Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Since joining Rancher Labs to head up the Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore region, my day revolves around discussing containers/Kubernetes use cases and adoption with many of the top enterprises, DevOps groups, and executives in the area. Not only is this a great learning experience and a fantastic way to meet people, it is also a huge eye opener into the many reasons why Kubernetes adoption is growing so rapidly and what the current challenges are.

Many of my fellow engineers ask me what it means to be an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer). When I tell them it’s a type of DevOps engineer, they get a glazed look in their eyes and then ask what a DevOps engineer is. I then find myself googling both job titles and reading twelve very different definitions until I reach the conclusion that these definitions vary wildly from company to company and from team to team.

As Stackery’s Ecosystems Manager, a huge part of my work revolves around meeting new people and developing relationships with them for the good of our company. I love this work not only because I’m passionate about people and serverless, but also because it keeps my curiosity muscle strong. To be good at my job, I need to do right by my personal connection to curiosity and learning— but sometimes I get off-track.

With the rise of the containerization technology and increased attention from enterprises and technologists in general, more and more containerized applications have been deployed to the cloud. Moreover, research conducted by 451 Research predicts that the application container market will grow dramatically through 2020, which will continue to expand the number of containerized applications being deployed to the cloud.

Today CVE-2019-5736 was announced which impacts all known versions of runc. Runc is the underlying component that creates containers in Docker, Kubernetes, and many other container systems. The full details of this vulnerability are available in the Openwall oss-security mailing. Due to the severity of this issue, exploits will not be published for another week, giving people time to patch.

Serverless has, for the last year or so, felt like an easy term to define: code run in a highly managed environment with (almost) no configuration of the underlying computer layer done by your team. Fair enough, but what is is a serverless application? A Lambda isn’t an app by itself, heck, it can’t even communicate with the world outside of Amazon Web Services (AWS) by itself, so there must be more to a serverless app than that.