devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Jules Louis

  • SmartBear Announces New Collaborator Integration with GitLab and Enhanced Integrations with GitHub and Bitbucket

    SOMERVILLE, Mass. – Mar. 7, 2017 – SmartBear Software, the leader in software quality tools for teams, released a new version of Collaborator, the leading peer code and document review tool that helps development, testing and management teams work together to produce high quality code, applications and services. The latest release of Collaborator adds a new integration with GitLab and has enhanced existing integrations with Atlassian’s Bitbucket and GitHub. Now Collaborator is the only peer code and document review tool that integrates with the three largest repository management solutions. These integrations provide the ultimate flexibility for development teams to leverage a single peer code and document review tool across teams, regardless of the repository or version control tools they are using.

    This new functionality allows users that desire a more robust peer review process to automatically create Collaborator code reviews any time a pull request is created. In addition to creating the Collaborator review, the pull request can be merged or the branch deleted once the Collaborator review completes.

    “As enterprises increasingly focus on agility, they don’t want to leave software quality in the dust,” said Donnie Berkholz, Research Director at 451 Research. “SmartBear Collaborator integrates with popular Git-based offerings and includes automatically triggered code review, which aims to help development organizations deliver higher-quality code and continual process improvement.”

    SmartBear also continues to focus on Collaborator’s document review capabilities by adding pan, zoom and scroll features. Document review users can quickly and easily zoom in on files by using their mouse scroll wheel and then pan around the document by clicking and dragging. The ability to create customizable syntax highlighting schemes that allow for unique keyword identification outside of what is offered by default in Collaborator has also been added.

    “More teams are looking for solutions that allow them to extend the code review capabilities that are offered in GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab,” said Justin Collier, Product Owner, Collaborator at SmartBear. “Collaborator is a tool purposely built to help teams achieve this. Organizations have always seen document review as a priority for improving their final deliverables; however, many teams are still reviewing documents using Microsoft Word’s track changes and comments feature. Though great for two people to collaborate, it becomes much more cumbersome as additional people are added to an email chain. Collaborator 11.0 delivers enhancements that allow easy document review for the entire team.”

    Collaborator 11.0 delivers one tool for code and document review with the ability to integrate with repository management solutions while keeping the Collaborator workflow that users know and love.

    Collaborator is available in three versions – Community, Team and Enterprise. For more information, visit: https://smartbear.com/product/collaborator/overview/. For a free trial, visit: https://smartbear.com/product/collaborator/free-trial/. Follow @CollaboratorSB on Twitter.

    — Jules Louis

  • CA Technologies to Acquire Veracode, a Leading SaaS-based Secure DevOps Platform Provider

    NEW YORK, March 6, 2017 – CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Veracode, a leader in securing web, mobile and third-party applications across the software development lifecycle, for approximately $614 million in cash. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal year 2018, and is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.

    The combination of CA’s portfolio with privately-held Veracode will establish CA Technologies as a leader in the Secure DevOps market through the automation and scaling of application security testing (AST) to develop and deploy applications faster with fewer defects. With Veracode, CA Technologies bridges its Security business with its broad DevOps portfolio and adds to its growing SaaS business. Veracode extends CA’s go-to-market strategy into midsize enterprise customers while CA accelerates Veracode‘s global reach into larger enterprise customers.

    “Security testing is growing faster than any other security market, as AST solutions adapt to new development methodologies and increased application complexity. Security and risk management leaders must integrate AST into their application security programs.”* Increased deployment of web and cloud-based business applications has further propelled the market growth. “By 2019, more than 50 percent of enterprise DevOps initiatives will have incorporated application security testing for custom code, up from less than 10% in 2016.”**

    “Software is at the heart of every company’s digital transformation. Therefore, it’s increasingly important for them to integrate security at the start of their development processes, so they can respond to market opportunities in a secure manner,” said Ayman Sayed, President and Chief Product Officer, CA Technologies. “This acquisition will unify CA’s Security and DevOps portfolios with a SaaS- based platform that seamlessly integrates security into the software development process. Looking holistically at our portfolio, now with Veracode and Automic, we have accelerated the growth profile of our broad set of solutions. We now expect that the size of our growing solutions within our Enterprise Solutions portfolio will eclipse the more mature part of the Enterprise Solutions portfolio in FY19.”

    The ability to deliver Identity and Access Management, DevOps tools and automation capabilities with SaaS-based application security, allows CA to offer enterprises of all sizes a faster time-to-value from their software investments.

    Digital transformation requires an integrated and agile approach to security. Code-vulnerability risk is mitigated and time spent identifying and fixing security issues in production is reduced when security testing is shifted earlier into the application development process. According to data from the National

    Institute of Standards and Technology, “it’s 30x more expensive to fix a vulnerability during post- production than during the design, requirement identification and architecture stage.”

    Named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing***, Veracode’s solution enables automated, on-demand application security testing starting at the earliest phases of the development lifecycle to improve testing speed, address security concerns in production, and eliminate risk. In addition to dynamic application testing, the SaaS-based application security testing software and solutions also perform static testing to detect potential vulnerabilities in custom code, third party applications and open-source components.

    “We provide over 1400 small and large enterprise customers the security they need to confidently innovate with the web and mobile applications they build, buy and assemble, as well as the components they integrate into their environments,” said Bob Brennan, CEO, Veracode. “By joining forces with CA Technologies, we will continue to better address growing security concerns, and enable them to accelerate delivery of secure software applications that can create new business value.”

    Founded in 2006, Veracode has offices in Burlington, MA and London and has over 500 employees worldwide.

    Expected Financial Impact

    Assuming the transaction closes in early April, CA Technologies preliminary expectation is that the acquisition will:

    • Add two to three percentage points of revenue, both as reported and in constant currency. As a result, fiscal year 2018 total revenue is expected to increase in the range of 1 percent to 3 percent as reported, or 2 percent to 4 percent in constant currency. At December 31, 2016 exchange rates, this translates to reported revenue of $4.06 billion to $4.14 billion.
    • Impact GAAP and non-GAAP total company operating margins, such that fiscal year 2018 GAAP operating margins are expected to be in the range of 26 percent to 27 percent and non-GAAP operating margins are expected to be approximately 36 percent.
    • Have a modestly adverse impact on GAAP and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share, and cash flow from operations, both as reported and in constant currency in fiscal year 2018 and fiscal year 2019.
    • Be accretive to net income in fiscal year 2020.
      The combination of acquisition-related expenses and purchase accounting adjustments, in addition to the structurally lower margin profile of the SaaS business model, is expected to impact CA’s fiscal year 2018 and fiscal year 2019 results.

    — Jules Louis

  • IBM Building First Universal Quantum Computers for Business and Science

    Yorktown Heights, N.Y. – 06 Mar 2017: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems. “IBM Q” quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform. While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers.

    IBM Quantum Computing Scientists Hanhee Paik (left) and Sarah Sheldon (right) examine the hardware inside an open dilution fridge at the IBM Q Lab at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, NY. On Monday, March 6, IBM announced that it will build commercially available universal quantum computing systems. IBM Q quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform and will be designed to tackle problems that are too complex and exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle. One of the first and most promising applications for quantum computing will be in the area of chemistry and could lead to the discovery of new medicines and materials. IBM aims at constructing commercial IBM Q systems with ~50 qubits in the next few years to demonstrate capabilities beyond today’s classical systems, and plans to collaborate with key industry partners to develop applications that exploit the quantum speedup of the systems. (Connie Zhou for IBM)

    IBM also announced today:

    • The release of a new API (Application Program Interface) for the IBM Quantum Experience that enables developers and programmers to begin building interfaces between its existing five quantum bit (qubit) cloud-based quantum computer and classical computers, without needing a deep background in quantum physics.
    • The release of an upgraded simulator on the IBM Quantum Experience that can model circuits with up to 20 qubits. In the first half of 2017, IBM plans to release a full SDK (Software Development Kit) on the IBM Quantum Experience for users to build simple quantum applications and software programs.

    The IBM Quantum Experience enables anyone to connect to IBM’s quantum processor via the IBM Cloud, to run algorithms and experiments, work with the individual quantum bits, and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing.

    “IBM has invested over decades to growing the field of quantum computing and we are committed to expanding access to quantum systems and their powerful capabilities for the science and business communities,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director for IBM Research. “Following Watson and blockchain, we believe that quantum computing will provide the next powerful set of services delivered via the IBM Cloud platform, and promises to be the next major technology that has the potential to drive a new era of innovation across industries.”

    IBM intends to build IBM Q systems to expand the application domain of quantum computing. A key metric will be the power of a quantum computer expressed by the “Quantum Volume”, which includes the number of qubits, quality of quantum operations, qubit connectivity and parallelism. As a first step to increase Quantum Volume, IBM aims at constructing commercial IBM Q systems with ~50 qubits in the next few years to demonstrate capabilities beyond today’s classical systems, and plans to collaborate with key industry partners to develop applications that exploit the quantum speedup of the systems.

    IBM Q systems will be designed to tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle. One of the first and most promising applications for quantum computing will be in the area of chemistry. Even for simple molecules like caffeine, the number of quantum states in the molecule can be astoundingly large – so large that all the conventional computing memory and processing power scientists could ever build could not handle the problem.

    IBM’s scientists have developed techniques to efficiently explore the simulation of chemistry problems on quantum processors (https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08213 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02058) and experimental demonstrations of various molecules are in progress. In the future, the goal will be to scale to even more complex molecules and try to predict chemical properties with higher precision than possible with classical computers.

    Future applications of quantum computing may include:

    • Drug and Materials Discovery: Untangling the complexity of molecular and chemical interactions leading to the discovery of new medicines and materials;
    • Supply Chain & Logistics: Finding the optimal path across global systems of systems for ultra-efficient logistics and supply chains, such as optimizing fleet operations for deliveries during the holiday season;
    • Financial Services: Finding new ways to model financial data and isolating key global risk factors to make better investments;
    • Artificial Intelligence: Making facets of artificial intelligence such as machine learning much more powerful when data sets can be too big such as searching images or video; or
    • Cloud Security: Making cloud computing more secure by using the laws of quantum physics to enhance private data safety.

    “Classical computers are extraordinarily powerful and will continue to advance and underpin everything we do in business and society. But there are many problems that will never be penetrated by a classical computer. To create knowledge from much greater depths of complexity, we need a quantum computer,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems. “We envision IBM Q systems working in concert with our portfolio of classical high-performance systems to address problems that are currently unsolvable, but hold tremendous untapped value.”

    IBM’s roadmap to scale to practical quantum computers is based on a holistic approach to advancing all parts of the system. IBM will leverage its deep expertise in superconducting qubits, complex high performance system integration, and scalable nanofabrication processes from the semiconductor industry to help advance the quantum mechanical capabilities. Also, the developed software tools and environment will leverage IBM’s world-class mathematicians, computer scientists, and software and system engineers.

    “As Richard Feynman said in 1981, ‘…if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.’ This breakthrough technology has the potential to achieve transformational advancements in basic science, materials development, environmental and energy research, which are central to the missions of the Department of Energy (DOE),” said Steve Binkley, deputy director of science, US Department of Energy. “The DOE National Labs have always been at the forefront of new innovation, and we look forward to working with IBM to explore applications of their new quantum systems.”

    Growing the IBM Q Ecosystem

    IBM believes that collaborating and engaging with developers, programmers and university partners will be essential to the development and evolution of IBM’s quantum computing systems.

    Since its launch less than a year ago, about 40,000 users have run over 275,000 experiments on the IBM Quantum Experience. It has become an enablement tool for scientists in over 100 countries and, to date, 15 third-party research papers have been posted to arXiv with five published in leading journals based on experiments run on the Quantum Experience.

    IBM has worked with academic institutions, such as MIT, the  Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, and École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

    to leverage the IBM Quantum Experience as an educational tool for students. In collaboration with the European Physical Society, IBM Research – Zurich recently hosted students for a full-day workshop to learn how to experiment with qubits using the IBM Quantum Experience.

    “Unlocking the usefulness of quantum computing will require hands-on experience with real quantum computers,” said Isaac Chuang, professor of physics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. “For the Fall 2016 semester of the MITx Quantum Information Science II course, we featured IBM’s Quantum Experience as part of the online curriculum for over 1,800 participants from around the world. They were able to run experiments on IBM’s quantum processor and test out for themselves quantum computing principles and theories they were learning.”

    In addition to working with developers and universities, IBM has been engaging with industrial partners to explore the potential applications of quantum computers. Any organization interested in collaborating to explore quantum applications can apply for membership to the IBM Research Frontiers Institute, a consortium that develops and shares a portfolio of ground-breaking computing technologies and evaluates their business implications. Founding members of the Frontiers Institute include Samsung, JSR, Honda, Hitachi Metals, Canon, and Nagase.

    “We heavily invest in R&D and have a strong interest in how emerging technologies such as quantum computing will impact the future of manufacturing,” said Nobu Koshiba, President of JSR, a leading chemical and materials company in Japan. “Our pipelines of innovations range from synthetic rubbers for tires to semiconductor and display materials, along with products in the life sciences, energy and environmental sectors. By having exposure to how quantum computing can provide new computational capability to accelerate materials discovery, we believe this technology could have a lasting impact on our industry and specifically our ability to provide faster solutions to our customers.”

    — Jules Louis

  • Hedvig Raises $21.5M Series C to Cement Leadership in Software-Defined Storage Market

    SANTA CLARA, Calif. – March 2, 2017 – Hedvig today announced the close of a $21.5 million Series C funding round with new investments from Singapore-based EDBI and Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The round also included expanded investments from Atlantic Bridge Ventures, including its Oman Technology Fund, and contributions from existing investors True Ventures and Vertex Ventures. With a total of $52 million in financing to date, Hedvig will use the latest round of funding to expand into new markets, develop end-to-end cloud and backup solutions for large enterprises and grow its world-class engineering, sales and channel teams. Additionally, to help lead Hedvig’s growth in the $7 billion software-defined storage (SDS) market*, the company announced in a separate release that technology sales veteran Ediz Ertekin has joined the company’s executive team as SVP of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations.

    “We’ve seen tremendous growth and traction from Hedvig since they launched in 2015. Their ability to attract customers ranging from blue-chip companies to large financial institutions like BNP Paribas is a testament to the quality of the product and support Hedvig offers,” said Brian Long, managing partner at Atlantic Bridge. “Hedvig’s strong vision for modern storage positions the company for clear leadership in the software-defined storage market, especially as enterprise use of public cloud continues to take hold.”

    New strategic investments from EDBI and Hewlett Packard Enterprise will accelerate Hedvig’s growth in key markets. With EDBI’s support and Singapore as a focal point, Hedvig will expand its development and go-to-market resources across Asia Pacific. The region has shown a significant increase in SDS demand, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32 percent through 2022.** HPE’s strategic investment will assist Hedvig in offering its leading-edge SDS solution to enterprises architecting hybrid IT. Milan Shetti, CTO of the Data Center Infrastructure Group at HPE, will serve as a technical advisor to Hedvig.

    “As cloud adoption gains traction in Asia, companies seek new storage solutions that could offer cloud-like agility, scalability and cost-efficiency to better manage their voluminous data,” said Ms. Swee Yeok CHU, CEO and President of EDBI. “Hedvig’s next-generation SDS platform allows enterprises to leverage multiple cloud storage options to perform computing tasks of varying complexity, hence providing the flexibility to meet their increasingly sophisticated data needs. Singapore’s leading data hub position will be an ideal base for Hedvig to target the Asian market with EDBI’s support.”

    Seventy-five percent of businesses are forecasted to be digital businesses by 2020***. Many of these organizations are not only faced with the overwhelming cost of migrating to the cloud, but also the complexity of operating in the cloud. Hedvig eliminates storage bottlenecks associated with deploying a cloud strategy. Its Universal Data Plane approach enables businesses to simplify how they scale their virtual data center, efficiently store their primary and secondary data, and begin the shift of their data to the cloud.

    “All sectors of enterprise IT are being hit by new demands from the massive wave of emerging digital businesses. It’s a wake-up call for the storage industry and a signal that a flexible, simple software-defined storage solution is needed for primary and secondary storage in the era of cloud,” said Avinash Lakshman, founder and CEO of Hedvig. “This investment round is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the Hedvig team. We’ll build on our early customer success in key financial services, service provider, manufacturing, energy and retail markets by continuing to innovate in both cloud and backup capabilities. With this latest investment, we are poised to grab the No. 1 spot in the fragmented software-defined storage market.”

     

    — Jules Louis

  • Cisco and Docker Team to Modernize Cloud and Data Center Application Environments

    SAN JOSE, Calif.—March 2, 2017—Today, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Docker Inc. announced a strategic alliance for worldwide engineering, sales and support to deliver essential container capabilities for application-centric data center and cloud infrastructure.

    Customers can modernize applications using Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) with Docker Datacenter, and deliver them securely and efficiently across Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco validated Converged Infrastructure solutions with Cisco partners.  Cisco and Docker will deliver unified and certified solutions for the entire application journey, whether organizations are containerizing traditional applications, refactoring applications to microservices, or creating new applications.  Docker EE with Docker Datacenter running on Cisco UCS will provide application developers a seamless way to deploy, iterate, re-deploy, and monitor applications onto production infrastructure.

    This worldwide initiative between two industry leaders will deliver:

    • Reduced complexity for improved manageability and automation, leveraging the unified, highly scalable architecture of Cisco UCS, with consistent management across all computing environments – traditional and modern.  Cisco UCS is ideal for distributed, microservices application architectures with high performance networking and comprehensive infrastructure controls via application programming interfaces.
    • Scalable, resilient, secure networking for containerized applications using Contiv, a Cisco-initiated open source project that allows IT organizations to implement comprehensive network policy enforcement.

    “The powerful combination of Cisco’s leading UCS product line for Cloud infrastructure and Docker’s containerized technology will offer customers high levels of security, manageability and scale,” said Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Computing Systems Product Group. “Developers and IT, working together, can now build, ship, and deploy container applications anywhere.”

    “Enterprises are increasingly looking to Docker to modernize their traditional applications so their investment in Linux and Windows Server applications can achieve major operational efficiencies while making these applications more agile, cloud-ready and more secure” said Ben Golub, CEO, Docker. “This strategic partnership brings even more opportunity for these enterprises by running Dockerized applications on a validated Cisco UCS infrastructure that is optimized for security, availability, performance and scale.”

    Docker EE is the leading container platform for enterprise developers and IT teams that are looking to converge a diverse set of application pipelines under one uniform packaging format, API & tooling for all their applications across the entire application lifecycle. Docker EE establishes the foundation for a Containers as a Service (CaaS) model that becomes the framework for an enterprise software supply chain where any applications (traditional and microservices) can be managed centrally and uniformly across any infrastructure.

    Joint sales and support programs across Docker, Cisco and Cisco channel partners ensure that Docker EE works seamlessly for applications deployed across hybrid cloud, converged infrastructure, converged storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, and Cisco servers. Enterprise customers have the assurance of Cisco-supported Docker platform as part of this strategic relationship.

    Cisco and Docker plan to deliver joint solutions, which will be available through Cisco’s partner channels with full support:

    • Contiv: Contiv is a Cisco-sponsored, completely open source networking fabric for heterogeneous Docker deployments across virtual machines, bare-metal, and public or private clouds. As the industry’s most powerful container networking fabric, Contiv, with its Layer2, Layer3, overlay and ACI modes, natively integrates with Cisco infrastructure and complements Docker by directly mapping the application intent with the infrastructure capabilities using rich networking and security policies. At Cisco Live! Berlin 2017, Cisco announced the availability of Contiv 1.0.  Cisco and Docker announced today that Contiv is now a Docker Certified plugin, through participation in the Docker Certification Program, a framework for partners to integrate and certify their technology to the Docker Enterprise Edition commercial platform.  Contiv is available as a certified plugin in the Docker Store.
    • Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Docker Data Center on Cisco UCS: Customers can quickly deploy Docker Datacenter in a development or production environment on Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers or C-Series rack servers by leveraging a certified reference architecture and best practices for deployment.  This solution is targeted at stateless container deployments and comes with entry and mid-range configurations; it is ideal for customers who want to jump start their container journey.
    • Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Docker Data Center on Converged Infrastructure:  Cisco, a leader in the converged infrastructure market, brings its proven data center architecture to containerized deployments through its CVD “Flexpod with Docker Data Center for Container Management.” This CVD delivers a highly available and scalable converged infrastructure solution including how to deploy and configure Docker Datacenter on FlexPod to utilize both virtual and bare-metal instances of Docker Universal Control Plane (UCP) nodes. The reference architecture also includes manual deployment and automated deployment processes for Cisco UCS and the Docker volume plugin for NetApp storage.

    Cisco has a proven history of working with partners to develop solutions that deliver business value. The Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS™) and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) are open infrastructure frameworks supported by broad, mature partner ecosystem. The alliance with Docker will extend benefits of Cisco’s data center architectures to container environments, and the two companies will collaborate going forward to bring additional solutions to the marketplace.

    Availability

    Contiv is available now at http://contiv.io and can be downloaded from Docker Store and GitHub

     Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Docker Data Center is available now.

    The Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Converged Infrastructure is available now.

    Additional Resources

    Learn more about: Cisco Data Center and Virtualization

    Learn more about: Cisco Unified Computing System

    Learn more about: Cisco Data Center Services

    Learn more about:  Contiv

    Read Cisco Contiv blog: Contiv 1.0

    — Jules Louis

  • HyperGrid Announces a Docker Certified Plugin for Hypercloud Block Storage Service

    Mountain View, CA – March 2, 2017 HyperGrid, the Enterprise Cloud-as-a-Service leader, today announced that its HyperCloud Block Storage Volume Plugin has been “Docker Certified” and is available in the Docker Store. This plugin enables an automated storage service for containerized applications. The Docker Certification Program is a framework for partners to integrate and certify their technology to the Docker Enterprise Edition commercial platform. With HyperCloud, deploying stateful applications on containers can be done in a single click while adhering to IT-defined entitlements, approvals, quotas, and quality of service (QoS) policies.

    The complexity of a piece-part approach and the absence of a utility consumption model in most private cloud initiatives has prevented many organizations from delivering mission-critical applications to their customers quickly. Many IT organizations find themselves stuck with manual processes that result in long waits experienced by end users, rising operational expenses, inconsistent infrastructure, and overall dissatisfaction by business users.

    HyperCloud Block Storage Service meets the diverse needs of enterprises by providing reliable block storage to run mission-critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint. Leveraging storage volumes that provide consistent and low-latency performance, HyperCloud delivers database as a service for Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Mongo, and many others. The database services in HyperCloud deliver scalable and highly available databases supporting multi-host clustering, backup, replication, and automatic database recovery.

    Advanced infrastructure and application modelling for both virtualized and container-based application workloads allow customers to provision databases using:

    • IT-blessed scripts (e.g. BASH, PowerShell, Puppet, etc.) that can be invoked at 20 different life-cycle events (triggers) to standardize application deployment on any infrastructure
    • Data injection to support dynamic application dependencies in multi-VM or multi-container deployments

    Self-provisioning via a self-service library of infrastructure, storage, network, database, and application services means IT services are delivered in minutes, not days, reducing the likelihood of shadow IT. The governance framework in HyperCloud provides role-based access controls, entitlements, approval, quota and cost metering policies to enable secure and holistic management of resources, workloads, and operations across any cloud with the cost visibility needed to control spending.

    Here are the key benefits of the Docker Volume Plugin for HyperCloud Block Storage:

    • High performance & fault tolerance.High performance storage that provides fault tolerance to deliver high availability with fast performance across the data network.
    • Policy-based Governance.Leverage HyperCloud’s governance framework to enable role-based access controls, entitlements, approval, quota and cost metering policies to manage block storage usage across the enterprise with the cost visibility needed to control spending.
    • Rapid block storage delivery.Self-provisioning of block storage for system administrators means VMs and containers with dedicated, persistent storage volumes are delivered in minutes under the governance policies and security controls defined by IT.
    • QoS controls.For the mission critical applications, QoS controls on HyperCloud’s all-flash storage can be configured to prioritize I/O and provide the expected service levels.
    • All-flash advantage.Reducing costs by making maximum use of available storage space with all-flash’s smaller footprint.
    • Inline erasure encoding.Protecting the data before it leaves the host and eliminating the need for replicas.
    • Linear scaling and pricing.Adding capacity as needed with pay-as-you-go pricing.
    • Infrastructure & Storage as Code. HyperCloud allows users to create Machine & Volume Blueprints as code controlled by entitlements to restrict access to the blueprints. Customers can define tiers for their infrastructure & storage services – e.g. platinum, gold, and silver. Each tier would be allocated specific compute, network and storage resources given the workload and the environment on which it would be provisioned.

    Supporting Quotes

    “We would like to congratulate HyperGrid on their acceptance of the HyperCloud Block Storage Volume Plugin into the Docker Certified Program. Enterprise IT teams are looking to Docker to provide recommendations and assurances on the ecosystem of container content, infrastructure and extensions. HyperGrid’s inclusion into the program indicates that their plugin has been tested and verified by Docker, confirming for customers that their container images have been evaluated for security and are supported and built according to best practices.” – Marianna Tessel, EVP, Strategic Development

    “We’re excited to roll out HyperCloud Block Storage Service along with the certified volume plugin in the Docker Store. While Docker was initially popular among developers working on stateless application architectures built on microservices, enterprises are increasingly leveraging Docker to run stateful applications – for which database storage management is the primary challenge. HyperCloud delivers container databases that can be easily deployed and managed with an advanced orchestration framework that lets users easily set up replication, backup and automatic scale out, which are all needed in a production environment.” – Intesar Mohammed, VP of Engineering, HyperCloud, HyperGrid

    “With the new block storage service that enables automated provisioning and mounting of high performance block devices on VMs and containers, enterprises can run mission-critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint that are backed by high performance and fault tolerant storage volumes.” – Manoj Nair, Chief Product Officer, HyperGrid

    — Jules Louis

  • From Monolith to Microservices – and Beyond!

    From Monolith to Microservices – and Beyond!

    Software application development and delivery often involves multiple development, infrastructure and operations teams, each with their own preferred “tools of the trade” for building, testing and deploying code changes

    For years, virtualization and cloud technologies have provided agile, on-demand infrastructure. The advent of Microservices promises even more agility– but what is required to take advantage of Microservices?

    Join Electric Cloud CTO Anders Wallgren and Trace3 Principal Consultant – DevOps Marc Hornbeek as they discuss what is required to:

    • Overcome culture and architecture challenges created when decomposing monolithic applications into Microservices-based applications.
    • Coordinate integration, testing, monitoring, packaging, release approval and deployment of Microservices-based applications over elastic infrastructures
    • Create a controlled and auditable delivery pipeline to support
      Microservices-based application.
    • Prepare for “future” applications, pipelines and patterns.

    RECORDING

    SLIDES

    [slideshare id=72784830&doc=microservicesandbeyondwebinarv2-jessica-170303190452]

    — Jules Louis

  • DBmaestro Now Provides Database DevSecOps With New Security Policy Control Capabilities

    BOSTON, March 1, 2017 – DBmaestro, the pioneer and leading DevOps for database solution provider, today announced new capabilities to enforce DevOps organizational policy, by strictly monitoring and controlling the database environment. The new DevSecOps component, Policy Control Manager, eliminates the risk of exposing the database to critical errors which can lead to downtime and the loss of data.

    DevSecOps integrates security measures into its automated development and deployment philosophy, as security has and will always be an integral part of the software product life cycle. DevSecOps opens the door for a more dynamic and secure way of managing infrastructure and automated deployment, maximizing risk management, prevention, flexibility, speed and time to market.

    The transition to Agile development by enterprises has led to a dramatic increase in the numbers of releases and development cycles. It has also intensified the challenges of controlling, tracking and auditing changes to the application and database. While existing solutions address these needs for code, the database, which is the next major asset in the supply chain, is sometimes ignored. Dealing with the databases also provides additional complications due to the nature of its critical data, and because any downtime can prove disastrous.

    DBmaestro has stood out as a leader in automating DevOps for the database and continuous integration and delivery. The new capabilities of DBmaestro’s Policy Control Manager allow DevOps and security managers to easily create a set of policies for all release packages, regardless of their source.

    “Our Global 1000 customers need to enforce and audit their database changes, and our new Policy Control Manager is a game changer for them,” said Yariv Tabac, Co-Founder and CEO of DBmaestro. “We’ve seen structural changes in the databases mistakenly added during schema changes and then dropped, costing financial institutions millions of dollars in losses. These leading institutions now understand the need for a security component in their database – professionally referred to as DevSecOps – in order to complete their digital transformation. DBmaestro allows enterprises to put an automated security policy in place to define, and then automatically control who is authorized to make changes to the database, in which scenarios, and when, thus preventing unauthorized or malicious changes to the database.”

    — Jules Louis

  • Webinar: Efficient Performance Test Automation – Optimizing the Jenkins Pipeline

    Webinar: Efficient Performance Test Automation – Optimizing the Jenkins Pipeline

    Shift-left testing represents a huge opportunity within the context of DevOps and Continuous Delivery, and integrating performance tests into your Continuous Integration scope greatly reduces performance risks when adding a new feature, or fixing a bug.

    Even better – adding performance tests into the widely used Jenkins Pipeline is easier than you might think. In this webinar, co-presented by CA BlazeMeter and CloudBees, we’ll offer practical tips and best practices for leveraging performance test automation in a continuous integration environment.

    In this webinar we’ll cover:

    • How to easily implement a project’s entire build/test/deploy pipeline in Jenkins and store that alongside existing code
    • How to configure and execute realistic, large-scale performance-testing scenarios as part of the Continuous Integration process
    • Enabling easy test configuration maintenance using the open source test automation tool Taurus along with Jenkins Pipeline
    • Analyzing comprehensive performance test results in real-time, and integrating those results as a part of the build promotion criteria

    Extend the impact of performance testing across the software delivery pipeline and the popular tools your teams are already using.

     RECORDING

    SLIDES

    [slideshare id=72705475&doc=slidesfortodayswebinar-170301171123]

    — Jules Louis

  • Red Hat Helps Enterprises Embrace DevOps at Scale with Ansible Tower 3.1

    RALEIGH, N.C. — —

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Ansible Tower 3.1, the latest version of its enterprise-grade, agentless automation platform. Ansible Tower by Red Hat helps enterprises cut through the complexities of modern IT environments with powerful automation capabilities that can improve productivity and reduce downtime. New additions to the latest version of the platform enable enterprises to better scale DevOps automation and offer the ability to link multiple Playbooks into longer, more complex jobs, enhancing productivity across the business.

    Ansible Tower 3.1 addresses these priorities by automating complex workstreams and making it easier for a wide range of developer and IT operations teams to apply automation to their day to day roles.

    MARY JOHNSTON TURNERRESEARCH VICE PRESIDENT, IDC

    Ansible Tower by Red Hat internally uses the popular Ansible open source automation project to help teams more effectively manage systems and optimize multi-tier deployments while adding control, security and delegation capabilities. Ansible Tower 3.1 includes several new and enhanced features to help provide greater value to IT teams, including:

    • Multi-Playbook workflows enable users to more easily string together multiple existing jobs templates into a single job run – without the need to create additional Playbooks. Powerful workflows can be designed complete with decision points, logic branches, and integrated notifications to fully orchestrate the application lifecycle.
    • Scale-out clustering increases the number of jobs that can be run simultaneously.
    • A more streamlined job details page provides more applicable information that can be understood and used by a wider audience across the enterprise. The job details page now provides job output searching, and formats the data for easier reading and analyzing without having to leave the Tower user interface.
    • Integration with enterprise logging providers allow for automation results to be indexed, monitored, and acted on as part of enterprise-wide analytics and log aggregation installations.
    • Universal search functionality allows users to search and filter throughout Tower by the executing user, job templates by the inventory used, and more.
    • User interface localized for two new languages, Japanese and French. The translated interface provides for Ansible Tower 3.1 use across the global enterprise.

    Availability
    Ansible Tower 3.1 by Red Hat is available now through the Red Hat Customer Portal.

    Supporting Quote
    Tim Cramer, head of engineering, Ansible, Red Hat
    “DevOps teams look to IT automation to help speed productivity and manage complex deployments. The new workflow functionality in Ansible Tower 3.1 takes those capabilities a step further by helping to make automation even more intuitive. With workflows, users can run separate playbooks in a dependent fashion, including the ability to run different playbooks based on the success or failure of the prior job – further reducing manual process and enabling faster time to market.”

    Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president, IDC
    “Open source automation technologies are important in the continued successful evolution and adoption of DevOps within enterprise IT. Beyond just providing automation tools, these technologies help collaborative development and operations teams to cut through the complexities of configuring and optimizing modern computing environments. Ansible Tower 3.1 addresses these priorities by automating complex workstreams and making it easier for a wide range of developer and IT operations teams to apply automation to their day to day roles.”

    — Jules Louis