Jennifer Riggins

Author Archives: Jennifer Riggins

Google SRE: Site Reliability Engineering at a Global Scale

When DevOps was coined around 2009, its purpose was to break down silos between development and IT operations. DevOps has since become a game of tug-of-war between the reliability needs of the operations team and the velocity goals on the developer side. Site reliably engineering became that balancer. As Benjamin Treynor Sloss, designer of Google’s SRE program, puts it: “SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design and run operations.” The SRE team has emerged as the answer to how you can build systems at scale, striking that balance between velocity, maintainability and efficiency. It was only logical that this year’s books on site reliability engineering. Of course, almost everyone outside of Google will probably not work on anything at this scale, but, because increasingly distributed systems are constantly integrating with others, Continue reading

Tetrate Service Bridge to Close Enterprise Application Networking Gap via Service Mesh

At some point, you’ve got to stop building something you think people need and start putting it out there to test in the market. You have to go get users. This is where the first engineers of the Istio service mesh at Google found themselves about four years ago. But, like many things in the still-emerging cloud native space, the first response was: Well, what is it? Who else is using it? Tetrate Service Bridge to act as an application connectivity platform or a technical bridge to take you from those legacies to those modern environments, and to increase reliability and availability. Also called TSB, it looks to solve the issue of networking for heterogeneous workloads. Tetrate Service Bridge, built on Istio and now in general availability, presents itself as the solution to enterprise-grade challenges that can’t be just abstracted out with a Kubernetes layer. The Tetrate team has built out the core set of functionality around controlling traffic across an entire fleet of services, from the edge to the mesh. Butcher says TSB bridges the gap between having service mesh capabilities and actually realizing those capabilities in a way that is safe. He said, “This service mesh is great, but how do I actually use it in my enterprise? How do I change my process to take advantage of the mesh? And actually changing processes is really expensive, so how do I not change my process either?” And those enterprise processes aren’t simple either. They look to use service mesh to enforce security and compliance requirements. Or to gain control and visibility across entire complex infrastructures. How to put security controls in place across highly heterogeneous environments. “Service mesh serves a lot of problems I have but you are telling me I can only have it in Kubernetes? I want those things to help me get from my legacy to a modern environment, not already in that,” Butcher said. TSB helps you manage across the full breadth of compute, connecting Kubernetes and legacy infrastructure. He gives examples you can use to link with Istio and Envoy and just start assembling your application network. “Tetrate Service Bridge is a platform for applications to communicate securely and successfully without having to get into the weeds of what lives there.”— Zack Butcher, Founding Engineer, Tetrate Butcher says then there’s the enterprise management side, teams need to be able to prove they are using service mesh correctly and securely. He says TSB enables teams to divvy up their physical infrastructure and cloud-based environments, with multitenancy and controls, so you can use service mesh to “do cool things at runtime.” The connectivity tool works not only with Istio and the Apache Skywalking, enabling observability across whole systems. They are clear that while they are a tool to ease the use of these open source tools and the whole Tetrate team is contributors to the open source projects they depend on, they are not an open core company, intentionally. “In my opinion, there’s this really big tension in open-core companies. If me, as a developer, I have to decide project or product that people pay for — he doesn’t want to make the value prop decision,” Butcher explained. He continued, “We are building a layer on top of the open source pieces. We are assembling these open source pieces together in a coherent system.” Another part of this decision is that, since they are still essentially using open source tools, enterprises can do so in a relatively cheap way through Tetrate. Butcher points to the fundamental difference between enterprise closed source products like TCB and the open source projects it serves. “Capabilities go in open source and then how you manage those capabilities and how you use them within an organization, that’s what you put in the product,” he said.” While they only went fully public with TSB in April, they built it alongside adopters from the start. Butcher, paraphrasing Socrates, said that after the “pain of adopting Istio — we were in a cave without users” they were determined to build hand in hand with users. One such early adopter was FICO, the organization that creates the predominant credit risk score in the U.S. One emerging use case for service mesh is encryption in transit to ensure compliance to ever-changing regulations and standards from HIPAA and GDPR to automate enforcement of

KubeCon EU: Envoy Looks to WebAssembly to Extend Microservices Monitoring

The whole agile move towards autonomous development is great to embrace the individual team and even engineer preference. However, there’s no doubt it makes it difficult for governance. It’s hard to monitor, observe and learn from disparate tooling. Tetrate.io, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, virtual edition, a new Envoy extension as a single interpretation for these many languages. He started by saying how: “One fundamental purpose of Envoy is its ability to see into every single request received or made by your application.” Skopets says the next step is to extend Envoy as a way to learn from actual traffic in an efficient, flexible and simple manner. This usually involves natively developing Envoy in C++ and statically linking into the Envoy binary. He says this involves a lot of custom builds of Envoy which leads to “a lot of investment and commitment upfront.” Skopets suggests instead using AssemblyScript, which is a subset of the Fork the code for this instance on Github. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is a sponsor of The New Stack. Feature image by Pixabay. The post KubeCon EU: Envoy Looks to WebAssembly to Extend Microservices Monitoring appeared first on The New Stack.

Words Matter: Finally, Tech Looks at Removing Exclusionary Language

This month the tech industry’s lexicon is seeing a small but significant shift: Common technical phrases, most notably “Master/Slave” and “Whitelist/Blacklist” that have been red-flagged as offensive, or even racist, sometimes for decades, are getting updates. Android and GitHub Android, Splunk. Many orgs are also looking at replacing the concept of “whitelist” in both its documentation and in its APIs. Other companies and open source projects are following suit. This work is in part to take another semantic and moral stand that Black Lives Matter. And, at times, it is

NS1 Builds on DNS to Speed Traffic Management

When user experience is increasingly synonymous with speed and reliability, new traffic management sub-teams are appearing at elite digital enterprises. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we talk to NS1, the networking automation company or, as he calls it, “the system of record for many, many of the key domains and the applications on the internet today.” Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn He says that each of us interacts with NS1 dozens of times a day, like when we are connecting on LinkedIn or sharing files on DropBox. NS1 sits at the base of this new traffic management stack, steering that traffic across our increasingly complex and distributed systems. This stack also includes content networking delivery networks (CDN), load-balancing tooling, edge networking footprints, service meshes, and software for service discovery and egress optimization. This new role isn’t just about measuring if traffic is working correctly, but really understanding both your users and systems Continue reading

Will Kubernetes Drive Cloud Native Telcos?

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, Nov. 18-21 in San Diego. Perhaps the most global use case to come for Kubernetes is in the telecommunications industry. It does have about five billion users after all. And it’s inherently a hardware-backed, well-regulated industry. The New Stack founder and publisher Alex Williams sat down at last month’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to talk about telco’s cloud native future with OPNFV), and Vulk Coop design and development cooperative. The different collaborative, telecom-focused Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation working groups that Kirksey and Carpenter are a part of have witnessed — and sometimes driven — telco’s move over the last five years from monolithic hardware appliances toward what’s now known as the cloud. Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn For telcos, cloud native means software solving the complex problems heavy equipment traditionally did. It all comes down to answering two questions: What are the problems Continue reading

Gremlin’s Scenarios Simulate Common Outages for Chaos Engineering

There are two things that seem to motivate developers — a speedy, self-explanatory onboarding experience and a bit of friendly competition. Certainly, Gremlin chaos as a service’s new Scenarios features seems to check both boxes. The Scenarios feature, which launched Thursday at the company’s Lorne Kligerman. The idea for Scenarios pulled from their former chaotic lives as well as from customer success and developer advocates. “We know things will fail today. We Continue reading