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Author: devopsy.kinsta.cloud

  • Morpheus Data Optimizes Multi-Cloud Deployments and Unifies Ops Teams Machine learning, container orchestration, and DevOps integrations reduce costs and speed app deployments

    San Mateo – Nov 15, 2017 – Today, Morpheus Data announced a major software release which brings predictive analytics to cloud management and enables end-to-end app lifecycle management in multi-cloud hybrid IT environments.

    Research indicates that total enterprise spending on public cloud services is expected to continue to grow at double digits over the coming years. Much of this growth comes from application teams seeking to mirror best- in-class DevOps organizations where time to deploy is measured in minutes. At the same time, enterprise IT teams are signaling adoption of multi-cloud strategies rather than standardizing on a single provider. Unfortunately, fragmented cloud management has done little to speed deployment and rouge development has led to expensive cloud sprawl.

    To address these gaps, Morpheus Data has updated its Unified Ops Orchestration platform with machine learning to lower cloud costs and new 3rd party integrations to speed application deployments. Unlike tools which only address part of the issue, only Morpheus provides a systematic solution to optimize resources, enable governance, accelerate workflows, and modernize applications. The solution was architected to be 100% infrastructure agnostic across bare metal, VM, and containerized deployments spanning on-premises, hosted, and public clouds.

    “Cloud Computing and DevOps trends are inexorably linked, yet large organizations are still fighting inefficient IT silos and lacking visibility,” said Brad Parks, VP of Business Development, Morpheus Data. “Morpheus has embedded machine learning into our unified orchestration engine to not only find and fix cloud drain but also provide governance and automation to help customers take back control.”

    Enabling AI in the Datacenter to reduce cloud cost by thousands As IT organizations are evolving from traditional operations to embrace their new role as cloud brokers there is a need to improve understanding of

    Ó2017 Morpheus Data, LLC. All Rights Reserved

    current cloud usage, much of which often has been provisioned without formal controls.

    To help organizations improve efficiency and establish visibility of complex multi-cloud infrastructure, Morpheus provides Cross-Platform Discovery to identify what applications, VMs, and Containers have been deployed and gather data on capacity, memory use, performance, and power consumption. Morpheus is capable of interrogating brownfield private clouds from HPE, Nutanix, VMware, and others as well as public clouds like AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, and IBM.

    Using machine learning, the new Guided Remediation feature enables customers to sunset unused instances, move workloads to lower cost clouds, adjust memory or capacity allocation, and even setup power schedules to tightly control costs. At one recent early access customer, Morpheus uncovered several hundred thousand dollars of potential savings by using these new discovery and analytics capabilities.

    Unlike pure play VM analytics tools, Morpheus will find and fix issues in both VMs and containers across a wide number of on-prem and off-prem clouds. Additionally, customers can take advantage of robust policy management and cloud brokerage tools to set, compare, and control costs at the time of provisioning to prevent future issues. Users can easily map workloads to the right infrastructure with custom costing, visibility of public cloud costs, and in-line comparison tools.

    Providing seamless integration across DevOps and CloudOps Development teams continue to put increasing pressure on IT to enable the rapid provisioning of new infrastructure but the constant introduction of new tools and frameworks makes it difficult to keep up and forces ops to use multiple tools to get the job done.

    Originally designed by DevOps practitioners for their own internal use within distributed heterogeneous infrastructure, Morpheus was architected to rapidly integrate new technologies. This is in contrast to offerings which were born for narrow use cases to serve specific hypervisors or hardware platforms. New stack integrations for hybrid IT include:

    • Certification with ServiceNow so IT can utilize ServiceNow approvals to control creation and extension of provisioning instances. Customers can also use the Morpheus plug-in to expose service catalog items for multiple apps and clouds directly within ServiceNow while Morpheus automates back-end provisioning.
    • Deployment of, and provisioning to, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes clusters for IT shops adding containers to their application mix. This new functionality allows consolidation of bare metal, VM, and container orchestration and adds to already existing native container orchestration and Docker support.
    • New cloud and infrastructure connectivity for HPE OneView, IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix) and Upcloud. These expanded cloud types are on top of an already substantial list of major cloud platforms and IT

    Ó2017 Morpheus Data, LLC. All Rights Reserved

    operations tools; collectively they give customers the freedom to scale in virtually any direction.

    • Connectivity to GitHub and Jenkins helps teams shift left and provide release automation all the way from code builds through to deployment and monitoring. These CI/CD integrations are part of a self-service portal which already supports native scripting and configuration management via Chef, Ansible, Salt, and Puppet.

    The ability to manage all of these apps, platforms, tools, and clouds from a single simple graphical interface or programmatically via full fidelity API and CLI enables faster provisioning and more deploys per day, giving customers an advantage over competitors as they deal with digital disruption.

    For more information, visit www.morpheusdata.com

    Upcoming Events
    Morpheus Data will have teams on-site at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, HPE Discover EMEA in Madrid, and Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Data Center Conference 2017 in Las Vegas. If you’d like to setup time for a discussion or demo please use the contact form at www.morpheusdata.com

    About Morpheus Data, LLC
    Morpheus Data, LLC is the entity behind the Morpheus unified ops orchestration platform. Morpheus is infrastructure agnostic and provides developers, IT managers, and DevOps professionals full control over bare metal, VM and container-based systems— across any app, cloud, database, or infrastructure. A single platform provides complete application lifecycle management, including provisioning, backup, recovery, logging, monitoring, reporting, and access control. With Morpheus, IT organizations speed up application delivery, simplify workload migration, eliminate cloud and vendor lock, and provide greater operational efficiency. Morpheus offers more built-in integrations than any other cloud management platform on the market.

  • Toptal Launches New On-demand DevOps Specialization to Serve Enterprise Shift to the Cloud

    SAN FRANCISCO – November 16, 2017 – Toptal, a global network of top engineers, designers, and finance experts that empowers companies to accelerate, adapt and scale, today announced it is launching a new on-demand talent specialization that is focused on meeting the rising need for skilled DevOps engineers. Tapping into Toptal’s private network of highly skilled IT professionals, the new specialized service will connect businesses and organizations with freelance DevOps professionals who are experts in virtualization, containerization, automation, continuous integration and delivery, and cloud application distribution.

     

    Since 2016, Toptal has seen a 109 percent annual growth rate in demand from its clients for DevOps positions, growing consistently by more than 25 percent for each of the last four quarters. Similar data from the Linux Foundation’s 2017 Open Source Jobs Report finds that 60 percent of open source professionals and hiring managers are currently looking to fill vacant DevOps engineering positions. Andreessen Horowitz’s Scott Weiss calls DevOps “more than just a methodology. It’s a must-have skill set for the modern programmer — and is increasingly becoming its own department.” He agrees that “the rise of the hyperscale cloud datacenter has made this job much harder.” The 2017 State of DevOps Report has found that high performing organizations spend 21 percent less time on unplanned work and rework, and 44 percent more time on new work.

     

    “As organizations undergo DevOps transformations to more quickly deliver applications and services and compete more effectively in the market, most still don’t have access to the right talent who can make this happen,” said Alvaro Oliveira, VP of Talent Operations, Toptal. “Our new DevOps specialization provides a reliable pipeline of qualified IT professionals who can enable shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases, among other agile software development goals.”

     

    Toptal’s new DevOps specialization builds on recent successes working with clients like Motorola Solutions and Arduino. Toptal’s DevOps specialization provides the talent needed for organizations to successfully move business applications to the Cloud and compete more effectively.

    One such DevOps expert in the Toptal network is Andrea Villa, a former DevOps engineer at Atlassian and system architect at CloudReach with 15 years of experience in system administration, information security, and networks, having worked as a specialist in cloud migration, deployment, and automation.

     

    “To be effective, today’s DevOps Engineer needs to have a developer background and possess a wide knowledge of system administration and network knowledge,” Villa said. “It’s important that they be able to bridge the gap between the raw code and the challenges that the business has to face everyday – such as reducing friction between ideas, delivery, and consumers.”

     

    Another Toptal expert with 12+ years experience in DevOps is Fredrik Håård, who specializes in back-end product development and lifecycle maintenance. Håård was a Senior Cloud Architect at McKinsey and at Wondersign ensured the success of their final migration to the cloud.

     

    “Good DevOps engineers must be a champion – and take responsibility for – all the areas that might not be prioritized by the organization such as data security, disaster recovery, mitigation, and audits,” Håård said. “The choices you make in DevOps can have long-lasting effects at a company.”

     

    Toptal attracts the best talent across software development, design, and business. Applicants undergo a rigorous screening process that accepts less than three percent of applicants. Toptal then looks for the perfect fit between talent expertise and the needs of clients.

     

    By leveraging a curated, expert-driven matching process that ensures that the right individual or team is found without time-consuming resume reviews and interviews, Toptal’s proprietary technology platform automates the hiring process, driving speed and efficiency. The outcome is a highly qualified workforce with specialized skills to meet the needs of companies – saving both time and money. This model has led Toptal to become the largest distributed workforce in the world with annual revenues exceeding $100 million and growing at approximately 300 percent over the prior two years.

     

    For more information on Toptal DevOps, please visit: www.toptal.com/services/devops-services.

     

    About Toptal:

    Toptal is an exclusive, global network of top engineers, designers, and finance experts, empowering companies to accelerate, adapt, and scale. Toptal serves thousands of clients, including Fortune 500 companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Emirates, Pfizer, Axel Springer, and J.P. Morgan, among many others, delivering expertise and world-class solutions at an unparalleled success rate. For more information, please visitwww.toptal.com/enterprise.

  • VictorOps Announces New Mobile Features to Improve the On-Call Experience

    New Features Boost Usability and Performance for Increased Productivity Anytime, Anywhere

     

    BOULDER, Colo. – November 15, 2017 – VictorOps, the real-time incident management company for DevOps teams, today announced new mobile features to both their Android and iOS applications in an effort to help on-call teams access the most pertinent context necessary to resolve an incident – from anywhere.

    “Today’s workforce is mobile. Regardless of a person’s role, the ability to work from anywhere is crucial in today’s competitive landscape. But for on-call teams the need is even more dire to ensure the lowest time to resolution and to minimize downtime,” said Joni Klippert, VP of Product, VictorOps. “We want on-call teams using the VictorOps mobile app to be able to have access to the information they need, anywhere, any time, so they can resolve the incident at hand and get back to living their lives.”

    VictorOps has made a number of improvements to the mobile app to allow users to get up and running quickly. VictorOps has also implemented a more intuitive navigation system within the app, designed to enable users to interact with the interface more naturally.

    Further key mobile release features include:

    • Annotations within incidents– Quicker access to metadata and graphs associated with an incident means that users know more about the problem and steps to take when they’re paged in the middle of the night
    • Integration icons– Improved visual cues including integration logos mean users can identify the misbehaving systems at a glance
    • Timeline– As data sources and communication has increased within the VictorOps application, the team streamlined the look and feel of the timeline to surface the most actionable data in a beautiful new format
    • Chat feature– Chat has been improved with better image handling to support rich Post-Incident Analysis

    “For our customers, accessibility and flexibility are vital to a healthy work-life balance,” added Klippert. “These new mobile features go far beyond paging to help on-call teams work smarter, not harder – even when they’re away from their desks.”

    For more information about VictorOps’ new mobile features, visit www.victorops.com. Or to see a live demo, stop by booth 316 at the 2017 DevOps Enterprise Summit.

     

    About VictorOps

    VictorOps is incident management software purpose-built for DevOps. From fast forensics to rapid remediation, we empower engineering and operations teams to work together, solve problems faster, and continuously improve in high-velocity deployment environments. Privately held, VictorOps is backed by Costanoa Ventures, Shea Ventures and Foundry Group. For more information, visit www.victorops.com and follow the company on Twitter @VictorOps

  • ScaleArc Improves Uptime and Performance for Telmate Video and Audio Communications

    ScaleArc increases high availability architecture and enabled database consolidation, simplifying operations and improving customer satisfaction

     

    SANTA CLARA, Calif. –  November 15, 2017 – ScaleArc, a leader in database uptime, announced today that Telmate has built ScaleArc software into its telecom environment to improve availability and performance of its communications services. Telmate provides video and audio communications to inmates in correctional facilities, enabling connectivity with loved ones and improved mental health. The technology provider also delivers verification and investigative tools and services that increase physical safety and effectiveness of correctional facilities.

     

    Telmate relies on the MariaDB open source MySQL database to deliver these communications services. All calls go through the database cluster residing in multiple data centers. ScaleArc has alleviated downtime in the environment and increased throughput, enabling better communication services.

     

    “We needed to ensure fault tolerance and better throughput on our mission-critical databases,” said Alex Alexander, database architect at Telmate. “We looked at a number of open source options, but ScaleArc proved to be much more robust and had been deployed in a much larger number of production environments.”

     

    By delivering improved performance, ScaleArc enabled Telmate to consolidate its MySQL infrastructure. Telmate has also benefitted from ScaleArc’s built-in diagnostics to update and fix database problems. “ScaleArc analytics provided valuable insights into our transactions in the changed database environment,” added Alexander.

     

    “Voice and video communications are particularly vulnerable to performance problems,” said Justin Barney, president and CEO of ScaleArc. “Slow service is essentially no service. By improving throughput and streamlining operations on Telmate’s conferencing infrastructure, we’re able to help Telmate deliver vital services to the inmate population.”

     

    About ScaleArc

    ScaleArc enables continuous availability of apps and accelerates the journey to the cloud. ScaleArc’s database load balancing software abstracts apps from the data tier, so organizations of all sizes can shield applications from database downtime and improve application performance with no code changes. ScaleArc simplifies running database workloads in the cloud, enhances DBaaS offerings, and speeds development of new cloud-native apps. Learn more about ScaleArc and its customers and partners at www.ScaleArc.com.

     

    ScaleArc and the ScaleArc logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of ScaleArc in the United States and other countries. All brand names, product names or trademarks belong to their respective holders.

  • BMC SURVEY: New Management Approaches, Intelligent Capabilities are Required for Multi-Cloud Environments

    40 percent of IT decision makers do not know how much they are spending on cloud services

    BMC recommends that organizations re-think their current multi-cloud management approaches to address new complexities

    78 percent of global respondents are looking at applying artificial intelligence to manage multi-cloud environments

    LONDON, Nov. 14, 2017 — BMC EXCHANGE LONDON — Rapid adoption of multiple public and private cloud services and infrastructure has created complexity that is amplifying traditional pressures placed on digital businesses, according to new research from BMC, a global leader in IT solutions for the digital enterprise. As a result, organizations are realizing that current strategies and methods of managing multi-cloud environments need re-thinking, and are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as an emerging solution.

    BMC’s survey of over 1,000 IT professionals in 11 countries reveals what the new Multi-Cloud world means to IT, and how current multi-cloud management approaches need rethinking with emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence.

    BMC announced the survey of more than 1,000 IT decision-makers in 11 countries today at its BMC Exchange Londonevent. Conducted by research firm opinion.life, the survey examines how businesses are investing in multiple public cloud solutions from several vendors to optimize costs, stay agile, and mitigate risks. These distributed, multi-cloud environments are also creating a broader attack surface and potentially increasing costs. According to the survey, 40 percent of IT leaders do not know how much their businesses are spending on cloud services in total.

    “The number one driver for adopting multiple clouds is cost optimization, yet two out of every five IT leaders are completely in the dark on what their organizations are spending on cloud,” said Bill Berutti, President, Enterprise Solutions at BMC. “Multi-cloud has truly changed the game: the traditional way of looking at IT infrastructure simply does not work anymore. IT leaders must consider new ways to manage multi-cloud environments to ensure they are getting the expected benefits from public cloud in terms of cost savings, automated performance optimization, and increased security and governance.”

    Recognizing the complexity of managing multiple cloud environments, 80 percent of respondents agree that new approaches and tools are required. Among the new approaches being considered is AI, with 78 percent of IT decision-makers indicating that their companies are looking for ways to apply artificial intelligence as part of their multi-cloud management strategies.

    BMC offers the following recommendations for organizations to successfully manage multi-cloud environments:

    • Gain increased visibility into cloud assets to get the complete picture
    • Get a clear picture of cloud costs: it may not make sense to run everything in cloud
    • Take a proactive stance to harden a broader attack surface, ensure compliance
    • Re-think management approaches: simplify and automate as much as possible
    • AI and machine learning can remove repetition out of multi-cloud management


    45 percent     of the global survey respondents indicated cost optimization as a reason for using more than one public cloud vendor, with 44 percent indicating a desire to maintain agility and 40 percent mitigating risk with multiple cloud providers. Survey respondents indicated that implementing security and governance policies is the top challenge when managing multi-cloud environments, followed by automation, optimizing resource utilization, and cloud consumption costs. Highlighting the need to address the security challenges amplified by a larger, more distributed, increasingly virtual infrastructure, IT decision-makers indicate that security is the primary area they intend to invest in over the next 24-36 months.

    “The majority of IT leaders now understand that the complexity created by multi-cloud is amplifying the traditional challenges business face: security, visibility, cost, performance, automation, and migration,” Berutti continued. “Now they must also adapt their management approach using new technology solutions built for multi-cloud that leverage machine learning and AI to reduce that complexity.”

    For more information, download BMC’s full report: “Multi-Cloud Requires New Management Strategies and a Forward-Looking Approach.”

    Methodology
    1,026 respondents were surveyed online worldwide (France, Germany, Spain, UK, Australia, China, India, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, USA) in August 2017. Respondents were eligible if they had specific IT job titles (Senior ITDMs: CIO, CTO, COO, CDO, VP IT Infrastructure and Operations, VP Application Development or above; or ITDM: Enterprise Architect, Cloud Architect, IT/MIS/BIS Director, IT/MIS/BIS Manager), were employed by a business of more than 250 employees, and were currently using cloud services. The USA and India respondents were split between 50 senior ITDMs and 100 other ITDMs. All other markets were split between 30 senior ITDMs and 50 other ITDMs. Data has been weighted so that each market contributes equally to regional and global totals. Respondents were surveyed online by research firm opinion.life.

    About BMC
    BMC is a global leader in innovative software solutions that enable businesses to transform into digital enterprises for the ultimate competitive advantage. Our Digital Enterprise Management solutions are designed to make digital business fast, seamless, and optimized from mainframe to mobile to cloud and beyond. BMC digital IT transforms 82 percent of the Fortune 500 and serves more than 10,000 customers worldwide.

    BMC – Bring IT to Life
    BMC, BMC Software, the BMC logo, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software Inc., are registered or pending registration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©Copyright 2017 BMC Software, Inc.

    About opinion.life
    opinion.life is an international market research firm driven by the idea that all opinions matter. From the individual, to the communities and workplaces they form, opinion.life uses research and technology expertise to understand the behaviours, attitudes and beliefs that shape our world – www.opinion.life

  • CollabNet Unifies Agile and DevOps Lifecycles into a Single Workflow with Continuum, an Enterprise-grade Continuous Delivery Platform

    Continuum is now integrated with leading software application development solutions to provide value stream visibility

     

    SAN FRANCISCO (DevOps Enterprise Summit #DOES17) – November 13, 2017 – CollabNet, a global leader in enterprise software development and DevOps solutions, will be highlighting its DevOps product, Continuum, an enterprise-grade Continuous Delivery (CD) platform, at the DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES17) starting today in San Francisco. Continuum is core to CollabNet’s unified and integrated DevOps product offering. It has enterprise DevOps automation and intelligence capabilities to measure and optimize DevOps performance and accelerate software delivery with Value Stream Management. CollabNet will demonstrate these capabilities in booth #111 at the show. In addition, the company will be highlighting Continuum’s integration with leading software application development solutions to provide value stream visibility.

    CollabNet recently merged with VersionOne, the Agile lifecycle management leader, and now offers solutions for every stage of the software development lifecycle—from planning and development to delivery. The newly combined company will maintain the CollabNet name and the joint organization will demonstrate its DevOps offerings at the DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES17).

    “CollabNet and VersionOne share a vision that Agile and DevOps are interconnected practices managed with a single mindset through a fully integrated, flexible and governed value stream,” said Flint Brenton, CEO at CollabNet. “This has been our vision from the beginning—to provide organizations with a single platform to achieve Agile and DevOps success. By adding VersionOne’s strengths, we now offer a way to consolidate and unite the value stream management process with complete visibility into the software delivery cycle.”

    Continuum will be highlighted in the DOES17 booth #111 as a stand-alone product in addition to being shown as an integrated product with software application development solutions. Users can now have value stream visibility with:

    Continuum + Lifecycle, a leading enterprise-grade Agile management tool

    Continuum + TeamForge, a leading ALM solution

    Continuum + TeamForge SCM, a leading version control solution

    Continuum + Jira™ Software, a software development tool

     

    The DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES17) is located at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square, and runs from November 13-15. Please visit the CollabNet/VersionOne booth #111 to find out how Continuum solves even the toughest challenges for enterprise software delivery.

    For more information about Continuum, please visit: www.versionone.com/devops.

    Share This: . @CollabNet and @VersionOne now offering end-to-end #DevOps and #Agile integrated solutions available for demo in the #DOES17 exhibit hall

    About CollabNet

    CollabNet is a global software and services company that allows leading enterprises and  government organizations to deliver high-quality software at speed. With our platform and services our customers develop and deploy cutting edge applications by empowering their teams to scale enterprise-wide agility and DevOps across their software development lifecycle. With CollabNet, teams can work together to envision, build and deliver great software with confidence.

    www.collab.net

    CollabNet is a Vector Capital Company

  • SignalFx Announces Comprehensive Global Monitoring for Google Cloud Platform

    Solution Offers Real-Time, End-to-End Operational Intelligence for DevOps Environments

     

    SAN MATEO, Calif. – Nov. 13, 2017 – SignalFx, a leader in real-time operational intelligence for data-driven DevOps, today announced an integration for comprehensive global monitoring for Google Cloud Platform. This integration allows enterprise-class Google Cloud customers to leverage the real-time, end-to-end operational intelligence of the SignalFx solution. Global organizations can get alerts in real-time from SignalFx’s streaming analytics platform across their entire technology stack. From infrastructure to applications critical information will be uncovered every second of every day so unwanted issues can be instantly fixed. The integration currently is live across many Google Cloud Platform services.

     

    If DevOps isn’t happening in real real-time, it’s not happening fast enough. SignalFx delivers a comprehensive view into an organization’s DevOps environment as it happens. Now enterprises can monitor the Google Cloud Platform in SignalFx using Google’s Stackdriver metrics, with built-in dashboards for Google Compute Engine, Google Container Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Router, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, App Engine and Cloud Datastore.

    “In a world where customer experience defines brands, there’s no room for error. SignalFx is for companies whose customers expect their products and services to perform 24X7,” said Karthik Rau, Founder and CEO of SignalFx. “Our operational-intelligence platform provides instant visibility into technology performance so companies can fix what needs fixing and uncover opportunities to keep customers engaged and happy. That’s what matters most.”

     

    “SignalFx’s metrics, dashboards, and alerts are now available for a broad range of Google Cloud Platform services enabling developers with real time insights throughout their development lifecycle. This can help users of the SignalFx platform develop faster and more robust applications on Google Cloud,” said Adam Massey, Director of Strategic Technology Partnerships, Google Cloud.

     

    Supporting Resources

     

    About SignalFx

    SignalFx is a leader in real-time operational intelligence for data-driven DevOps. The service discovers and collects metrics across every component in the cloud, replacing traditional point tools and providing real-time visibility into today’s dynamic environments. Leveraging the massively scalable SignalFx platform, the SaaS service is optimized for container and microservices based architectures and provides powerful visualization, proactive alerting, and collaborative triage capabilities across organizations of all sizes. SignalFx is used by Fortune 500 enterprises across financial services, apparel, industrials, telecommunications, media, and by web-scale players like Yelp, Hubspot, Acquia, and Kayak. SignalFx is venture-funded by Andreessen Horowitz and Charles River Ventures.

  • Founded by Ex-Googlers, LightStep Emerges from Stealth and Redefines Application Performance Management (APM) for Enterprises Adopting Microservices

    Twilio, Lyft, Yext, GitHub and DigitalOcean All Rely On LightStep [x]PM In Production
    San Francisco, CA – November 14, 2017 – Today at Structure 2017, LightStep comes out of stealth and formally introduces its first product, LightStep [x]PM. LightStep [x]PM is the first performance management solution to apply APM’s core value proposition – monitoring and troubleshooting performance issues – across all components of today’s software applications: web and mobile clients, monoliths, microservices, both on premises and in the cloud. LightStep gives an accurate, detailed snapshot across the entire complex software system at any given point in time, enabling organizations to identify bottlenecks and resolve incidents rapidly.

     

    Today LightStep also announced $29 million in funding from Sequoia, Redpoint and others.

     

    LightStep was founded in 2015 to address challenges faced by enterprises building complex software. Introducing microservices has accelerated software development, but these additional services bring greater operational complexity and a dramatic increase in the volume of diagnostic data, making performance management a challenge. The existing APM solutions fail to scale or to provide accurate insights in real-time since ordinary transactions can involve dozens to thousands of distinct services.

     

    LightStep [x]PM addresses these challenges with a unique, decentralized architecture that continuously analyzes 100% of transactions across all services, in production. This lets customers measure performance wherever it impacts their business: distinct microservices, key mobile transitions, crucial customer accounts, or individual end-users. When LightStep [x]PM’s statistical engine detects an anomaly, it replays and records a detailed end-to-end trace. This trace provides the cross-service context needed to resolve an incident or identify a performance problem.

     

    Customers on LightStep [x]PM
    LightStep [x]PM customers take seconds or minutes to resolve incidents that previously required days of ongoing, multi-team firefighting. The product has led to massive performance improvements in key end-user experiences for both web and mobile.

     

    • Twilio reduced incident resolution times by 92% with LightStep. Twilio SVP Platform Jason Hudak said: “LightStep [x]PM not only finds our performance problems, it tells us why they’re happening. Within an hour of running LightStep, our billing transactions team was able to identify issues and deliver betterments that led to a 70% reduction in latency. LightStep helps me sleep better at night knowing that our engineers will able to identify and remediate issues in real-time, maintaining customers’ trust in Twilio.”
    • Yext uses LightStep to monitor top customers to provide a best-in-class experience. Yext VP of Engineering Rob Figueiredo said: “With LightStep, we have performance omniscience. It delivers stats and detailed traces, all broken down per customer, in real time. It ensures we deliver on our promises to customers.”
    • Lyft moved from monoliths to a distributed architecture with LightStep. Lyft VP of Engineering Pete Morelli said: “LightStep is the future of monitoring and was instrumental in our move to microservices. Our systems generate more than 100 billion microservice calls per day. LightStep is one of the only systems that can make sense of that firehose: it jumps to the root cause of performance problems anywhere from mobile all the way to the bottom of our distributed stack.”

     

    LightStep Data Sources
    There are many ways to integrate with LightStep [x]PM, and customers combine them to gain full coverage of their software systems:
    • Native integration with OpenTracing, a CNCF member project and open API standard co-created by Ben Sigelman, CEO and co-founder of LightStep, and others in the OSS tracing community
    • Existing centralized logging data from many sources
    • Service mesh technologies and load-balancers like Envoy, linkerd, nginx, haproxy and others

     

    “Today’s production applications do not come from a single mold,” said Daniel Conde, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “There will be microservices as well as monolithic applications, and deployments will be on bare metal services and on hybrid cloud platforms. These need to co-exist and integrate with each other, so a modern application performance monitoring solution needs to gather data from across the enterprise with all of these models. LightStep [x]PM meets those needs with a modern solution that examines application performance end-to-end, across all of these diagnostic data sources and ultimately enable rapid problem resolution.”

     

    “I have seen software development change rapidly in the last decade, and I believe we are entering a new era,” said Ben Sigelman, co-founder and CEO at LightStep. “Today, enterprise IT and engineering leaders preside over complex, business-critical software applications that operate at a daunting scale. We built LightStep to deliver products, beginning with LightStep [x]PM, that cut through the complexity of today’s production software and keep our customers in control.”

     

    Sigelman is an expert in performance analysis and debugging in large software systems. He designed and deployed global-scale monitoring technologies at Google, including Dapper, an always-on distributed tracing system which analyzes more than 2 billion transactions per second.

  • IBM Brings Cloud-native Environment to Private Clouds

    New IBM Cloud Private software – based on containers, microservices and APIs –bridges Public Cloud and traditional IT environments

    ARMONK, N.Y. – 01 Nov 2017: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new IBM Cloud Private software platform to help companies unlock billions of dollars in technology investment in core data and applications and extend cloud-native tools across public and private clouds.

    IBM Cloud Private software is designed to enable companies to create on-premises cloud capabilities similar to public clouds to accelerate app development. The new platform is built on the open source Kubernetes-based container architecture and supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. This facilitates integration and portability of workloads as they evolve to any cloud environment, including the public IBM Cloud.IBM also announced new container-optimized versions of core enterprise software, such as IBM WebSphere Liberty, Db2 and MQ – widely used to run and help secure the world’s most business-critical applications and data. This makes it easier to share data and evolve applications as needed across IBM Cloud private and public clouds and other cloud environments with a consistent experience.

    An airline, for example, could use IBM Cloud Private to bring a core application that tracks frequent flyer miles into a private cloud environment and connect it to a new mobile app in the public cloud. A financial services firm could use it to keep customer data in-house as it works to meet its security and regulatory requirements while taking advantage of new analytic tools and machine learning in the public cloud to quickly identify investment trends and opportunities.

    Enterprises to Spend More Than $50 Billion a Year on Private Clouds

    While public cloud adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace, organizations, especially in regulated industries such as finance and health care, are continuing to leverage private clouds as part of their journey to public cloud environments to quickly launch and update applications. IBM estimates companies will spend more than $50 billion globally starting in 2017 to create and evolve private clouds with growth rates of 15 to 20 percent a year through 2020, according to IBM market projections.

    “Innovation and adoption of public cloud services has been constrained by the challenge of transitioning complex enterprise systems and applications into a true cloud-native environment,” said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President for IBM Hybrid Cloud and Director of IBM Research. “IBM Cloud Private brings rapid application development and modernization to existing IT infrastructure and positions it to be combined with the services and experience of a public cloud platform.”

    Hertz, Ilmarinen Transforming IT with Private Cloud

    The Hertz Corporation, one of the top car rental companies in the world, believes both public and private cloud is critical to achieving its technology objectives.

    “Private cloud is a must for many enterprises such as ours working to reduce or eliminate their dependence on internal data centers,” said Tyler Best, Hertz Chief Information Officer. “A strategy consisting of public, private and hybrid cloud are essential for large enterprises to effectively make the transition from legacy systems to cloud. Hertz is an early adopter of both public and private IBM cloud and we could not accomplish our technology goals without private cloud as part of our overall cloud portfolio.”

    Ilmarinen, a Finland firm responsible for the pensions covering approximately 900,000 Finns, has started a pilot project with IBM Cloud Private and plans to be in production in early 2018.  “Ilmarinen is excited about the capabilities in IBM Cloud Private as a flexible, compliant cloud-native platform that it can deploy and manage behind our firewall for creating new applications and modernizing traditional workloads,” said Jani Itkonen, Production Manager, Ilmarinen.

    IBM Cloud Private Provides Flexible Platform with Support for Enterprise Developers

    Innovations used in IBM Cloud Private are designed to simplify cloud management, accelerate app develop and maintain security across cloud environments. Key features include:

    • Cloud Management Automation – Streamlined management across cloud environments to help launch, monitor and manage services and help ensure consistent security protocols.
    • Security & Data Encryption – Security Vulnerability Advisor to scan containers across the cloud to surface potentially serious issues and weaknesses; Ability to encrypt all data in flight and provide for strict access control by users within a cluster.
    • Core Cloud Platform – Includes a container engine, Kubernetes orchestration, Cloud Foundry and essential management tools surrounding developer runtimes, which are fully integrated and automated.
    • Infrastructure Choice – Compatible with systems from leading manufacturers including Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Lenovo and NetApp, as well as IBM Systems, including IBM Power Systems, IBM Z and IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix software.
    • Data and Analytics – Integrations with database services, such as IBM Db2, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, to leverage data and gain business insights.
    • Application Support & DevOps Tools – Containerized versions of software and development frameworks, including IBM WebSphere Liberty, Open Liberty, MQ and Microservice Builder, as part of software bundles; Optimized management and DevOps tools, including APM, Netcool and UrbanCode, which can be added for a separate fee.

    IBM also offers cloud deployment, management, brokerage and storage services to help clients manage multiple clouds and can help clients with migration of applications to IBM Cloud Private. More details on Cloud Private can be found in the product overview.

    IBM Cloud Private Reinforces IBM Commitment to Open Source

    IBM Cloud Private is another significant step in IBM’s support for organizations to create, deploy and manage apps in the cloud environment of their choice. IBM and Google recently announced an effort to create and open source the Grafeas project to help developers with security of containers. Last month, IBM released Open Liberty, a new lightweight, open-source version of its WebSphere Liberty Java application server, to make it easier for developers to get apps up and running in any cloud environment.

    IBM also is a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which hosts Kubernetes and Cloud Private is in compliance with its interoperability conformance tests. To get started with IBM Developer Journeys as they relate to Kubernetes, please visit: https://developer.ibm.com/code/journey/

    For more about IBM Cloud Private, visit here.

    For more about IBM Cloud, visit here.

    Contact(s) information

    Joe Guy Collier
    IBM Media Relations
    1 (248) 990-4707
    jgcollie@us.ibm.com

  • Dominica DeGrandis Joins Tasktop as Director of Digital Transformation

    DevOps Expert to Help Organizations Better Understand, Visualize and Optimize Their Value Streams

     

    VANCOUVER, BC, Nov. 8, 2017– Tasktop, the leader in Value Stream Integration, today announced that Dominica DeGrandis has joined the company as director of Digital Transformation.

    In this role, she will help grow market awareness of Tasktop within the DevOps community and help organizations better understand, visualize and optimize their value streams.

    DeGrandis is a regular speaker at global DevOps and Lean events and is finalizing her latest book: Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow, which will be released in November.

    “Dominica is the foremost expert in Kanban Flow in the IT industry today,” said Neelan Choksi, president and chief operating officer, Tasktop. “Her passion for visualizing team demand and capability is a great fit for Tasktop in our efforts to drive Value Stream Integration and Value Stream Visibility. Dominica’s knowledge of DevOps theory and practice will allow her to provide sound and actionable advice and direction to our global customer base.”

    “I welcome this new opportunity at Tasktop,” said DeGrandis. “As director of Digital Transformation, I get to help people automatically visualize their workflow and reduce coordination costs across siloed teams — an effort near and dear to my heart.”

    Prior to joining Tasktop, DeGrandis was director, Learning & Development, at LeanKit. She has also taught Lean, Kanban and Flow to a wide range of global organizations including industry leaders like Expedia, Hearst and Microsoft, and worked extensively in configuration management.

    She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science, math, physics from the University of Hawaii.

    About Tasktop

    Over one million users employ Tasktop’s Value Stream Integration technology to transform software development and delivery. Tasktop not only unifies the software development and delivery team, but also provides unprecedented visibility into the business critical processes of software delivery. Tasktop customers are the global leaders in financial services, insurance, government and manufacturing, and include 43 of the Fortune 100, 11 of the top banks in the world, six of the top six health plans and four of the top ten US insurance companies. Partners, including CA, Micro Focus and IBM, rely on our independent, vendor-neutral role to connect their customers’ software delivery disciplines via OEM distributions of our products. For more information about Tasktop, please visit: http://tasktop.com.