devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Application Error Monitoring Platform Airbrake Raises $11 Million from Elsewhere Partners

    Experienced leadership team to focus on market expansion and product roadmap

    Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA, April 9, 2020 – Airbrake, a leading application performance and code-level error monitoring software company, announced an $11 million financing round led by Elsewhere Partners. Airbrake offers real-time error monitoring for the end-to-end application stack, improving the efficiency of continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD).

    Airbrake takes CI/CD to the next level by revealing real-time application errors, combining code-scanning and error-logging before it reaches the end-user. This increases the velocity that companies can release high-quality applications, reduces development costs, and improves customer retention.

    “Airbrake grew rapidly and profitably under the product-focused leadership of Joe Godfrey,” said Nick Stoffregen, Vice President at Elsewhere Partners. “The company created a product that developers love, and Airbrake has grown organically as a result, without dedicated sales and marketing teams.”

    Several senior-level software company veterans have joined Airbrake to expand the Go-To-Market strategy and product roadmap. The team plans to focus on increasing value to the developer community and helping businesses accelerate digital transformation.

    The expanded executive team includes:

    “We’re excited to continue nurturing the strong relationships Airbrake has built with customers in the developer community,” said Treb Ryan, CEO of Airbrake. “Once dev teams try Airbrake, they uncover real-world errors across the entire solution that they never knew existed,” Ryan said.

    “Airbrake is a textbook example of the success of product-led growth,” said Shelley Perry, Executive Chairman of Airbrake. “This investment allows Airbrake to focus on value-led growth, which includes increasing customer feedback, building community, and investing in partnerships within the CI/CD ecosystem,” Perry said.

    About Airbrake 

    Airbrake is a full-stack Application Monitoring service that helps thousands of engineering teams build and deploy great software. Airbrake provides real-time feedback on what’s broken, who’s affected, and how to fix it, allowing teams to ship better quality software with speed and confidence. It fits seamlessly within the existing workflow, integrating with Slack, JIRA, GitHub, GitLab, and other popular productivity tools. Thousands of companies use Airbrake to handle hundreds of millions of errors every month This includes the world’s leading streaming entertainment services, digital home security monitoring, and customer service and engagement platforms.

    About Elsewhere Partners

    Founded in 2017, Elsewhere Partners is a growth-stage venture capital firm founded by former Austin Ventures partners; the firm focuses investments on what they call “Elsewhere Outliers” –– business software companies that are located outside of traditional venture capital hubs and have achieved substantial customer traction and revenue growth that are ready to scale. Elsewhere Partners combines transitional capital with leadership expertise to help companies achieve exit readiness on their founder’s timetable. Elsewhere Partners portfolio includes Airbrake, ActivTrak, burstIQ, Foresite, Intential, OpsCompass, Relatient (exited), Statflo, Tasktop, and Vyopta.

     

     

  • Syncfusion Releases Essential Studio 2020 Volume 1

    Latest version brings new Kanban, Progress Bar, and Card controls to comprehensive Blazor suite

    Research Triangle Park, N.C., April 09, 2020—Syncfusion, Inc. announced today the release of Essential Studio 2020 Volume 1. The highlights of this release include new Kanban, Progress Bar, and Card controls in preview for the Blazor suite and the move of 11 other Blazor controls from preview to final release. The Essential JS 2 suites also gain three new components, and the Xamarin platforms receive a plethora of new features to improve existing controls.

    “Our developer community continues to be very enthusiastic about our growing Blazor suite and this latest release responds to that demand by offering some of the most requested Blazor controls, such as the kanban board,” said Daniel Jebaraj, CEO of Syncfusion. “Our commitment to offering quarterly product updates allows us to deliver the latest and most requested features to our growing community.”

    Syncfusion’s native Blazor components library contains over 65 high-performance, lightweight, modular, and responsive UI controls in a single package. Updates in Volume 1 include:

    • Kanban—allows users to visually organize and prioritize work, and manage workflow transparency.
    • Progress Bar—allows users to visualize the changing status of an extended operation, such as a download, file transfer, or installation.
    • Card—offers a flexible and extensible content container with multiple variants and options like headers, footers, media, content, and actions.

    Syncfusion’s Essential JS 2 suites receive new Kanban, Progress Bar, and Dropdown Tree components in this release. A few other release highlights for the web platforms include:

    • Resource view support for the Gantt Chart control (JavaScript, React, Vue).
    • Infinite scrolling support in DataGrid and batch editing support in TreeGrid (ASP.NET MVC, Angular).
    • Web layout support for Word Processor (React, Vue).
    • Native template support for HTML shapes in Diagram (ASP.NET Core).

    Syncfusion also continues its dedication to the Xamarin platform with new features such as trend line support for the Charts control. Xamarin.Forms now comes with WPF support for the DataGrid control, while Xamarin.Android and Xamarin iOS are enhanced with a current time indicator in the Scheduler control and row- and column-span support for fields in the DataForm control.

    These are just a few of the new controls and features in Essential Studio 2020 Volume 1. Explore the entire list on the What’s New page. Existing customers can download the new version of Essential Studio by signing into their accounts. Those interested in trying Essential Studio can download a free 30-day trial. Syncfusion Essential Studio is a software product offering 1,600+ components and frameworks that can be used in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code for developing stunning applications.

    About Syncfusion, Inc.

    Syncfusion is the enterprise technology partner of choice for software development, delivering a broad range of web, mobile, and desktop controls coupled with a service-oriented approach throughout the entire application lifecycle. Syncfusion has established itself as the trusted partner worldwide for use in mission-critical applications. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Research Triangle Park, N.C., Syncfusion has more than 22,000 customers, including large financial institutions, Fortune 100 companies, and global IT consultancies.

     

  • IBM and CGI U partner on the 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge University Edition to take on COVID-19 and climate change

    Encouraging students to help tackle the world’s reaction to COVID-19 and climate change.

    By Dennis Bly
    Published April 9, 2020

  • Okera Raises $15 Million to Meet Growing Customer Demand, Names Nick Halsey CEO

    ClearSky leads investment, Patrick Heim and Tim Eades join the Okera board

    SAN FRANCISCO, April 7, 2020 — Okera today announced the company has raised $15 million in new funding to help provide enterprises with secure data access at scale for modern analytic platforms. The strategic investment was led by ClearSky Security. The current raise brings the total funding for the company to $29.6 million and includes participation by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures. The new funding will be used to expand Okera’s investment in engineering, sales, and marketing.

    Nick Halsey, who has joined Okera as CEO and board member, most recently served as President and CEO of Zoomdata. Timothy Eades, vArmour CEO and an early investor in Okera, has been named Executive Chairman and Patrick Heim, Partner and CISO at ClearSky, has joined the Okera board.

    According to Gartner, organizations are increasingly using multi-cloud architectures which introduces a layer of complexity to secure and protect data management and access. In addition, companies must comply with an evolving data privacy regulation landscape, including GDPR and CCPA with GDPR fines alone likely to exceed $1 billion by 2021.

    With these evolving privacy regulations, the Okera Active Data Access Platform (ODAP) enables companies to comply and better deliver secure data access in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Data owners and stewards can now automatically discover and audit data usage in their data lake, create access policies using its visual policy engine and enforce fine-grained access. Sensitive data can be dynamically protected using obfuscation functions including tokenization, anonymization, pseudonymization, redaction, and masking.

    “Nick’s success in building large, high-performing organizations in the data management and analytics sectors makes him an ideal leader for Okera at this exciting stage of growth,” said Nong Li, Okera Co-Founder and CTO.

    “It’s never been more important than today to secure data access, especially in the current climate with more employees working remotely than ever before,” said Halsey. “There’s an infinite market opportunity for us and I’m looking forward to working with Nong and the exceptionally talented team at Okera.”

    “In my role as a CISO, I understand that one of the biggest challenges facing companies is securing access to data while being compliant with rapidly evolving privacy regulations,” said Heim. “I was impressed with Okera’s technology and how easily it can be implemented to create a tremendous opportunity for enterprises to shift from a reactive posture for each new data security challenge to building security into their infrastructure from the ground up.”

    About Okera
    Okera provides secure data access at scale so that data teams have the confidence to unlock the power of their data for innovation and growth. By ensuring that appropriate data access controls are in place and meet the evolving data privacy landscape, the Okera Active Data Access Platform can automatically discover and audit data lakes, create access policies using its visual policy engine, and enforce fine-grained access in multi-cloud environments such as AWS and Azure. Okera is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, ClearSky Security, and Felicis Ventures. Learn more at www.okera.com or contact us at info@okera.com.

    About ClearSky Security
    ClearSky is a venture capital/growth equity firm that has been operating since 2012 with offices in Florida, New York, Boston and San Francisco. ClearSky is currently investing through two funds: ClearSky Security and ClearSky Power & Technology. ClearSky Security invests in companies that offer transformative security solutions, with a special focus on cybersecurity, privacy, compliance and data governance. ClearSky Power & Technology invests in innovative companies providing technology and services to enterprise customers, with a special focus on the power and enterprise software/infrastructure sectors.

     

  • Pega Helps Accelerate Digital Transformation With Launch of Pega Kickstart Services

    New fixed-price offerings help enable businesses to deploy customer microjourneys, email bots, or workforce intelligence in just weeks

    CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 7, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company empowering digital transformation at the world’s leading enterprises, today announced the launch of Pega Kickstart™ – a new family of fixed-price services that help businesses quickly deploy Pega software to help address critical customer and employee experience problems. Through a combination of Pega tools, best practices, and a dedicated services team, Pega Kickstart provides a faster path to digital transformation with high-impact returns delivered in just weeks.

    This screenshot shows how Pega Email Bot uses AI to analyze incoming customer emails, pull out important data, and initiate action on the customer request. Today Pega announced Pega Email Bot Kickstart, a new service in the Pega Kickstart service family that enables clients to deploy a complete intelligent email automation solution in just five weeks for $75,000.

    Digital transformation – once a marathon – has now turned into a sprint. Organizations are scrambling to adjust to an extraordinary level of disruption brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses are reassessing how to meet the increasing digital demands of their homebound customers while also helping their newly remote employees stay engaged and productive. But these are not new problems; the pandemic has only accelerated the need to fix them.

    Today Pega introduced three new Pega Kickstart services offering a way for businesses to more rapidly solve today’s challenges while also helping set the foundation for future innovation. These services include:

    • Pega Microjourney™ Kickstart: Pega will design and deliver a customer microjourney in as little as five weeks for $100,000. A microjourney is a new term describing a customer’s path to a specific desired outcome – such as “inquire about service,” “dispute a charge,” or “onboard a new partner.” After years of perfecting low-code development, the Pega team will collaborate with clients to identify, design, and quickly deliver a highly-automated microjourney to help improve the customer experience.
    • The Pega Platform™ low-code app development software makes it easy for clients to manage, improve, and extend their new microjourney after the initial deployment. The platform comes integrated with Pega Express™, an intuitive software development methodology that guides users step by step through the implementation process – from designing to building to driving user adoption. With no manual coding skills required, Pega Platform empowers businesspeople to modify the solution or create new microjourneys with minimal effort.
    • Pega Email Bot™ Kickstart: Pega will deploy Pega Email Bot – a complete intelligent email automation solution – in as little as five weeks for $75,000. Businesses are drowning in customer inquiries coming in via email, a problem that’s grown exponentially worse in the pandemic. Customer service personnel simply can’t keep up. Pega experts will work with the client deploy Pega Email Bot, which automates the triage and response to these large volumes of customer email from end to end. It uses artificial intelligence with natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand the purpose and intent of each email, then applies dynamic case management to drive the inquiry to resolution.
    • Pega Workforce Intelligence™ Kickstart: In as little as seven weeks for $25,000, Pega will deploy Pega Workforce Intelligence software to help businesses understand how their employees work and the obstacles that get in the way of doing their jobs. These insights are even more important today as organizations try to manage their newly remote workforce from a distance. Pega Workforce Intelligence will analyze the desktop actions of up to 200 employees to uncover the hidden inefficiencies that hinder performance – from broken processes to ineffective technology. Pega experts will then guide the client to turn these insights into action to help employees be more efficient and satisfied in their work.

    All Pega Kickstart services include professional services and training in one fixed fee. During the project, Pega Email Bot Kickstart and Pega Workforce Intelligence Kickstart also include software licensing, which can be extended for an additional fee after project delivery is completed. Pega Microjourney Kickstart clients can add software licensing to the project service based on the mutually agreed project outcomes. For more detailed information on Pega Kickstart, which are available today, please see the links in the Supporting Resources section below.

    Quotes & Commentary:
    “Even in the best of circumstances, businesses are in a never-ending race to keep up with changing customer expectations and ward off the latest market threats,” said Don Schuerman, CTO and vice president, product marketing, Pegasystems. “Now we’re offering an even faster and easier way to improve customer and employee experiences with our Pega Kickstart services. In just weeks, and for a fixed cost, our experts will deliver a custom solution built to meet today’s challenges and future proofed for the long haul.”

    Supporting Resources

     

    About Pega
    Pega is the leader in cloud software for customer engagement and operational excellence. The world’s most recognized and successful brands rely on Pega’s AI-powered software to optimize every customer interaction on any channel while ensuring their brand promises are kept. Pega’s low-code application development platform allows enterprises to quickly build and evolve apps to meet their customer and employee needs and drive digital transformation on a global scale. For more than 35 years, Pega has enabled higher customer satisfaction, lower costs, and increased customer lifetime value. For more information on Pegasystems (NASDAQ: PEGA) visit www.pega.com.

  • Impact of Visual AI on Test Automation Shows 5.8x Faster Authoring, 5.9x Better Test Code Efficiency, and a 4.6x Increase in Test Stability

    Empirical data from 288 Quality Engineers reveals how Applitools Visual AI helps teams release higher quality apps faster when using Cypress, Selenium, and WebdriverIO

    SAN MATEO, Calif., April 7, 2020 – Applitools, the leading provider of Visual AI powered test automation, today announced an industry report that reveals the impact of Visual AI on the performance of the most popular open source test frameworks – Cypress, Selenium, and WebdriverIO. Data was sourced from 288 quality engineers across 101 countries, spending an average of 11 hours during November 2019. This amounts to a combined 80 work weeks, or well over a year and a half of quality engineering hours, making it the largest industry study of its kind to date.

    To download the “Impact of Visual AI on Test Automation Report” visit: (https://www.applitools.com/impact-of-visual-ai/)

    “The Impact of Visual AI on Test Automation Report” provides important learning including:

    • 5.8x Faster Test Creation: When using existing open source code-based frameworks in isolation, it took testers 7 hours to create test code in contrast to just 1.2 hours using Visual AI. As a result, testers are able to greatly expand test coverage while simultaneously releasing faster than ever before.
    • 3.8x Increase in Test Code Stability: Participants used 32 locators and labels on average to provide test coverage using code based frameworks alone. This number dropped to just 7 with Visual AI. This increased stability greatly reduces test flakiness, broken CI/CD builds, and time spent on maintenance. Better test stability leads to efficiency gains along whatever dimension the quality engineering team values most – either more coverage, more time to manage quality, or even faster test cycles in support of CI/CD.
    • 45% More Efficient at Catching Bugs: Participants caught 19 out of 20 bugs (95%) using Visual AI compared to just 13 (65%) when using code based frameworks in isolation. When test builds are faster, provide more coverage, and are more stable and easily maintained, testers catch more bugs pre-production while still delivering more features, faster than previously thought possible.
    • Visual AI Helped Testers Succeed in Their Work When Used in Conjunction with Open Source Frameworks: All 288 testers that participated in the study achieved success rates of 79% when using their preferred code-based framework vs. 88% with Visual AI. This is a nine point jump in their performance after just a single hour of Visual AI training. Eric Davidson, Software Engineer from Chick-Fil-A comments, “This was an incredible opportunity to experience the power of Visual AI. Applitools has created a tool that easily integrates with existing frameworks and quickly augments functional test suites…”

    To dive deeper into this study, register for the upcoming webinar on April 23, 2020, “The Impact of Visual AI on Selenium, Cypress, and WebdriverIO: Side-by-Side Test Code Comparison From 288 Quality Engineers” hosted by Raja Rao and James Lamberti of Applitools (https://go.applitools.com/200423-Hackathon-insights-webinar.html).

    “Visual AI is a tremendous efficiency multiplier for automated testing,” said Gil Sever, CEO of Applitools. “It improves the productivity of developers and test automation engineers more than 5X, delivers huge time and money savings in the app delivery cycle, removes the testing bottleneck in the CI/CD process, and helps deliver software applications with unprecedented visual and functional quality on any computer and mobile device.”

    “Testers need to look at Visual AI as a superpower. A virtual assistant that can access every screen and page in minutes, inspect it for changes and interpret every one of them the same way the human eye and brain would, but do so without ever getting tired or making any mistakes. We believe this capability is a major part of the future of test automation.”

    According to Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Software Test Automation (December 18, 2019), “61% of [its 2019 Software Quality Tools and Practices Survey] respondents said that AI/ML features would be very valuable in software testing tools. Improved defect detection (48%), reduction in test maintenance cost (42%) and improved test coverage (41%) were seen as the top benefits expected (multiple answers were allowed).” “The Impact of Visual AI on Test Automation Report” provides empirical evidence that Applitools Visual AI delivers exactly what the market expects from the addition of AI/ML into automated testing.

    Data was sourced via the “Global Visual AI Rockstar Hackathon” which challenged software testers to create test suites for five real-world functional testing use-cases using their preferred code-based approach, including Selenium, Cypress, or WebdriverIO, and then repeat the process after adding Applitools Visual AI. This approach provided an unbiased, highly controlled environment from 288 quality engineers from 101 different countries during the 30 days ending November 30, 2019.

    “Completing the hackathon was a keystone achievement in my career!” said Tracy Mazelin, QA Engineer at Paylocity. “I learned more by participating in this hackathon than any other automation instruction I’ve taken in the past number of years. I’m now 100 percent convinced that Visual AI testing is an essential tool for efficiently validating web and mobile software applications.”

    “This was the most interesting and useful event of the year in the field of test automation,” said Viktar Silakou, Lead QA Automation Engineer at Globant S.A. “This allows you to take a look at test automation from a different point of view and gives an opportunity to radically improve your existing approaches.”

    About Applitools

    Applitools enables Visual AI powered test automation to help teams release high-quality web and mobile apps faster and more efficiently.

    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 Software, Banking, Insurance, Retail, Pharmaceuticals, 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.

  • Prey Releases Free Remote Device Monitor Tool to Help Small and Medium Businesses Switch to Remote Work During Global COVID-19 Emergency

    This new software allows IT managers to monitor and manage up to 50 devices remotely (laptops, tablets, or mobiles), visualizing their position, their network’s security status, and more features that intend to help maintain visibility on enterprise fleets as they transition to remote work

    SAN FRANCISCO, April 07, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Prey Inc., provider of the cross-platform, open source anti-theft and device management software that protects more than eight million mobile devices, released today the Remote Device Monitor. This is a free, lightweight version of Prey’s management software designed to provide companies that are rushing a transition to remote work with a way of having visibility and basic security control over the computers, laptops, and mobile devices that their workforce take home during the COVID-19 crisis.

    This tool is composed of two parts. The agent, installed on the enterprise’s device, and the online management panel, from where the fleet’s manager will be able to monitor the linked devices live in a global map view that reflects the device’s live location, their unique ID, online status, connectivity, active network, and the network’s security status to ensure the device is not in a vulnerable environment.

    Moreover, administrators have a field at disposal on each device to assign a user, and add a contact for that user, to keep accountability of the worker responsible for each of the devices. If contact with the user is necessary for a quick alert, administrators can also send an individual or collective message alert that will be displayed on the devices’ screen.

    This is available as a standalone solution, companies can sign up here, but utilizes the same agent installer as the rest of Prey’s platform.

    The Concerns That Rushed Remote Work Generated

    This new free asset was conceived from an investigation that the Prey team kickstarted after seeing the concerns and troubles raised by its user and the IT community during this unexpected and in-mass shift to remote work.

    The team reviewed the main concerns that were to be addressed in these circumstances and identified the following: a vast majority of the community needed to have visibility of the location of the company’s devices assigned for remote work. The second concern was keeping basic accountability of the workers responsible for each device. Thirdly, 50% of the consulted users considered network information necessary to implement palliative measures if the connections are insecure, badly protected, or open.

    Advice on Remote Work Preparation

    Prey has 10 years of experience as a remote device management and security solution, and the same amount of time as a company that works under a hybrid-remote work policy, where the location of work is flexible and non-mandatory for its workers.

    Due to this, the team has decided to compile a series of recommendations to overcome the technical, humane, and communication challenges that come with the implementation of remote work. As promoters of this work policy, two introductory pieces were shared:

    About Prey Inc.
    Prey Inc. is a software development company, provider of the Prey service: an anti-theft, data protection, device management and tracking platform for enterprise organizations with 10 years of experience in the market. It currently serves over 7 million users worldwide and protects more than 8 million laptops, tablets, and mobiles. Prey’s cross-platform, open-source security solution consolidates mobile device management on a single account, no matter how many different device manufacturers or operating systems need to be tracked.

    Find out more at: www.preyproject.com.

  • CloudBees Named Google Cloud 2019 Technology Partner of the Year for Application Development

    SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CloudBees, Inc. today announced that it has received the 2019 Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year for Application Development.

    CloudBees was recognized for its achievements in software development in the Google Cloud ecosystem. Joint customers are able to optimize software delivery processes through CloudBees’ continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) offerings, including the first end-to-end continuous Software Delivery Management (SDM) system and the first cloud native CD as a Service solution, powered by Jenkins X.

    SDM is an emerging category of software for IT that defines software delivery as a core business process. CloudBees has outlined its vision for the category, introducing a set of capabilities for its SDM platform that connect artifacts, data and events across an organization’s DevOps toolchain into a unified system of record. CloudBees SDM platform was built from the ground up on Google Cloud.

    CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X extends the value for enterprises by providing a SaaS environment for Jenkins X on Google Cloud. Using the solution, developers gain a full cloud native experience for the build-test-deploy lifecycle without having to spend time managing a cloud implementation and the complexities of Kubernetes. CloudBees CI/CD powered by Jenkins X, is built with robust integrations into Google Cloud’s Platform infrastructure.

    “We’re proud to be named Google Cloud’s 2019 Technology Partner of the Year for Application Development,” said Francois Dechery, chief strategy officer, CloudBees. “This award recognizes our outstanding success in 2019, using a winning combination of Google Cloud technologies in multiple technology segments to deliver innovative software development solutions and customer satisfaction.”

    “We’re delighted to recognize CloudBees’ work in application and software development on Google Cloud,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice-president, global ecosystem at Google Cloud. “CloudBees’ capabilities in software delivery management, built on Google Cloud, can help enterprise IT streamline the development and delivery of new applications across an organization. We look forward to a continued partnership to help customers succeed.”

    CloudBees Core and CloudBees Accelerator are all available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.

    Additional Resources

    About CloudBees

    CloudBees, the enterprise software delivery company, provides the industry’s leading DevOps technology platform. CloudBees enables developers to focus on what they do best: Build stuff that matters, while providing peace of mind to management with powerful risk mitigation, compliance and governance tools. Used by 50% of the Fortune 100, CloudBees is helping thousands of companies harness the power of continuous everything and gets them on the fastest path from great idea, to great software, to amazing customer experiences, to being a business that changes lives.

    Backed by Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures, Delta-v Capital, Golub Capital and Unusual Ventures, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite team of continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps professionals. Follow CloudBees on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

  • Instana Releases Context Guide, First Graphical UI Representation of an Application System Model

    Company’s Automated APM Solution Now Shows Users Context Without Requiring any Training or Knowledge About the Management Application

    Under Embargo Until: April 7, 2020 at 8:10 am EST

    Chicago, IL – April 7, 2020 – Instana, a leading provider of automated Application Performance Management (APM) solutions for microservices, today announced the availability of the Instana Context Guide, providing GUI-based access to the company’s underlying system model called the Dynamic Graph. With the release of Context Guide, Instana becomes the first APM solution to provide a graphical navigator through managed applications’ service architecture.

    “A major challenge of modern Dev and Ops teams is the ability to see and understand what’s going on in complex application eco-systems,” said Chris Farrell, Instana Technical Director and APM Strategist. “Instana’s new Context Guide allows any user to get an instant visualization of the upstream and downstream dependencies for any object or service in the application, without requiring any training or technical knowledge.”

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

    A key part of that automation is enabled through the company’s Dynamic Graph, an advanced uber-model that includes dependencies, individual infrastructure health profiles, configuration information and performance information – all updated in real-time as the system changes. The release of Context Guide marks the first time that users can actually use the dynamic graph for themselves to navigate across the application and infrastructure visualizations that are the heart of Instana’s Application Performance Monitoring solution.

    “Container orchestration and service-oriented architecture have helped us improve on scalability and reliability of our applications for our customers. But they’ve also introduced more complexity which makes it difficult to get the visibility we want for effectively monitoring performance,” said Tobias Otto, Technical Lead at INFORM, GmbH. “While Instana has always helped us deal with that complexity, the new Context Guide allows us to actually navigate through it in an easy and intuitive way. The new Context Guide didn’t need any introduction; people just started using it, making it even easier to look at the entire nature of an individual problematic application component, from downstream dependencies to the application infrastructure with a few clicks.”

    The Dynamic Graph is a key component of Instana’s automated and AI-powered features. More than just a model, the dynamic graph is an inventory of all individual entities, configuration data, performance metrics, dependencies and change logs – all wrapped up in one – and with every other entity in the system.

    The latest in a series of product releases designed to help Dev and Ops teams optimize performance of their applications, today’s announcement provides deeper information, specifically situational context,  about each service, relationships between services and the overall application. With Context Guide, now users can quickly traverse from user requests to slow transactions to problematic software or infrastructure with just a few clicks.

    You can learn more about Instana and Context Guide at https://instana.com.

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    ABOUT INSTANA

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

     

  • IBM awards its second $50,000 Open Source Community Grant to internship and mentorship program Outreachy

    By Todd Moore and Guillermo Miranda
    Last October, the open source community at IBM awarded a first-of-its-kind quarterly grant to promote nonprofits that are dedicated to education, inclusiveness, and skill-building for women, underrepresented minorities, and underserved communities in the open source world. Our Open Source Community Grant identifies and rewards future developers and open source leaders and creates new tech opportunities for underrepresented communities.
    Today, we are pleased to announce that the winner of the second quarterly Open Source Community Grant is Outreachy. Our open source community nominated a number of nonprofits doing incredible work and, while voting was close with plenty of deserving organizations in the mix, we awarded Outreachy the most votes for their commitment to providing paid internships to underserved and underrepresented minorities. The award is timely as it will help Outreachy provide paid remote work to underrepresented groups in a time when people are being forced to work from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Open source internships provide skills, training remotely
    Outreachy is a nonprofit that provides internships in the free and open source software (FOSS) space for people from groups that face under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the technology industry of their country. Outreachy explicitly invites applications from women (both cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people and people from Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander backgrounds.
    “The current COVID-19 crisis underscores the inequities in our society. People who have jobs that can be done remotely find themselves in a stable situation and able to weather this crisis at home while many workers have no immediate way to earn a living without risking their lives,” said Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, the parent organization of Outreachy.
    “Getting paid home-based work to folks who are subject to systemic bias has never been more important than it is right now. We’re working to make this Outreachy round the biggest one ever to help the most people right now. This grant will make a big difference to offset the reduction in some of our corporate sponsorship from companies that are struggling.”
    Outreachy internships are open to applicants around the world; interns work remotely and are not required to move. Outreachy interns are also paid a stipend of $5,500 USD for the three-month internship and usually have a $500 USD travel stipend to attend conferences or events. Outreachy has converted the travel payment to support people in their efforts to stay at home while the current pandemic crisis continues.

    What is the Open Source Community Grant?
    IBM has a longstanding commitment to investing in diversity and inclusion. The IBM Open Source Community Grant recognizes a nonprofit organization dedicated to education and skill building for women, under-represented minorities, and underserved communities, while also promoting open source. The grant includes a cash award ($25K) and a technology award (valued at $25K) to directly support education and career development activities. Our internal open source community votes on the winners, with Girls Who Code winning the inaugural awardin October 2019.

    Stay tuned for how Outreachy uses their award
    We owe a big thank you to our open source community at IBM for casting their votes and helping us decide which of the many great community improvement initiatives we should support with this second Open Source Community Grant. Stay tuned for updates about how Outreachy uses their award.
    Todd Moore is the Vice President of Open Technology and Developer Advocacy at IBM and Guillermo Mirandais the Vice President and Global Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at IBM.


    Photo CC-BY-NC-SA Sage Sharp. From left to right: Lidza Louina (former Outreachy intern and Systems Software Engineer at DigitalOcean), Tony Sebro (Outreachy organizer and legal counsel for Wikimedia Foundation), Jessica Marlene Canepa (former Outreachy intern and Product Help Content Writer at GitHub), and Sage Sharp (Outreachy organizer and diversity and inclusion consultant at Otter Tech).