Malcolm Matalka, founder of Terrateam, joins host Giovanni Asproni to talk about the reasoning behind the choice of a not-so-widespread language (OCaml) and the (almost) total avoidance of frameworks for the development of Terrateam. While discussing the reasons for choosing a specific programming language and the advantages and disadvantages of using external frameworks, they touch on other related topics, including static vs dynamic typing, the use of monorepos, and the advantages of using a single language that can be used both for web frontends and server backends. The episode ends with lessons learned that can be applied to other contexts and projects.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Emre Baran, CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, and Alex Olivier, CPO and co-founder, join SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan to explore “stateless decoupled authorization frameworks. The discussion begins with an introduction to key terms, including authorization, authorization models, and decoupled frameworks.

They dive into the challenges of building decoupled authorization, as well as the benefits of this approach and the operational hurdles. The conversation shifts to Cerbos, an open-source policy-based access control framework, comparing it with OPA (Open Policy Agent). They also delve into Cerbos’s technical workings, including specification definitions, GitOps integration, examples of usage, and deployment strategies. The episode concludes with insights into potential trends in the authorization space.

This episode is sponsored by Penn Carey Law school

Tyler Flint, CEO of qpoint.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about managing external vendor dependencies, including several best practices for adoption. They start with a look at internal versus external services, including details such as the footprint of external services within a micro-services application, and difficulties organizations have tracking their service consumption, quantifying service consumption, and auditing external services. Tyler also discusses the security implications of external services, including authentication and authorization. They examine metrics and monitoring, with recommendations on the key metrics to collect, as well as acceptable error rates for external services. From there they consider what can go wrong, how to respond to external service outages, and challenges related to testing external services. The episode wraps up with a discussion of qPoint’s migration from a proxy-based solution to one based on eBPF kernel probes.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.