The New Stack

Virtual Private Network (VPN) software provider Tailscale has brought on Kubernetes pioneer Joe Beda as an advisor, the latest move for the company to establish itself in the growing enterprise Kubernetes market.

Beda was one of the three engineers at Google who originally developed the Kubernetes orchestration engine at Google, along with Brendan Burns (currently at Microsoft) and Craig McLuckie (currently heading Stacklok).

Founded in 2019, Tailscale has enjoyed considerable success from its open source VPN software WireGuard, which

ATLANTA — VCluster Labs (formerly Loft Labs) has released an augmented version of its namesake Kubernetes distribution, one customized for running NVIDIA GPUs, the preferred platform for running large, compute-intensive AI workloads.

The company will be demonstrating the software at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2025, being held this week in Atlanta, at booth #421.

The platform is officially called the Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI to Maximize GPU Efficiency on NVIDIA Kubernetes Environments. It combines advanced isolation,…

To help a team member get up to speed on a project, I had to learn and then document how to set up a Mac environment with both Node.js and the .NET runtime. I had never used .NET on a Mac, so the first customer for this piece of documentation was me.

Naturally, I tapped my team of AI assistants who collectively hold a lot of knowledge about the topic. They wrote instructions, I followed along and reported problems, and we iterated toward the solution.

Then the penny dropped: These AI assistants can not only help write the instructions, but…

The term “snake oil salesman” is often used to describe individuals who engage in deceptive marketing practices. Wild west characters like Clark Stanley advertised their snake oil as a wondrous cure-all remedy. But in 1916, the U.S. government’s Bureau of Chemistry tested the liniment, found it to be dramatically overpriced and of limited value, and Stanley was fined $20.

Yet that’s not the end of the story.

You Probably Use Snake Oil

Snake oil wasn’t entirely purposeless. While it’s true that it didn’t match the claims on the…

The path from proof of concept to production-grade system exposes a familiar pattern in enterprise software. Teams sprint toward product-market fit, then spend years firefighting operational issues they didn’t initially architect for.

In the automotive industry, where data platform decisions affect millions of daily users, meeting this challenge becomes even more important, making effective data management mission critical.

As director of platform engineering at a major automotive company, I’ve lived this reality. I worked on an internal…

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), our exposure to benchmarks — not to mention the sheer number and variety of them — has surged. Given the opaque nature of LLMs and other AI systems, benchmarks have become the standard way to compare their performance.

These are standardized tests or data sets that evaluate how well models perform on specific tasks. As a result, every new model release brings updated leaderboard results, and embedding models are no exception.

Today, embeddings power the search layer of AI applications, yet…

BERLIN — One of SAP’s key themes during its TechEd 2025 event in Berlin this year was “openness.” While it’s not an open source company in the traditional sense, over the last decade, SAP has regularly been among the top 10 open source contributors in terms of active contributors, and it’s doubling down on this. But SAP has also shifted to being more open in other ways, which became clear in a number of conversations I recently had with some of its executives.

This shift to being more open takes several forms. It includes opening…

In the days of on-premises data centers, when procurement cycles were measured in months, overprovisioning was a logical risk management strategy — so commonplace that no one gave it a second thought.

In theory, the rise of elastic utility compute offered by public cloud providers should have gotten us away from it, but it simply hasn’t. Companies I’ve worked with are typically overprovisioned by at least 50%, even in the cloud. Zombie servers, which were once doing useful work but are no longer, abound.

Why Cloud Overprovisioning…

Containerization has transformed how teams build and deploy applications, but it’s also introduced new operational challenges. Traditional container images often include far more components than necessary — shell utilities, package managers and libraries that never get used by the running application. This bloat increases image sizes, slows deployment and broadens the attack surface.

To meet modern performance and security demands, the industry should consider shifting toward more minimal, deterministic images. This is where chiseled…

As someone who grew up as a Hoosier, seeing a Linux distribution named OpenIndiana warms my heart.

Of course, is it really a Linux distribution?

Nope.

OpenIndiana, based on OpenSolaris, is a Unix operating system, so if you’re coming from Linux and you expect to experience a very Linux-like operating system, you might be in for a surprise.

Sun Microsystems initially released OpenSolaris in 2005 as an open source version of its Solaris Unix operating system. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 and shuttered the project shortly thereafter.

If you…