Alex Williams
Co-Host of The New Stack Context
Alex Williams is founder and editor in chief of The New Stack. He's a longtime technology journalist who did stints at TechCrunch, SiliconAngle and what is now known as ReadWrite. Alex has been a journalist since the late 1980s, starting at the Augusta Chronicle in 1989 after completing his master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Early in his career, he reported for newspapers in New York and Oregon, worked for a magazine writing about home textiles (ask him about it some time) and spent a year as a television business news anchor. Alex's online career began in 2003 when he did a web event called RSS WinterFest, which was followed by Podcast Hotel, an event all about the intersection of art and commerce and the impact digital media has on independent culture. While in college, Alex played baseball in France, which led him to writing stories of his experiences, and eventually a career in journalism.
Alex Williams has hosted 114 Episodes.
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Episode 30: This Week on The New Stack: ChefConf 2018, Plus Hedley the Robotic Skull
June 1st, 2018 | Season 2 | 36 mins 11 secs
arduino, automation, chef, chef automate, chefconf, chefconf 2018, developers, devops, inspec, programming, raspberry pi
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we delve into the latest project from our resident hardware hacker, Dr. Torq, offer a summary of last week's ChefConf conference.
Last week, TNS Editor Alex Williams attended ChefConf in Chicago where he hosted a day of podcasting. We’ll hear his top takeaways from that event, including the latest on InSpec, Chef’s compliance automation tool. The company just announced an integration with their its version of Automate - the company’s automation platform. Williams says InSpec is really innovative and could be big for the Chef’s cloud native strategy going forward.
We also spoke with Dr. Torq, who has been writing for us regularly about his Raspberry Pi and machine learning project called Hedley, the robotic skull.
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Episode 28: This Week on The New Stack: Kubernetes Needs Developers
May 18th, 2018 | Season 2 | 35 mins 43 secs
container orchestration, containers, developers, devops, k8s, kubernetes
Hacker News and the Twitterverse were alight this week with discussion of Datadog engineer Jason Moiron’s blog post titled “Is Kubernetes Too Complicated?” This article hints at a Kubernetes backlash afoot, with ongoing concerns about its complexity. We speak with TNS correspondent Scott Fulton, who has a TNS article summarizing these issues.
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Episode 27: This Week on The New Stack: Git and GitOps
May 11th, 2018 | Season 2 | 34 mins 40 secs
application development, developers, git, github, gitlab, gitops, software development, web development
This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we are all about the git open source version control software. Last Friday, TNS correspondent Michelle Gienow has kicked off a series git, with an introduction to git for everyone. This week, she continues that work with an introduction to its most popular online hosted version, GitHub.
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Episode 26: This Week On The New Stack: KubeCon Highlights
May 4th, 2018 | Season 2 | 23 mins 31 secs
cloudnativecon, cncf, kubecon, kubernetes, kubernetes 1.10, spiffe
This week on The New Stack Context, the editorial team recorded live from Copenhagen, Denmark, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon -- the CNCF’s premiere event focused on Kubernetes and other cloud-native open source projects including Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd and others. The New Stack managing editor, Joab Jackson, editor-in-chief Alex Williams, and Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate at the CNCF, discuss the latest with the Kubernetes community after the recent release of Kubernetes 1.10.
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Episode 24: This Week on The New Stack: Ripping Out The Guts Of Cloud Foundry And Adding Kubernetes
April 20th, 2018 | Season 2 | 24 mins 32 secs
cf summit boston, cloud foundry, cloud foundry foundaton, kubernetes, suse
The New Stack editorial team is reporting live this week from Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston. We hosted a pancake breakfast and podcast discussion on the intersection of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes this morning. And we’ve been hosting a day of podcasting and livestreaming from the show floor where we’ve talked to companies such as Dynatrace, Pivotal, Snyk, Grape Up, and many others.
In this episode of Context we’re going to have a roundtable discussion about the news from Cloud Foundry Summit and some of our top takeaways so far from the keynotes and sessions.
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Episode 23: This Week on The New Stack: Telcos' Move to Kubernetes Means Cloud Race Isn't Over Yet
April 13th, 2018 | Season 2 | 28 mins 26 secs
anaconda, containerization, containers, data science, docker, enterprise software, juniper, kubernetes, machine learning, telcos
On this week's episode of The New Stack Context, TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson was reporting live from AnacondaCon in Austin, Texas. He covered the annual data science conference for Anaconda users and came back with some insights on Anaconda and machine learning in the enterprise. We’ll hear more about that in the second half of the show.
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Episode 22: This Week on The New Stack: DevOps Performance Metrics, Microservice Workflows
April 6th, 2018 | Season 2 | 30 mins 17 secs
camunda, circleci, developers, devops, enterprise software, metrics, microservices, news, open source, workflow automation
This week on The New Stack Context we talk with CircleCI CEO Jim Rose about a three-part series of posts he just wrote for The New Stack about the metrics that the company has found are useful for measuring an organization’s DevOps performance. The series is full of lots of data and graphics to help explain some standard metrics like mainline branch stability, deploy time and deploy frequency. Rose spoke to us about the report CircleCI put together, how they came up with those metrics, and how they can be useful for DevOps teams.
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Episode 21: This Week on The New Stack: Hykes Leaves Docker, Nvidia Joins the Kubernetes Movement
March 30th, 2018 | Season 2 | 30 mins 14 secs
ai, developer tools, developers, docker, gpu, gtc 2018, infrastructure automation, nvidia
This week we start with news from Docker, that its founder and former CTO Solomon Hykes has announced he’s leaving the company. Alex Handy first reported that Hykes stepped down as CTO back in November. At the time he said he was staying on as VP of the board of directors. Then this week Hykes published a post on the Docker blog announcing he’s leaving the company he started 10 years ago. Alex Handy has the story for us again.
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Episode 20: This Week on The New Stack: Kubernetes and the Single Sign-on
March 23rd, 2018 | Season 2 | 31 mins 57 secs
authentication, kubernetes, microservices, pusher, single sign-on, sso
This week, we’re joined by Joel Speed, a DevOps engineer at Pusher who is working to build their internal Kubernetes Platform. Speed has been writing a series of articles for The New Stack recently about how Kubernetes handles authentication and how to create a single sign-on experience for Kubernetes users. The team at Pusher has developed its own in-house single sign-on solution for their Kubernetes users that also offers more fine-grained access control. Speed spoke to us about the SSO set up at Pusher and how it came about.
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Episode 19: This Week in News: Microservices, Kubernetes Data, and SXSW
March 16th, 2018 | Season 2 | 32 mins 53 secs
application development, at-scale development, cloud native microservices, microservices, sxsw
This week, we’re joined by TNS correspondent Michelle Gienow, TNS Research Director Lawrence Hecht and TNS founder Alex Williams. This week, Gienow published the second article in our new weekly feature series focused on microservices. We’ll be covering cloud native microservices from start to finish for the next few months — starting with some of the things that organizations should consider when they’re weighing the decision to move to a microservices architecture. Michelle shares some of what she learned so far about why companies are adopting microservices architectures.
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Episode 18: This Week in News: Time-Series Data and Instagram's Storage Engine
March 9th, 2018 | Season 2 | 25 mins 28 secs
analysis, application development, big data, cloud-native technologies, data, data storage, influxdata, news, programming, software, time series databases, tsdb
This week we're speaking with Katy Farmer, Developer Advocate at InfluxData, who has been writing a regular series for The New Stack on time-series data.
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Episode 17: This Week in News: Vulnerability Disclosure, Software Architecture
March 2nd, 2018 | Season 2 | 32 mins 58 secs
bug bounties, camunda, hackerone, iot, microservices, news, o'reilly software architecture conference, security, vulnerability disclosure
On this week's episode, TNS security correspondent Lucian Constantin joins us to talk about how companies can and should handle security reports. His latest story on this subject is based on a recent survey of 1,700 bug bounty participants on HackerOne. The survey revealed that one in four ethical hackers have had cases where they eventually gave up on reporting vulnerabilities because the affected vendors didn't respond to the issues. And this wasn't because of a lack of trying to contact those organizations. Constantin explained how your company sets up a good vulnerability reporting policy so you’ll learn about vulnerabilities from ethical hackers first, before customer data end up for sale on the underground market.
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Episode 16: This Week in News: VMware and OpenFaaS, Chef InSpec, HPE OneSphere
February 23rd, 2018 | Season 2 | 30 mins 2 secs
chef, cloud native architectures, enterprise it, hpe, inspec, news, open source, openfaas, security, vmware
This week, from a snowy Portland Oregon, we spoke with Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS. Ellis has hired on to VMware to work full time on the OpenFaaS serverless software, as part of VMware’s new Open Source Technology Center. Until now, Ellis has been working on OpenFaaS in his spare time while holding down a day job as an application developer at ADP. We spoke with him about why he made the decision to join VMware and what it means for the OpenFaaS community.
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Episode 15: This Week in News: Oracle's Autonomous Database, InfluxData's Timely One
February 16th, 2018 | Season 2 | 29 mins 35 secs
application development, cloud-native, influxdata, influxdays, news, oracle cloud day, software development, technology, twistlock
This week we were busy reporting from events in New York, starting with Oracle’s Cloud Day event on Monday where he brought us an update on the cloud provider’s autonomous services. On Tuesday he also attended InfluxDays, a time series data and application conference, and he’ll give us the highlights from that event as well.
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Episode 14: This Week in News: Kubernetes Alone Does Not a Market Make
February 9th, 2018 | Season 2 | 36 mins
application development, cloud, coreos, developers, devops, iot, kubernetes, open source, openshift, podcast, programming, software, software development, tech, technology
This week we are still talking about the CoreOS acquisition by Red Hat last week. TNS contributor Scott M. Fulton had the chance to talk with CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi and Red Hat’s vice president for OpenShift Ashesh Badani, for a story on TNS. He got the lowdown on what “may” happen to products like Tectonic and Container Linux now that they’re part of Red Hat’s portfolio. “May” being the keyword here.
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Episode 13: This Week in News: Red Hat Acquires CoreOS, Cost-Accounting for Serverless Devs
February 2nd, 2018 | Season 2 | 30 mins 41 secs
application development, coreos, developers, devops, kubernetes, open source software, programming, software, software development
This week on The New Stack Context weekly news wrap podcast, we talk with TNS European correspondent Mark Boyd about his fascinating story on how serverless architectures are turning developers into accountants.