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Articles by Alex Williams

The Quiet Security Risk Hiding Inside Your SaaS Stack

By Alex Williams |Security Boulevard Verified

As companies scale, SaaS stacks expand faster than governance ever could. Tools get added to solve immediate problems, then stitched together through APIs, SSO, and permissions that rarely get revisited. Security teams stay focused on perimeter defenses that barely exist in cloud-first environments, while the actual attack surface keeps widening internally. This is where incidents are born, long before anyone realizes something is wrong. SaaS sprawl rarely looks dangerous in the moment.

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Security Metrics That Actually Predict a Breach

By Alex Williams |Security Boulevard Verified

You know the drill – monitoring has basically turned into dashboard upon dashboard. What actually predicts a breach rarely fits neatly into a slide. The signals are uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing, and usually harder to measure. They expose process debt, access sprawl, and human behavior that tools can’t fully control. Those are the metrics that matter when attackers are already halfway inside your environment. The rest just make the dashboard look alive.

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Designing Reliable Data Pipelines in Cloud-Native Environments

By Alex Williams |Cloud Native Now

Data pipelines rarely fail all at once. They degrade quietly, miss signals, backup under load or produce results that look correct until someone notices they aren’t. In cloud-native environments, that fragility is amplified. Elastic infrastructure, distributed services and constant change make reliability less about perfect architecture and more about disciplined design choices. Teams that succeed treat pipelines as living systems, not one-off integrations.

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Case study: Making long-term impact achievable through short-term goals

By Alex Williams, Dwayne Gumbs |Charity Times Verified

When outcomes may not surface for years, how can charity leaders show that a programme is “working”? Dwayne Gumbs and Alex Williams, Co‑Founders of Diverse Voices, reflect on a pilot programme that turned long‑term ambition into measurable short‑term progress. ___________________________________________________________________ Many in the third sector are faced with the dilemma of how to prove the impact of projects whose true goals won’t be visible for years.

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A Frontier Model Built Like a Brain with Python and Rust

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

The team from Pathway believes that the transformer architecture developed eight years ago has reached its limits, which no amount of computing can overcome. Nor is there the power available to sustain itself. Further, there’s a lack of temporal reasoning and continual learning.

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Welcome to AI's Messy Middle: Where 36x Gains Require Distinguished Engineers

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

LAS VEGAS — Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman had a story to tell about Kiro, its new agentic IDE, in his keynote at AWS re:Invent. A distinguished engineer at his company, Anthony, led a team that rearchitected a project in 76 days with six developers. They had initially expected it to take 18 months with 30 people. Eye-opening stuff, enough to make an engineering lead run to the agent vending machine. Garman shared his story this fall with customers, who asked how Anthony’s team did it.

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Inside Uber's Multicloud AI Reality: The Gap Between Data and Compute

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Uber, one of the original ride-hailing services, developed a distributed infrastructure before most anyone even considered it for their enterprise. It ran Mesos before moving to Kubernetes three years ago. The company is now moving from on premises to multicloud, which has its pros and cons as Uber wrestles with how to optimize GPU usage across multiple cloud providers, juggle workloads and create a cohesive converged infrastructure.

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The Real Cost of Cryptojacking

By Alex Williams |Security Boulevard Verified

Cryptojacking isn’t just an IT headache—it’s a silent financial drain that can cripple performance, inflate operating costs, and quietly erode trust. Imagine waking up to find your cloud bill doubled, your application latency spiking, and your team scrambling to find the cause. The culprit? A few lines of malicious code mining cryptocurrency in the background while your systems foot the bill.

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Tech Layoffs: Turning Disaster into Opportunity

By Alex Williams |Techstrong IT

Layoffs suck. There’s no eloquent way to package that moment when your Slack stops loading, your email gets disabled, and your day is suddenly filled with questions about COBRA, severance and LinkedIn updates. In the tech world, where once “job-hopping” was glamorized as a way to climb fast and experiment freely, mass layoffs now feel like a jarring reality check for developers worldwide. The safety net isn’t what it used to be, and the ground feels a little less stable.

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Why Modern IT Operations Are Becoming More Like Space Travel

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Get a bunch of geeks to Las Vegas, have a former astronaut give a keynote about the connection between space travel and IT, then top it off with conversations about AI and interplanetary travel. ManageEngine‘s user conference in Las Vegas earlier in September, provided a unique perspective for IT workers to see the correlation of AI to their work. For context, it drew comparisons to the work of astronauts and the quest for interplanetary travel.

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The World Runs 20 Billion Instances of Curl. Where's the Support?

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

AMSTERDAM — There’s plenty of money in the global economy. And a big part of the economy runs on software. And software is mostly open source. We’ve heard that before. However, many companies still fail to invest in open source projects, despite the benefits they offer. What is the value of open source? It’s worth $8.8 trillion, a total that reflects what it would cost to create software from scratch if it weren’t freely available, according to Harvard University.

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New OLTP: Postgres With Separate Compute and Storage

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Are online transaction processing (OLTP) databases stuck in the past? Well, OLTP databases are tightly coupled, said Databricks co-founder Reynold Xin in his keynote earlier this month at the Databricks Data + AI Summit in San Francisco. Such databases are monolithic, combining compute and storage in big machines, which leads to various problems, including over-provisioning, scaling challenges, performance issues and a range of system complexities.

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No SSH? What Is Talos, This Linux Distro for Kubernetes?

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

The rise of container-based Linux distros is real, especially now with the demand for deploying to edge environments that require lightweight operation systems. Talos Linux, developed by Sidero Labs, is a Linux distro built for Kubernetes. It has SSH access disabled, and security comes built-in. In a demo, founder and CTO Andrew Rynhard joined Justin Garrison, head of product, for a demonstration to discuss the idea behind Talos and how it works.

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What Does AI Cost? No One Knows.

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Why is it so difficult to get the engineering team to tell what AI tools cost? Well, it’s not really about cantankerous engineers. (Most of the time, it’s not.) It’s really about how different groups in an organization manage their work and the KPIs they set for themselves. DevOps teams are sensitive to encroachment. FinOps teams face criticism for their insistence on controlling costs for work that an engineering team deems essential.

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FinOps Foundation Launches New FinOps for AI Certification

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

SAN DIEGO — It’s AI boom time: Gartner predicts an estimated $644 billion will be spent on generative AI in 2025. However, few, if anyone, know how to manage the cost of AI, much less understand its value. At FinOps X this week, the FinOps Foundation introduced a certification for AI. The new credential is for practitioners who seek to understand AI spending and the value it offers.

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Prequel: Software Errors Be Gone

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

The large cloud providers have tools to uncover software errors. But for almost every other developer out there, good luck. Enter Prequel and their service launching today for developers to solve a problem that does not require vast resources. With its community-based approach, Prequel aspires to fill an unmet need in the observability space, helping find errors, bugs, configuration errors, and developer anti-patterns.

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A Startup Complements Kubernetes, Docker and Wasm at the Edge

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

cDavid Aronchick looked around the historic room at 116 Pall Mall in central London for the Cloud Native Rejekts conference — a must-attend if you attend a KubeCon conference. What a space, BTW. Aronchick is the CEO of Expanso, a startup that provides distributed computing to workloads. Instead of moving the data, the compute goes to the data itself — increasingly relevant as enterprise customers look beyond the cloud for their computing needs.

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AI Agents Are Dumb Robots, Calling LLMs

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

It sounds like a robot cartoon: Robots will rule! AI agents will rise! The software will die! Cue the howling laughter of some oversized, demonic, armor-covered lizard nerd. But really, are we headed this way? We know software won’t go poof and evaporate. That sounds more like a serverless joke. It’s ephemeral! But Mark Hinkle, CEO and founder of Peripety Labs, is bullish on AI agents on this episode of The New Stack Makers.

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OAuth Works for AI Agents, but Scaling Is Another Question

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Maya Kaczorowski had started getting questions about AI identity and AI agent identity from people who did not have a primary place in the security industry. “And it was very interesting because I just spent the past several months before that talking to a lot of CISOs and security leaders about the top pain points that they have, and this is not something that they were bringing up,” Kaczorowski said on the latest episode of The New Stack Makers.

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Writing Code About Your Infrastructure? That's a Losing Race

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Writing code about your infrastructure will give way to building models for assembling the automation. It means thinking about how to create systems that people can see and act on quickly, bypassing what historically involved building out diagrams and managing code reviews.

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Why Fitting Open Source and AI Together Is So Messy

By Alex Williams |StartupNews.fyi

LONDON — At a panel of leading open source AI experts at the third annual State of Open Con (SOOCon25), one thing quickly became clear: Even the pros are having trouble putting together the open source AI puzzle. Moderator Alex Williams, The New Stack’s founder and publisher, opened the conversation by asking Sam Johnston, founder of the Open Source Alliance (OSA), to define the meaning of openness and AI, particularly concerning cost and reproducibility.

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The Open Source License Rug Pull and More at State of Open Con 25

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Hang on a minute, can we make some more money off all this work we’ve done on this open source project? Let’s relicense! What could go wrong? Well, it could get forked. And we see that over and over again. When it comes to thinking about the state of open source, the relicensing issue is one of a number of frustrations faced by the community, many of which will be aired Feb. 4-5 in London at the third annual State of Open Conference (SOOCon25).

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Open Source in 2025: What Will Matter Most This Year?

By Alex Williams, Amanda Brock |StartupNews.fyi

2024 didn’t fail to disappoint in delivering another roller coaster of a year for open source software. Open source isn’t just code today, it’s a philosophy that we have seen put under serious pressure throughout the last couple of years. Navigating that pressure must become our collective, global, community mission in 2025. That’s the only way that we can hope to protect the future of open source. At the State of Open Con, on Feb.

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Cerbrec: A Framework for Python Devs Without AI Experience

By Alex Williams, Kimberley Mok, Octavian Tanase, Janakiram MSV |The New Stack Verified

Researchers love PyTorch. However, it takes considerable skill to use the framework for deep learning. Cerbrec is building a graph-based deep learning AI framework for researchers and developers. With its drag-and-drop interface, people with some knowledge of Python can use Cerbrec ‘s flagship product, Cerbrek Graphbook, as a PyTorch visualization platform without the expertise that is generally required to use the massively popular deep learning framework.

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The Feds Push WebAssembly for Cloud Native Security

By B. Cameron Gain, Alex Williams, BC Gain, Kimberley Mok |The New Stack Verified

The Feds Push WebAssembly for Cloud Native Security Featured image via Unsplash+. The use of WebAssembly could become mandatory to meet security-compliance requirements while solving other ongoing security conundrums as Wasm becomes more widely adopted.

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Qodo: A Multi-Agent Code Platform to Write, Test and Review Code

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

LAS VEGAS — Zero to production, AI-generated code has come a long way in two years. Gartner predicts that in 2025, 30% of code will be generated by AI. Coding is only the start. Qodo, formerly Codium, believes that this new reality means we need more AI — specifically, a multi-agent code integrity platform to write, test, and review code. The problem with developers using code-generation tools will only get worse, said Qodo Founder and CEO Itamar Friedman in an interview at AWS re:Invent.

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Is Apache Spark Too Costly? An Amazon Engineer Tells His Story

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

RALEIGH, N.C. — Is Apache Spark too costly? On LinkedIn, Amazon Principal Engineer Patrick Ames is recommended as the “go-to” guy for explaining how things work. You get that kind of reputation when you manage exabyte-scale data transfers from Apache Spark to Ray, a unified framework for scaling AI and Python applications. Ray, by the way, is the new hotness.

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AI Agents and Copilots: SAP Introduces Deeper Integrations

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

SAP has launched collaborative AI agents in Joule, its generative AI copilot, as a further effort to provide deeper integrations across its software ecosystem.

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Who Owns AI’s Output? – Communications of the ACM | Flipboard

By Alex Williams |Flipboard

3 hours ago Hello, Quartz members, and welcome to Sunday Reads! Tim Walz and JD Vance held a vice presidential debate, 45,000 dockworkers walked off the job from Maine to Texas but quickly came back, and the damage from Hurricane Helene was immense. Suggested Reading 4 billionaires getting even richer from …

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The WordPress Saga: Does Matt Mullenweg Want a Fork or Not?

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

A CEO is no longer expected to talk candidly about open source. Maybe business leaders have never expected open source to be anything but serve their business interests. Not every CEO takes advantage of open source to the degree we have seen in recent months. But no one is free of blame. Open source means different things to different people, and everyone uses it for their own purposes. The colloquial use of open source gives companies like Meta the opportunity to use open source as they wish.

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Oracle Code Assist, Java-Optimized, Now in Beta

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

LAS VEGAS – Here it comes again. Oracle Code Assist (OCA) is now in beta after an initial introduction in the spring. At its user conference here, Oracle CloudWorld, the company also announced some incremental enhancements for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE) to enhance the deployment and management of AI workloads. Like most tools in the space, Oracle says OCA helps coders code faster. But it arrives with its share of tools for developers.

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Why Open Source AI Has No Meaning

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Meta is winning the open source AI story by using the term to push a large language model (LLM) that is not open source. But really, the Meta camp can call open source whatever it wants. AI creates a paradox for the open source community. On one side are the open pragmatists and on the other are the ones who want open source AI to be aspirational and true to its principles. The problem: open source is diminishing in meaning as AI LLM providers call their services open source whether they are or not.

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VMware's Golden Path

By Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

In an era of overwhelming complexity, the golden path is a top priority for software architects. Why? We’re moving to an application-centric world, said James Watters, senior director of R&D, Tanzu, Division, Broadcom. If there are fewer application patterns, then everyone’s life gets a bit simpler — the security person, the infrastructure person, the developer. But what is the golden path?

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In the Age of AI, What Should We Teach Student Programmers?

By David Cassel, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

In a world where AI has created powerful tools for coding, what exactly should computer science teachers tell the young programmers of tomorrow? On the front lines of the future, educators are grappling with what stance to take — with a little help from nonprofits and professional trade associations. The ongoing discussion offers a unique perspective on a very real need being confronted: to understand where we’re at, in order to define where we want to go.

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In the Age of AI, What Should We Teach Student Programmers?

By David Cassel, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The Code Project

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Rapid Innovation In Vehicle Connectivity Is Creating New Developer Roles

By Nick Power, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

I have worked in the software industry for the past three decades and, in that time, have seen considerable evolutions in software development. I am passionate about understanding technology’s impact on people’s daily lives and what technology consumers want to pay for. As society evolves, the technological landscape shifts in tandem, reflecting the changing values, needs, and behaviors of the population.

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Even Data-Driven Companies Fall Short of Their Data's Potential

By AMIT SHARMA, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

A recent survey found organizations that relied on data to guide business decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic emerged stronger and better positioned to navigate the market volatility. Investments in data pay off — or have the potential to. The path from data investment to desired outcomes is not linear.

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Hackathon Tips to Boost DevOps Innovation

By Rita Manachi, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Enterprises have gotten pretty good at adopting DevOps practices, but scaling them can be difficult. To be sure, newer disciplines like platform engineering and roles like compliance architects are valid manifestations of DevOps. But sustaining and expanding a productive DevOps operation requires constant validation and growth. That’s why we see more companies turning to the humble hackathon to sustain their engineering culture.

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How to Manage Linux Software

By Damon Garn, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

This article on services fits into a larger series of Linux articles covering various sysadmin topics, including hardware identification and managing system processes. You can build a lab environment by following the information in the Linux: Companion Lab for Linux Skill Blocks Repository article.

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Bypassing eBPF to Protect Runtimes in Kubernetes Apps

By Alex Williams, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Jason Myers |The New Stack Verified

SEATTLE — Kubernetes is a good fit for the scale needed to run generative AI applications. But GenAI poses a security problem that requires new approaches to protecting runtimes in Kubernetes applications. If anything, CloudNativeSecurityCon earlier this summer showed how deeply complex the problems become with new attack vectors that compound with GenAI.

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Linux: Secure Yourself With GnuPG on Linux

By Jack Wallen Verified, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

GnuPG (aka GNU Privacy Guard) is a free, open source replacement for Symantec’s PGP suite that allows you to encrypt and sign data security. With GnuPG, you can protect files on your local system and even communications with third parties. With a versatile key management system and access to several public key directories, GPG is a must-have for security-minded Linux users. GnuPG can be used from the command line and is supported by email apps such as Thunderbird.

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How To Manage Linux Log Services

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Introduction to Flutter - How Does It Compare to Tauri?

By David Eastman, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

When I looked at Tauri last week, I was asked how it compares with other similar app-building projects. Flutter is more of a platform and uses the Dart language, but I think with Tauri supporting mobile builds it might be time to look at where Flutter is right now. Flutter is “an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multiplatform applications from a single codebase.” It can compile down to ARM for full mobile support.

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Linux: Mount Remote Directories With SSHFS

The Secure Shell (SSH) isn’t just about allowing you to remote into servers to tackle admin tasks. Thanks to this secure networking protocol, you can also mount remote directories with the help of the SSH File System (SSHF). SSHFS uses SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) to mount remote directories to a local machine using secure encryption, which means the connection is far more secure than your standard FTP.

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New Eleventy Supports ESM and NY Times Embraces React 18

By Loraine Lawson, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

This week, Eleventy, aka 11ty, released its version 3.0 beta, which it is touting as “ESM-friendly.” “We did it. It’s happening. After 18 alpha pre-releases and over a year of work, our very first beta release of Eleventy 3.0 is now available,” the team wrote on its GitHub release notes. ESM stands for ECMAScript Modules, and it’s a modern JavaScript module format natively supported in most web browsers. It’s a “,” explained web developer Jacob Jackson.

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Kafka 3.8 Brings Faster Startups to Java Developers

By Joab Jackson Verified, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Java developers who wrangle with Kafka are getting some love from the new release of the open source data streaming platform. The project has packaged the latest version, Kafka 3.8, in a GraalVM, a container for enterprise Java environments. While not jaw-dropping, for Java developers this is some good news, noted Confluent Developer Advocate Sandon Jacobs, who, prior to joining Confluent, worked as a Java developer on Kafka.

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Supercharge AIOps Efficiency With LLMs

By Avitan Gefen, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Senser has been an AI company from day one. We operate within the AIOps category, using machine learning to graph production Cloud and IT environments and provide our customers with deep insights into the root cause and change impact. While the buzz around implementing generative AI capabilities in the observability market is recent and loud, we’ve been quietly evaluating the specific roles LLMs can play in bolstering our offering over the past year.

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Netflix Open Sources Maestro, a Next-Gen Data Workflow Engine

Video and gaming streaming service Netflix has released as open source the workflow orchestrator that its army of data scientists and analysts use every day to understand user behaviors and other large-scale data-driven trends. The Maestro workflow orchestrator, released under an Apache 2.0 license, was designed to support hundreds of thousands of workflows and has completed up to 2 million jobs in a single day for the media company.

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Synthetic Monitoring With OpenTelemetry

By Ken Hamric, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

Synthetic monitoring is used to proactively test and monitor production systems, ensuring performance, availability, key functionality and assessing user experience. There are several types of monitors, ranging from simple pings to fully automated web interactions. Modern engineering teams are now using OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing for production monitoring and troubleshooting, but mostly in a manual, reactive manner.

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FinOps Can Turn IT Cost Centers Into a Value Driver

By Bill Lobig, Siddarth Jain, Patrick McFadin, Alex Williams |The New Stack Verified

The reality is that IT has traditionally been a major cost center within the business. Rather than contributing to profits, it often results in high operational expenses. Back-office inefficiencies, like those within IT, cost companies up to 30% of revenue every year. In today’s economy or any economy, this model is not sustainable, particularly as companies strive to increase tech investments over the next year and beyond. However, there is good news.

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