FutureStack 2022 overview

Get a recap of all the FutureStack 2022 highlights. 

The keynote from Bill Staples

CEO of New Relic, Bill Staples kicked off FutureStack with a keynote address that spanned multiple announcements of new platform capabilities, product demos, highlights from partners, and more. If you’re interested in watching the full keynote for yourself, a recording will be available June 1 on FutureStack.com. 

Various New Relic users also shared their success, including Chris Gundersen (Senior Manager, Global Technology, Digital Solution Architecture from McDonald’s), Juan Martin Pi (Senior Engineer from Mercado Libre), Robbie Belson (Principal Engineer, Corporate Strategy from Verizon), and Satya Prakash (Foot Locker). Additionally, Úlfar Erlingsson, Chief Architect at Lacework, discussed how both New Relic and Lacework are on a joint path to developing more secure software. 

Several live demos were also featured in the keynote, to showcase tools like distributed tracing troubleshooting. Peter Pezaris, SVP, Strategy and Experience at New Relic demoed CodeStream, a tool available as part of New Relic that supercharges development workflows by putting collaboration tools in your IDE. If you haven’t started using Codestream yet, you can install it now and give it a try for free. 

Products and partnerships

Multi-year partnership between Microsoft Azure and New Relic 

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI, Microsoft, presented some exciting news. Developers can now use New Relic as their default observability platform natively inside Azure Portal. This partnership with Microsoft has four key pillars: 

• Option to store telemetry in Azure: Developers can opt into the Data Plus SKU and choose the New Relic platform on the cloud of your choice to help align with their digital transformation and multi-cloud strategy.
• Native Azure portal integration: New Relic will collaborate with Microsoft on the engineering effort to deliver natively integrated New Relic observability solutions through the Azure Portal.
• Ability to use Microsoft committed spend to buy New Relic: Developers can retire their Azure commitment by purchasing New Relic from the Azure Marketplace, simplifying purchasing and contract management.
• Deep Azure services support: Deep integrations between Microsoft services and New Relic help send telemetry data to one place, and translate that data into actionable insights.

Vulnerability management

Both Bill Staples and Jonathan Karon, Senior Director of Software Engineering and Security and Innovation at New Relic, debuted vulnerability management. Now you can easily aggregate native vulnerability detection and existing security data from the security solutions they already use. As a result, engineering teams like DevOps, SecOps, NetOps, and SRE will have total visibility of all of the vulnerabilities in their software stack in a matter of minutes, so they can collectively understand and close security gaps, and ultimately protect their customers’ data.

For all FutureStack product announcements, be sure to read our blog post that recaps them all. 

FutureHack 2022

Thanks to everyone who participated in FutureHack this year. Congratulations to the winners!

• Justin Hawkins in the Continuous Integration category for his project that integrated CircleCI builds with New Relic
• Diana Esteves and Kedasha Kerr (Team Open Sesame) in the Build Something Amazing category for a project that instrumented IoT with New Relic
• David Canas, awarded Best New Hacker for using the margins of a technical article to support new engineers
• Curt Bryan in the Most Fun Application category for his project for an open source power dialer
• Jaxon Repp and Jake Cohen (Team HarperDB) in the Best Overall Hack category for reduced API latency with API caching and New Relic monitoring

Inspiration from Dr. Moogega Cooper

Dr. Moogega “Moo” Cooper, Nasa’s planetary protection engineer, highlighted her belief in developing a “childlike curiosity” and encouraged the audience to take fearless but reasoned risks. She emphasized leaving yourself room to fail in a trusted environment. Building that environment for Dr. Moo means that team members work together and listen to and incorporate diverse perspectives. Of course, she also discussed the persistence and dedication that has been so key in her work and humanity’s efforts in voyaging across the universe.  

Social impact 

New Relic announces new grant program

New Relic announced a $100,000 Impact Fund to provide unrestricted dollars to eligible U.S. nonprofit organizations for use on technology projects. The fund builds on current programs that enable nonprofit technology and engage New Relic employees and support community partners. The Impact Fund is dedicated to investing in the advancement of nonprofit technology and digital transformation by supporting nonprofits in addressing their most important technological barriers. 

Grant size will be determined by NewRelic.org and will range from $5,000-$25,000 per project. Grants will support nonprofits with strategic or innovative technology needs, digital transformation projects, and creative solutions to enhance organizational efficiency and effectiveness. 

Platzi partnership

Online learning platform, Platzi will now offer New Relic Student Edition to all Platzi students with the help of New Relic. New Relic will also add an observability course to the platform, which will feature in all the cloud engineering educational tracks. Additionally, New Relic will sponsor 2,000 scholarships so more students can sign up to gain skills. 

Learn with Jason sponsorship

Learn with Jason is live, hands-on learning that brings in teachers from across the web developer community. New Relic will support Learn with Jason with an annual sponsorship and be part of Observability Week, where students will build an application, instrument it, and learn how to use the data that is generated. 

Wilco partnership

New Relic will team with Wilco to produce a hand-on gamified programming experience called League of Observability. Wilco will also add New Relic tracks to their current engineering challenges. 

Closing speech highlights

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, also known as “Woz,” discussed working with Steve Jobs, starting Apple, and how the human brain works. Through his science fair projects, he learned how electrons flowed and atoms were constructed. He built ham radios as a 10-year-old. He realized building computers was his passion before he knew of anyone else doing it. Back when a computer cost as much as a house, he made a promise to himself: he was going to have a computer before he had a home, and eventually, he'd make computers affordable for people. 

Woz's FutureStack keynote will be available on June 1 on FutureStack.com.