devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Vercel Announces $40M in Series B Funding to Fuel Frontend Development Innovation

    GV-led round will be used to accelerate adoption and expand hybrid platform for development and deployment of any dynamic website or application

     

    SAN FRANCISCO – December 16, 2020 – Frontend development pioneer Vercel today announced that it has secured $40M in series B funding in a round led by GV, with participation from new investors Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital and Geodesic Capital in addition to existing investors Accel and CRV. The new funding, which brings the total raised to $61M, will be used to accelerate research and development, drive platform innovation and scale its team globally to further accelerate frontend developers’ ability to enrich end users’ web experiences. Companies including AirBnb, Hashicorp and TripAdvisor deploy their frontends with the Vercel platform.

     

    “We see a significant uptick in the number of global enterprises transitioning from cloud to serverless computing technologies,” said Tyson Clark, GV general partner. “This opens the door for companies like Vercel to transform the frontend development market. Vercel’s collaborative approach to interactive web applications is well-positioned to become the top choice for developing the websites over the next decade.”

    Vercel provides a software development workflow and deployment platform that redefines how developers work, how they collaborate with lines of business and, most importantly, how their sites perform. The leading advocate and enabler of frontend developer experience and the creator of Next.js, the first hybrid framework to succeed at scale, Vercel uniquely satisfies the needs of both static and dynamic websites and applications. Hybrid applications give users all the capabilities and benefits of a static generator, while providing the flexibility of server-side rendering or streaming server-side rendering for additional personalization within the same application.

    “Since our inception, Vercel has been focused on creating the most powerful way to develop, preview and ship interactive web applications without having to depend on monolithic backend systems,” said Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel. “Vercel is now the preferred frontend development platform, capable of providing dynamic web application experiences for growing legions of Javascript developers. We are extremely pleased to have partnered with GV, whose experience in this space will help us grow as a company, rapidly expand our user base and ensure ever-higher quality of user experiences globally in the coming months.”

    About Vercel

    Vercel is the leading advocate and enabler of frontend developer experience, having created Next.js, the most popular React framework available, and Vercel, the best platform to build and deploy any frontend website or application. Vercel provides unsurpassed vertical integration, from developer experience to edge delivery, with the industry’s most advanced development tools paired with parallel compute in a serverless cloud environment providing a fully-managed, highly-automated experience for both developers and users. Companies including AirBnb, Hashicorp and TripAdvisor deploy their frontends with the Vercel platform. Venture-backed by Accel and CRV, Vercel (twitter@vercel) is headquartered in San Francisco.

  • IBM joins the Crossplane community

    IBM joins the Crossplane Community to advance the development of hybrid cloud application platforms.

    By Chris Bailey, Paolo Dettori, John Ponzo
    Published December 15, 2020

    Today IBM is pleased to announce that it is joining the Crossplane community and releasing an experimental release of a Crossplane provider for IBM Cloud. This enables IBM Cloud managed resources to be exploited from Crossplane.

    What is Crossplane?

    Crossplane is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project that provides the ability to manage infrastructure and resources, including cloud managed services using Kubernetes CRDs, and has contributions and support from a number of major vendors. These include Microsoft, Alibaba, GitLab, and Red Hat, as well as Upbound, which founded the Crossplane project two years ago.

    One unique feature is the capability to define compositions to represent resources such as databases, and back those compositions with one of more pluggable providers that deploy and manage an instance of the resource.

    This makes it possible to create applications that are portable across cloud providers and still use cloud-managed resources: an application defines the deployment of a resource such as for a PostgreSQL database using a Crossplane composition CRD, and the database is then created and controlled by the configured provider.

    This capability extends the hybrid, multi-cloud portability that already comes from Kubernetes and OpenShift. You can deploy the same application to Amazon AWS and to IBM Cloud, using the Amazon Relational Database Service in the first case, and the Databases for PostgreSQL service in the second. This concept also extends to hybrid-cloud scenarios, using an in-cluster provider to deploy a containerised instance of PostgreSQL.

    Crossplane architecture

    Hybrid multicloud applications

    Hybrid, multi-cloud strategies have the potential to reduce vendor lock-in, reduce service disruption risks and enable better disaster recovery, as well as providing the core cloud benefits of agility, scalability and elasticity. Enterprises are widely taking this approach, with 35% of IT infrastructure spend on private clouds, and 21% on public clouds (IDC, 2020), and 81% of enterprises working with two or more providers (Gartner, 2019).

    Reaching the full potential of a hybrid multi-cloud strategy however requires application portability:

    • deploying workloads to multiple clouds to avoid service disruption and enable disaster recovery
    • placing workloads to meet locality, security, compliance or data governance requirements
    • migrating workloads as part of a cloud adoption roadmap

    Current application portability issues means that “few applications ever move once they have been deployed in production and adopted by the business” (Gartner, 2020).

    While Kubernetes is increasingly seen as the ubiquitous application portability layer for containerized, cloud-native applications, additional application portability challenges persist. This is driven because any given cloud platform extends beyond Kubernetes itself. Each managed Kubernetes service provides a subtly different flavor due to the infrastructure implementation on which it runs and the vendor specific capabilities, services and APIs, it provides. The use of capabilities such as serverless functions, managed services (eg, databases, datastores and messaging services), load-balancing and proxy services, identity and access management, and observability all add friction and barriers to application portability.

    The use of Red Hat OpenShift resolves a number of these issues by providing a consistent layer across hybrid multi-cloud deployments for Kubernetes and a number of other services such as Service Mesh and Serverless. Crossplane extends this to a wider set of resources.

    Improving application portability

    Crossplane “supercharges your Kubernetes clusters enabling you to provision and manage infrastructure, services, and applications from kubectl” (Crossplane.io). Essentially, Crossplane provides a framework for publishing Kubernetes CRDs to manage infrastructure and resources.

    For managed services, this makes it possible to publish a composed resource type, for example a PostgreSQLInstance CRD, that can be used by applications to create, configure and manage an instance of a PostgreSQL database. That PostgreSQLInstance resource is an interface layer, composed from one or more providers that can manage infrastructure resources that provide the concrete implementation of the PostgreSQL database. Those concrete implementations could be managed services running in-cluster, on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, and now IBM Cloud.

    While managed services are key for improving application portability, Crossplane can be used to deploy and manage a wide range of resources including being used to provision clusters themselves, for example in hybrid multi-cloud management scenarios.

    The IBM Cloud Provider for Crossplane

    IBM has just released an experimental release of an IBM Cloud provider for Crossplane. This provides a set of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and Controllers to provision and manage IBM Cloud infrastructure and services from the Crossplane control plane.

    The provider currently provides the following features:

    • Provision and manage 85+ hosted services and their credentials from the IBM Cloud Catalog
    • Import existing IBM Cloud services into the provider
    • Use Go templating to shape credentials for the requirements of applications.

    Over the coming weeks, we’ll be looking to enhance the provider with additional IBM Cloud APIs including IBM Cloud Databases and IAM, and maintaining API compatibility of the provider using code generation against the OpenAPI specs from the IBM Cloud Services.

    Visit GitHub to find the IBM Cloud Provider in the Crossplane Contributions organization.

    Related

  • Netdata Cloud Simplifies IT Infrastructure Monitoring and Troubleshooting for more than 25 Thousand Users in 2020

    Award-winning, Free Service Helps Developers and IT Professionals Diagnose System and Application Issues in Real Time

    SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Dec. 15, 2020 – Netdata, the company behind the eponymous open-source, distributed, real-time, performance and health monitoring solution for systems and applications, today announced that it has helped more than 25 thousand developers and IT professionals reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructure monitoring with its free, open-source-based solution.

    “The cost and complexity of infrastructure monitoring is daunting for many organizations,” said Costa Tsaousis, chief executive officer and founder of Netdata. “Before Netdata, infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting required extensive pre-planning, with a high degree of resource, time, and financial investment by teams with deep knowledge and domain expertise. Worse, the result often left IT teams scrambling to the command line when high-level dashboards with insufficient granularity or resolution failed to uncover issues. Netdata radically simplifies IT infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting with its zero-configuration, zero-compromises approach.”

    Netdata Cloud, introduced in May, is a free software service that extends the single-node monitoring and troubleshooting previously available in the free, open-source Netdata Agent to provide visibility into the entire infrastructure at a glance. The distributed data architecture of Netdata Cloud enables it to scale infinitely to handle infrastructure of any size and complexity with no pre-planning and zero configuration. Thousands of metrics for hundreds of systems and applications are automatically detected, collected, and meaningfully visualized for optimal anomaly detection with helpful, exploratory tools like metric correlations for faster root-cause analysis.

    Recent Highlights

    • The free, open-source Netdata Agent grew from 2 to 3.5 million users in 2020. Netdata is the fourth most-starred project in the CNCF landscape after Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and Elastic.
    • Netdata now offers turnkey, zero-configuration, notification integrations for Atlassian OpsGenie and StackPulse.
    • Netdata Cloud was recognized as a global leader in cloud computing by the Business Intelligence Group with a 2020 Stratus Award in the category of Cloud Disruptor.
    • Robin Schumacher has joined Netdata as vice president, product. Schumacher most recently served as senior vice president, product engagement at DataStax.

    About Netdata

    Netdata democratizes monitoring, empowering IT teams to know more about their infrastructure, enabling them to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues, collaborate to solve problems, and make data-driven decisions to move business forward. The free, open-source Netdata Agent gives teams comprehensive, real-time visibility into the full technology stack, yet is easy to install with no configuration necessary and no limits on scalability. Netdata Cloud brings teams and data together in one place to proactively identify, troubleshoot and resolve issues as soon as they are detected. Netdata is committed to a community-first approach, with hundreds of contributors, thousands of GitHub stargazers and millions of users worldwide. To learn more, visit Netdata.cloud.

  • LinearB Software Delivery Intelligence Helps Dev Teams Build and Ship Value Faster

    Invisible project management, real-time insights and team metrics usher in a new data-driven approach for delivery efficiency, software quality and continuous team improvement

    LOS ANGELES & TEL AVIV — December 15, 2020, LinearB, the team behind Software Delivery Intelligence, today introduced a new, essential tool for dev teams to ship faster with higher quality. Correlating Git and project management data, LinearB delivers dashboards, reports and real-time alerts of how teams actually work to predict and eliminate project delays, remediate high-risk code, remove cycle bottlenecks, illuminate shadow work and ensure focus on high-priority tasks.

    LinearB is free forever for individual teams. To sign-up, visit linearb.io/sign-up-free.

    “Something is broken with how software projects are delivered. While Git and CI/CD tools have adopted a dev-first approach, project management and engineering efficiency tools have a top-down mindset and actually make life harder for developers,” said Ori Keren, co-founder and CEO of LinearB. “Dev teams need tools that live in their workflow, reduce manual work and help them focus on building and improving. Think of Software Delivery Intelligence as Git correlation and reconstruction technology that makes project management updates redundant, with team metrics and operational insights built in.”

    LinearB addresses challenges dev teams face today:

    Project Management Tools are good for planning but don’t add value once dev teams start building. They are unable to understand progress without manual status updates and fail when it comes to developer specific work happening in branches, pull requests and releases.

    Efficiency & Value Stream Tools miss the target of opening the engineering ‘black box’ because the metrics are not actionable. They also fail to gain adoption within the team because of the “big brother” cultural impact and the temptation to use executive dashboards to micromanage dev team activities.

    LinearB automatically constructs and visualizes detailed progress timelines for open project issues with zero manual inputs and synchronizes updates to project systems eliminating costly developer interruptions. The platform automates the collection and display of team and project performance data that typically takes data engineers hours to compile manually.

    Developers get insight about their work where they live in Slack and Git,  dev team leads get clear visibility from the first-ever project board with a full Git activity timeline for every issue, and VPs of Engineering get actionable team-based metrics that empower daily improvement.

    The result is a new data-driven approach to building and delivering software as a team:

    Better decision-making: LinearB flags which teams and projects need help so dev leaders know where their time and attention can do the most good each day.

    Faster delivery: Teams are alerted in real-time to project risks, delays and dependencies so they can course correct and deliver more features faster.

    Improved visibility: Dev leaders now have metrics for team performance, efficiency, quality and focus areas providing clarity about what to work on, when to hire and where to invest in automation.

    Better communication: Metrics are the language of business leaders. LinearB visualizes the most important team-based metrics like Cycle Time to help translate engineering to non-technical executives.

    Meaningful meetings: LinearB provides data-driven dashboards for stand-up, retro, sprint planning and release planning meetings ensuring conversations are fact-based and time is used efficiently.

    Asynchronous development: LinearB gives everyone real-time visibility into projects without the need for manual updates, interruptions or status meetings, empowering hybrid remote teams to work async.

    “LinearB connects the dots between our Git activity and project issues giving our team greater context into the work we’re doing every day and helping us deliver more efficiently,” said Brent Bartlett, VP of Engineering at Grin. “I use the team performance reports to keep the pulse of our remote team. They’re generated automatically which eliminates hours I used to spend manually collecting data from all of our different sources.”

    Building a community of progressive software development leaders

    To help dev leaders adopt this new way of working, LinearB hosts a community called Dev Interrupted consisting of a Discord chat server, podcast and weekly newsletter.

    Chris Downard, VP of Engineering at GigSmart, LinearB customer and Dev Interrupted community moderator said “I love the Dev Interrupted Discord. Every day there’s super smart dev leaders sharing ideas and helping each other improve.”

    To connect with other dev leaders and join the conversation, visit linearb.io/dev-interrupted

    About LinearB

    LinearB believes dev teams need new, data-driven approaches focused on team and project performance — not static project management metrics. To advance better ways of working and team performance, its Software Delivery Intelligence gives team leads useful data to ensure the right work is done faster, while developers have the freedom and autonomy to work how they want. For more information, visit www.linearb.io.

  • LogicGate Secures $8.75 Million in Growth Capital, Total Funding Surpasses $40 Million

    Investment will fuel international expansion and new product offerings in 2021

    CHICAGO – December 15, 2020 – LogicGate, a leading provider of cloud software solutions for automating governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes through its Risk Cloud™ platform, today announces it’s secured $8.75 million in growth capital from Greenspring Associates and Silicon Valley Bank. The funding will fuel LogicGate’s growth trajectory as the company revenue grew by more than 100 percent in the past year driven by significant customer demand for the Risk Cloud product.

    “2020 showed just how important GRC is because of business disruption and exposure to new risks,” said LogicGate CEO Matt Kunkel. “This validates our mission, and I’m more confident in the LogicGate team and our product than ever. We saw some amazing milestones in 2020, like the launch of the LogicGate Power User Certification Program, the Risk Crowd User Community, and our first user conference, Agility. We’re helping more customers than ever turn risk into a strategic advantage, and we’ll continue evangelizing this as LogicGate’s mission through 2021.”

    With this latest investment from Greenspring Associates, LogicGate has reached more than $40 million in total funding. This infusion will further LogicGate’s work in its partner and customer advancements in the form of a new GRC ecosystem for customers, partners and prospects to explore all Risk Cloud offerings and create their ideal risk program and the focus on leading the market in risk quantification features. It will also fuel LogicGate’s expansion into European markets.

    “While compliance is non-negotiable, having a platform for it didn’t feel like a priority. Until now,” said Hunter Somerville, at Greenspring Associates. “Organizations are realizing that investing in a GRC platform is essential and that they’re not all archaic. Platforms like the Risk Cloud stand out because they’re flexible enough to be completely custom but also have pre-built content, frameworks and workflows. This combination of approaches to software enables enterprises to work efficiently and supercharge more processes than ever before.”

    In 2020, LogicGate made enhancements to the Risk Cloud platform, adding native integrations with Okta, Slack, and Jira to their integrations suite. The company doubled its library of out-of-the-box applications which enable LogicGate customers to implement best-practice GRC processes quickly. These, among other user-interface upgrades and customer success initiatives, led to a 300 percent growth in monthly active users, and a 20 percent increase in average applications used per customer.

    Customers aren’t the only ones taking notice of LogicGate’s strides in product development,

    Through a year of intense growth, LogicGate has been able to maintain a superior company culture, receiving a Top Workplaces 2020 honor by The Chicago Tribune. Adding personnel to LogicGate’s team will be vital as the company expands its footprint in Europe. The company plans to add another 100 employees over the next 18 months.

    This announcement follows LogicGate’s announcement of new out-of-the-box Applications for the Risk Cloud platform. For more information about LogicGate or to view open positions, visit LogicGate.com.

     

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    About LogicGate

    LogicGate is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions for automating governance, risk and compliance (GRC) processes. LogicGate empowers customers to transform disorganized risk and compliance operations into agile enterprise risk management programs, tailored to their business needs. Its proprietary Risk Cloud™ platform, an end-to-end suite of risk management solutions, blends the right mix of flexibility and out-of-the-box functionality, enabling organizations to manage their risk with confidence. Companies like SoFi, CAPCO and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, rely on LogicGate to accurately assess, monitor, action, and, when needed, rapidly pivot GRC processes, without the support of consultants or corporate IT. The Chicago-based company has been named a leading GRC Software Platform on the G2 GRC Grid for five consecutive quarters, and was awarded Best Security Innovation in a SaaS Product by the SaaS Awards. For more information, visit LogicGate.com and follow LogicGate on LinkedIn and Twitter at @LogicGate.

  • Instana Adds ARM-Based Host Support for Monitoring and Tracing PHP Services on AWS Graviton2

    First Application Monitoring and Observability Solution to Natively Trace and Profile on ARM-Based Processors Automatically

    Chicago, December 15, 2020 – Instana, the leading provider of automated Application Monitoring and Observability solutions for cloud-native microservice applications, today announced support for monitoring and tracing PHP applications on Amazon’s AWS Graviton2. The first Instana release to support an ARM-based processor, today’s announcement of an ARM-based monitoring sensor makes Instana the first observability and monitoring solution to support automatic distributed tracing across PHP workloads running on AWS Graviton2.

    “The continued evolution of Cloud infrastructure and platforms requires tooling for Dev and Ops teams to keep up,” said Chris Farrell, Director and APM Strategist at Instana. “More than just performance metrics, Instana’s new PHP monitoring and tracing sensor for AWS Graviton2 delivers the observability DevOps requires to manage mission critical applications.”

    Like it does with every other managed workload, Instana’s PHP sensor for AWS Graviton2 monitors the infrastructure and application performance (including deep code visibility), captures a trace of every request and profiles every process. Instana sensors for other ARM-based environments are expected to go live in the future.

    Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process and updates application dependency maps in real time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline.

    Today’s announcement, coinciding with the last week of AWS re:Invest, is the third in a series of announcements about application monitoring and observability for Amazon’s AWS eco-system. Last week, Instana became the first solution to natively trace Java, Go, Python and Node.js applications running on AWS Lambda. The week before, Instana announced the availability of a new AWS Marketplace offering.

    Learn more about Instana, the Enterprise Observability Platform and automated Application Monitoring at https://instana.com

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    ABOUT INSTANA

    As the leading provider of Automatic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions for microservices, Instana has developed the automatic monitoring and AI-based analysis DevOps needs to manage the performance of modern applications. Instana is the only APM solution that automatically discovers, maps and visualizes microservice applications without continuous additional engineering. Customers using Instana achieve operational excellence and deliver better software faster. Visit https://www.instana.com to learn more.

     

  • Downloads Of Industry-Standard Axe-Core Digital Accessibility Rules Hit 100 Million

    Open Source Downloads Grow Tenfold in Under Two Years, Suggesting Expanding Need for Digital Accessibility Testing

    HERNDON, VA – December 11, 2020  – Deque Systems, the trusted leader in digital accessibility, announced today that axe-core, the most accurate and widely used open source library of accessibility rules, has exceeded 100 million downloads, growing at a rate of more than 4 million downloads a week.

    Driven by a need for fast and accurate accessibility testing, the use of axe-core spans the globe. The vast majority of downloads came from external (non-Deque) web sources, including Google and Microsoft—a testament to the growing and vibrant developer community that has openly embraced axe-core.

    “The contributions of the developer community and their commitment to making the web accessible to people with disabilities have fueled our growth trajectory since we released axe-core as open source in 2015,” comments Dylan Barrell, Chief Technology Officer at Deque Systems. “The exponential rate of adoption we’ve seen in recent years is indicative of digital accessibility becoming more pervasive for the nearly one in four U.S. citizens with a disability.”

    Many organizations reference the axe-core rules library as the de facto standard for accessibility testing, including Google, Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice, among others. These rules help inform testers and web developers what is and isn’t accessible to people with disabilities. Fast, secure and lightweight, axe-core was built to seamlessly integrate with any test environment and can automate testing alongside regular functional testing.

    Axe-core is the foundation of Deque’s accessibility testing tools including the free axe browser extensions and the axe DevTools toolkit. Developers may download axe-core at: https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core.

    “Besides being legally mandated per the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), more organizations are realizing the benefits of digital accessibility, ranging from capturing overlooked market share, lowering operational costs and boosting brand value,” says Preety Kumar, CEO of Deque Systems.

    Momentum Heading into First axe-con: Deque’s axe-con is a new industry conference to be conducted online March 10-11, 2021. Axe-con is an open and inclusive event that welcomes developers, designers, business leaders and accessibility professionals of all levels to a unique conference focused on building, testing, and maintaining accessible digital experiences.

    Registration for axe-con is free, with leaders in the field offering attendees best practices for accessibility in design, development, and testing. Speakers include American internet pioneer Vint Cerf, Disability Rights Lawyer and Author Haben Girma, Smashing Magazine Editor in Chief Rachel Andrew and dozens of other industry influencers.

    To register for axe-con, please visit deque.com/axe-con/register.

    About Deque Systems

    Deque (pronounced dee-cue) is a web accessibility software and services company, and our mission is Digital Equality.  We believe everyone, regardless of their ability, should have equal access to the information, services, applications, and everything else on the web.

    We work with enterprise-level businesses and organizations to ensure that their sites and mobile apps are accessible. Installed in over 250,000 browsers and with over 4,000 audit projects completed, Deque is the industry standard.

  • Sauce Labs Acquires API Fortress to Bolster Continuous Testing Platform with Modern API Testing Solution

     Acquisition adds array of API testing capabilities to company’s existing functional UI testing capabilities, creating a more comprehensive and seamless customer experience

    • Addition of API testing enables testers and developers to more efficiently collaborate on modern API-driven applications

    SAN FRANCISCO – December 10, 2020 – Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of continuous testing solutions that deliver digital confidence, today announced that it has acquired API Fortress, a leading provider of modern API testing solutions for agile and DevOps teams. The acquisition addresses a critical need for customers by enabling them to quickly, easily, and continuously test the API endpoints that make up the core of modern API-driven applications. The API Fortress platform enables customers to transform their API development processes, accelerate releases, and reduce risk in the software development lifecycle. With the addition of API Fortress, Sauce Labs now offers an even richer and more comprehensive testing experience, one that includes API testing in addition to functional UI testing, visual end-to-end testing, and front-end performance testing, as well as real-time test insights and analytics.

    “We’re thrilled to welcome the people and products of API Fortress to Sauce Labs,” said Aled Miles, president and CEO, Sauce Labs. “Sauce Labs is committed to helping organizations grow their digital confidence by providing them the testing platform they need to deliver a flawless and trusted experience to their customers. Today’s announcement is further evidence of that commitment and we look forward to a bright future for API Fortress and its customers as part of the growing Sauce Labs team.”

    The acquisition of API Fortress complements Sauce Labs’ existing functional UI testing capabilities by enabling customers to address one of the biggest challenges they typically face with traditional UI testing. Customers running functional UI tests on the Sauce Labs platform will be able to leverage API Fortress to quickly and easily determine if there are issues at the API level that require a more targeted set of API tests, and if so, to generate and execute those tests using a powerful set of API testing capabilities available directly from Sauce Labs.

    “As functional UI testing and targeted API testing go hand-in-hand in the modern era of API-driven applications, Sauce Labs is the perfect long-term home for all that we started building at API Fortress,” said Patrick Poulin, co-founder and CEO, API Fortress, who will join the Sauce Labs product leadership team. “We’re honored to be part of Sauce Labs and we’re eager to join with their world-class development and customer success teams to deliver the comprehensive testing experience digital businesses need to grow and thrive.”

    Solving an acute developer pain point

    In the early days of application development, web applications made just a small number of API requests to required microservices. With fewer API endpoints to track down, a functional test failure caused by an out-of-date API was relatively easy to identify and debug, making the need for targeted API testing far less acute. As modern software development has progressed, however, web apps have become far more API-driven, and the number of APIs communicating with various microservices has exploded.

    In the absence of targeted API testing, QA teams generally have no way of knowing whether a front-end functional test has failed due to a broken endpoint or a bug in the application code itself, meaning the arduous and time-consuming task of identifying and debugging the failure falls to developers. Deployments can grind to a halt while developers chase down broken services they’re not responsible for maintaining. But with API testing as part of a comprehensive continuous testing platform, testers and developers gain immediate insight into how and when APIs break.

    “As modern web apps continue to become more API-driven than ever before, developers and QA professionals must collaborate around the API to build high-quality applications, including and especially when it comes to testing,” said John Kelly, CTO, Sauce Labs. “The acquisition of API Fortress adds another tool to the Sauce Labs portfolio that facilitates greater collaboration between testers and developers and is yet another proof point of the significant investment we’re making to support the developer community.”

    Modern API testing with API Fortress

     

    API testing with API Fortress enables customers and partners to significantly shorten test sprints, improve code quality, and monitor functional uptime. The API Fortress platform features an API-first design that enables it to easily integrate with the tools integral to building and testing APIs and to seamlessly mesh with existing DevOps toolchains. API Fortress empowers developers to work in parallel with QA and testing teams throughout the API lifecycle.

    The API Fortress platform gives customers the ability to:

    • Easily create and edit functional tests. API Fortress users can automatically generate their first API test in seconds.
    • Monitor performance, uptime, and functional uptime of live APIs. API Fortress users can accurately track the true uptime of APIs through functional tests and quickly diagnose API problems before they are discovered by end-users or cybercriminals.
    • Build API mocks manually or automatically from live API traffic. API Fortress users can expedite new API deliveries and minimize the effects of unreliable internal environments with API mocking.
    • Create a Load Test in as little as 15 seconds. API Fortress unifies functional and nonfunctional API testing, allowing users to use existing functional tests as load tests.

    To learn more about API Fortress, go here.

    Lincoln International served as the exclusive financial advisor to API Fortress on this transaction.

    About Sauce Labs
    Sauce Labs is the leading provider of continuous testing solutions that deliver digital confidence. The Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud delivers a 360-degree view of a customer’s application experience, ensuring that web and mobile applications look, function, and perform exactly as they should on every browser, OS, and device, every single time. Sauce Labs is a privately held company funded by Toba Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Centerview Capital Technology, IVP, Adams Street Partners, and Riverwood Capital. For more information

  • Bugsnag Announces Inaugural Application Stability Index Report, Reveals Mobile and Web Apps Fall Short of Stability “Five Nines”

    Findings illustrate the need for superior application stability for improved customer experience and retention

    SAN FRANCISCO — Bugsnag Inc., an application stability management pioneer, today announced the results of its Application Stability Index: Are your Apps Healthy? report analyzed the performance of approximately 2,500 top mobile and web applications (by session volume) within its customer base. The report reveals the median stability of mobile applications is 99.63%, while the median stability of web applications came in at 99.39%. These findings indicate almost four out of every 1000 customers could be having a completely broken experience with a mobile application. Similar to the “five nines” (99.999%) that infrastructure and operations teams use to measure uptime and availability, this benchmark will help development teams make decisions about when to build features versus fix bugs based on the application’s current stability.

    “With more consumers using online apps, providing an error-free experience is of utmost importance to drive consumer engagement and retention,” said James Smith, CEO of Bugsnag. “To help engineering teams understand the stability and reliability of their apps, we’ve compiled data on the session-based stability of leading mobile and web applications across market segments to set a benchmark for app health. Engineering teams are always striving to innovate, and we’re dedicated to helping them achieve app stability excellence to deliver a better customer experience, drive loyalty and business growth.”

    Measuring and Improving Application Stability for Mobile-First Engineering Organizations

    Compared to the 99.999% industry target for most IT infrastructure groups, also known as “five nines,” a median stability of 99.63% presents a significant opportunity for engineering organizations to invest in measuring and improving application stability and customer experience.

    STABILITY SCORE BY TYPE OF MOBILE DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM
    Platform Android iOS React
    Native    		 Unity
    75th percentile 99.97% 99.94% 99.88% 100%
    Median 99.69% 99.72% 99.40% 99.96%
    25th percentile 98.87% 98.94% 97.83% 99.43%

    The report includes application data from several mobile development platforms, including Android, iOS, React Native, and Unity, as well as several front-end development platforms, including Angular, Backbone, Ember, React, and Vue. Key findings include:

    • Android and iOS native applications tend to have a higher median stability as specialized developers working on these applications have the expertise required to understand and address stability issues effectively.
    • Android applications tend to have a slightly lower median stability compared to iOS applications. As Android presents a much less constrained development environment due to increasing device fragmentation compared to iOS, it is inherently more difficult for Android development teams to test their applications.
    • React Native has a slightly lower median stability than the other mobile development platforms. Although it allows engineering teams to develop for iOS and Android together, expertise in these platforms is needed to effectively investigate and fix bugs in the native layers of the code.
    • Unity applications boast the highest median stability score. The isolated testing environment of Unity applications makes it less likely that a bug will crash the entire application.
    • Web applications have a lower median stability compared to mobile applications, indicating modern web development frameworks may provide more resources to manage errors.
    • There is correlation between size of the engineering team and median stability scores. The smaller the engineering team, the lower the median stability. This holds true in teams up to 50 engineers as achieving product-market fit is more important than app stability. However, large teams of 100+ engineers working on more mature applications experience challenges such as legacy code, compounding technical debt and complexity of team structure that result in declining stability scores.

    “Although stability is commonly a KPI owned by engineering organizations, it has a significant impact on overall business performance and growth,” said Smith. “Engineering organizations can no longer separate business metrics from the stability of their applications — they must standardize error monitoring and stability solutions across the stack and across multiple teams.”

    Bugsnag is meeting this challenge head on and enabling teams to measure and improve app stability, so organizations can increase competitive advantage and drive business growth.

    About the Bugsnag Stability Index Report:

    The Bugsnag Stability Index Report is based on actual customer sessions and 30-day stability assessments patterns that were analyzed and scored by the Bugsnag Application Stability Management platform in 2020. For more information, please visit: www.bugsnag.com/research/2020-application-stability-index-report

    About Bugsnag

    Bugsnag is a pioneer in application stability management. We make error monitoring actionable and help enterprises and small businesses stabilize, prioritize and fix bugs. As a full stack solution, we are recognized for our best-in-class support for mobile applications. Bugsnag empowers software development, client observability and release management teams to make data-driven decisions on when to build features versus fix bugs.

    Organizations experience significant ROI due to faster innovation led by developer efficiencies and improved customer experiences. We process over 1 billion crash reports every day from applications worldwide and more than 5,000 industry leading brands including Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, Lyft, Yelp and Pandora use Bugsnag as their daily dashboard. Based in San Francisco, Bugsnag is backed by GV (Google Ventures), Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. For more information, visit www.bugsnag.com.

  • Hunters Receives Growth Funding from Snowflake Ventures for its Open XDR

    LEXINGTON, Mass. and TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 10, 2020 — Hunters today announced that Snowflake Ventures has joined Hunters’ Series A investors alongside Okta (OKTA) and Microsoft (MSFT) M12 venture arm, further endorsing Hunters as a leading startup in Open XDR (Extended Detection & Response). Series A investors also include U.S. Venture Partners, YL Ventures, and Blumberg Capital.

    Snowflake was one of Hunters’ first customers and a go-to-market partner. Given this experience, Snowflake Venture’s investment strongly validates the efficacy of Hunters’ open XDR platform and its potential for explosive growth in the rapidly emerging category.

    “Snowflake and Hunters share the same vision of empowering organizations to fully mobilize their data in a  secure way,” Snowflake’s Head of Corporate Development, Stefan Williams said. “Snowflake’s Data Cloud coupled with Hunters’ breakthrough technology in security operations, empowers joint customers with  best-in-class automated threat detection at cloud-scale.”

    The Snowflake Ventures investment comes on the heels of Gartner’s recognition of Hunters in its March 2020 Gartner “Innovation Insight for Extended Detection and Response” report. According to the report, “Extended detection and response describes a unified security incident detection and response platform that automatically collects and correlates data from multiple proprietary security components.”

    Driving Hunters’ rapid market uptake is the technological gap security analysts face with effective threat detection and response, despite years of investments in security products. According to new ESG Research, 93% of the respondents said they are planning an XDR investment in the next 12 months.[1]

    “Hunters’ strategic partnership with Snowflake allows users to not only own their security data within their Snowflake, but also get Hunters’ advanced XDR capabilities with a click of a button. After years of investment in security technologies, the time has come to stitch together customers’ sparse security products and build a comprehensive decision support system that will enable SOC teams to better detect and respond,” said Uri May, Co-founder and CEO of Hunters. “The surge in the number of attack surfaces and their scale, and the lack of interpretive consolidated technology have left SOCs at a disadvantage. Hunters XDR fills this gap and delivers a technological leap in threat detection and response so that SOC teams can detect and respond with accuracy and speed.”

    Watch a demo to learn more about Hunters’ open, knowledge-powered XDR and the advantages of combining Hunters and Snowflake’s platform.

    About Hunters

    Hunters’ open XDR is built to empower SOC teams with an automated decision support system they can rely on, while making the most of  the existing security stack. Hunters flexibly integrates with your security tools to extract threat signals across endpoints, cloud, email, network and more. By leveraging a proprietary knowledge graph technology, Hunters effectively contextualizes and correlates both high fidelity and low fidelity threat signals, into actionable findings. Hunters’ XDR enables analysts to answer the three biggest questions around triage automation, incident response, and critical needs of threat hunting. Learn more at Hunters.AI.

     

    [1] Source: ESG Research Report, 2020 Trends in XDR Survey, November 2020