Context 134 : The CNCF Technology Radar Evaluates Observability Tools

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In this episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we speak with Jonas Bonér, Akka creator and founder/chief technology officer of Lightbend, about the challenges of bringing state to serverless, reactive microservices frameworks, and Cloudstate itself. TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

For this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we ask Levine about the excitement around WebAssembly, its use in the Envoy proxy, and Solo.io’s new proposal for packaging WASM modules in the Open Container Initiative format. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson. Although WebAssembly was created for bringing advanced programming to the browser, Solo.io’s founder/CEO Idit Levine has been a vocal proponent of using the portable fast open source runtime to extend service meshes — citing Solo.io’s own work in offering tools and services to support commercial service mesh operations. In fact, WASM, as its also known, could be used to bring extensibility across a wide variety of cloud native projects, she argues.

Application and system observability was the focus of the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technology Radar end user survey, posted last week. So for this week’s TNS Context podcast episode, we invited Cheryl Hung, CNCF vice president of ecosystem, to discuss these latest findings. To get an additional industry perspective on observability, we’ve also invited Buddy Brewer, vice president of full stack observability for New Relic.

The ideal state of a cloud native shop is to run a development and deployment pipeline that can seamlessly move applications from the developer’s laptop to the data center (or the edge) without any manual intervention. And while there are many tools available to facilitate such automation — Helm, Operators, CI/CD toolchains, GitOps architectures, Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform — all too often edge cases and exceptions still require personal attention, bringing DevOps pipelines to a halt. The missing pieces of the puzzles are a control plane and a unified application model for the control plane to run upon, asserted Phil Prasek, a principal product manager at Upbound, in this latest episode of The New Stack Context podcast. Prasek envisions a time when organizations can build their own customized set of platform services, where developers can draw from a self-serve portal the building blocks they need — be they containerized applications or third party cloud services, and have the resulting app run uniformly in multiple environments. “Within an enterprise control plane, you can basically have your own abstractions, and then you can publish them,” Prasek said. TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

Late last month, Rancher Labs donated its popular K3s Kubernetes distribution to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This stripped down version of Kubernetes has been a quiet hit among cloud native users — many who are deploying to edge environs. So for this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we invited Rancher Co-Founder Darren Shepherd to discuss what Rancher is seeing in the cloud native ecosystem. Rancher is in the process of being acquired by SUSE and, because the deal is still pending, Darren could not comment but he did chat about K3s, as well as Kubernetes. The New Stack Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.