devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • DevOps Institute Expands Team to Support Global IT Community Demand for DevOps Skills Transformation

    As a member-based association, DevOps Institute is unifying an open continuous learning community comprised of IT professionals, education partners, consultants, talent acquisition and business executives

    BOCA RATON, Fla., April 8, 2019 — DevOps Institute (https://devopsinstitute.com/), a member-based association for advancing the human elements of DevOps, today announced its continued growth with the addition of several new team members and promotions. With more than 200 global Registered Education Partners, tens of thousands of certified professionals and a rapidly expanding worldwide member community, DevOps Institute expanded its team to further support its SKIL Framework of Skills, Knowledge, Ideas and Learning.

    DevOps Institute is committed to advancing the human elements of DevOps success by providing IT practitioners and the DevOps community a holistic framework that’s needed to advance their careers and support their organization’s transformation.  From accredited certifications and research to live events and continuous learning programs, DevOps Institute is 100 percent focused on providing the “know-how” to make DevOps possible.

    “The results of our recent Upskilling research outlines the growing need for T-shaped professionals* and the new skill sets that are sweeping the global enterprise IT community,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute. “To support our members and partners, and grow our own SKIL framework, we’ve strengthened our organization with committed and passionate team members. We believe that passionate, skilled people are the critical success factor for DevOps success.”

    In addition to the team of Community Advocates now supporting the European and Latin America markets, additional team members of DevOps Institute include:

    • Rinku Sachdeva: Certification and Learning Program Manager

    Based in Toronto, Sachdeva has extensive experience in managing and marketing enterprise certification and learning programs – particularly products within the IT community. She will be invaluable in building and delivering continuous learning programs to partners and the community.

    • Arlene Hoffman: Global Marketing Director

    Based in South Florida, Hoffman brings a wide range of marketing expertise across multiple B2B vertical markets, including content management, digital creation, brand messaging and marketing automation. She will ensure the industry is aware of and has access to the growing body of SKIL framework knowledge.

    • Sean Bush: Event Management Specialist

    Based in South Florida, Bush, a graduate of Florida State University with a degree in marketing and entrepreneurship, comes to DevOps Institute from a translation software vendor. He will play an active role in the DevOps Institute’s growing events initiative for years to come.

    In addition, DevOps Institute is pleased to announce the following promotions:

    • Dheeraj Nayal has been promoted to Global Community Ambassador
    • Marc Halcrow has been promoted to Director of Development and Operations
    • Taylor Puleri has been promoted to Digital Marketing and Social Media Manager
    • Alice Acedia has been promoted to Account Manager to support existing partners

    To learn more about DevOps Institute and it’s SKIL framework for advancing the human elements of DevOps, please visit (https://devopsinstitute.com/). To receive a complimentary copy of the 2019 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report, please visit (https://hubs.ly/H0gJb190).

    About the DevOps Institute

    DevOps Institute is a membership association dedicated to advancing the human elements of DevOps success. We believe DevOps holds the greatest promise to help enterprises transform the entire IT paradigm into a competitive advantage that encompasses all facets of the organization. Our mission is based on a framework of skills, knowledge, ideas and learning (SKIL) that practitioners need to advance DevOps and their careers. All of its work, including accreditations, research, events, and continuous learning programs – is focused on providing the “know-how” to make DevOps possible.

    Web | https://devopsinstitute.com/

    Twitter | @DEVOPSINST

    LinkedIn | /devops-institute

    YouTube | DevOps Institute

     

  • SmartBear Goes All In at Atlassian Summit 2019 in Las Vegas

    SmartBear Experts Hit the Stage, Offer Personalized Demos, and Give out Envy-Inducing Prizes at Atlassian Summit – April 9-11, 2019 – Las Vegas

    SOMERVILLE, Mass. – April 05, 2019 – SmartBear, the innovator behind the industry’s highest impact tools to build, test, and monitor great software, is going all in at Atlassian Summit 2019, taking place on Tuesday, April 9 – Thursday, April 11 in Las Vegas with great speaker sessions, demos in Booth #1140, and envy-inducing prizes. Learn how Zephyr, acquired by SmartBear in 2018, as well as HipTest, Swagger, and the company’s functional and performance testing tools, work synchronously with Atlassian to round out the entire software development lifecycle.

    WHAT & WHEN:           

    SmartBear at Atlassian Summit 2019:

    • Breakout Session: Head of Test Management and Marketplace Solutions, Ryan Lloyd, is presenting, “Maximize the Effectiveness of Your Testing Process by Extending Your Jira Workflows” – Tuesday, April 9, 6:40 p.m. PDT
    • Breakout Session: Vice President of Product and HipTest Founder, Laurent Py, is presenting, “Can BDD Save Agile?” – Wednesday, April 10, 1:00 p.m. PDT
    • Expo: Meet the team and get demos at Booth #1140

    WHERE:

    Mandalay Bay South Convention Center, 3950 South Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada

    Software teams continue to successfully leverage Jira to manage their development processes. While Jira remains as the central place for teams to manage their work, there is often uncertainty about how to manage their testing efforts and improve on quality goals. The good news is many patterns and solutions exist to help companies extend their Jira workflows and deliver quality software. Join Ryan Lloyd in his session to learn how your team can improve testing and make progress towards your goals.

    In 2018, Ron Jeffries wrote a controversial post: Should Developers Abandon Agile? With Agile going mainstream, some of the key values are being misunderstood. How can Behavior Driven Development (BDD) help? Laurent Py walks through a real example from a DevOps team deploying 10+ times a day in production using both BDD and Test Driven Development to address these challenges. Learn how to combine excellent collaboration with excellent code to see if BDD can save Agile.

    During the Sponsor Booth Crawl on Wednesday, attendees are invited to stop by the SmartBear booth to chat over sushi and beer.

    SmartBear continues to strengthen its relationship with Atlassian by leveraging SmartBear tools to bring more value to the users of the Atlassian Marketplace.

    SmartBear is a Diamond Sponsor of Atlassian Summit 2019. For more information on the event, visit: https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/smartbear-atlassian-summit-2019/

    About SmartBear Software

    SmartBear is behind the software that empowers developers, testers, and operations engineers at over 20,000 of the world’s most innovative organizations including Adobe, JetBlue, MasterCard, and Microsoft. More than 6 million people use our tools to build, test, and monitor great software, faster. Our high-impact tools are easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to use. These tools are backed by a team of people passionate about helping you create software that transforms our world. Those tools are SmartBear tools. That team is SmartBear. For more information, visit: http://smartbear.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

     

     

  • Cloud-Native Security Leader Alcide Integrates with Fortinet’s Security Fabric to Provide Hybrid Cloud Network Security solution

    Joint Solution Offers Unified Security Policy Enforcement and Enhanced Threat Detection Across Multiple Clusters and Multi-Cloud Deployments

    Tel Aviv – April 4th, 2019 – Alcide, a cloud-native security provider of the first Microservices Firewall, which secures microservices deployments with one policy engine for Dev, Sec and Ops, today announced a Fabric-Ready partnership with Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions. The joint hybrid cloud security offering aims to provide enhanced threat detection and mitigation for complex enterprise environments across public and private clouds, and support network and security teams with their daily task of ensuring a smooth, secure and frictionless business continuity.

    The integrated hybrid cloud security solution was created on top of FortiOS – the Fortinet operating system that connects security devices together for effective and comprehensive security, while ensuring full control over all security and networking capabilities. It also leverages FortiGuard Labs’ threat intelligence with Alcide’s powerful high-resolution reputation hit detection capabilities, such as crypto-mining, command & control and many others. Integrated together, Fortinet blocks threats at the network perimeter, while Alcide leverages its patent pending microservices behavioral-based anomaly engine to detect east-west attacks across and within the different clusters. In addition, the Alcide platform, automatically and selectively, by using FortiOS REST APIs, programs FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls to enforce a deeper security inspection for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), which results in an end-to-end security solution with a unified security policy enforcement across and with multiple Kubernetes clusters and hybrid-cloud deployments.

    Customers of the integrated solution benefit from the following:

    • Unified threat hunting and management
    • High-resolution triage of anomalous microservices network activity
    • Combining North-South threat intelligence reputation with deep East-West traffic inspection
    • Continuous control and visibility

    “We are excited to partner with Alcide to help customers apply consistent and broad security to their cloud-based application deployments. Leveraging the joint solution, customers can benefit from security tailored for their container and serverless environments working in concert with trusted and true network security for their cloud networks” said Lior Cohen, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Cloud Security at Fortinet.

    “We are thrilled to collaborate with Fortinet,” said Gadi Naor, co-founder and CTO, of Alcide, “by leveraging industry-leading security portfolio and integrating with FortiGate NGFW and FortiGuard Labs’ threat intelligence, which enables customers to easily harness deep security controls on public and hybrid cloud deployments.”

    Alcide will be presenting its hybrid cloud solution at Fortinet’s global user and partner conference Accelerate 19 , from April 8-11 , at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida.

    About Alcide

    Alcide is a cloud-native security leader empowering DevSecOps teams to continuously secure and protect their growing multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments. By automatically discovering, managing and enforcing security policies across deployments, Alcide’s Microservices Firewall for K8s and Istio enables unified code-to-production enforcement of security policies spanning networks and workloads. This enables the smooth operation of business apps while protecting cloud deployments from malicious attacks. More at https://www.alcide.io/

     

  • ChartIQ’s Finsemble Adds Support for Electron, Bringing World-Renowned Technology to its Smart Desktop Platform

    Financial technology company adds open-source container support to bolster reputation as desktop integration platform of the future

     

    Charlottesville, VA—April 4, 2019—Standing by its commitment to help the finance world work smarter, ChartIQ announces that its desktop integration platform, Finsemble, now supports Electron.

    Electron is the leading, open-source web container for writing cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is the framework behind a wide range of industry-leading applications like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and thousands more.

    Finsemble allows engineers to quickly integrate any type of application to create customized smart desktops faster. With Electron, they can build on a modern tech stack while improving overall performance for the end user.

    “Electron support takes Finsemble to another level,” CEO Dan Schleifer says. “Electron is deployed on over 100 million desktops around the world and is maintained by a robust open source community. Our customers can be assured their smart desktop is running on the fastest, most secure, HTML5 container.”

    A Global Community

    Electron is vibrant, free, and open-source, with active contributions by expert technologists from firms like Github, Microsoft, and ChartIQ itself. Building a smart desktop with Finsemble means financial firms can now join an expanding, global community.

    “Engineers in the finance world who have embraced web technologies want to use Electron,” said ChartIQ CTO Terry Thorsen. “They have something to be excited about—the option to build powerful desktop applications on a modern tech stack without having to discard or rebuild the legacy applications that users depend on.”

    An open-source technology like Electron eliminates the need for commercial software containers. Savvy executives can cut the entire budget line associated with commercial container costs by building their smart desktop with Finsemble.

    Performance and Security

    For maximum performance and security, Finsemble supports only the latest version of Electron. Finsemble’s built-in Electron Adapter also prevents vulnerabilities by firewalling untrusted content.

    Additionally, Finsemble automatically incorporates security features provided by Electron’s underlying Chromium engine. As the codebase behind the world’s most popular web browser, Chromium gives developers access to the best modern technology and APIs, and has been built to be secure by design.

    The Ultimate Smart Desktop

    Lower costs, speedier performance, and the global community that supports Electron all bolster Finsemble’s reputation as the desktop integration platform of the future.

    “Our engineers spent years discovering, and then solving, the hard problems associated with HTML5-based smart desktops. Our goal to provide an unparalleled desktop integration platform is easier with Electron under the hood,” Schleifer says.

    Start building your modern financial desktop today by scheduling a free demo of Finsemble or email us at info@chartiq.com to learn more.

    About ChartIQ

    ChartIQ provides software to help the finance world work smarter. The maker of the industry’s most powerful HTML5 financial charts, ChartIQ also delivers Finsemble, a desktop integration platform that links any financial applications together to create smart, modern desktops. ChartIQ’s solutions are built in current web technology to help firms innovate faster, saving them time and money. Founded in 2012, ChartIQ is a fast-growing firm based in Charlottesville, VA with offices in New York and London. Some of the largest financial institutions are among ChartIQ’s 300 global customers. For more information, please visit: https://www.chartiq.com.

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  • Sectigo Adds ACME Protocol Support in Certificate Manager Platform to Automate SSL Lifecycle Management

    Limits Human Error and Website Outages While Enabling Enterprises to Configure Automation Workflow

    ROSELAND, N.J – April 4, 2019 – Despite enterprises’ increasing use of modern, agile computing environments including virtualization, containerization, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud, a vast number of IT administrators continue to deploy and manage certificates using old-fashioned techniques better suited to the infrastructure of the 90s than today’s DevOps environments. This “management by spreadsheet” introduces inefficiency and risk of outage or non-compliance due to human error.

    To address the problem, Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA), the world’s largest commercial Certificate Authority and a leader in web security solutions, today announced support for the ACME protocol in its popular Sectigo Certificate Manager platform. By adding ACME support, Sectigo brings the reliability and efficiency of automation to enterprise certificate management.

    “Any organization managing certificates manually across hundreds of web servers is at huge risk of unexpected certificate expiration and the resulting system failures that can cripple a business for a period of time,” said Lindsay Kent, VP of Product Management, Sectigo.

    Lowering the TCO of Certificate Management

    A single-server SSL Certificate installation requires up to nine time-intensive steps including login, download, renewal configuration, and testing, and costs an estimated $50 to $100 per web for each installation or renewal. Plus, complexity and cost only increase for web servers using multiple domains, wildcard certificates, reverse proxies, or load balancers.

    Each step requires precise management by a web administrator or employee with technical skills to avoid the risk of human error and unexpected outages, which can be quite costly. For example, mobile operator O2 sought millions in damages from Ericsson following the loss of service for 32 million of its customers, along with those of other carriers around the globe. The day-long network data collapse in December 2018 owed itself to an expired certificate in the Ericsson technology stack servicing these carriers.

    “Manually installing SSL certificates requires specialized skills, without which the enterprise risks misconfiguration, lack of visibility into installed certificates, and the inability to rapidly replace certificates due to unplanned events. A web administrator who is more skilled with HTML coding and web site building, and less experienced in Linux shell, may have significant difficulty performing the necessary steps, or may spend a great deal of time learning,” added Kent.

    Four Ways to Automate While Maintaining Control

    Advancements in the Sectigo Certificate Manager platform address these enterprise-scale challenges by providing mechanisms to automate installation and renewal of SSL certificates to servers within the traditional data center or in a DevOps environment — fully automating both deployment and ongoing management. This ACME support applies to Extended Validation (EV), Organization Validation (OV), and Domain Validation (DV) SSL certificates.

    • Industry-standard ACME protocol – Developed by the IETF, Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) defines an extensible framework for automating issuance and validation procedures for certificates, enabling servers to obtain DV, OV, and EV SSL certificates without manual user interaction. More than 100 open-source ACME clients are available to automate certificate issuance on Apache, IIS, NGINX, F5 BIG-IP, Citrix Netscaler, and other popular web servers and networking gear. The ACME tools fully automate key generation, domain control validation, certificate creation, and installation on the server. Where public certificates are needed, the client can request them directly from Sectigo.

     

    • Proprietary automated method – For Apache, IIS, Tomcat, and F5 BIG-IP environments, Sectigo provides a client for installation in one location at the customer premise that can then communicate with all the enterprise’s servers. Sectigo Certificate Manager embeds the web server administrator credentials into this agent for installation of certificates and private key propagation.

     

    • Custom workflows with REST API – Customers may use Sectigo’s RESTful (Representational State Transfer) API to install certificates, allowing for a customized workflow, including approvals and other steps. The administrator can require approval for certificate requests originating from the ACME client and can discover, track, run reports on, and make manual changes to certificates.

     

    • Tighter integration with third-party products – Sectigo has integrated with F5 BIG-IP and is working on additional third-party integrations to deliver full automation and workflow management.

    To learn more, watch the Sectigo ACME Automation Video.

    About Sectigo

    Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA) provides web security products that help customers protect, monitor, recover, and manage their web presence and connected devices. As the largest commercial Certificate Authority trusted by enterprises globally for more than 20 years, and more than 100 million SSL certificates issued in over 200 countries, Sectigo has the proven performance and experience to meet the growing needs of securing today’s digital landscape. Follow Sectigo on LinkedIn or Twitter @SectigoHQ.

     

  • StackPath Unveils New EdgeEngine Capabilities

    Serverless Computing Service Grows Even More Powerful for Developers

    DALLAS — April 3, 2019 — StackPath, the world’s first secure edge platform, today announced new features and tools for StackPath EdgeEngine, the company’s simple yet powerful serverless computing service that lets developers run code at the cloud’s edge without a server, virtual machine, or container. The new features include an EdgeEngine CLI tool, sandbox, and WebAssembly (WASM) support, making it easier for developers to create, test, customize, and control EdgeEngine scripts.

    “We’re focused on helping developers easily build and innovate their solutions on the edge,” said Ben Gabler, StackPath Chief Product Officer. “EdgeEngine is built on modern technology and developers expect modern tooling to go with it. That includes opening up the language support beyond just JavaScript and providing tools to make getting on the edge even easier.

    StackPath has released three key improvements for the EdgeEngine:

    • EdgeEngine CLI tool: The EdgeEngine CLI tool allows developers to easily change scripts on the fly. Not only are new scripts/updates propagated to the entire Edge within 1-2 seconds, but with the CLI tool developers can now maintain version control in their existing CI/CD pipelines. The EdgeEngine CLI tool is available at https://github.com/stackpath/edgeengine-cli.
    • EdgeEngine Sandbox: The EdgeEngine Sandbox allows developers to create, test, and revise scripts before they are deployed to the edge, a critical step before pushing real-time business logic in front of an edge delivery solution. The EdgeEngine Sandbox is available at https://sandbox.edgeengine.io.
    • WebAssembly Support: EdgeEngine now supports WebAssembly (WASM), enabling developers to write scripts at the edge in more than 20 different languages, including C, C++, Rust, Go, and many more. A growing set of examples for using WASM with EdgeEngine is available at https://github.com/stackpath/edgeengine-examples.

    “As developers and users of our own technology, we constantly have ideas for making our products even more powerful and easier to use,” said Gabler. “Our team is at work creating more additional developer tools for our other Edge Computing products, such as containers and VMs, as well as our Edge Services including CDN, DNS, WAF, and monitoring.”

    About StackPath
    StackPath is a platform of secure edge services that enables developers to protect, accelerate, and innovate cloud properties ranging from websites to media delivery and IoT services. With an innovative global edge network infrastructure, StackPath delivers enterprise-grade security and performance in a frictionless, on-demand platform with cloud-scale control and flexibility. More than one million customers, including early-stage and Fortune 100 companies, use StackPath services. StackPath is headquartered in Dallas and has offices across the U.S. and around the world. For more information, visit stackpath.com and follow StackPath at www.fb.com/stackpathllc and www.twitter.com/stackpath

     

     

  • Alfresco Unveils new AI and ML-based Intelligence Services Module

     

    • Simply A Better Way to Extract Relevant Content from Unstructured Data with Amazon Web Services
    • Use with Unstructured, Content-Rich Environments such as Insurance Claims Servicing and Citizen Services

    BOSTON, MA. – April 3, 2019 – Alfresco Software, a commercial, open source software company today unveiled the immediate availability of a new Intelligence Services module for its cloud-first Digital Business Platform. The Intelligence Services module, which seamlessly leverages Amazon Web Service solutions, uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) to provide enterprises with a highly-scalable method for intelligently extracting important content often locked away in multiple documents, scanned images, videos and photographs.

    According to Forrester*, they are seeing “[their] customers want to extract more data and value from their managed content. AI and analytics are rapidly entering the landscape, particularly with cloud content platforms. Opportunities to automate the extraction of themes and entities and apply relevant metadata without disturbing information workers are becoming real.”

    Tony Grout, Chief Product Officer, noted: “The Alfresco Intelligence Services module enables users to access critical information from any type of content such as names and date of birth from a scan of a passport or a car license plate to a photograph of a traffic accident. While the underlying technology is sophisticated AI and ML, we have designed the module so that customers can easily define specific use-cases using very simple rules and actions.”

    Alfresco is seeing significant demand for the Intelligence Service module for two use-cases, Claims Service Automation and Citizen Services. Claims Services Automation helps insurance companies improve file intake and orchestrates claims processes in a secure and regulatory-compliant manner. Alfresco’s Citizen Services’ capability enables government agencies to receive and manage information and service requests from citizens. It includes content management, process design & orchestration as well as governance.

    Grout added: “In each of the Citizens Services and Claims Service Automation use-cases, Alfresco Intelligence Services help streamline processes by intelligently extracting critical information from document scans, video feeds, photographs and other unstructured data sources and adding to the case file as structured data. In essence, we created simply a better way to use Al and ML without the need for data scientists to configure and train AI over time.”

    The Intelligence Services module captures and preserves all AI data, which means users can reuse the data at any time when needed. It also extracts relevant intelligence in a way that provides granular control and enables users to use complex metadata structures, as well as build more effective user interfaces.

    The Alfresco Intelligence module natively integrates with Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon Textract to provide enterprises with the ability to recognize specific, relevant information and extract it instantly using machine learning.

    Users can now drive even more value with the ability to analyze their content and gain insights based on entities (e.g., people, places, locations), more than a hundred languages, and key phrases. They can also perform sentiment analysis to detect positive, negative, neutral and even mixed emotions. Additionally, through the use of deep learning technology, users can extract textual context from images and videos, and identify people, text, scenes and objects. The textual information can then be stored in Alfresco’s content metadata. Moreover, the Intelligent Services module provides a smart OCR & information processing capability that allows enterprises to take a mass ingestion of information and automatically classify the content instantly – utlimately, a self-learning service that improves its quality over time using machine learning.

    The Alfresco Digital Business Platform (DBP) connects people, processes and systems seamlessly, and delivers content to the people who need it in the way they want it. This in turn enables our customers to turn their content into knowledge through scalable processes built for their business, while protecting it with powerful governance capabilities. The DBP is a fully integrated platform that provides a flexible, agile framework that our customers can use to build their own unique digital experiences.

    About Alfresco

    Alfresco Software, Inc. (“Alfresco”) is a commercial, open source software company. The company provides a better, more effortless way for people to work, making sure they have the information they need, exactly when they need it most. The Alfresco Digital Business Platform accelerates the design and delivery of ‘cloud-first’ solutions for the enterprise that are process and content intensive. It is a single, integrated platform built from the ground up by Alfresco and used to digitize processes, manage content and securely govern information. Alfresco helps more than 1,300 industry-leading organizations, including Cisco, Pitney Bowes, Capital One, US Department of Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NASA, be more responsive and competitive. Founded in 2005, Alfresco has its U.S. headquarters in San Mateo, California, and European headquarters in Maidenhead, UK. For more information on Alfresco, please visit http://www.alfresco.com.

    • “The Five Key Trends That Will Shape Your 2019 Content Services Strategy Landscape”: The Enterprise Content Management Playbook , Forrester Research, Inc.,  February 25, 2019

     

  • Cloud Foundry Global Survey Finds Companies Commit to Digital Transformation Process with Confidence in Cloud

    More than half of companies surveyed are putting mission-critical apps in the cloud


    PHILADELPHIA — April 2, 2019 – For the first time, a majority of companies are putting mission critical apps in the cloud, according to the latest report released today by Cloud Foundry Foundation, home to a family of interoperable open source projects for the enterprise, at its North American Cloud Foundry Summit in Philadelphia. The study revealed that companies treat digital transformation as a constant cycle of adaptation rather than a one-time fix. As part of that process, cloud technologies such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), containers and serverless continue to grow at scale, while microservices and AI/ML are next to be integrated into their workflows.

    As more companies embrace the reality of digital transformation, they are adapting to the iterative journey that unfolds. Case in point: 74 percent of respondents equate digital transformation to “perpetual shifts and constant adaption of new technology,” compared to 26 percent who view digital transformation as a “one-time change and adoption of new technology.” More than three quarters of IT decision makers believe digital transformation is a reality, and 86 percent of CIOs, CTOs and Line of Business leaders agree.

    “The vast majority of companies agree digital transformation is a constant process of incremental change, rather than a one-time initiative, and are realizing their long-term strategy must involve adaptation to a wide range of unforeseen challenges and technological changes,” said Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “Although companies are starting to see the benefits of advanced cloud technologies, what’s coming next—artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain, for example—will continue to prove that the only constant in technology is change.”

    Key findings from the report include:

    • Multi-platform strategy is flourishing: Almost half of respondents (48 percent) report using a combination of PaaS, containers and serverless technologies together—an increase of nine percent from last year’s multi-platform report. There are increases across the board in companies using a combination of all three technologies in various iterations, with 72 percent using PaaS and containers together (+8%), 50 percent using PaaS and serverless together (+7%), and 49 percent using containers and serverless together (+7%).
    • Container usage widens: Among companies using or evaluating containers, there has been substantial growth in the number of containers used. Organizations using 100 or more containers has grown from 34 percent in April 2018 to 48 percent in February 2019. Among the IT decision makers surveyed, 62 percent report they expect containers to be mainstreamed at their organization within a year.
    • Serverless evaluation slows, but there is broader deployment among users: While there was a slight pull back in overall usage and evaluation since September, for those using and evaluating serverless, broad deployment doubled since last year—increasing from 9% to 18%.
    • Timeline to see digital transformation vary by region: North American companies are largely feeling the benefit of digital transformation or expect to in this quarter (49%), though slightly more than a third (34%) don’t expect to see benefits for a year or more. Conversely, a third of organizations in Asia expect to see benefits later this year while only 24% expect it to take over a year. More than half of European companies (56%) already feel the benefit or expect to this quarter, while a small percentage (19%) expect to feel the benefits within the year.

    To receive a copy of the report, go here.

    Since 2015, ClearPath Strategies, a strategic consulting and public opinion research firm, has conducted Cloud Foundry Foundation’s Global Perception Study (GPS), a series of deep-dive research on topics critical to cloud and developers. The results in this report come from the ninth round of this global quantitative and qualitative research in that series. The survey consisted of 501 interviews of IT professionals and execs, covering eight geographies (Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and the US) and was offered in five languages corresponding to those geographies. The data was weighted evenly across three regions, Asia, Europe, and North America, to correspond with past waves of research. While margin of sampling error cannot technically be calculated for online panel populations where the relationship between sample and universe is unknown, the margin of sampling error for equivalent representative samples would be +/- 4.8 percent.

    The sample was distributed across four major ITDM roles and the proportions were weighted to reflect consistency with past GPS waves. The breakdown of roles is as follows: Dev/DevOps (30 percent), Ops/Architect (30 percent), CIO/CIOs/Line of Business (25 percent), and IT Managers (15 percent). This mix of company size is as follows: 32% SME (<1K employees),  68% Enterprise (1K+), 25% Large Enterprise (10K+). To ensure the highest quality respondents, surveys include enhanced screening beyond title and activities of company size (no companies under 100 employees), cloud IT knowledge, and years of IT experience.

    Cloud Foundry is an open source technology backed by the largest technology companies in the world, including Dell EMC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, SAP and SUSE, and is being used by leaders in manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. Only Cloud Foundry delivers the velocity needed to continuously deliver apps at the speed of business. Cloud Foundry’s container-based architecture runs apps in any language on your choice of cloud — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, VMware vSphere, and more. With a robust services ecosystem and simple integration with existing technologies, Cloud Foundry is the modern standard for mission critical apps for global organizations.

    About Cloud Foundry Foundation

    The Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent non-profit open source organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the industry standard for delivering the best developer experiences to companies of all sizes. The Foundation projects include Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, BOSH, Open Service Broker API, Eirini, CF Containerization, Abacus, CF-Local, CredHub, ServiceFabrik, Stratos and more. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, and is used by more than half the Fortune 500, representing nearly $15 trillion in combined revenue. Cloud Foundry is hosted by The Linux Foundation and is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more, visit: http://www.cloudfoundry.org.

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  • TOC Votes to Move OPA into CNCF Incubator

    Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept the Open Policy Agent (OPA) as an incubation-level hosted project.
    OPA, which entered the CNCF Sandbox in March 2018, is an open source, general-purpose policy engine that enables unified, context-aware policy enforcement across the entire stack. It
    provides greater flexibility and expressiveness than hard-coded service logic or ad-hoc domainspecific languages and comes with powerful tooling to help anyone get started.

    “Policy-based control is necessary as enterprise adoption of cloud native technology expands,” said Torin Sandall, Software Engineer at Styra and Technical Lead for OPA. “OPA has found an
    ideal home within CNCF. Other CNCF projects can optionally integrate with a consistent policy expression and enforcement mechanism, and common toolset around it. We are looking
    forward to continuing this work as we move into the Incubator.” Every organization has unique policies that affect the entire stack. These policies are vital to long term success because they codify important requirements around cost, performance, security, legal regulation, and more. At the same time, organizations often rely on tribal knowledge and documentation to ensure that policies are enforced correctly. While these approaches are known to be error prone, they exist because systems frequently lack the flexibility and expressiveness required to automate policy enforcement.
    With OPA, services offload policy decisions by executing queries, and OPA evaluates policies and data to produce query results (which are sent back to the client). Policies are written in a
    high-level declarative language, Rego, and can be loaded into OPA via the filesystem or welldefined APIs.

    “The cloud-native ecosystem must provide flexible solutions to control who can do what across modern, microservice deployments because legacy approaches to policy management do not
    satisfy the requirements of modern environments,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO/COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “OPA has made strides integrating with Kubernetes
    through the Gatekeeper project that integrates policy management. Moving OPA to the CNCF Incubator will raise awareness and encourage the development of OPA extensions in and
    outside the cloud native ecosystem.” OPA has been used to policy-enable software across several different domains across several layers of the stack: container management (Kubernetes), servers (Linux), public cloud infrastructure (Terraform), and microservice APIs (Istio, Linkerd, CloudFoundry). Starting in January 2019, Styra, Google, Microsoft, and others began jointly developing and contributing the OPA Gatekeeper sub-project. Gatekeeper integrates OPA with Kubernetes to help admins enforce admission control policies and audit clusters for existing policy violations.
    Gatekeeper also includes a standard library of policies for common use cases (e.g., registry whitelisting, ingress conflicts, label management, etc.).

    Netflix uses OPA as a method of enforcing access control in microservices across a variety of languages and frameworks for thousands of instances in their cloud infrastructure. At KubeCon
    Austin 2017, Netflix described how they architected access control around OPA. OPA is also used in production by companies like Intuit, Medallia, Chef, and others. “Applying access control in a diverse ecosystem is a challenge at scale. Ensuring that all of our applications spread across many applications and frameworks are applying authorization correctly and consistently would be impossible without the right tools. OPA gives us the power to define policies in a consistent manner, leverage complex data sources in those definitions, apply them everywhere in our environment, and easily test them for correctness.” said Ian Haken, Senior Security Engineer at Netflix.
    Main OPA Features:
    ● Decoupled – administrators can manage policies dynamically without requiring changes
    to services.
    ● Compatible – RESTful APIs use JSON over HTTP so you can integrate OPA with your
    service no matter which programming language you use.
    ● Responsive – designed from scratch with latency-sensitive applications in mind,
    enforcing policies with minimal performance impact.
    ● Interactive – anyone can use OPA’s interactive shell to quickly experiment with queries
    and data sets.
    ● Easy to Deploy – has zero deployment dependencies. It runs as a daemon side-by-side
    with your service and shares its fate for the purposes of high availability.
    ● Embeddable – services written with Go can use OPA as a library and do not need to run
    a separate daemon.
    Notable Milestones:
    ● 45 contributors
    ● 1,847 GitHub stars
    ● 52 releases
    ● 1,545 commits
    ● 151 forks
    As a CNCF hosted project, joining incubating technologies like OpenTracing, Fluentd, gRPC, rkt, CNI, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, NATS, Linkerd, Helm, Rook, Harbor and etcd, OPA is part
    of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. Every CNCF project has an associated maturity level: sandbox, incubating, or graduated
    project. For more information on what qualifies a technology for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria v.1.1.

    For more on OPA, please visit https://github.com/open-policy-agent.

     

  • RBC Capital Markets Modernizes Process and Content Services with Alfresco Digital Business Platform

    Global Investment Bank Streamlines IT Operations and Shortens Application Development Time To Impact, Supporting Thousands of Users

    BOSTON, MA. – April 2, 2019 – – Alfresco Software, a commercial, open source software today announced that RBC Capital Markets, part of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), selected Alfresco’s Digital Business Platform to provide process and content services across the company. Additionally, RBC Capital Markets uses the Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF) to rapidly develop solutions using reusable pre- or custom-built components.

    RBC Capital Markets is a top-ten global investment bank with in-depth expertise in capital markets, banking, and finance. RBC Capital Markets has some 14,700 clients in 112 countries and more than $8 billion in revenues.

    According to James ‘Jim’ Williams, Managing Director, Head of Operations and Shared Services Technology at RBC Capital Markets, “Many of our existing applications and platforms are difficult to maintain and modernize. The Alfresco Digital Business Platform helps us modernize content and document rich applications  because it understands the details behind a document, not just the fact that it exists.”

    Williams noted:  “A critical need was support for legally-mandated post-trade activities, including the process-intensive workflows required to comply with tax regulations.”

    Further, with more than 100 custom applications, RBC Capital Markets needed to streamline legacy systems and migrate  outdated business process management (BPM) software that lacked rich document management capabilities. RBC Capital Markets required a platform that integrated both process and content capabilities, as well as one that provided support for accelerated application development leveraging DevOps to support continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and cloud deployment.

    Designed to meet the demands of RBC Capital Markets’ growing business, Alfresco now serves as the basis for critical 14 applications supporting the needs of 3,500 business users, or 50 percent of the workforce. Alfresco-powered solutions are now supporting numerous business-critical functions for RBC Capital Markets, including: Tax Operations, Regulatory Compliance, Regulatory Request Management, Job Attestation Monitoring, Equity Trade Confirmations, Payment Allocations, Risk Limit Management, and Resource Onboarding.

    Another benefit of the Alfresco Platform at RBC Capital Markets has been the ability to keep pace with a rapidly growing business. “We can now meet our business requirements with a much faster turnaround,” noted Ruchi Saraswat, Director, Global Head of Tax Operations. By using the Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF) to accelerate solution development, IT can build applications rapidly and iteratively using reusable pre or custom-built components. “It’s like using building blocks, where we build all the modules and put them together,” Saraswat explains. “Reusable components really help our team enormously.”

    She also credits Alfresco’s Customer Success team with helping RBC Capital Markets get up to speed quickly. “We can easily take on new challenges because we know we’ve got Alfresco backing us up.”

    With Alfresco process automation, content management and development tools, RBC Capital Markets has increased operational efficiency, tightened internal controls, and strengthened regulatory compliance. Common user experiences across the company have increased adoption and streamlined work, while the flexible and future-proof Alfresco platform enables RBC Capital Markets to adapt to dynamic markets by building new solutions as needed and deploying quickly using the latest DevOps tools, including Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Maven, Jenkins, and Git.

    Alfresco CEO Bernadette Nixon observed: “The RBC Capital Markets implementation is a perfect example of how organizations can leverage process, content and rapid application development for business advantage. The stable, scalable and supportable applications built on Alfresco have generated significant interest across various business units within RBC, and the firm is evaluating several future applications to be built on the now-standardized Alfresco platform. We are thrilled with the success that RBC has achieved with Alfresco, and we applaud their approach to innovation and modernization.”

    About Alfresco

    Alfresco Software, Inc. (“Alfresco”) is a commercial, open source software company focused on the enterprise. The company provides a better, more effortless way for people to work, making sure they have the information they need, exactly when they need it most. The Alfresco Digital Business Platform accelerates the design and delivery of ‘cloud-first’ solutions for the enterprise that are process and content intensive. It is a single, integrated platform built from the ground up by Alfresco and used to digitize processes, manage content and securely govern information. Alfresco helps more than 1,300 industry-leading organizations, including Cisco, Pitney Bowes, Capital One, US Department of Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NASA, be more responsive and competitive. Founded in 2005, Alfresco has its U.S. headquarters in San Mateo, California, and European headquarters in Maidenhead, UK. For more information on Alfresco, please visit http://www.alfresco.com.