks, you will be seeing a lot more content on The New Stack, and the content will be more fun and more informative to read than ever before! In many ways, we will be morphing into an entirely new news site altogether.

For one, we have a new News Editor, Darryl Taft. You probably have read Darryl Taft’s work. Over the past few decades, he has covered enterprise software for some of the largest IT trade publications such as e Week, Ziff-Davis, Tech Target and others. Traditionally, The New Stack, with our modest budget, has not been a "news first" organization: If Microsoft or Google released some software of interest to our audience, we would report on the basics and maybe follow up with some analysis sometime later. But thanks to our many sponsors, and under Darryl’s guidance, we are going to start bringing you that news a lot more quickly, and in a lot more depth. Look out InfoWorld and DevOps.com, we are about to give you a run for your money! We’ve got Darryl on deck.

We also have a new Features Editor, Heather Joslyn. A “Feature” is newspaper-speak for an extended, in-depth article, one that could run 1,500 words or more. Our many writers are all very enthusiastic and have lots of great information to share. And one of the jobs of a proper Features Editor is to edit this material so it flows as smoothly as possible for you, the reader, and include all the angles that you may be curious about. Also, Heather has worked as a senior editor for the esteemed Journal of Philanthropy, and we want to leverage this expertise to broaden our range and include more articles about management at scale, and the importance of diversity on the health of the modern organization. Technology will always be part of our DNA, but we also want to understand more about the people behind the technology.

The way we see it, computer science and the IT industry are different from pretty much every other field in one important way: Exponential scalability. A trade journal in, say, accounting or mechanical engineering may report on new tools or new processes to get the job done more efficiently. But at the end of the day, the accountant’s or mechanical engineer’s job is largely the same. Only in IT do the performance gains come at such a dramatic scale that technical managers routinely have to completely rethink how their systems operate. It’s a wild ride, and we will be here for you, with the explanation and analysis. 

Google Docs Switches to Canvas Rendering, Sidelining the DOM

Google Docs is changing how it renders documents — from the traditional HTML-based DOM approach, to using a web standard called Canvas. Canvas "enables the developers of Google Docs to bypass all of that persnickety DOM wrangling & just 'paint' the document onto the page [...] The Google Docs shift to canvas rendering may be an early sign of a bigger change in how web applications are built,” TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus writes.

GRPC Delivers on the Promise of a Proxyless Service Mesh

With the newest edition of the gRPC protocol, microservices-based systems will no longer need separate stand-alone service mesh sidecars, noted Megan Yahya, Google’s product manager for gRPC, in her talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU earlier this month. Instead, for those already using gRPC, they can extend the service directly to the control plane, and have it take over the work formerly done through proxy services.

Series: A Close Look at Cloud-Based Machine Learning Platforms

This week, The New Stack ran a "deep dive" series examining the Machine Learning-as-a-Service offerings from the major cloud providers, authored by analyst Janakiram MSV. Janakiram lays out his methodology and assesses Amazon Sage Maker, Azure Machine Learning services, the newly introduced Google Vertex AI, as well as machine learning platforms from IBM and Oracle. Start here.