devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Instana Announces Direct Integration of Traces With Always-On Production Profiling

    APM Users Can Jump from Problematic Requests Directly to Related Profiles for Deeper Troubleshooting with a Single Click

    Chicago – September 1, 2020 – Building on its acquisition of leading production profiling solution StackImpact, Instana today announced deeper integration between its application monitoring, tracing and profiling capabilities, building on its lead as the most complete application performance management solution for modern applications. The latest integration allows Instana users to drill down into profiles related to individual request / user traces which require investigation.

    “As applications continue to simultaneously grow in complexity and importance, the ability to identify performance bottlenecks and solve them quickly is paramount to successful application delivery,” said Chris Farrell, Technical Director and APM Strategist at Instana. “Instana’s single-click direct path from individual traces directly to applicable process profiles makes it both easy and quick for users to get the information they need to identify CPU, Memory and Concurrency issues and solve them.”

    The leading provider of automated microservice application monitoring solutions, Instana acquired the production profiling solution provider StackImpact in 2019. Not content to merely deliver two stand-alone tools, Instana integrated the two unmatched performance management solutions together, culminating with a February announcement of delivering the industry’s first APM solution to provide automated monitoring of every service, tracing of every request and profiling of every process.

    Today’s announcement encompasses two parts of that trifecta – tracing and monitoring. The new capabilities provide more than just integration of the functionality. With one click, users can jump from a trace that needs deeper investigation to a profiling dashboard, filtering out extraneous profiles and showing only those profiles that match the time of the individual request.

    Instana’s Always-On production profiling allows users to go back and profile their live code related to application slow-downs or problems after the fact, with complete profiles available for up to a week. Like every other Instana feature from End User Monitoring to Deep Analytics, Always-On Profiling is made available to Instana APM customers at no additional charge.

    Unlike traditional APM tools, Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes and Docker. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack, traces all application requests and profiles every process – without requiring any human configuration or even application restarts. The solution detects application and infrastructure changes in real-time, adjusting its own models and visualizing the changes and any performance impact in seconds.

    You can learn more about Instana and the latest Profiling features at https://instana.com/profiling.

  • Instana Announces Direct Integration of Traces With Always-On Production Profiling

    APM Users Can Jump from Problematic Requests Directly to Related Profiles for Deeper Troubleshooting with a Single Click

    Under Embargo until 8:10 am EST on 9/1/20

    Chicago – September 1, 2020 – Building on its acquisition of leading production profiling solution StackImpact, Instana today announced deeper integration between its application monitoring, tracing and profiling capabilities, building on its lead as the most complete application performance management solution for modern applications. The latest integration allows Instana users to drill down into profiles related to individual request / user traces which require investigation.

    “As applications continue to simultaneously grow in complexity and importance, the ability to identify performance bottlenecks and solve them quickly is paramount to successful application delivery,” said Chris Farrell, Technical Director and APM Strategist at Instana. “Instana’s single-click direct path from individual traces directly to applicable process profiles makes it both easy and quick for users to get the information they need to identify CPU, Memory and Concurrency issues and solve them.”

    The leading provider of automated microservice application monitoring solutions, Instana acquired the production profiling solution provider StackImpact in 2019. Not content to merely deliver two stand-alone tools, Instana integrated the two unmatched performance management solutions together, culminating with a February announcement of delivering the industry’s first APM solution to provide automated monitoring of every service, tracing of every request and profiling of every process.

    Today’s announcement encompasses two parts of that trifecta – tracing and monitoring. The new capabilities provide more than just integration of the functionality. With one click, users can jump from a trace that needs deeper investigation to a profiling dashboard, filtering out extraneous profiles and showing only those profiles that match the time of the individual request.

    Instana’s Always-On production profiling allows users to go back and profile their live code related to application slow-downs or problems after the fact, with complete profiles available for up to a week. Like every other Instana feature from End User Monitoring to Deep Analytics, Always-On Profiling is made available to Instana APM customers at no additional charge.

    Unlike traditional APM tools, Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes and Docker. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack, traces all application requests and profiles every process – without requiring any human configuration or even application restarts. The solution detects application and infrastructure changes in real-time, adjusting its own models and visualizing the changes and any performance impact in seconds.

    You can learn more about Instana and the latest Profiling features at https://instana.com/profiling.

     

    ###

    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.

  • Eggplant Extends Empowerment of Citizen Developers and Business Users

    Enhances the Accessibility of its Digital Automation Intelligence Platform to Low or No Code Users

    LONDON & BOULDER, CO, August 26th Eggplant, the intelligent automation specialist, today announced updates to its Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) Platform that extends the empowerment of both technical and non-technical users to rapidly release high-quality and high-performance digital products.

    Organizations are now dependent on their ability to rapidly deliver and optimize digital products that delight users and scale to the demands of the networked marketplace. With the pivot to digital, citizen developers and business users are becoming increasingly involved in the development, testing and release of digital products.

    Eggplant’s DAI Platform uses revolutionary techniques of low code modeling and AI-assisted test creation, to increase the level of automation, and to improve and simplify the user experience of testing and releasing digital products. Eggplant enables both technical and business users to drive the creation of test automation that can test functionality, performance, load and usability, all through the lens of user experience. And it can do this across complex processes, across any target platform – including mobile, desktop, web, mainframe, IoT or custom hardware.

    The DAI Platform is the only software testing solution to automate every aspect of the testing lifecycle through AI, machine learning, deep learning and analytics. Eggplant improves business performance in releasing and maintaining digital products, delivering significant time-to-market improvements, while significantly reducing cost, skills and resource requirements.

    New additions to Eggplant’s DAI Platform include:

    • Guided onboarding:The interface now helps users through each step of the automation, making it easier and quicker to get up and running.
    • Proactive test asset maintenance:The automation not only identifies issues with test assets but now suggests a solution to update it. Users have the flexibility to fully automate the maintenance of assets or to review suggestions that are presented in a report.
    • System health status:This snapshot provides an overview of each element making it easy to see at a glance any areas requiring attention.

    Quotes and commentary 

    For digital transformation to be realized, software development needs to be more accessible to more people. With Eggplant, citizen developers and business users can tap into our AI-powered platform to easily automate the entire testing life cycle. The ability to integrate with DevOps at speed and continually meet customer experience requirements is mission-critical in our digitally dependent world.”

    Gareth Smith, CTO Eggplant

    Additional Resources

    • Find out more about the Digital Automation Intelligence Platform here
    • Learn more about Eggplant
    • Follow Eggplant on Twitter

    About Eggplant

    Eggplant, part of Keysight Technologies, provides user-centric, intelligent testing and performance solutions designed to optimize the digital experience, delight customers, and drive business success. Only Eggplant enables organizations to test, monitor, analyze, and report on the quality and responsiveness of software applications across different interfaces, platforms, browsers, and devices, including mobile, IoT, desktop, and mainframe. Learn more at Eggplant.

     

  • Global Survey Shows API Quality and Standardization Challenges Increase as API Adoption Fast-Tracks with Pandemic

     Enterprise concerns for API standardization top list of challenges as more organizations turn to OpenAPI as de facto API industry standard

    SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Aug. 25, 2020 — SmartBear, a leading provider of software development and quality tools, has released its 2020 State of API Report. This year’s findings show standardization remains a top challenge for more than 58% of organizations, particularly large enterprises, as they scale API development. Problems with lack of standardization and subsequent quality are coming to light as many companies fast-track API adoption and accelerate digital initiatives due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because API standardization directly impacts the ability to consistently deliver the best customer experiences, it’s a top priority for enterprises.

    The 2020 State of API Report is the first such survey conducted during COVID-19, and more than 3,500 responses were received from May to June 2020 from API developers, architects, testers, and product leaders. The survey provides insights across different aspects of the API lifecycle, including API design, development, documentation, testing, and monitoring. It also studies trends in technologies, standards, and tooling that are reshaping the API ecosystem.

    Key findings include:

    • 58% of organizations list standardization as a top API challenge
    • Microservices drive API growth according to 65% of respondents
    • 82% of respondents cite OpenAPI as the dominant API standard
    • More than 50% cite cloud service provider as their choice for API management
    • 64% cite internal interoperability as biggest driver for API development

    “We are grateful to this global community for providing their insights, especially during a pandemic,” said Cynthia Gumbert, Chief Marketing Officer at SmartBear. “Businesses are accelerating digital transformation using APIs at a pace never conceived of just a few months ago, while needing to provide even higher quality service to their customers. A clear takeaway from this report is that API standardization has escalated from a good practice to a must-have in order to survive and thrive.”

    For the second year in a row, standardization was the top API challenge that organizations want solved in the near future. Standardization was especially a concern among organizations that need to scale API development across distributed development teams. In terms of API design frameworks to aid standardization, the OpenAPI Specification (formerly known as Swagger) remains the overwhelming choice for standardization, according to 82% of survey respondents.

    “Every year, I hear how more and more people depend on the OpenAPI Specification to help them in their API work,” said Marsh Gardiner, Google Cloud Product Manager and OpenAPI Initiative Marketing Chair. “The growth in popularity of the OpenAPI Specification further underscores the importance of a standard for defining APIs. Increasing developer agility is now more important than ever, and standards-based approaches make that possible.”

    SmartBear is the sponsor of two of the largest open source API and web services communities, Swagger and SoapUI. In 2015, SmartBear launched the Open API Initiative (OAI) under The Linux Foundation with key industry leaders including Google, IBM, and Microsoft. The goal of the OAI is to create an open approach to governing the continued evolution of the Swagger Specification used for describing RESTful APIs.

    Upcoming webinar

    SmartBear API experts are discussing the key findings in the report in a live webinar on Tuesday, August 25, 2020. Register here:

    https://smartbear.com/resources/webinars/state-of-api-report-2020/

     

    The 2020 State of API Report is available for download at: https://smartbear.com/resources/ebooks/the-state-of-api-2020-report/.

     

    About SmartBear
    At SmartBear, we focus on your one priority that never changes: quality. We know delivering quality software over and over is complicated. So, our tools are built to streamline your process while seamlessly working with all the tools you use – and will use. Whether it’s Swagger, Cucumber, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, TestComplete, or more, our tools are easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to integrate. We’re used by 7 million developers, testers, and operations engineers at over 22,000 organizations – including world-renowned innovators like Adobe, JetBlue, MasterCard, and Microsoft. Wherever you’re going, we’ll help you get there. Learn more at www.smartbear.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

  • Founded by ModelDB Creator, Verta Launches to Bring Order to Enterprise AI/ML Chaos With $10 Million in Series A Funding Led by Intel Capital

    First Modular, Interoperable Platform That Streamlines AI/ML Model Management Across Deployment, Operations, Governance and Monitoring


    PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 25, 2020     (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today Verta, the AI/ML model management and operations company, formally launched with its product that helps data science teams bring order to the chaos of sprawling enterprise machine learning environments. Used by well-known global brands, including one of the world’s leading workplace collaboration tools, Verta helps enterprise data science teams standardize otherwise fragmented workflows in order to ship models more frequently with full traceability and low overhead.

    “Data science teams live in their own specialized world, working with data, running experiments and building great models. The software deployment teams that take those models and use them to power production applications have a completely different focus and set of trusted tools. Forcing these teams to learn each other’s tools is a distraction neither of them need. With Verta, we help each team to stay focused on what they do best,” said Manasi Vartak, founder and CEO of Verta.

    Vartak, who has worked at Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter in software engineering and machine learning roles, created ModelDB, the first open source modern model management system, during her PhD at MIT’s CSAIL lab. ModelDB is widely used in the industry and Fortune 500 companies today and forms the backbone of Verta.

    Mike Leone, senior analyst at ESG, said: “As the AI/ML market expands rapidly, data science teams are becoming overburdened. They’re tasked with solving strategic business problems, but they’re bogged down by several non-data science tasks: data integration, data quality, cumbersome checkpoints; governance/compliance; learning intricacies of technology in the operational stack, like Kubernetes. This is where Verta can help by taking on the AI operational burdens data science teams face and enabling them to concentrate on strategy, innovation and what they were hired for: data science.”

    Verta interoperates with the rich variety of tools and workflows used by data science and machine learning teams—including TensorFlow, PyTorch, Spark.ml and R—allowing them to stay productive using the approaches they determine best suit their needs. Verta’s support for the rapidly changing landscape ensures data science teams can continue to innovate quickly, rather than wasting time supporting a brittle, home-grown patchwork of systems that need constant care. Verta’s MLOps capabilities have been designed to be compatible with trusted application platforms such as Kubernetes, helping enterprise infrastructure teams to support model-based applications with well-established methods and tools.

    “Before Verta, it used to take us about six months to deploy a new model into production. This wasn’t delivering value to customers fast enough. With Verta, we can deploy models multiple times every month, so effectively ten times faster, and with a lot less overhead for our team,” said Jenn Flynn, senior data scientist at LeadCrunch.ai. “Verta lets us focus on the data science without worrying about infrastructure and operations.”

    For enterprises with large-scale model management needs, Verta’s ModelDB-based model catalog and governance mechanisms enable them to keep track of model designs, deployment approvals and full traceability audits to provide the highest levels of assurance demanded by the toughest global regulations. Customers can design and deploy models with confidence, trusting that Verta’s visibility and reporting functions will show them what they need to know, when they need it.

    Verta’s model monitoring capabilities help data science teams ensure their models remain accurate and that their intelligent products keep providing value to customers. By monitoring model performance, data drift and service levels across deployment environments—including Verta’s Inference Engine, AWS SageMaker, and other domain-specific systems—Verta ensures model-based applications continue to perform at their best, and can be rapidly refreshed as and when needed. Data science teams can monitor the performance of their models, and ensure they are well-informed of the state of production applications at all times. IT teams also benefit from Verta’s integrations with standard monitoring tools, ensuring they see the views they need in the formats they prefer.

    Today Verta also announced $10 million in Series A funding led by Intel Capital with participation from General Catalyst who led the seed round.

    Mark Rostick, VP and senior managing director at Intel Capital, said: “Verta is addressing one of the key challenges companies face when adopting AI – bridging the gap between data scientists and developers to accelerate the deployment of machine learning models. Companies need a solution that solves the DevOps part, deploys ML models into production, monitors the ML model performance and accuracy, applies governance and supports reproducibility. Verta connects data scientists, DevOps and production engineers and enables them to more quickly and easily create and deploy efficient ML solutions that give their companies a competitive edge.”

    Steve Herrod, Managing Director at General Catalyst, said: “AI/ML is such a hot area, but there are so few companies focusing on the challenges faced by organizations running intelligent products in production. Developing theoretical models is one thing but turning them into products that deliver real value to customers is quite another. I’m excited by Verta’s focus on the part of the market with all the value.”

    Additional Resources

    • Read Verta founder and CEO Manasi Vartak’s “Verta: Model Management and Operations Platform for Production Machine Learning” blog: https://blog.verta.ai/blog/verta-platform-model-management-mlops
    • Read Verta CTO Conrado Miranda’s “The Third Wave of Operationalization is Here: MLOps” blog: https://blog.verta.ai/blog/the-third-wave-of-operationalization-is-here-mlops

    About Verta
    Verta provides AI/ML model management and operations software that helps enterprise data science teams to manage inherently complex model-based products. Verta’s production-ready systems help data science and IT operations teams to focus on their strengths and rapidly bring AI/ML advances to market. Based in Palo Alto, Verta is backed by Intel Capital and General Catalyst. For more information, go to www.verta.ai or follow @VertaAI.

    About Intel Capital
    Intel Capital invests in innovative startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, datacenter and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute and a wide range of other disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$12.9 billion in more than 1,582 companies worldwide, and 692 portfolio companies have gone public or participated in a merger. Intel Capital curates thousands of business development introductions each year between its portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world’s most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.

  • Cognizant to Acquire Tin Roof Software to Expand Digital Engineering Services

    Acquisition Will Boost Software and Digital Product Development Expertise in the U.S.

    TEANECK, N.J., Aug. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) has entered into an agreement to acquire Tin Roof Software, a privately-held custom software and digital product development services company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Tin Roof specializes in innovative digital products that allow companies to improve customer experiences and increase revenue. The acquisition will expand Cognizant’s software product engineering footprint in the U.S. and connect Tin Roof’s experts with Cognizant’s broader global software development capabilities.

    Tin Roof offers software design, development, DevOps, and delivery services for clients increasingly dependent on software for a competitive edge. Custom solutions for Fortune 500 clients and others include re-architecting and migrating products to the cloud, building customer-facing web and mobile apps, creating APIs and data pipelines for transaction processing, and designing secure payment processing systems. Tin Roof works across a range of industries, including telecom, media and entertainment, financial services, retail, hospitality, consumer products, travel, logistics, and transportation.

    “To compete effectively, clients are replacing traditional application development with digital engineering to build leading-edge, consumer-grade experiences and infuse software into their products, services, and customer experiences,” said Malcolm Frank, President, Digital Business, Cognizant. “Cognizant is investing to compete and win in digital engineering, one of our strategic priorities. Tin Roof’s exceptional software product development and agile teams share our philosophy of customer-centricity and will strengthen our network of engineering talent in the U.S. We look forward to welcoming Tin Roof’s software product engineering experts to Cognizant.”

    “Delivering strategic, innovative solutions that drive tangible business outcomes is at the heart of our success,” said Daniel Gore, President and Chief Executive Officer, Tin Roof Software. “We look forward to our software product engineering experts joining Cognizant Softvision and connecting to Cognizant’s global delivery model, complementing Cognizant’s deep expertise in artificial intelligence, data, Internet of Things, cloud, and interactive experience.”

    Tin Roof has operations in Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth. Upon completion of the transaction, Tin Roof’s experts will join Cognizant Softvision. In 2018, Cognizant acquired Austin, Texas-based Softvision, a leader in developing custom digital products using unique collaborative engineering methods. Cognizant Softvision has significant global presence, with studios in Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Romania, and the U.S.

    In 2019, Tin Roof was named to Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 5000, an annual list of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. Over the past four years, Tin Roof has also won the Atlanta Business Chronicle Pacesetter Award as one of the Top 100 fastest-growing private companies in Georgia. In addition, Tin Roof has been recognized by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as one of Atlanta’s Top 150 Workplaces. 

    The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2020, subject to satisfaction of closing conditions, including regulatory review. Financial details were not disclosed.

    Learn More

    Tin Roof Software website

    Cognizant Softvision Digital Engineering website 

    About Tin Roof Software

    Tin Roof Software is one of the fastest-growing software product engineering and consulting firms in the U.S. Founded in 2014, our client base entrusts Tin Roof to build some of the most important consumer-facing and enterprise solutions for their businesses. To learn more, please visit www.tinroofsoftware.com.

  • GoodData Launches GoodData Community and University to Unlock 100% Adoption of Data Analytics Across Organization

    New Resources for Users to Learn from GoodData, Each Other, about the Leading Business Intelligence Platform
    SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — GoodData®, a leading analytics and business intelligence company, announced today that it launched GoodData Community and GoodData University to enable rapid and continuous sharing of information on the GoodData platform and to pioneer a faster, more frequent flow of information between GoodData users and the company.

    Both offerings are free and open to all users, customers, prospects, and analysts interested in quick technical refreshers. The aim is to make it easier for users to get the full value from the GoodData analytics platform in an easy to consume educational model.

    “Now more than ever, our customers need to quickly make data-driven decisions to ensure their success,” says Roman Stanek, co-founder and CEO of GoodData. “With many workers still remote, the need for online communities and resources for information sharing and gathering is even more critical.”

    GoodData Community is the place for users and potential customers to ask and get real time answers to their product questions. GoodData users enjoy learning from one another and the community page gives them a platform to do just that. The community has two distinct parts: Knowledge Base, which includes “how-to” tutorials on the most frequently asked customer questions and the Q&A section populated by users.

    In addition to getting information out to users, GoodData Community will provide feedback that will drive product improvements. “GoodData welcomes feedback and values transparency, so we can learn from our customers and then better meet their needs,” says Zdenek Svoboda, GoodData co-founder and VP of product. “GoodData Community will be one more touchpoint for us to learn what works, what doesn’t and how we should improve it.”

    GoodData University is targeted toward our current and future data engineer and analyst users. GoodData university enables these makers to dive deeper into relevant technical content, choosing what they want to learn – and when. The bite-sized content, in 10 to 15 minute offerings, helps users learn throughout their workday. Coursework is created based on trending technical topics and user requests.

    While GoodData Community is about rapidly solving issues, GoodData University enables hands on exercises, deep training and discussions around such things as data literacy, data modeling & integration, and the concepts behind GoodData’s design. GoodData University also offers live sessions to enable discussion between leaders and users.

    About GoodData
    GoodData is the only platform that provides the creation, delivery, and automated management of analytics at massive scale. We enable companies to embed analytics within their products to deliver insights for their customers, partners, and other users to make business-critical decisions.

    More than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 are using GoodData to achieve actionable insights. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Intel Capital, TOTVS, and others. For more information visit our website and follow GoodData on Twitter and LinkedIn.

    ©2020, GoodData Corporation. All rights reserved. GoodData is a registered trademark of GoodData Corporation in the United States and other jurisdictions. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

    —

  • Split Raises $33 Million Series C As Enterprises Accelerate Digital Transformation Amid Rapid Economic Change

    Comcast Ventures leads round with new investors Microsoft’s M12 Ventures, Atlassian, ServiceNow, and 01 Advisors, as sales growth tops 2.4x

    REDWOOD CITY, CA, August 25, 2020 – Split, the leading feature delivery platform, today announced $33 million in Series C funding to address the growing global demand for feature flags. The new funding comes as enterprises accelerate digital transformation amid rapid economic change and transition to impact-driven software development.

    Led by Comcast Ventures, the round included participation from existing investors Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Harmony Venture Partners. Investors Dick Costolo and Adam Bain of 01 Advisors, Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Atlassian and ServiceNow also participated, bringing the total amount of capital Split has raised to $60 million.

    “Based upon a deep belief in the importance of developer solutions, we have been tracking Split’s product and the team’s commercial progress during the past 18 months,” says Dave Zilberman, managing director at Comcast Ventures, who joins Split’s Board with this investment. “Split’s data integrations and enterprise functionality set it apart for enterprise-grade feature flagging and experimentation that allows software features to be measured by the business impact they make.”

    Founded in 2015, Split recognizes that software is at the heart of every enterprise, and its mission is to empower product engineering teams to deliver features that have a direct and measurable impact on the business. Since then, it has emerged as the leading enterprise feature delivery platform by ensuring every feature creates a positive impact, bringing together feature flags with a data platform that can integrate into any data pipeline.

    Split has experienced a year of unprecedented growth. In the last year, the company has more than doubled its sales, doubled its customer base and now serves more than one trillion feature flags monthly to more than one billion users through its platform.

    “The recent global health crisis created by COVID-19 has shifted business online, driving the demand for digital products and software. More than ever, enterprises need to deliver digital services with an expected impact,” said Brian Bell, CEO of Split Software. “We provide them the ability to release product features quickly and with maximum business impact, helping engineering teams to deliver innovative products while also improving their development cadence.”

    The new funding will be used to accelerate product leadership, bring to market additional data integrations, add developer workflow integrations with leading tools and expand enterprise sales and customer success teams.

    Split President and Co-Founder Trevor Stuart said, “This investment unlocks new opportunities to further integrate with the DevOps and product analytics ecosystem. This is an enormous validation from industry heavyweights that feature delivery is how software will be developed.”

    Feature flag usage has spiked recently, due to the acceleration of digital transformation. With teams driven to create value for customers faster, Split’s technology allows engineering teams to immediately understand the impact of new features on applications. Split also helps developers maintain control over the user experience with monitoring and alerting to prevent application failure.

    In the past year, Split has launched many industry firsts in its platform. These include:

    • Feature Monitoring that alerts engineering teams if a newly released feature creates a spike in errors or degradation of performance
    • Approval Flows that improve collaboration and compliance as enterprises adopt feature flags
    • Integrations with mParticle, Sentry and Google Analytics that ingest data to support enterprise-scale feature delivery

    Company accomplishments:

    • Now serving more than one trillion feature flags per month
    • Named to the 2019 CNBC Upstart 100
    • 2019 SD Times 100 ‘Best in Show’ in Software Development Tools
    • Finalist in DevOps Dozen ‘Best DevOps Presentations of the Year’

    To learn more about Split or to schedule a demo, please visit www.split.io

    Quotes from participating investors:“I know the potential of this market because I’ve lived it before. At Twitter, I saw how rigorous feature management and experimentation unlock product innovation as organizations scale. I’m excited to support Split as they bring their platform to every enterprise software development team,” said Adam Bain, co-founder and managing partner at 01 Advisors.

    “Split has distinguished itself by creating an incredible feature delivery platform that accelerates the ability for companies to deliver more value to customers,” said Tiffany To, head of solutions, Agile and DevOps at Atlassian. “We are excited to deepen our partnership with Split through product integrations, so software teams can use our products together seamlessly in their DevOps toolchains.”

    “Split’s combination of feature flags, progressive delivery and software experimentation aligns closely with ServiceNow’s Enterprise DevOps vision, which is to scale adoption of DevOps in the enterprise on the promise of rapid and reliable release cadence, quality and business impact,” said RJ Jainendra, vice president and GM, ServiceNow IT Business Management and DevOps.

    About Split

    Split is revolutionizing software delivery with Impact-Driven Development, ensuring engineering teams reduce development time, mitigate release risk, and focus on the features that solve customer and business problems. Split’s Feature Delivery Platform pairs the speed and reliability of feature flags with data to measure the impact of every feature. Engineering teams at Twilio, Salesforce, LexisNexis, National Geographic, and Qantas trust Split to drive Impact-Driven Development, delivering features that matter with data-driven certainty and measurable impact for their business. Get started for free at www.split.io/signup.

  • Istio 1.7 delivers hybrid cloud features

    By Steve Dake, Open Source Leader, Cloud Native, IBM

    Today’s Istio 1.7 release offers significant improvements to Istio’s operational experience. Several new feature improvements, including control plane upgrades, virtual machine integration, and a central Istiod experience, make Istio easier to operate and expands its capabilities for hybrid cloud environments. This blog post introduces you to new features in the release, talks about IBM’s investment in Istio, and explains how Istio is crucial to developing an open hybrid cloud environment.

    Feature improvements

    Multiple control plane upgrades. A valuable usability improvement is the canary upgrade feature’s integration into the operator. With this change, Istio’s canary upgrade becomes generally available and the preferred upgrade path for Istio. With a canary upgrade, you can verify a new control plane using continuous integration and Istio’s telemetry features. Once a portion of the workloads are verified, more workloads can be transferred until all are running using the new Istio control plane.

    For a quick look at this feature, watch the following video.
    iv>
    Virtual machine integration. Istio has had virtual machine integration since its very early releases, although there were some usability concerns. With Istio 1.7, virtual machine integration is approaching beta quality. The goal of virtual machine integration is to connect virtual machine workloads to a service mesh, such that a virtual machine behaves like another workload within Istio. The new WorkloadEntry API in Istio 1.7 treats VMs like Kubernetes pods, so you can manage your infrastructure with APIs. Additionally, we implemented many security enhancements, including token bootstrapping and certificate rotation. We’re still developing the virtual machine integration, but you can use the alphaquality documentationto connect a virtual machine to a service mesh. The work is progressing rapidly with a large party of interested developers.

    Central Istiod. Developed by IBM, central Istiod was partially implemented in Istio 1.6 and now is alpha quality in Istio 1.7. The benefit of central Istiod is that it is now viable to offer the decoupling of the Istio control plane from the data plane for improved operational support. In addition, Central Istiod delivers on the requirement of multitenancy and is the first step towards the mulitenancy journey for Istio.

    Work led by IBMers Lin Sun And Shao Jun Ding introduces a new deployment model for Istio which enables mesh operators to install and manage the mesh control plane on dedicated clusters, separated from the data plane clusters. In the following video, Shao Jun Ding introduces you to Central Istiod.

    Additional improvements

    Some other improvements in Istio 1.7 that you should know about include:

    • Testing and qualification improvements. Our Istio community is getting more stringent with testswhich produces a better project deliverable each release. At last count, Istio has 20k+ functional tests, and 45k+ unit tests.
    • Move to Envoy xDSv3. xDS is the underlying API that presents a dataplane protocol that Istio manages. This major version change offers improved performance and scalability.
    • Istio Container Network Interface. Istio’s CNIenables Istio workloads to run without elevated permissions in Kubernetes.

    Istio enables workload portability, a key factor in hybrid cloud

    One of the biggest challenges for delivering a hybrid cloud environment is the requirement to connect different environments together using network technology. Without connectivity, workload portability has been a challenge for delivering a true hybrid cloud experience.

    IBM Cloud Satellite enables you run workloads where it makes the most sense — whether that’s public cloud, your data center or an edge location. The Istio service mesh drives the IBM Cloud Satellite distributed cloud network connectivity, delivering workload portability and interoperability.

    IBM’s Istio investment

    Leading in innovation. In the Istio project, our developers focus on building the technologies that we think are most important for creating and enabling an open hybrid cloud environment. Specifically, we lead the effort to enable central Istiod, the first step in a journey to multitenancy within Kubernetes. IBM is actively involved in bringing virtual machine integration to Istio, having developed much of the initial technology in Istio 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7. Finally, IBM focuses on overlapping technology enablement such that enabling one technology enables another.

    Supporting the community. While some controversy surrounds Istio’s governance, the dedication of the community members gives life to the Istio project and keeps it moving forward. The strength of any project depends on these contributors, and IBM believes strongly in supporting the community and we hope that all are proud of the Istio 1.7 release.

    Get involved with Istio

    Here are a few ways for you to get involved with the Istio community and project:

    Steven Dake is an open source leader at IBM. He is a maintainer within the Istio project, and serves as a workgroup lead within the Environments Working Group.

  • ConnectALL Announces Support for Business Outcomes in Its Value Stream Management Solutions

    The ConnectALL VSM solution will now give business leaders even greater ability to manage and achieve business outcomes by connecting OKR tools to their value streams.

     

    ATLANTA – August 20, 2020 – ConnectALL, a leading provider of value stream management solutions, today announced a new feature  ̶  the ability to incorporate OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) into its value stream management solution. The integration of OKR solutions into the software value stream enables corporations to associate business outcomes with code in production.

    “Equipping our customers to connect OKRs to software delivery will provide unparalleled visibility into their value streams,” said ConnectALL Chief Operating Officer Lance Knight. “At the same time, we are helping organizations build the right products and services that align to business outcomes.”

    “Integrating OKRs into the software delivery value stream enables stakeholders to federate corporate  objectives across the whole value stream and visualize, in real time, the completion of tasks that deliver on those objectives,” Knight continued. “Connecting OKRs to value streams is invaluable to tracking and visualizing that pursuit.”

    The ability to connect OKRs to value streams will supercharge ConnectALL’s analytics capabilities, giving business leaders visibility of goal completion across the full value stream. With ConnectALL insights, they can also drill down to see more granular data, connecting OKR’s to associated Epics, features, User Stories, defects and more.

    Executives will have visibility from their objectives (and everything related to objectives) all the way down to code in production  ̶  regardless of the tool with which they are being managed. With OKR integrations such as Gtmhub, artifacts will be federated through the value stream to help manage the delivery of key business activities and promote achievement of business outcomes.

    Furthermore, the bi-directional synchronization powered by ConnectALL lets teams track the progress of required activities to achieve an objective throughout the software delivery process. At the same time, it will promote outcome alignment across the complete software delivery pipeline.

    “Imagine a world where business leaders can effectively track and manage their digital transformations,” Knight continued. “By connecting their value streams to their outcomes, ConnectALL has made that vision come true.”

    “We are beginning our foray into OKR solutions with Gtmhub, a top-rated, pure-play OKR tool, but this is just the beginning,” said ConnectALL Chief Operating Officer Lance Knight. “Since ConnectALL can integrate any two software platforms, companies can use OKRs in a way never before possible.”

    “They can use them to see how changes and corrections affect an extraordinary array of business and customer service activities in Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, ZenDesk and many, many more,” Knight concluded. “The options are truly limitless.”

    About ConnectALL
    ConnectALL helps companies achieve value stream management and create business value by bringing software innovation to market faster. The company’s integration platform, which was awarded Best in Show in the Value Stream Management category of the 2019 SD Times 100 and ranked a “High Performer” in the G2 Spring and Summer 2020 Reports. ConnectALL unifies applications, tools, people and processes, connecting dozens of software delivery tools and facilitating powerful cross-team collaboration. In short, it empowers the true value drivers of software development — humans — to achieve project goals. Paired with its Universal Adapter, ConnectALL can unite an unlimited number of tools for seamless collaboration, bi-directional information capture and exchange, automated event triggering, and much more. For more information, visit https://www.connectall.com.