Alex Williams

Portland

Founder and Publisher at The New Stack

Founder and Publisher, The New Stack (he/him)

Articles

New OLTP: Postgres With Separate Compute and Storage

6 days ago | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

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

2 weeks ago | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

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.
What Does AI Cost? No One Knows.

2 weeks ago | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

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.
FinOps Foundation Launches New FinOps for AI Certification

3 weeks ago | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

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.
Prequel: Software Errors Be Gone

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

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.
A Startup Complements Kubernetes, Docker and Wasm at the Edge

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

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.
AI Agents Are Dumb Robots, Calling LLMs

Mar 20, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

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.
Goodbye SaaS, Hello AI Agents

Mar 13, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

The transition from SaaS to Services as Software with AI agents is upon us. AI agents are here, and a new need for orchestration will come, much like Kubernetes emerged as containers scaled. This will require ways to allocate resources and manage workflows between agents, among other requirements.
How Generative AI Is Reshaping the SDLC

Mar 6, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

Srini Iragavarapu posted to LinkedIn about the interview I did with him in Seattle at Amazon Web Services’s offices. What he says about the software development life cycle (SDLC) is a good overview of what we see happening at AWS, but also across the developer world. On LinkedIn, he wrote that “generative AI is fundamentally reshaping the SDLC.” And it’s more than just efficiency gains.
OAuth Works for AI Agents, but Scaling Is Another Question

Feb 27, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Alex Williams

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.