devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • ScyllaDB Adds Amazon DynamoDB-compatible API to Database-as-a-Service Offering

    Scylla Cloud simplifies migration for DynamoDB users, adds Grafana integration and extends flexible new deployment options

    PALO ALTO, Calif., June 10, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — ScyllaDB today announced that it has added its recently launched Amazon DynamoDB-compatible API, Alternator, to Scylla Cloud, the fully managed version of its NoSQL database. Other new features in Scylla Cloud include integration with popular open source monitoring tool Apache Grafana and the ability for users to run Scylla Cloud on their own AWS accounts.

    Scylla Cloud offers a cost-effective alternative to other database-as-a-service (DBaaS) options. Running the same workloads as Amazon DynamoDB and Google Cloud BigTable, Scylla Cloud comes in at roughly one-fifth the cost. Built on Scylla Enterprise, Scylla Cloud handles petabytes of data, performing millions of operations per second with predictable low latencies. It allows rapid prototyping, deployment and scaling of applications without the overhead of database administration, minimizing downtime and allowing developers to move high-performance applications quickly into production.

    “We are very impressed with the performance and ease of operations with Scylla Cloud,” said David Zhao, Director of Engineering at popular online publishing platform Medium. “Scylla Cloud gives us a fully managed database that frees us from having to spend valuable engineering time on DB operations. We’ve been fans of ScyllaDB for a long time. For our applications, it delivers the best cost/performance compared to other RDBMS or NoSQL databases.”

    Other recent Scylla Cloud updates include:

    • Run Scylla Cloud in Your Own AWS Account: ScyllaDB now gives users a choice of where they deploy their fully managed Scylla Cloud database: via their Scylla Cloud account or in their own AWS account. This new option allows Scylla Cloud users to keep all Scylla resources (EC2, VPC, S3 buckets, etc.) while maintaining their own AWS pricing, company policies and geographic regulations.
    • Grafana Integration: Scylla Cloud now integrates directly with the widely used Grafana multiplatform open source solution for running data analytics, improving the observability of Scylla Cloud cluster performance.
    • Extract Metrics for Prometheus: Scylla Cloud now supports extracting cluster metrics in Prometheus format. Extracted statistics can be viewed with either Scylla Monitoring Stack or any other monitoring tool that supports the Prometheus format, such as Datadog.

    “DynamoDB users who have experienced sticker shock from high database costs can now easily migrate to a much more cost-effective alternative, one with many more deployment options,” said Dor Laor, ScyllaDB co-founder and CEO. “They can also now take advantage of other open source tools like Grafana and Prometheus.”

    For more information on Scylla Cloud, or to sign up for an account, please visit scylladb.com.

    About ScyllaDB
    Scylla is the real-time big data database. API-compatible with Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB, Scylla embraces a shared-nothing approach that increases throughput and storage capacity as much as 10X that of Cassandra, while significantly reducing the total cost of ownership. Comcast, Starbucks, Ola Cabs, Samsung, IBM, Grab, MediaMath, AppNexus, Medium, Santander and many more leading companies have adopted Scylla to realize order-of-magnitude performance improvements and reduce hardware costs. ScyllaDB was founded by the team responsible for the KVM hypervisor and is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Eight Roads Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Wing Venture Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, TLV Partners, Magma Venture Partners, Western Digital Capital and Samsung Ventures. For more information: ScyllaDB.com

  • Fusion by Datanomix Now Available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

    Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to industrial manufacturing software for machine and shop floor monitoring to boost productivity and OEE 

    By seeing the entire factory floor and providing job-specific production intelligence in real-time, there is no more waiting until the end of the day to see where opportunities for improvement exist with Fusion by Datanomix.

    NASHUA, New Hampshire — June 9, 2020 — Datanomix Inc. today announced the availability of its Fusion platform in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Microsoft Azure. CNC manufacturing companies can now take advantage of the scalability, high availability, and security of Azure, with streamlined deployment and management. Datanomix Fusion is the pulse of production for modern machine shops. By harnessing the power of machine data and secure cloud access, Datanomix has created a rich visual overlay of factory floor production intelligence to increase the speed and effectiveness of employees in the global Industry 4.0 workplace.

    Datanomix provides cloud-based, production intelligence software to manufacturers using CNC tools to produce discrete components for the medical equipment, aerospace, defense and automotive industries with its Fusion platform. Fusion is accessible from any device, giving access to critical insights in a few clicks, anytime and anywhere. Fusion is a hands-free, plug-and-play solution for shop floor productivity.

    By establishing a data connection to machines communicating via industry-standard protocols like MTConnect or IO-Link, Fusion automatically tracks what actual production is by part and machine and sets a benchmark for expected performance. To measure performance against expected benchmarks, a simple letter grade scoring system is shown across all machines. In cases where output has not kept pace with the benchmark, the Fusion Factor would decline, informing workers that expected results could be in jeopardy.

    “Our Fusion platform delivers productivity wins for our customers using a real-time production scoring technology we call Fusion Factor,” said John Joseph, CEO of Datanomix. “By seeing exactly what is happening on the factory floor, our customers experience 20-30% increases in output by job, shorter time to problem resolution and a direct correlation between part performance and business impact. We give the answers that matter, when they matter and are excited to now give access to the Azure community.”

    By seeing the entire factory floor and providing job-specific production intelligence in real-time, there is no more waiting until the end of the day to see where opportunities for improvement exist. In TV Mode, displays mounted on the shop floor rotate through the performance metrics of every connected machine, identifying which machines need assistance and why.

    “TV Mode has created a rallying point that didn’t exist on the shop floor previously. Fusion brings people together to troubleshoot today’s production challenges as they are happening. The collaboration and camaraderie is a great boost not only to productivity, but also morale,” says Joseph.

    Continuous improvement leaders can review instant reports offered by Fusion that answer common process improvement questions ranging from overall capacity utilization and job performance trends to Pareto charts and cell/shift breakdowns. A powerful costing tool called Quote Calibration uses all of the job intelligence Fusion collects to help business leaders determine the actual profit and loss of each part, turning job costing from a blind spot to a competitive advantage.

    Sajan Parihar, Senior Director, Microsoft Azure Platform at Microsoft Corp. said, “We’re pleased to welcome Datanomix to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, which gives our partners great exposure to cloud customers around the globe. Azure Marketplace offers world-class quality experiences from global trusted partners with solutions tested to work seamlessly with Azure.”

    The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. The Azure Marketplace helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.

    Learn more about Fusion at its page in the Azure Marketplace.

    About Datanomix

    Based in New Hampshire, Datanomix is fueling the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, with Fusion – data analytics made simple for the manufacturing floor. Datanomix’s mission is to level the data analytics playing field for industrial manufacturers by giving them robust decision-making tools so they can proudly build world-class products. Learn more at www.datanomix.io.

    ###

     

     

  • Groupe PSA Delivers Superior Online Customer Experience with Real-Time Response Time, Supporting 15X its Mainframe Capacity with GigaSpaces InsightEdge

    Mainframe Modernization Solution Calculates CO2 emissions to meet WLTP Standard for PSA Customers Worldwide.

    New York, NY —June 10, 2020 —GigaSpaces, the provider of InsightEdge, the fastest in-memory real-time analytics and data processing platform, announced today that Groupe PSA in partnership with Capgemini, has successfully launched its digital application to calculate in real-time, the CO2 emissions of each personalized car configuration to meet the WLTP (world harmonized light-duty vehicles test procedure) standard.

    The solution, powered by GigaSpaces InsightEdge, delivers a 15-19 milliseconds query and analytics response time handling up to 95.2% of calculation requests without accessing the mainframe.  Infrastructure footprint was reduced by a factor of 4-6X while scale was increased by 20X. The solution was developed and deployed in production in 12 weeks. Groupe PSA is the second largest car manufacturer in Europe, manufacturing Peugeot, Citroen and other brands, with sales of 3.5 million vehicles in 2019.

    In order to comply with the WLTP standard, Groupe PSA needed to calculate CO2 emissions based on their customers’ configuration of features selected using the PSA online application.  The calculations required a less than 100 millisecond response time to deliver the expected user experience along with a high level of accuracy and reliability to avoid fines that could reach up to €100 million annually. The mainframe modernization solution also needed to be cloud ready, scale elastically and ensure always-on functionality. The existing mainframe solution could not deliver on the requests per second requirement which was 15 times more than its performance capacity.

    PSA, with Capgemini conducted a study on various technical solutions, but the competitive solutions were limited by storing data solely on a key value store which could not meet the performance requirements due to the need to frequently access the mainframe to execute complex queries and analytics.

    “Our selection criteria focused on scalability, performance, the ability to store and process various data structures, overall simplicity and cost. GigaSpaces InsightEdge was the most suitable solution,” said Santiago Castelao, Lead Project Manager, PSA. “As we move forward, we will continue to leverage the solution’s ability to unify transactional processing with real-time analytics and machine learning and introduce new applications to meet additional business needs.“

    GigaSpaces InsightEdge data and analytics platform was implemented to resolve the mainframe bottleneck problem by seamlessly offloading requests to its core in-memory data grid engine

    Unlike a standard database, GigaSpaces InsightEdge uniquely co-locates data and business logic in the same memory space, which delivers unparalleled performance and reduces network costs. The cloud native in-memory computing solution optimally supports event driven advanced queries and analytics and unique aggregation and masking capabilities, which streamlines the workflow, maximizing performance while minimizing the data footprint.

    “We are proud to partner with Capgemini to provide Groupe PSA with most modern data solutions to deliver superior online customer experiences while complying with clean air regulations,” said Moshe Weizman, Director, France & Nordics at GigaSpaces. “The successful deployment of this solution underscores our commitment to our partners’ and customers’ success with the most advanced, agile data and analytics platform for all of their digital-transformation initiatives and legacy strategies.”

    About GigaSpaces

    GigaSpaces provides the fastest in-memory computing platforms for real-time insight to action and extreme transactional processing.  With GigaSpaces, enterprises can operationalize machine learning and transactional processing to gain real-time insights on their data and act upon them in the moment.  The always-on platforms for mission-critical applications across cloud, on-premise or hybrid, are leveraged by hundreds of Tier-1 and Fortune-listed organizations worldwide across financial services, retail, transportation, telecom, healthcare, and more. GigaSpaces offices are located in the US, Europe and Asia.

    For more information, visit www.gigaspaces.com and www.gigaspaces.com/blog/, follow us on Twitter, or  visit our YouTube and LinkedIn channels.

  • Moveworks Integrates with Microsoft Teams to Transform Enterprise IT Support

    Integration of leading AI and Natural Language Understanding platform with Microsoft Teams turns chat and collaboration platform into an autonomous IT support channel

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA. — JUNE 8, 2019 — Moveworks today announces a technology integration to help enterprises using Microsoft Teams deliver autonomous resolution of employee IT tickets. Through this integration, employees can now engage Moveworks’ AI-powered bot within Teams to get instant help — whether it’s a request for information, troubleshooting support, resetting a password, or any other IT request — without involving an IT support agent.

    Powered by Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Machine Learning (ML), the Moveworks platform understands employee issues and requests by analyzing complex enterprise language patterns, and then triggers a resolution autonomously.

    “Organizations today must be even more responsive to employees’ IT issues, given the current crisis,” said Bhavin Shah, CEO, Moveworks. “Previous approaches to speeding up IT support consisted of toolkits, which required a lot of effort to set up and configure. We’ve applied machine learning to understand the language of IT support, to identify the best path to resolve issues, and then trigger the right automation — so we can solve IT issues end to end, without the need for people to work on them.”

    Shah continues, “As working remotely becomes the new normal, collaboration hubs like Microsoft Teams are allowing employees to stay productive from anywhere. Moveworks is thrilled to partner with Microsoft to help achieve that vision — adding instant, AI-powered IT support to the platform’s extensive capabilities.”

    Bhrighu Sareen, General Manager, Microsoft Teams said, “The Moveworks integration will now allow our joint customers to empower their employees to use Microsoft Teams to resolve their most critical IT support issues instantly and autonomously.”

    Key benefits of the Moveworks and Teams integration include:
    ●  Teams becomes the unified IT support hub: Integrating with Moveworks enables Teams to become a unified natural language UI/UX for enterprise apps, including ServiceNow.
    ●  Better employee experience: Moveworks autonomously resolves, on average, 35-40 percent of all IT support tickets with a resolution time of 60 seconds. Employees get their IT support issues solved in seconds instead of days—all with a simple, natural language chat within Teams.
    ●  Empowers service desk resources: CIOs and IT teams can free service desk agents from repetitive and manual tasks and empower them to work on more strategic initiatives.
    ●  More ROI from existing investments: Enterprises running Teams and Moveworks derive better ROI on their existing automated services. Moveworks makes this possible because its conversational AI understands the IT issue when the employee reports it in a Teams chat. Moveworks takes immediate action, executing the existing automated service that the employee would not have found otherwise.

    Through the integration, enterprises running Teams can now leverage pre-built Moveworks integrations to their organization’s core IT systems, such as Active Directory for identity and access management, Office 365 for email / groups, SharePoint for knowledge, Microsoft System Center Orchestrator for automating workflows, and ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow, Jira, and Zendesk for tracking requests.

    The Teams and Moveworks integration, and the latest improvements to Moveworks’ machine learning models, have boosted automatic ticket routing at Equinix, with more than 1,800 tickets now triaged per week, on average. The system is now able to make an automatic routing decision for an estimated 65 percent of incoming tickets, and of those, it provides the correct routing decision approximately 96 percent of the time. As a result, less than a year after launch, Equinix has already witnessed an estimated 32 percent reduction in the average IT ticket’s lifespan — a figure which continues to climb as Moveworks gets smarter with experience.

    “I have three priorities when it comes to supporting our workforce: enable the IT team to focus on high-value tasks, put intelligence in their hands to make better decisions, and deliver the best support experience to employees,” said Milind Wagle, CIO, Equinix. “Moveworks is unique in that it helps us achieve all three together. Integrated with Microsoft Teams, it allows our employees to stay productive, connected, and engaged, no matter where they’re working.”

    ABOUT MOVEWORKS
    Moveworks is the industry’s first autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) platform for IT resolution in the enterprise. To learn more visit http://www.moveworks.com

  • Sysdig Continues International Expansion with New Data Center Options in the US and Europe

    • Company expands SaaS offering, while adding stringent data protection and compliance

    • Customers are able to choose where their data is stored

    SAN FRANCISCO – June 9, 2020 — Sysdig, Inc., the secure DevOps leader, today announced new data center options in Frankfurt, Germany and on the west coast of the United States, in Oregon, to satisfy growing demand for the Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform. The expansion of Sysdig services to additional hosting locations prepares Sysdig for the next stage of growth. The two data centers strengthen data protection standards by adding encryption at rest.

    Organizations recognize the advantages that come with cloud native and are rapidly moving to containers and Kubernetes to accelerate innovation. In the current business environment, many companies are speeding cloud-native transitions, and look to Sysdig to address their security, visibility, and compliance requirements for containers. The data centers in Germany and on the west coast of the United States are in addition to the company’s current data center on the east coast of the United States, in Virginia.

    “We are adding hosting locations in response to our rapid expansion,” said Suresh Vasudevan, chief executive officer, Sysdig. “The Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform scales to support the largest enterprise cloud deployments, while providing a fast ramp to productivity with our SaaS offering. We have several marquee customers in the EU and they prefer a local data center.”

    Key Customer Benefits

    • Better EMEA user experience: The German data center enables Sysdig to service European companies with reduced latency.

    • Stringent data protection: The new data centers offer full encryption. Data is encrypted at rest in addition to the existing encryption for data in motion across public networks. Sysdig also pursues key independent third-party validations of its security, processes, and services. Sysdig has successfully completed a SOC 2 Type 1 audit and the company is currently going through the SOC 2 Type 2 certification. Sysdig undergoes third-party network penetration testing and source code reviews annually and external network penetration testing quarterly. Customers can use Sysdig knowing their data is being protected properly.

    • Green data centers: Sysdig selected data centers that are powered by renewable energy.

    Customer Experience

    New customers have the option to select the data center of their choice. Existing customers can continue to use the Virginia data center or they can switch to one of the new locations. Current customers that choose to use a new data center should contact Sysdig for support. Sysdig has dedicated teammates that will help customers transition.

    Availability

    The German data center will be available later this month, while the data center in Oregon is operational now. Learn more about how Sysdig can help organizations ensure compliance.

    About Sysdig

    Sysdig enables companies to confidently run cloud-native workloads in production. With the Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform, cloud teams embed security, validate compliance, and maximize performance and availability. The Sysdig platform is open by design with the scale, performance, and usability enterprises demand. The largest companies rely on Sysdig for cloud-native security and visibility. Learn more at sysdig.com.

  • Axiom Launches the Cure for Machine Data Headaches with $7M in Funding

    • New enterprise-grade DevOps product cuts costs by 10X and reduces time needed to manage machine data and surface insights
    • The founding team have spent over a decade building developer products used by millions at Xamarin and Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu Project)
    • Axiom discloses $7m in funding from Crane Venture Partners, LocalGlobe, Fly VC and Mango Capital
    • Angel investors include former Xamarin founder and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins

     

    London – 9 June 2020 – Axiom today announces that it is launching with an enterprise-grade solution to manage and analyse machine data at any scale, across any type of infrastructure. Axiom gives DevOps teams a cloud-native, serverless solution to store and query their data all the time in one intuitive interface – without the overhead of maintaining and scaling data infrastructure.

    Until now, DevOps teams have spent a great deal of time and money managing their infrastructure without being able to own and analyse their machine data. Despite all the tools at hand, managing and analysing critical data has been difficult, slow and resource-intensive, taking up far too much money and time for organisations. Based on a revolutionary object-based datastore, Axiom provides an efficient and effective way to manage machine data and surface insights in real-time at a fraction of the cost and time as current solutions.

    Co-founder and CEO Neil Jagdish Patel, commented: “My co-founders, Seif and Gord, and I have been working together for over a decade building widely-used developer products. We created Axiom having experienced first hand the problems today’s DevOps teams face managing massive data streams and complex infrastructures. A quarter of our time was spent managing machine data to keep the products running efficiently rather than building new features.” Patel continued, “We wanted to approach the problem in a way that fixed the fundamental problems teams were facing. To do that we had to build a cloud-native, object-based solution that provided the flexibility of indexing and querying huge volumes of data while drastically reducing management and infrastructure time and costs.”

    In addition to its official launch, Axiom is announcing that it has raised $7m in funding since it was founded in 2017, including a new $4m seed round led by Crane Venture Partners with participation from Fly VC, Mango Capital and LocalGlobe, which led the previous round of funding. Notable angel investors include former Xamarin founder and current GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins.

    Scott Sage, Founder and Partner at Crane Venture Partners added, “Neil, Seif and Gord are a proven team that have created successful products that millions of developers use. We are proud to invest in Axiom to allow them to build a business helping DevOps teams turn logging challenges from a resource-intense problem to a business advantage. Built for today’s infrastructure trends of flexible, hybrid environments, Axiom is the best solution for managing today’s machine data.”

    Axiom co-founders Neil Jagdish Patel, Seif Lotfy and Gord Allott, have worked together for more than a decade creating products used by millions of developers. Together, they created Xamarin Insights that enabled developers to monitor and analyse mobile app performance in real-time for Xamarin, the open-source cross-platform app development framework. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft for between $400 and $500 million in 2016. Before working at Xamarin, the co-founders also worked together at Canonical, the private commercial company behind Ubuntu Project.

    Axiom is a fully remote team of 14 people across seven time zones. Two of the three founders are based in the UK (in Manchester and in London) along with the third co-founder based in Berlin. Axiom will use the new funding to build out its product, sales and marketing functions to bring its enterprise-grade solution to the market.

    About Axiom

    Axiom gives companies an enterprise-grade solution for DevOps teams to manage and analyse their machine data logs at any scale, across any type of infrastructure. Built by developers for developers, Axiom provides an efficient and effective way to manage machine data and surface insights in real-time at a fraction of the cost and time as current solutions. Axiom is funded by Crane Venture Partners, LocalGlobe, Fly VC and Mango Capital, with support from notable angel investors that include GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins. www.axiom.co

     

  • BMC Unveils AIOps for the Modern Mainframe

    Actionable Insights allow organizations to detect problems impacting mainframe system health and performance before they happen

    HOUSTON – June 4, 2020 – BMC, a global leader in IT solutions for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, unveiled BMC AMI Operational Insight, an AI-driven, forward-looking solution that uses machine learning to detect anomalies and maximize lead time for remediation to mitigate mainframe issues before they become business problems.

    Today’s rapidly changing marketplace, with shifting dynamics and competitor challenges, requires companies to optimize for increased performance and 24/7 availability to stay ahead of the competition. As a business-critical platform, it is imperative that mainframe issues are identified and addressed before any system downtime or degradation can impact operations. The BMC AMI Operational Insight solution provides the intelligence for mainframe experts and newer employees alike to support every organization’s journey to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise with the modern mainframe.

    “Managing the mainframe has never been more critical to serving customers and ensuring uptime. It is imperative that companies have the capabilities to proactively manage the platform and anticipate problems before they happen,” said John McKenny, Senior Vice President of ZSolutions Strategy and Innovation at BMC. “By applying AIOps to the mainframe for better availability and performance with BMC AMI Operational Insight, our customers can reclaim their valuable time and shift resources to focus on the strategic priorities that will allow them to become Autonomous Digital Enterprises.”

    The BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) AIOps suite envisions a three-part workflow – detect, find, and fix – designed to greatly reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) so operations teams spend less time reacting to issues and more time advancing high-level business initiatives. With BMC AMI Operational Insight, users gain a solution that utilizes machine learning to learn what is normal, detect anomalies, and maximize lead time for remediation, avoiding downtime or system degradation. As an example of how companies can avoid downtime, a global financial services provider has seen the potential benefits of using BMC AMI Operational Insight and the predictive insights it could provide. Through a demo, the company noticed it was able to detect problems two days earlier to avoid a system issue.

    Key benefits of BMC AMI AIOps include:

    • Faster detection: Notifications alert users of anomalies, allowing them to proactively solve problems impacting systems before they cause any downtime.
    • More accurate predictions: Multivariate analysis looks across all KPIs simultaneously instead of in silos, to ensure no KPI anomalies are missed, resulting in fewer false positives.
    • Data science and domain expertise built-in: Knowledge of which metrics to watch quickly fills the gaps left by a retiring workforce and expedites the learning curve for new staff. In addition, getting rid of the guesswork of collecting and evaluating extraneous metrics eliminates the waste of costly MIPS.
    • Out-of-the-box predictive problem detection: Minimal configuration required means users can install, add data, and realize value immediately.
    • Improved and adaptive intelligence for systems: Continuous consumption of deep and broad data sources helps add intelligence to complex systems, while continuous learning ensures teams can keep up with rapid pace of change.

    “MTTR has been increasing for I&O leaders, indicating difficulty with finding and fixing issues that arise. Monitors have been a staple, but have reached their limits,” said Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, Management Software and DevOps, IDC. “Products with early detection and actionable insight that can help prevent damaging outages before your monitor alerts you are decreasing MTTR, leading to time and cost savings.”

    As part of the new BMC AMI AIOps suite, the BMC AMI Operational Insight solution ensures mainframe uptime that allows organizations to meet the growing demands of digital business growth. BMC continues to invest and innovate for the mainframe with new product introductions, as well as the recent acquisition of Compuware. BMC now offers a full suite of mainframe software development, delivery, and performance solutions that empower organizations to scale Agile and DevOps with a fully integrated toolchain.

    Additional Resources:

    ###

    About BMC

    From core to cloud to edge, BMC delivers the software and services that enable over 10,000 global customers, including 84% of the Forbes Global 100, to thrive in their ongoing evolution to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

  • Instaclustr Expands Fully Managed Open Source Data Solutions with Kafka Connect

    The addition of managed Kafka Connect provides enterprises with the most efficient, scalable, cost-effective, and reliable way to stream data between Kafka and myriad data systems

    Redwood City, California – June 8, 2020 – Instaclustr, delivering reliability at scale through fully managed open source data technologies, today announced the general availability of Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect. This newest addition to the Instaclustr Managed Platform enables seamless data movement between Apache Kafka and other data systems at scale. Kafka Connect joins Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, Apache Spark, and Elasticsearch as another fast, proven, resilient, and highly flexible open source data technology expertly managed and supported by Instaclustr.

    Kafka Connect – an open source component of the Apache Kafka project – facilitates integrations between Kafka clusters and external data sources and sinks. The solution leverages reusable open source Kafka Connectors that function as plugins between Kafka and other systems. By doing so, Kafka Connect solves the core challenges inherent to otherwise developing linearly-scalable streaming data integrators between Kafka and all other systems.

    Instaclustr is now offering Kafka Connect as a fully managed service, because the solution often requires significant operational proficiency to be efficiently deployed and optimized at scale. Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect delivers that deep expertise, enabling customers to rapidly build Kafka integrations to requisite data sources and reliably scale their streaming data capabilities. Backed by Instaclustr’s hands-on management, businesses can instead focus resources on building their applications while Instaclustr handles the complexities of Kafka Connect customization and deployment. Kafka Connect adds to the data-layer technologies Instaclustr delivers in their pure open source versions – giving Instaclustr customers an advantageous alternative to “open core” solutions that increase license costs and promote vendor lock-in.

    “Interest in Kafka Connect has been growing quickly, and deservedly so,” said Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer, Instaclustr. “Through our extensive preview release of managed Kafka Connect, we continue to see how much value this technology can provide enterprises seeking the most reliable and scalable way to connect Kafka clusters to external data sources and sinks. We’re excited to now launch the general availability of Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect, and look forward to helping new and existing customers leverage Kafka that much more efficiently and effectively.”

    Using Instaclustr, Kafka Connect clusters can be created – and Kafka integrations can begin getting built – within minutes. Instaclustr includes a collection of pre-built connectors for popular data stores, including for AWS S3. A Bring-Your-Own Kafka Connectors (BYO Connectors) option is also offered that enables enterprises to more quickly deploy custom Kafka Connectors. This allows enterprises to build bespoke integrations and/or experiment with new integrations not yet created. Customers can deploy any Kafka Connector – including any open source, proprietary-owned, or third-party connector (with appropriate use licensing) – directly onto their dedicated Kafka Connect clusters.

    Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect delivers everything enterprises will need to take full advantage of real-time data integration between Kafka and other data sources:

    • Automated provisioning and deployment: Instaclustr provides automated provisioning of managed Kafka Connect through the Instaclustr Management Console, REST APIs, or  the Instaclustr Terraform provider.
    • Flexible deployment: Customers have the choice to deploy a Kafka Connect cluster and link it to an Instaclustr Managed Kafka cluster, or deploy to a Kafka cluster running  outside of the Instaclustr platform. And a choice to deploy Kafka Connect cluster in its  own dedicated VPC or within the VPC of the associated Kafka cluster.
    • Run in your provider account or ours: Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect is supported on AWS, Azure, and GCP (available in a subsequent release after GA)  – or in the customer’s own on-prem data center. Customers can run it in Instaclustr’s cloud provider account with a fixed, infrastructure-inclusive cost, or use their own cloud provider account and pay a management fee per node.
    • Availability SLAs: Instaclustr offers a 99.99% availability SLA when using an Instaclustr-managed Kafka cluster.
    • Monitoring and alerting: Customers can access key metrics through Instaclustr’s Management Console and REST APIs, and can also retrieve monitoring metrics in a format compatible with the Prometheus monitoring system. Alerting is in place to enable Instaclustr’s team to proactively identify any irregularities.
    • Security: Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect is SOC 2 certified, featuring a client-to-cluster secured connection via TLS, node-to-node encryption, firewall configuration, and other enterprise-level security features.
    • 24×7 expert support: Instaclustr customers have 24×7 access to technical support, with hands-on expertise managing large-scale distributed systems.
    • Pre-built connectors: An AWS S3 connector (available in the GA release) and a Cassandra connector and an Elasticsearch connector (which will be added in subsequent releases).
    • Custom connectors: Customers can deploy any connector onto their dedicated Kafka cluster (appropriate use license is required).
    • Access to connector logs: Access logs generated by Connectors are available for simplified debugging.

    To begin a trial of Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect, visit here, or contact the Instaclustr sales or customer success teams.

    About Instaclustr

    Instaclustr delivers reliability at scale through our integrated data platform of open source technologies such as Apache Cassandra®, Apache Kafka®, Apache Spark™, Redis and Elasticsearch. We enable companies to focus internal development and operational resources on building cutting edge customer-facing applications. Instaclustr now has more than 70 million node hours and 6 PB of data under management across its open source technology suite.

  • IBM Releases Fully Homomorphic Encryption Toolkit for MacOS and iOS; Linux and Android Coming Soon

    June 4, 2020 | Written by: 

    Often, when I begin explaining fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to someone for the first time I start by saying that I’ve been working in the field for nearly a decade and yet, I still have to pause to spell it right. So, let’s call it FHE.

    Half-kidding aside, FHE really sounds like magic when you hear about it for the first time, but it’s actually based on very sound mathematics. The main difference is that FHE requires a shift in the programming paradigm that we are used to, which makes it a little more difficult to integrate into applications. That was until today thanks to a new toolkit we are making available for MacOS, iOS and soon for Linux and Android. In fact, developers with basic platform tool familiarity can get up and running by following a few simple instructions rather quickly (see video below). It was no small feat to synthesize 11 years of top-notch cryptography research into a streamlined developer experience that is accessible and freely available to anyone in the time most people would spend to brew a pot of coffee or de-clutter a desk.

    What is FHE?

    The common methods of storing and sharing sensitive data with colleagues and partners have weak links. Today, files are often encrypted in transit and at rest, but decrypted while in use. This provides hackers and insiders with repeated opportunities to exfiltrate unencrypted data. FHE plugs these holes. It allows the manipulation of data by permissioned parties while it’s remains encrypted, minimizing the time it exists in its most vulnerable state.

    In conjunction with other techniques, FHE also makes it possible to selectively restrict decryption capabilities, so people can see only the portions of a file that they are entitled to, and are necessary for them to do their work.

    1970s & Beyond

    FHE was first discussed in the late 1970s, but the real breakthrough came at the 41st ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing  on 31 May 2009 where it was demonstrated for the first time by cryptographer Craig Gentry in his highly cited, seminal paper Fully Homomorphic Encryption Using Ideal Lattices.

    While the paper was exciting news, many in the industry felt that FHE would remain on the cryptographic shelf because it was too slow for everyday usage due to the complexity of the computation and the enormous computing power it required. Thankfully, a small team at IBM Research took that on as a challenge and a decade later FHE performance has improved to a level that is adequate for certain applications, which will only improve with algorithmic advancements and future hardware accelerators.

    Use Cases

    FHE holds significant promise for a number of use cases such as extracting value from private data; data set intersection ; genomics analytics; obvious queries (i.e. querying without revealing intent) and secure outsourcing.

    FHE is particularly suited to industries which are regulated and make use of private, confidential and “crown jewel” data, such as finance and healthcare, since the technology can make it possible to share financial information or patient health records broadly while restricting access to all but the necessary data.

    For example, we recently published a paper with Brazil’s Banco Bradesco SA, where we homomorphically encrypted the data and the model, and showed that it was possible to run predictions with the same accuracy as without encryption and with adequate performance. The result, banks can safely outsource the task of running predictions to an untrusted environment.

    Show me the Tool Kits

    The new FHE toolkits for MacOS, iOS are now available in GitHub with Linux and Android expected in a few weeks. Each toolkit is based on HELib, the world’s most mature and versatile encryption library, includes sample programs making it easier to write FHE based code.

    The iOS toolkit includes an easy to follow and simple demonstration of a privacy preserving search against an encrypted database. The database is a key value store prepopulated with the English names of countries and their capital cities across Europe. Selecting the country will perform a search of the matching capital.

    I should point out that these are not perfect or final. We wanted to quickly put them out to get the technology into the hands of early adopters who want to make these concepts less abstract and more concrete as we look to build up a community of users and use cases.

    For a developer perspective, read this Q&A by my colleague Eli Dow and if you have questions join our Slack community.

    Clients interested in on-going training, knowledge transfer and joint development can sign up for a subscription to the FHE 2020 – Research Engagement Program.

     

  • AppOmni Supports Remote Workers with Release of Enterprise Essentials for SaaS

    New Solution Enables Enterprises to Securely Return to Business Operations 

    AppOmni, the world’s leading provider of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) for SaaS, today announced the release of Enterprise Essentials for remote workers. Enterprise Essentials secures top SaaS applications enterprises depend on today for day-to-day operations for remote workers. Enterprise Essentials includes security for Salesforce, Box, Zoom, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, and the recently announced Work.com.

    In the full-speed push toward remote work, organizations must ensure that these applications are configured correctly and in compliance with industry regulations and a host of privacy and data security requirements. Many enterprises lack the necessary tools to accurately assess the current state of their SaaS environment or alert them of any deviations from the approved best practices. The recent change in workforce and business models have exacerbated the problem, resulting in data exposures leading to possible breaches and/or regulatory compliance fines.

    “As enterprises increasingly rely on SaaS for their day-to-day operations, the security of data in SaaS as well as adherence to industry best practices is ever more critical,” says Brendan O’Connor, CEO and Co-Founder, AppOmni. “With many enterprises adapting to the new economic climate and supporting an increasingly remote workforce, their risk of data loss, data privacy, and compliance issues have grown exponentially. Misconfigurations, overly broad data sharing, and APIs exposed to the outside world create doorways for attackers to get in. Instead of trying to penetrate the corporate network to steal information, attackers now seek to pluck unsecured data straight from the cloud.”

    AppOmni’s platform implements guardrails for internal and external users of mission critical SaaS applications, enabling employees to work productively and securely. As the world’s leading provider of CSPM for SaaS, AppOmni enables organizations to quickly identify and remediate risky configurations, improper access controls, and data exposures before a breach can occur.

    According to Gartner, “Nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are the result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement and mistakes. Security and risk management leaders should invest in cloud security posture management processes and tools to proactively and reactively identify and remediate these risks.”*

    The platform provides customers an always-on dashboard that delivers visibility into the current state of their cloud/SaaS applications, deviations from their business intent, and a simple way to immediately verify the state of any application for both functional and security requirements. The platform can be deployed within minutes and immediately integrates into existing workflows to provide actionable insight and visibility on day one.

    “Given the rapid pace of data loss after the initial compromise of SaaS applications, solutions only providing detection and monitoring capabilities essentially become breach notification systems. Comprehensive preventative controls are the critical feature for any SaaS security platform,” said Brian Soby, CTO and Co-Founder, AppOmni. “AppOmni is giving security teams the ability to scan and assess the security of their mission critical SaaS applications, helping enterprises establish and maintain best practices, and prevent security issues before they occur.”

    AppOmni Enterprise Essentials is available immediately from AppOmni and AppOmni authorized partners.

    To learn more about AppOmni Enterprise Essentials, please visit appomni.com/EnterpriseEssentials.

    About AppOmni

    AppOmni is the world’s leading provider of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) for SaaS. AppOmni provides unprecedented data access visibility, management and security of SaaS solutions, enabling organizations to secure mission-critical and sensitive data. AppOmni’s patent-pending technology deeply scans APIs, security controls, and configuration settings to evaluate the current state of SaaS deployments and compare against best practices and business intent. With AppOmni, organizations can establish rules for data access, data sharing and third-party applications that will be continuously and automatically validated. The company’s leadership team brings expertise and innovation from leading SaaS providers, high tech companies, and cybersecurity vendors. For more information, please visit www.appomni.com.