devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • SQream Raises $39.4 Million in Series B+ Financing Round to Accelerate its Deep Tech Product Innovation for the Rapid Analytics of Massive Data Stores

    New York, NY, JUNE 24, 2020 – SQream, provider of a data analytics acceleration platform that enables enterprises to gain insights from their massive data stores, announced today that it has raised $39.4 million in Series B+ funding. The round was led by Mangrove Capital Partners and Schusterman Family Investments, who joined existing investors, including Hanaco Venture Capital, Sistema.vc, World Trade Center Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Silvertech Ventures and Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA). The proceeds of the investment will be used to recruit top talent to accelerate advancements in the Company’s technology and cloud innovation, and customer delivery platforms to better serve worldwide demand.

    While the COVID-19 pandemic created a major challenge for some companies, SQream’s growth is accelerating and the Company chose to raise funds from top new investors, and to add veteran investor Charlie Federman from Silvertech Ventures, and leading venture capitalist Roy Saar from Mangrove Capital Partners to its board of directors. This round of financing further underscores both the company’s existing and new investors’ confidence in SQream, and the team’s ability to deliver business critical innovation to leading global enterprises.

    “I have watched with enthusiasm the product innovation and resulting customer enthusiasm that SQream has earned from large global customers,” said Charlie Federman, Partner at Silvertech Ventures. “I am excited to be joining SQream’s board of directors at this critical time in its growth into the cloud, and believe that SQream will be a really important vendor for enterprises that need help getting timely critical insights from their data.”

    SQream’s data acceleration platform enables the fastest available analysis of hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of raw data from Hadoop or other data warehouses and databases. With SQream in their data pipeline, enterprises gain unrestricted access to their data, and are free to focus on uncovering new business powering insights.

    “Given the growth of data, which has been on a rocket-ship trajectory to zettabyte levels due to rapid digitalization, we are just scraping the surface of how companies will be generating value from their data,” said Roy Saar, Partner at Mangrove Capital Partners. “We are impressed by the quality and experience of the management team. We also share the conviction in SQream’s important role in driving business performance and providing a competitive edge. I could not be more excited about SQream’s potential for making a significant impact in the market.”

    “From the very beginning, our vision has been to enable enterprises to analyze more of their data much faster, providing better, more accurate and comprehensive business insights,” said Ami Gal, CEO and co-founder of SQream. “We have made our vision a reality by continuously improving our product, and by investing in top developers who enjoy the challenge and motivation of deep tech product innovation.”

    “The commitment we have received from both new and existing investors in this round, and from our customers, even during such a challenging period, is a strong validation of our vision and market potential,” noted Gal. “We look forward to working together to accelerate our expansion, and to further empower enterprises across the globe with timely and impactful business insights.”

    About SQream Technologies

    SQream develops and markets SQream DB, designed to obtain unparalleled business intelligence from massive data stores. Global enterprises use SQream DB to analyze more data than ever before, while achieving improved performance, reduced footprint, significant cost savings and the ability to scale the amount of data they analyze to hundreds of terabytes and more. SQream DB is available both on premise and in the cloud. To learn more, visit sqream.com or follow us on twitter @sqreamtech.

  • Blog for Good? Codefresh Rewards Guest Bloggers with Donations to Six Non-Profits

    Codefresh to support six organizations benefiting the black community, LGBT, health of women and girls, COVID-19 efforts, and more with help from DevOps guest bloggers

    Mountain View, CA, June 24, 2020 – Codefresh has launched a creative way to get funds into the hands of non-profit organizations while tapping the talent of bloggers who write about CI/CD, Kubernetes, containers, or general DevOps topics. It’s all in an effort to support organizations that benefit the black community, LGBT, people impacted by COVID-19, health needs of women and girls, and other worthy initiatives.

    Blog for Good gives writers an opportunity to share their DevOps knowledge on the Codefresh blog site in exchange for a $250 donation to one of six organizations. A second $250 can be kept by the writer or added to the donation.

    The organizations selected to benefit include Black Girls CODE, Direct Relief,

    Doctors Without Borders, Freedom4Girls, Maven Youth, and Women Who Code.

    Participants select a topic relevant to Codefresh, the leader in Kubernetes DevOps tools, and submit their content for consideration at https://codefresh.io/blog-for-good/#submit. Once selected, the author can choose which organization they’d like to support with $250 or $500, and Codefresh will send the check.

    “We as engineers want to fix things,” said Dan Garfield, Chief Technology Evangelist for Codefresh. “2020 has been a hell of a year, and Blog for Good is a great chance for engineers to impact one of these organizations that do so much good.”

    Codefresh’s CI/CD platform provides automation for building, testing and deploying modern applications using Kubernetes, serverless and more. Development teams often see 24x faster engineering cycles when using Codefresh.

    About Codefresh

    Founded in 2014 by Raziel Tabib and Oleg Verhovsky, Codefresh is the first Kubernetes-native CI/CD platform. After launch in 2017, Codefresh has gained tens of thousands of users. Unlike legacy solutions, Codefresh pipelines are uniquely designed for cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, and Helm. Codefresh is headquartered in Mountain View, CA and backed by world-class investors: M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, Viola Ventures, Vertex Ventures, Hillsven, CEIIF, UpWest Labs and Streamlined Ventures. Learn more about Codefresh at https://codefresh.io/. Follow on LinkedIn and Twitter at @codefresh.

     

  • LF Energy Launches Digital Substation Initiative to Modernize Power Grid Infrastructure

    Linux Foundation organization, LF Energy, with GE Renewable Energy, Schneider Electric and RTE, also launched CoMPAS to make substation systems interoperable as part of this initiative

    SAN FRANCISCO, June 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — LF Energy, a Linux Foundation nonprofit coalition that seeks to radically improve power grid infrastructure through open-source projects, today launched its Digital Substation Automation Systems (DSAS) initiative to enhance the power grid’s modularity, interoperability and scalability to accelerate the global effort toward carbon neutrality by 2050.

    LF Energy, in partnership with GE Renewable Energy, Schneider Electric, RTE, Alliander, and other leading organizations in the energy sector, also launched today the first project under DSAS: CoMPAS, or Configuration Modules for Power industry Automation Systems.

    “As a global society, we are at a turning point in history,” said Dr. Shuli Goodman, Executive Director of LF Energy. “We either continue down our current path, or we thoroughly examine the processes and infrastructure in place and make real, meaningful changes that address the climate crisis directly. Our power grid is notoriously one of the greatest challenges for ending the climate crisis. With our CoMPAS project and other future DSAS projects, LF Energy and our members are proud to lead the charge in making 100% decarbonization a reality as we transform power grid infrastructure.”

    Digital Substations
    The transition from fossil-based fuels to clean energy sources has given rise to variable conditions that cause fluctuations in power supply and demand, like renewable energy and electrical vehicles. Because of this, power grid operators now face greater challenges ensuring the grid is stable and optimizes power supply and demand.

    LF Energy’s DSAS initiative seeks to alleviate these challenges by optimizing electrical substations through open-source technology. These substations form crossroads of the grids, connecting grid users and grid voltage levels. By deploying modern, open-source technology, digital substations can more efficiently adjust to changes in power supply and demand through expanded dynamic protection settings, better data management capabilities and increased adaptive automation functions.

    Additionally, a more efficient power grid of the future will increasingly integrate more solutions on the edge of the power grid, such as decentralized physical infrastructure assets, network or control, applications and analytics. Transforming our power grid represents one of the great opportunities for mitigating the climate crisis.

    “Digital Substations are growing up and this is the first time that so many leaders in the energy space have come together to create software to speed up this technology,” said Philippe Brun, Solutions Product Manager at GE Renewable Energy. “Other industries have shown that collaborating with historical and new key stakeholders to develop open-source solutions for industry-wide problems only fuels faster innovation, interoperability, adoption and success. With the support of LF Energy, GE’s Grid Automation is committed to collaborating on open-source projects like the DSAS initiative and CoMPAS to accelerate creating the electrical grid of the future.”

    CoMPAS
    CoMPAS is the first of many leveraged collaboration projects in LF Energy’s DSAS initiative. This is the first time in the power industry that organizations have come together to build open-source solutions for energy systems from start to finish, as most open-source projects are formed using existing technology. CoMPAS specifically seeks to build standardized and broadly applicable software components that optimize protection, automation and control (PAC) systems, as deploying modern PAC technologies is a pivotal first step to update substations.

    “The multi-vendor and multi-end-user collaboration under the LF Energy umbrella allowed us to swiftly design a strategic roadmap for the CoMPAS project,” said Lucian Balea, R&D Program Director and Open Source Program Officer at RTE, the electricity TSO of France. “We are excited to start developing open-source code in collaboration with the CoMPAS community to deliver high-quality software that accelerates the modernization of our grid infrastructure.”

    One hurdle to achieving industry-wide modernization of electrical substations is the lack of interoperability between PAC components from different vendors. To ensure standardization and encourage broad adoption, CoMPAS’s software components will be developed according to IEC 61850, an open, international standard that provides the framework to integrate a substation’s PAC functions, regardless of the vendor or end-user. IEC 61850 can be complex to comply with, which may discourage independent companies from developing technology that abides by it. CoMPAS seeks to provide the standardized open-source software building blocks for PAC components vendors to use to create interoperable digital substation solutions.

    “IEC 61850 is widely used across the globe, but the new challenges to implementing this standard now include user specifications and a lack of interoperability and reusability between engineering tools,” said Camille Bloch, IEC 61850 System Interface Expert at Schneider Electric. “We are excited to work with LF Energy and its other members to establish open-source, vendor-independent software components that companies can implement for safer, more reliable and innovative PACs and to modernize their electrical substations.”

    Tune into LF Energy’s free Technical Architecture Workshop on July 8, 2020 to learn about CoMPAS and other LF Energy projects. Find more information and register here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/lf-energy-tech-architecture-workshop/

    Additionally, for more information on becoming an LF Energy member, visit: https://www.lfenergy.org/about/membership/

    About LF Energy
    A first-of-its-kind initiative, LF Energy provides a 21st century plan of action to solve climate change through open frameworks, reference architectures and a support ecosystem of complementary projects. In addition to RTE, members include Alliander, Energinet, TenneT, Elering, IBM, NREL, Recurve, Stanford University, OSISoft, Unicorn, Wind River, Cloud Bees, Alan Turing Institute, Pecan Street, and many others. Find further information here: https://www.lfenergy.org.

  • JFrog Drives DevOps Fast-Forward, Unveils New Software Distribution Capabilities to Handle Rising Volume and Frequency of Edge Updates

    Liquid Software Leader Delivers New Capabilities for CI/CD, SecOps, Helm, and Coins the Necessity of “BinOps” to Manage the Growing Flow of Software Packages

    Sunnyvale, CA, June 24, 2020 — JFrog swampUP Conference — JFrog, the Universal DevOps technology leader known for enabling liquid software via continuous update flows, has unveiled new capabilities to address the growing problem of software distribution bottlenecks. The newly introduced CDN-based and Peer-to-Peer software package distribution mechanisms empower companies to overcome the challenge of frequently delivering large volumes of artifacts to internal teams and external clients. The announcements took place at JFrog’s annual swampUP user conference.

    The explosion of both hybrid and edge infrastructure, and the increased adoption of cloud-native apps that rely on compounded artifacts can create a “firehose” distribution problem, increasingly clogging networks with a stream of software updates. Distribution challenges will continue to grow, with IDC predicting there will be more than 520 million brand new digital apps and services added by 2024.

    Peer-to-Peer and Cloud-Based Distribution Enable Digital-First Economy

    Unveiling the new Peer-to-Peer artifact download capability, JFrog is serving companies that need to distribute coordinated software updates for hundreds and thousands of connected machines that are updated in parallel, but cannot sacrifice speed and security. By breaking the artifact down into smaller pieces and allowing those pieces to be shared between peers on the same network, JFrog can accelerate download speeds by orders of magnitude and increase resilience by expanding beyond a single point of failure.

    JFrog has also delivered a new CDN-based package distribution function that solves the challenge of distributing software to large communities of external users or partners. This mechanism works in cases where companies need a simple, SaaS-managed solution to enable external downloads, such as distributing software that can be downloaded by anyone including drivers, plugins, and commercial software products, or updates for partners and users.

    “DevOps in a digital-first economy demands the need for speed and security throughout the entire software release cycle all the way to the edge. We provided our community with the first purely hybrid, end-to-end DevOps and DevSecOps platform, and now we’re extending all the way to EdgeOps,” said Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder and CEO of JFrog.  “Major enterprises are facing a clear challenge in distributing packages quickly and fearlessly across their organizations, as well as to clients and partners. The DevOps revolution will not be completed without providing a comprehensive, powerful binary distribution mechanism; this is our commitment to developers, and its developers’ responsibility to their organizations.”

    New Upgrades Streamline Pipeline Assembly and Build Testing

    In a massive upgrade to their Binary Operations (or “BinOps”) toolset, JFrog has also announced new features for its JFrog Pipelines solution that encompasses continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). JFrog has expanded on its existing selection of pre-built common functions, known as “Native Steps,” by allowing users to build their own library of reusable pipeline steps via an Extensions Development Kit (EDK). Now DevOps teams can encapsulate frequent and common actions in their pipelines, offering a much simpler solution than traditional approaches which often involve plugins that conflict with each other, creating a “plugin hell” for users. Extensions can be run in parallel, allowing pipelines to run with multiple extension versions simultaneously.

    “As the world continues to move towards massive delivery of software, the ‘BinOps’ path of managing your software releases becomes more critical than ever,” said Yoav Landman, CTO and co-founder of JFrog. “Shifting binaries to the left and using immutable release binaries as early as possible in the software delivery pipeline is the only way to achieve robust, trusted and secure releases and maintain stable metadata that relates to these releases. We are proud to lead the way of BinOps with the JFrog Platform.”

    The first free, security-focused central repository of Helm charts is now available for the community

    Lastly, JFrog has added to their portfolio of public artifact centers with a fresh offering focused on managing the increasing volume of microservices-based and containerized applications. Dubbed “ChartCenter,” the free service from JFrog will provide immutable Helm Chart management for developers, who face increasing complexity in managing Helm, Docker and Kubernetes deployments as they grow in the enterprise. The all-new, free ChartCenter is available at https://chartcenter.io/.

    JFrog’s swampUP conference is completely digital and currently taking place in the Americas, with the event in EMEA and APAC regions taking place June 30 and July 1.

    About JFrog

    JFrog is on a mission to enable continuous updates through liquid software, empowering developers to code high-quality applications that securely flow to end-users with zero downtime. JFrog is the creator of Artifactory, the heart of the end-to-end Universal DevOps platform for automating, managing, securing, distributing, and monitoring all types of technologies. JFrog products are available as open-source, on-premise, and on the cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. As a leading universal, highly available enterprise DevOps solution, the JFrog platform empowers customers with trusted and expedited software releases from code-to-production. JFrog is trusted by more than 5,600 customers, and top global brands depend on JFrog to manage their binaries for their mission-critical applications. JFrog is privately held with offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. Learn more at jfrog.com

     

  • Copado Launches Its Summer 20 Release including DevOps 360 Analytics, the First Salesforce Delivery Management Solution

    DevOps 360 Analytics, the First DevOps Analytics Performance Platform for Salesforce, Provides Visibility into Value Delivery and Measures Real Business Impact

     

    More than 160 New Features Added to Optimize the Entire Transformation Delivery Process on Salesforce to Achieve Faster, Enterprise-ready Digital Experiences For Customers
    Chicago – June 24, 2020 – Copado, a leading native DevOps platform for Salesforce, today announced its Summer 20 release to accelerate, optimize and measure innovation delivery on the Salesforce platform. Summer 20 is a milestone release with a complete DevOps Analytics suite. It includes 160 new features to optimize the Salesforce delivery process and is the only 100% native Salesforce delivery management solution. With Copado, businesses can finally align their Salesforce delivery teams including admins, developers, architects, security, IT and the CIO, with a single view of the processes, data and insights required to rapidly deliver new innovation to the market safely.

     

    With COVID-19, every company in the world is facing a new economic reality to go digital. Today’s unpredictable environment is overwhelming delivery capacity. Delivery teams have an exponential impact on the ability to deliver business results, making DevOps a critical need in order to meet executive expectations on the speed, quality and visibility of their technology investments.

     

    “Salesforce is the platform for digital customer transformations and Copado is the DevOps engine for innovation delivery,” said Ted Elliott, chief executive officer of Copado. “Organizations relying on Salesforce as a cornerstone for their digital transformation projects need C-level visibility into the development lifecycle to understand how business goals are being addressed with technology. Copado is the only solution for Salesforce delivery performance and management, all built natively on the Salesforce platform. With Copado, organizations can now align people, process and goals to quickly and confidently deliver digital customer experiences on the Salesforce platform.”

     

    DevOps 360 Analytics
    Copado DevOps 360 Analytics, the first Salesforce DevOps analytics performance platform, delivers real-time visibility and analytics to any Salesforce project to optimize the planning, build and delivery of innovation. It brings together all the DevOps data from Salesforce into a collaborative DevOps platform that tracks the innovation delivery performance of a Salesforce project. With Copado DevOps 360, organizations can measure Salesforce ROI, accelerate release cycles, deliver safer releases, adapt to changing market conditions and align business goals with technology.

     

    “The pace of innovation today is insanely fast; software is constantly improving with new updates to address today’s insatiable thirst for digital experiences,” said R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst, Founder and Chairman of Constellation Research Inc. “Salesforce is the go-to platform for building the best customer experiences and organizations building on that platform need to ensure they are constantly and accurately evaluating the performance of the delivery process. Companies need to transform their business during these uncertain times and they seek an optimized and measurable DevOps solution that leads to faster release cycles and higher quality releases. DevOps is no longer optional for companies who must compete in today’s economic environment.”

     

    Copado DevOps 360 quantifies the success of transformation based on the speed and quality of innovation delivery. Beyond the standard reports and dashboards capability within Salesforce, Copado tracks the full history of metrics for each development item, providing in-depth analysis of future performance issues before they can happen. It allows organizations to align and collaborate around value delivery, gain visibility into the development lifecycle, identify and remove bottlenecks, and deliver more predictable, higher quality releases.
    Specifically, Copado DevOps 360 uses embedded Tableau analytics to show planning performance, development performance, delivery performance, CIO dashboards and value stream maps. Value stream maps provide clear and actionable insights into the development process, displaying stages, processes within stages and metrics associated with the processes.

     

    DevOps Expert Ecosystem
    As part of Summer 20, Copado has also launched the first Salesforce DevOps exchange, a marketplace in the Copado ecosystem. Customers can find data deploy templates, DevOps integrations and CI/CD extensions listed in the DevOps Marketplace. The Exchange is available within the Copado Community to all Copado customers and partners.

     

    The Community has more than doubled in size over the last 6 months with the Copado Academy, a “Trailhead-like” experience with multiple role-based trails and over 30 modules covering every aspect of Copado and DevOps best practices. It enables customers and partners to easily train, at scale, employees and consultants and join the world’s largest Salesforce DevOps community. Since launching its Salesforce DevOps certification program in December, Copado has trained more than 10,000 DevOps professionals and certified more than 8,500 admins.

     

    Industry-Specific DevOps
    Copado also introduced five Industry Solutions with its Summer 20 release for government, life sciences, telecom, technology and financial services companies. Working with partners in all five areas, Copado will provide accelerators and industry-specific DevOps offerings to help companies plan, build, deliver and manage Salesforce projects faster with higher quality.

     

    Copado at TrailheaDX
    Copado will be presenting at TrailheaDX, a virtual Salesforce event held on June 25, to explain how to bring DevOps principles to Salesforce development. Additionally, businesses wanting to understand how they fare against both Salesforce and industry-standard metrics for development velocity, quality and security can receive a free DevOps assessment from Copado.

     

    Additional Resources
    About Copado
    Founded in 2013, Copado is a leading DevOps platform for Salesforce. For enterprises wanting to accelerate their Salesforce deployments, Copado simplifies the release process, increases developer productivity and maximizes return on investment. The platform is comprised of Agile Planning, Release Management and Compliance & Testing. Backed by Insight Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, Copado counts more than 250 enterprises as customers, including Fair Trade, MassMutual, Shell and Vlocity. With more than 50 million transactions per month, Copado has received the top rating of 100 percent positive feedback on Salesforce AppExchange. More information can be found at: https://www.copado.com/
    # # #
    Salesforce and others are among the trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.

  • Interop Announces New Dates and Program Details for 2020 Digital Event

    SAN FRANCISCO – June 23, 2020 – Interop, the IT industry’s most trusted independent conference, announces new dates and details for Interop Digital 2020, taking place October 5-8. Interop Digital will offer a robust lineup of content including 50 sessions, 12 trainings and certifications, a virtual Expo Hall and networking opportunities, allowing the IT community to discover the newest and most valuable IT strategies surrounding the technology, people, and processes that make up an IT organization.

    “Interop Digital is more than just a technology conference,” said Meghan Reilly, General Manager, Interop. “We are listening to the needs of IT and network professionals and understand that technology leaders need education on IT management, talent issues, and business skills in addition to technology. We’re looking forward to hosting Interop digitally to be immersed in a community so passionate about the future of technology and the business opportunity it offers.”

    Program

    The 2020 event will feature new conference topics that allows attendees to address their specific needs across all aspects of IT. Through these new topics, Interop Digital aims to provide education on the latest technology while also addressing the management knowledge needed to ensure the right technology solutions are delivered to the right users in an effective, efficient, and secure fashion. Topics include:

    • Data and AI: It’s IT’s Time
    • Automation, Now!
    • Mastering the Modern Cloud
    • Recalibrating Networks and Infrastructure
    • Practical Defense
    • DevOps Rising
    • Leading the New IT Department
    • Elevating Workplace Experience

    Training & Certifications

    In addition to new tracks, Interop Digital has expanded its training and certification program to address the evolving needs of IT professionals. Taught by vetted experts, each training and certification is structured to provide attendees with the skills they need in critical areas that can immediately be put to use. All-new trainings and certifications include:

    • Offensive Security Operations: Introduction to Red and Purple Teams
    • Incident Response: Preparing Your Team and Organization
    • Choosing your SD-WAN Provider
    • Computing from Cloud to Edge
    • Migrating from IaaS to Containers
    • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation Certification

    Interop Digital is also bringing back attendee favorites such as:

    • Cybersecurity Crash Course presented by Dark Reading
    • Network Automation Summit presented by Network to Code

    Networking Opportunities

    Using artificial intelligence to help ensure more valuable connections, attendees will have ample opportunity to network with peers and create lasting connections. Interop Digital will offer pre-event access which includes networking events, video discussion groups and bonus content. Attendees will also have the chance to participate in 1:1 mentoring through the Ask the Experts program. In addition, there will be peer connection opportunities and special events including virtual happy hours, birds of a feather discussions, trivia games, and yoga.

    Interop Digital takes place online, October 5-8, 2020. Passes range from a $1,099 Conference + Certification pass to a free Business Hall pass. For more information and to register, visit: https://www.interop.com/ 

    About Interop

    Interop is the industry’s most trusted independent conference compiled by a community that evangelizes, supports, and unites enterprise IT professionals and fosters the next generation of technologists. For 30+ years, Interop has been dedicated to offering its community both strategic and actionable advice in critical areas, providing the breadth and depth necessary to uncover solutions that best meet their needs. Employed by a conference model committed to unbiased content, Interop focuses on a core set of technology and leadership competencies needed to run a modern IT department. For more information, visit www.interop.com. Interop is organized by Informa Tech.

    About Informa Tech
    Informa Tech is a market leading provider of integrated research, media, training and events to the global Technology community. We’re an international business of more than 600 colleagues, operating in more than 20 markets. Our aim is to inspire the Technology community to design, build and run a better digital world through research, media, training and event brands that inform, educate and connect. Over 7,000 professionals subscribe to our research, with 225,000 delegates attending our events and over 18,000 students participating in our training programmes each year, and nearly 4 million people visiting our digital communities each month. Learn more about Informa Tech.

  • IBM Cloud Expands Database Ecosystem with New Partners

    IBM to make DataStax Enterprise, EDB, and MongoDB Enterprise Server generally available.

    With open source technology pervasive across the IT industry coupled with the ever-increasing need to optimize your application workloads with fit-for-purpose database technologies, it has been part of IBM’s longstanding cloud database strategy to provide our clients with a variety of the most popular open source databases.

    Over the past decade, not only has IBM participated in and promoted the open source database market evolution (and this year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of IBM first proposing the SQL Relational Model), we’ve also recognized how many of the vendors behind these technologies have come to formulate and evolve their business models in light of these trends in the database market.

    IBM Cloud Databases’ two-front strategy

    At the center of this dynamic between the open source communities and the vendors backing those communities are our clients, and our drive to provide our clients with the best database technologies they want to use. It is with our clients as a priority that we are continually balancing our contributions to the open source communities with our support to the vendors backing these projects to formulate our two-front strategy.

    On one front, IBMers are actively participating across thousands of open source repositories across many technologies. Aptly, we have also just announced the next generation of our Cloudant DBaaS based on Apache CouchDB: Cloudant on Transaction Engine.

    On the other front, we are very excited to announce three new collaborations that enable IBM to enrich the database capabilities available on our cloud with the latest innovations, enterprise capabilities, and authentic technology from the vendors themselves.

    New partners

    Over the next few months, we will be making the following generally available:

    • DataStax Enterprise: Built on Apache Cassandra, extends operational reliability and improves performance for workloads. Provides foundation for further capabilities around graph and search.
    • EDB: Enhanced PostgreSQL with additional enterprise management tooling and security, support for Oracle compatibility, multi-master replication, and schema migration and compatibility analysis.
    • MongoDB Enterprise Server: Robust operational tooling, automatic field-level encryption, comprehensive auditing and advanced analytics.

    While ISV collaborations are plentiful across the various cloud providers these days, we’ve focused on a more deeply integrated experience in how these databases will be made available on the IBM public cloud, specifically in the following ways:

    • Natively run on the IBM public cloud, and managed only by IBMers
    • Backline expertise provided by the vendor, without providing access to customer databases or otherwise compromising data confidentiality
    • Provisioned directly from our catalog with availability across all six Multi-Zone Regions plus numerous Single-Zone Regions
    • Default high availability across Multi-Zone Regions, backed by IBM Cloud’s 99.99% SLA
    • Automatic backups to Cross Regional Object Storage with on-demand restore
    • Default integration into Key Protect, Log Analysis with LogDNA, Activity Tracker with LogDNA, and Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig
    • Seamless scale, independent allocation of compute and storage, and optional auto-scaling configurations
    • On IBM paper and supported through the IBM portal

    Please check back in the coming weeks for availability of these offerings.

    If you’re interested in learning more about how we built and run these offerings, alongside many of our other Database-as-a-Service offerings, I invite you to check out “Building Cloud-Scale DBaaS with Kubernetes Operators.”

  • Nylas Raises $25M To Fuel Innovation in Communication APIs

    SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nylas, a leading provider of communications APIs for developers, today announces $25 million in Series B funding. This round was led by 8VC and Round13 Capital, with participation from existing investors Spark Capital, ScaleUP, and Slack Fund. Additionally, new investors Citi Ventures joined the round.

    Nylas provides an API platform that enables developers to quickly and securely access and process user data from any email, calendar, and contacts provider in the world. Nylas’ solution saves customers an average of 16 months and $2M in up-front development costs by allowing developers to efficiently integrate complex, unstructured communications data into their applications in days, providing secure and reliable pre-built integrations that are SOC 2 certified, GDPR compliant, Privacy Shield certified, and HIPAA and FINRA-ready.

    Nylas boasts over 450 customers globally — including companies such as Comcast, Hyundai, Realtor.com, Dialpad, Freshworks, Pipedrive, Qualia, and Clio. Over 40,000 software developers around the world use Nylas to serve over 1.2B API calls and sync 15TB of data daily.

    “The way we build software has fundamentally changed. The last 10 years have been all about the explosive growth of applications; the next 10 years will be all about companies solving development challenges at the API and abstraction layer to enable developers to increase their go-to-market velocity,” said Gleb Polyakov, CEO and co-founder of Nylas. “Companies like Twilio, Stripe, and Nylas have shown developers around the world how API platforms can help them quickly and securely build critical features into their applications, removing complexity, cost, and risk. With this additional funding and deep expertise from all of our investors and partners, Nylas will be able to ensure that no developer has to waste their time building their own communications infrastructure ever again.”

    Nylas plans to allocate the funding to scale sales and marketing activities while accelerating product innovation. The funding follows the recent acquisition of June.ai, a developer of AI-powered productivity tools that perform autonomous tasks across users’ inboxes, such as organizing messages, surfacing attachments, automating responses, and highlighting important interactions. The integration of June.ai’s core technology expands the capabilities of the Nylas platform into intelligent workflow automation.

    “We are proud to lead this round as we continue to see Nylas’ exponential growth in a category that’s in heightened demand,” said Alex Moore, Partner at 8VC. “Over the years, we have seen the Nylas team establish and scale their platform to become an integral layer in some of the world’s leading software applications. We believe Nylas will become the industry standard for companies looking to power experiences in their applications that drive customer engagement and retention.”

    Nylas plans to double its workforce over the next 12 months and is hiring across locations in San Francisco, New York City, and Denver as well as building a dedicated engineering team in Toronto, Canada.

    “The amount of time Nylas is saving development teams is driving major efficiency gains for companies around the world. Their ability to break down what can take a mid-sized development team years to build themselves into weeks or days is a game-changer,” said Craig Strong, Partner at Round13 Capital. “Nylas is well-positioned in the industry, and we look forward to supporting their growth. With their push to establish an engineering hub in Toronto, we viewed this as a prime opportunity to aid them in the next stage of global expansion.”

    “Nylas’ rapid growth demonstrates the opportunity within the developer API space,” said Matt Carbonara, Managing Director at Citi Ventures. “The Nylas leadership team’s vision for the future is clear as they continue to build out an innovative, reliable, and secure platform for developers that is scalable and easy to use. Citi Ventures looks forward to aiding the Nylas team as they distribute this technology across industries.”

    To learn more about how Nylas is redefining how developers build communication features in their applications, visit www.nylas.com.

    About Nylas: Nylas is a pioneer and leading provider of universal communications APIs that allow developers to quickly connect their applications to every email, calendar, or contacts provider in the world.

    Over 40,000 developers around the globe use the Nylas communications platform to process over 1.2 billion API requests and 15TB of data per day from providers such as Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook.com, Yahoo! and more. Nylas was founded in 2013 and has raised over $55M to date from 8VC, Spark Capital, Slack, Citi Ventures, Round13, ScaleUP, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, and SV Angel. Nylas customers include Comcast, Hyundai, Realtor.com, Dialpad, Freshworks, Pipedrive, Qualia and Clio. Learn more at www.nylas.com.

  • Applitools Visual AI Reaches One Billion Images Analyzed

    World’s only AI-powered visual testing platform doubles usage year-over-year helping dev teams solve the complex, real world test automation problems brought on by the acceleration of digital transformation 

    SAN MATEO, Calif., June 23, 2020 — Applitools (https://applitools.com/), provider of a next generation test automation platform through Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid, announced its Visual AI technology has surpassed one billion images analyzed since launching commercially and is projected to double year over year. Each of the one billion images analyzed includes AI enhancing data from over 130 different browser and version combinations, viewport information, and direct user feedback on defects, dynamic content, and more. This uniquely enables Applitools to maintain 99.9999% accuracy to hundreds of Enterprise customers worldwide including the top 10 software companies worldwide, five out of the 10 top banks in the US, and many other Global 500 companies.

    Applitools Visual AI is rapidly outpacing the competition to visually validate business applications now forced into rapid digital transformation by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only Visual AI is agile enough to handle the complex and evolving challenges organizations face delivering quality modern applications including:

    • Cross-browser, cross-device, and cross-platform testing
    • Dynamic content
    • Responsive design for multiple screen sizes
    • Validation of compliance and regulatory requirements
    • Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) without compromising quality
    • End-to-end testing, integration testing, unit testing, and component level testing
    • Support of joint development and test engineering teams (DevOps and Shift Left)
    • Pre-production testing and post-production monitoring automation and maintenance

    “With Applitools, we’ve been able to make visual validation a first-class citizen within our CI/CD ecosystem,” said Mike Millgate, Technical Quality Architect at Gannett. “Our CI environment executes tens of thousands of Visual AI-powered tests against the grid each month. Since implementing it, we’ve been able to remove frail functional tests from our ecosystem and achieve a 99.8% pass percentage. We are faster, more stable, and ship with confidence with Applitools Visual AI running on the Ultrafast Grid.”

    Recent comparisons show that Applitools Visual AI outperforms any other UI validation technology including those leveraging pixel-to-pixel and DOM based analysis approaches. Applitools Visual AI saves customers from time consuming and disruptive false positives that often break builds and block the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) so vital to modern dev team success. Applitools customers also benefit from automated maintenance AI algorithms that significantly speed up the test results analysis process by automating repetitive maintenance operations. For example, automated maintenance AI allows users to approve or reject a bug only once on a single browser, single device, and in a single screen size. Then the AI engine automatically extends that operation across all devices, browsers, form factors and applications pages. This additional level of AI can also group multiple test results that reflect the same bug to allow the user to review only a single occurrence of each bug without spending time reviewing tens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of repetitions of the same bug on multiple environments.

    “This is the perfect example of how AI should be applied to solve complex, real world problems,” said Greg Sypolt from EverFi. “By eliminating the false positives associated with pixel and DOM based comparison tools, our team saves huge amounts of time and money. We simply can’t tolerate wasted time if we want to deliver quality applications as quickly as business teams need them in today’s global environment. Visual AI is a must for quality management of modern apps.”

    To fully understand the differences between Visual AI and pixel-based tools for visual validation, read this recent InfoQ article (https://www.infoq.com/articles/visual-ai-web-app-testing/). 

    Developers using modern development frameworks like Storybook, or developer friendly testing frameworks like Cypress, Espreso, XCUITest, etc. to test early and often in the software development cycle also see huge value in Visual AI. “I love how Applitools Eyes has the smarts to ignore minor visual differences in your components, especially when testing on different browser types where it’s easy for the layout to be off by a pixel,” said Kent C. Dodds, Google Developer Expert and Creator of TestingJavaScript.com.

    “The largest brands in the world trust Applitools because our Visual AI technology accurately emulates the human eye and brain to compare screenshot images, not pixels, for visual differences,” said Adam Carmi CTO and Co-Founder of Applitools. “Over the years we have collected data from thousands of applications and web sites that are fully tagged and indexed in a way that shows complete user journeys inside customer’s applications, bugs vs valid application changes, dynamic page regions, and more. To be able to see the same state of an app across different browsers, operating systems, viewport sizes, and device types over an extended period of time and app versions for such a large variety of apps is priceless.”

    Try the world’s most intelligent test automation platform for free at (https://auth.applitools.com/users/register) or talk to one of our Visual AI experts directly.

    To learn more about Applitools and the latest developments around Visual AI, visit (https://applitools.com/).

    About Applitools

    Applitools delivers a Next Generation Test Automation Platform through Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid. We enable engineering teams to release high quality web and mobile apps at incredible speed and at a reduced cost.

    Applitools Visual AI modernizes important test automation use cases — Functional Testing, Visual Testing, Web and Mobile UI/UX Testing, Cross Browser Testing, Responsive Web Design Testing, Cross Device Testing, PDF Testing, Accessibility Testing and Compliance Testing — to transform the way organizations deliver innovation at the speed of CI/CD at a significantly lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

    Hundreds of companies from verticals such as Tech, Banking, Insurance, Retail, Pharma, and Publishing — including 50 of the Fortune 100 — use Applitools to deliver the best possible digital experiences to millions of customers on any device and browser, and across every screen size and operating system.

    Applitools is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, please visit applitools.com.

     

     

  • Introducing IBM Cloudant on Transaction Engine: Cloud Native by Design

    By Adam Kocoloski, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO, IBM Cloud Data Services

    The IBM public cloud is built on a foundation of innovation in open source, leadership in security and enterprise-grade infrastructure, all with the goal of enabling our clients to rapidly build new applications while reducing the complexity of managing those applications as they scale. Today we’re announcing a substantial new capability on this front with the arrival of Cloudant on Transaction Engine.

    IBM Cloudant is an elastically scalable, serverless datastore built to meet the needs of cloud-native application developers. Since 2014 it has powered a wide variety of internal and external applications in IBM Cloud. Like many original “NoSQL” solutions, Cloudant delivered scalability and availability by sacrificing some of the isolation and consistency guarantees of traditional relational database systems. As we enter Chapter 2 of cloud, we’ve tasked ourselves with restoring those mission-critical properties while preserving and enhancing Cloudant’s cloud-native character. Cloudant on Transaction Engine represents our first major step towards achieving those objectives.

    Scaling to New Heights

    The new Transaction Engine architecture efficiently organizes data for rapid retrieval at scale, and we’re passing those efficiencies on to our clients. Cloudant instances running on the Transaction Engine can support databases up to 100TB, and we’ve reduced the per-gigabyte storage pricing for these new instances by 4x. We’ve worked diligently on an optimized hardware profile to drive down costs and leverage new innovations in storage technology to support this new pricing. Data is still stored in triplicate and replicated across IBM Cloud Availability Zones, and you only pay for the storage that you use.

    Query processing also gets a major boost from the Transaction Engine design. Smarter organization of the data in secondary indexes enables us to efficiently scale query throughput without imposing partitioning restrictions on your application’s data model. Create views and secondary indexes on your entire database and query them with predictable, consistent performance as you scale. At launch we are increasing the cap on provisioned read throughput by 5x — and if you need more throughput. Cloudant on Transaction Engine also eliminates Global Queries as a separate category of provisioned throughput, resulting in cost savings of up to 20xfor certain types of queries.

    Strong Consistency

    API calls issued to Cloudant on Transaction Engine operate against consistent, isolated snapshots of your database. Document operations are fully Linearizable, and secondary indexes are kept transactionally consistent with the main database. The native change capture feed exported for every Cloudant database is also totally-ordered, and the service will never replay previously observed events unless asked to by the client.

    While we’ve become experts at designing applications that make the best use of eventually consistent systems, and happily share that expertise with our clients, a data service that is immune to eventual consistency simply eliminates a whole class of issues that a developer otherwise has to consider. We’re delighted to offer this capability in IBM Cloudant and look forward to expanding the set of mission-critical applications that can leverage IBM Cloud as a result.

    Natively Secure

    Organizations entrusting their data to cloud databases need to know that the data is stored securely and protected from improper use. Cloudant on Transaction Engine implements native database encryption so that user data is represented as ciphertext even before it hits the disk. Each database is encrypted with a unique Data Encryption Key at no additional cost, and the root of trust for those encryption keys always traces back to IBM Cloud’s standard key management services, which leverage some of the most secure commercially-available encryption technology in the industry.

    Open by Design

    Cloudant on Transaction Engine reinforces IBM’s commitment to open innovation: the core database features powering the Transaction Engine instances are being developed as part of the next major release of Apache CouchDB. While we firmly believe that Cloudant provides the best vehicle for clients to benefit from these innovations, we are committed to the principle that you own your data, and we will always support an open API and replication interoperability with the open source community. Moreover, our Extension for Apache CouchDB offering ensures you can get the support you need to deploy and manage CouchDB in your own data center or other hybrid cloud environments. Blending CouchDB and Cloudant gives you a unique ability to bring your data exactly where it’s needed around the globe.

    Clients are recognizing the benefits of the updates being announced today.  “As a long-time IBM Cloudant customer, we are excited to onboard the new Cloudant on Transaction Engine benefits into the PayRange mobile payment architecture,” said Prashant Kanhere, CTO, PayRange. “PayRange provides contact-less payment methods for clients across hundreds of thousands of machines, and this capability is more important than ever these days. We are big users of Cloudant global queries and have high throughput requirements, and always looking for ways to optimize for performance, scalability and cost. Cloudant on Transaction Engine provides capabilities to take our application in the right direction on all those fronts.”

    In addition to announcing new capabilities to IBM’s Cloudant on Transaction Engine, we’re also celebrating the 50 year anniversary of the relational model behind Structured Query Language (SQL). In June 1970, IBM researcher and computing pioneer Edgar Frank Coddpublished the seminal paper “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” describing the famous relational model that became the foundation of SQL.

    ##