devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

  • Latest Version of Open Source IPFS Improves Performance

    Latest Version of Open Source IPFS Improves Performance

    The team behind the open source InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) announced this week that a significantly faster version of the peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol is now generally available.

    IPFS is a distributed file system that makes use of a global namespace to connect all computing devices. The fundamental difference between IPFS and other distributed file systems is a decentralized system of operators who hold a portion of the overall data, which serves to create a highly resilient system for storing and sharing files. Any operator on the network can serve a file by its content address, and IT teams can find and request content from any node using a distributed hash table (DHT).

    Molly Mackinlay, project lead for IPFS and a senior product manager for Protocol Labs, which provides protocols, systems and tools to improve how the internet works, said the latest 0.5 update to IPFS significantly improves the content routing performance in addition to adding support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.

    IPFS can now also add files to the IPFS network twice as fast, in addition to performance improvements that have been made to the core file transfer mechanism.

    Finally, the mechanism for looking up mutable links is also faster and there is an experimental pubsub transport to speed up record distribution.

    Mackinlay said organizations such as Microsoft and Netflix are adopting IPFS to drive a number of distributed computing use cases. Netflix, for example, has been experimenting with IPFS as a way to distribute container images that is more efficient than employing repositories.

    IPFS won’t replace the need for traditional file systems as much as it does create an opportunity to employ a file system that makes distributed computing on a global scale more feasible. Microsoft, for example, uses IPFS as the content address storage layer to power its take on a decentralized identity system. In fact, Mackinlay noted IPFS has now been deployed on more than 100,000 nodes around the globe.

    It’s too early to say how broadly IPFS might be employed. Mackinlay said the community is still growing as IT organizations discover IPFS makes tasks ranging from fetching data to watching a video more efficient. As is the case with most open source projects, the adoption of IPFS is more likely to be driven by developers from the bottom up rather than IT managers from the top down. Developers trying to find a way to more efficiently distribute container images could, in theory, employ IPFS without anyone in the organization even knowing.

    Regardless of how IPFS finds its way into the enterprise, the need for more efficient ways to distribute files and content has become apparent. While data may be more distributed than ever, the laws of physics have not been suspended. As such, IT teams need to find a way to leverage IT infrastructure resources that are physically located as close as possible to the point where content is consumed. On one level, of course, that’s the role of a traditional content delivery network (CDN). However, given the cost of employing CDNs to distribute massive amounts of data, it might not come as a surprise that the open source community is exploring a much less expensive alternative.

  • NetApp Grabs CloudJumper to Manage Windows Desktops in the Cloud

    NetApp Grabs CloudJumper to Manage Windows Desktops in the Cloud

    NetApp today announced it has acquired CloudJumper, a provider of management tools for virtual desktops at a time when the rate at which Windows desktops are moving into the cloud is accelerating.

    Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Cloud Data Services business unit, said NetApp will primarily employ CloudJumper as a software-as-a-service application that complements the Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) service provided by Microsoft on the Azure cloud. However, CloudJumper is also available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform.

    CloudJumper has also been rebranded as NetApp Virtual Desktop Service (VDS) on NetApp Cloud Central, a control plane for managing NetApp cloud services, and integrated with Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes.

    Lye said that as NetApp extended the reach of its data management platforms into the cloud it became apparent even before the COVID-19 pandemic that large numbers of desktops were moving into the cloud, thanks to the general availability of WVD and end of life for support for Windows 7. The COVID-19 pandemic is serving as a catalyst to further accelerate that shift as organizations look to make their IT environments both more flexible and resilient, said Lye.

    As more desktops shift to the cloud, it then only becomes a matter of time before those virtual desktops create the need for additional NetApp data management services that already reside natively on cloud platforms such as Azure, he added.

    While there is general agreement that more desktops will be moving into the cloud, the rate at which that transition will occur is debatable, since many organizations have limited resources to invest in IT projects. However, Lye said there are also many organizations that will take this moment to accelerate their transition to the cloud.

    The one thing that is for certain is the number of desktops deployed locally will decline steadily in on-premises IT environments. End users may still have a local device, but the amount of compute power required to access Windows desktops in the cloud should be substantially less. That’s critical as more organizations also are abandoning traditional desktops in favor of mobile computing devices that enable end users to work from anywhere. In fact, it’s not even clear to what degree the IT professionals supporting virtual desktops will need to be in an office when the management tools being employed all reside in the cloud.

    Clearly, in terms of Windows deployments, the next year may be the most transformational in recent memory. The impact on IT professionals will be especially profound as the need to physically service individual endpoints becomes less required. Of course, the transition to virtual desktops has been a long time coming. More than a few organizations have embraced virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with mixed success. However, now that virtual desktops have gone mainstream in the cloud, many IT organizations will soon be wondering why it took so long to actually make that happen.

  • One Identity Allies With HashiCorp to Advance DevSecOps

    One Identity Allies With HashiCorp to Advance DevSecOps

    One Identity, a provider of identity management software, has aligned with HashiCorp to make it easier for DevOps teams to implement best DevSecOps practices.

    Tyler Reese, a senior product manager for One Identity, said via a plugin for HashiCorp Vault developers can now securely manage, monitor, record and audit privileged and administrative access to their vaulted tokens, passwords, certificates, application programming interface (API) keys and other secrets residing in the Safeguard privileged access management (PAM) platform from One Identity.

    The goal is to make it easier for developers to securely access credentials stored within Safeguard without having to provide access to every credential used to access, for example, a packaged application that a developer is trying to provide access to via a custom application or vice versa, he said.

    The two companies are trying to bridge the divide between end user credentials managed by IT teams that have control over access to packaged applications and the way DevOps teams manage secrets within their custom applications, said Reese. DevOps teams increasingly need to integrate custom applications with packaged applications. The challenge organizations face is finding a way to securely provide that access in a way that doesn’t require internal IT teams to be overly involved in the application development process, he noted, adding by integrating with HashiCorp Vault, all the friction is taken out of the process.

    Based on a transparent protocol proxy software that inspects protocol traffic at the application level, Safeguard rejects traffic that violates policies defined by the internal IT team. That approach prevents unauthorized and unfettered access to data. IT teams can also monitor privileged sessions in real-time with the ability to execute various actions, such as terminating a session if unusual or unwanted behavior is detected. Safeguard also enables IT teams to rotate privileged access passwords to comply with a wide range of regulations, said Reese.

    As developers embrace DevSecOps they need to find a way to dovetail their efforts with existing password management processes. For the most part, DevSecOps remains aspirational within most organizations. There is general agreement that more responsibility for security should shift left toward developers. However, most organizations are still a long way from putting the tools in the hands of developers who need to extend existing DevOps workflows. In the absence of those processes and tools, DevSecOps often winds up being little more than a sermon that IT leaders give to development teams.

    On the plus side, the rate at which cybersecurity tools that are integrated with the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms on which DevOps processes depend is steadily increasing. As that trend continues to gain momentum, the relationship between developers and cybersecurity teams will evolve. Cybersecurity teams will continue to define controls and verify that they have been implemented. Developers will be held accountable for implementing those controls as part of the overall quality assurance process. The challenge now is getting everyone inside behind that cultural transition in advance of the tools that will be available soon.

  • Kong Brings Collaboration to Designing APIs

    Kong Brings Collaboration to Designing APIs

    Kong has launched an open source tool for designing application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to make it easier for teams of developers to collaboratively edit an API specification that can be stored in a Git repository.

    Based on the open source Insomnia API management platform the company gained last year by acquiring Floating Keyboard Software Inc., the Insomnia Designer tool for designing APIs integrates natively with the testing capabilities embedded in the Insomnia API management platform to make it easier to collaboratively design both REST and GraphQL services.

    As part of that effort, Kong is also releasing plugins that enable teams to automatically embed Kong Gateway policies directly into their API specification files within a Git repository.

    Greg Schier, technology tech lead for Insomnia at Kong, said the goal is to streamline the workflow for designing APIs by enabling teams to share updates to edits of API specifications using best GitOps processes.

    For example, DevOps teams can now search for API designs to discover details such as Git Status and Git Branch. They also can automatically generate configurations for both Kubernetes and Kong for Kubernetes within the individual API spec file. Developers can also select Kong plugins that provide capabilities such as authentication or rate-limiting to govern their API’s behavior.

    As organizations embrace microservices-based applications the need to be able to design, build, deploy and maintain APIs has become more critical. Each microservice within an application exposes its own APIs. Organizations that embrace microservices soon find they need to potentially build thousands of APIs. Rather than address each of those API as an isolated project, Kong is making the case for constructing a set of workflows that make it easier to design and construct APIs within the context of a larger DevOps process.

    The goal should be to eventually make the testing of APIs a natural extension of the unit testing process embedded within a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, said Schier.

    Within far too many organizations the designing and building of APIs is still an afterthought. There is naturally a lot of focus on building microservices, but once they are constructed not nearly as much attention is paid to the API. And yet, while microservices frequently are replaced, it is the API that remains constant. All the dependencies between the microservices that make up an application are only manageable because of the APIs employed to connect them all. Rather than constructing APIs after a microservice is built, Kong is making the case for consistently designing and building APIs in keeping with best DevOps practices.

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to say at what rate organizations will be building and deploying new applications. What is for certain is the bulk of new applications will be based on cloud-native microservices to make them more flexible and resilient. That way when the next major crisis erupts, organizations will be able to respond more adroitly to rapidly changing business conditions because the enterprise architecture now revolves around APIs.

  • Accurics Makes Infrastructure as Code More Secure

    Accurics Makes Infrastructure as Code More Secure

    Fresh off raising $5 million in funding, Accurics today launched a platform that analyzes the code employed to manage infrastructure as code for vulnerabilities as well as indicators of drift to create a threat model for cloud application workloads and then, if necessary, automatically roll back cloud settings to their last known approved state.

    Accurics CEO Sachin Aggarwal said rather than simply focusing on cloud infrastructure, the startup company’s platform analyzes vulnerability feeds, identity access management (IAM) privileges and other data to detect potential cloud security issues. That analysis can then be shared with third-party security tools to automate remediation, he said.

    Once the model is constructed, Accurics then monitors the application workload for changes that introduce risks and generates a topology for each workload in real-time to identify any potential indicators of drift away from the initial deployment settings. If the drift is due to a legitimate change, the code can be updated. If it introduces risks, IT teams can roll their code back to the last known secure posture using a “time machine” capability that Accurics has baked into its platform, he said.

    AccuricsThe Accurics platform takes a different approach to cybersecurity—rather than focusing solely on application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed by cloud infrastructure providers, it analyzes everything from the Terraform code used to programmatically install workloads to the container and serverless computing frameworks employed. In the future, Aggarwal said Accurics plans to add integrations with other infrastructure commonly employed in cloud environments, including Jenkins, Bitbucket and GitLab continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms.

    That analysis surfaces violations of common compliance and cybersecurity practices based on Security Operation Center (SOC) 2, General Data Protection Rule (GDPR), Payment Card Industry (PCI), Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability (HIPAA), International Organization of Standardization (ISO), Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Best Practices and the AWS well-architected framework.

    Aggarwal said Accurics advances DevSecOps by making it possible for organizations to continuously assess changes within their cloud application environments. Most of the issues involving cloud security today can be traced back to errors made while using tools to programmatically provision cloud infrastructure. The Accurics platform helps developers and cybersecurity teams to collaboratively discover those issues, he noted, adding the overarching goal is to enable both teams to reduce risks by eliminating the most common mistakes that are made in cloud computing environments.

    As the relationship between DevOps and cybersecurity teams continues to evolve, it’s become apparent the first issue most organizations need to address when it comes to cloud security is visibility. Most IT teams are concerned about cloud security not because the platforms are less secure than on-premises infrastructure. In general, cloud infrastructure is more secure. However, because of a lack of visibility, it’s not as easy for cybersecurity teams to discover when misconfigurations create a known vulnerability. If that issue gets resolved, much of the resistance to cloud computing generated by security concerns will fade away.

  • Chef Updates Tool for Managing IT Infrastructure as Code

    Chef Updates Tool for Managing IT Infrastructure as Code

    Chef today updated its tool for automating the management of IT infrastructure as part of an effort to further eliminate the need to rely on manual processes that generally fail to scale.

    John Wyss, vice president of product for Chef, said Chef Infra 16 adds a Unified Mode that provides a more streamlined means of executing policies and adds support for YAML, which means IT teams can now employ Chef to automate the management of infrastructure without having to write code.


    In addition, Chef has made it easier to update legacy instances of cookbooks built using Chef and added support for Arm processors.

    Interest in automating the management of IT infrastructure is expected to accelerate considerably in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many IT teams are likely to be considerably reduced in size. The remaining IT staff will need to automate the management of IT at much greater degrees than ever before. Much of that infrastructure soon may also be residing in a public cloud rather than in an on-premises IT environment.

    Of course, Chef is not the only way to automate the management of IT infrastructure. However, IT professionals who master Chef typically are able to create workflows that automate a wider range of tasks.

    As an early pioneer of using code to manage infrastructure, Chef has been making a case for employing the Ruby programming language to make it easier to manage IT infrastructure at scale. While adoption of Chef largely has been limited to IT professionals who could master Ruby, Wyss noted those individuals who have mastered Chef will be in much higher demand as organizations look for IT professionals who have the skills required to manage tasks that otherwise would have required a much larger staff.

    It remains to be seen to what degree IT professionals might embrace IT automation frameworks further. Many have developed their own scripts to automate a task. The challenge IT organizations have encountered is that those scripts are usually poorly documented and generally fail to scale. Automation frameworks provide a means to consistently manage IT infrastructure at scale in a way that is easily repeatable.

    In the meantime, the debate of who inside the IT organization will automate the management of infrastructure continues to rage. Some IT organizations want developers to be responsible for the entire stack as part of an effort to reduce headcount, while other organizations prefer to have developers for a variety of reasons focus all their energies on writing application code. Regardless of who automates the management of infrastructure, the one thing that just about everyone agrees on is that legacy processes for managing IT infrastructure that typically involve many rote mundane tasks are no longer the way to work.

    In fact, increased reliance on IT automation might accelerate the adoption of best DevOps practices because the frameworks required to automate the management of the underlying infrastructure might have been put in place already by the IT operations team, noted Wyss. Otherwise, the DevOps team itself has to put those IT automation frameworks in place with or without the help of the rest of the IT operations staff, which is a current state of affairs that many DevOps teams would just assume live without.

  • Commvault Deepens Ties With NetApp to Automate Data Protection

    Commvault Deepens Ties With NetApp to Automate Data Protection

    Commvault has extended its alliance with NetApp to make it possible to recover files nearly instantaneously from an all-flash memory array.

    Ranga Rajagopalan, vice president of product management for Commvault, said NetApp Scale-out Data Protection (SDP) from Commvault builds on its backup and recovery software to make it possible to use to NetApp hyperconverged infrastructure in combination with all-flash arrays running StorageGRID object storage software to now recover data stored on-premises or in the cloud.

    The on-premises capability is critical because it eliminates potential downtime in the event of a ransomware attack, Rajagopalan said, noting data can be recovered from an all-flash array residing on-premises using a scale-out architecture in a matter of seconds.

    At the same time, IT organizations can take advantage of an object storage system from NetApp that is compatible with the S3 application programming interface (API) to store data in the cloud, he added.

    Most IT organizations are by now aware the only way to combat ransomware is to be able to access a pristine copy of their data. The challenge they face, however, is finding a way to make that data accessible as fast as possible. It not only takes a significant amount of time to extract data from a cloud service, but it is also expensive. By keeping an organization’s most recent data available in an all-flash array locally, the time to restore data is sharply reduced, said Rajagopalan.

    Of course, organizations have been keeping copies of data on magnetic storage systems for years. However, as the cost of all-flash arrays continues to decline it’s now more affordable for organizations to consider employing much faster all-flash arrays to back up and recover their most mission-critical data, he added.

    Commvault also makes available application programming interfaces (APIs) through which the whole data protection process can be automated, he said.

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are two issues that many organizations are now struggling to manage. The first is the need to automate more processes at a time when many organizations will have smaller IT staffs. The number of IT personnel that can be dedicated to manually managing data protection tasks will be fewer during the economic downturn.

    At the same time, however, the number of ransomware attacks being launched continues to increase. All it takes is one mistake for an organization to find all its data encrypted. As a result, the relationship between data management and cybersecurity has become much tighter as organizations strive to ensure they always have a pristine copy of their data available.

    In the months ahead there is no doubt there will be a lot more focus on the total cost of IT operations. The challenge is, finding a way to reduce those costs must be balanced against the existing commitment to service level agreements (SLAs). The only way to meet those often-conflicting goals is to rely more on IT automation frameworks to make data always available, in a way that requires much less human intervention.

  • Red Hat Extends Scope of Ansible Tools

    Red Hat Extends Scope of Ansible Tools

    Red Hat today announced it has extended the analytics capabilities it makes available for instances of the Ansible IT automation platform and has made the Ansible Automation Services Catalog now generally available.

    In addition, Red Hat has increased the number of certified playbooks it makes available from both the company and third-party partners within the Ansible Content Collections. That repository now houses more than 1,200 certified Ansible Modules.

    Announced prior to the Red Hat Summit, which is taking place online this week, these offerings are part of a series of cloud services the company has developed to foster the adoption of Ansible to automate a wide range of processes.

    Tom Anderson, vice president for the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform at Red Hat, said that as Ansible is employed to automate more IT processes, more IT teams want to better understand how the playbooks being created using Ansible are being used within their organizations. The latest updates to the Ansible Analytics module add the ability to filter analysis by Red Hat Ansible Tower cluster, by date and between organizations. IT teams can also discover job statistics by total runs, total time, average time, success rate, most failed tasks and the failure percentage of that task.

    At the same time, the Ansible Services Catalog makes it easier to access curated playbooks that have been vetted thoroughly, he said.

    Anderson noted Ansible continues to gain traction because it provides a declarative approach to automating IT processes that can span multiple platforms. Interest in automation has increased substantially in the last several years. The challenge that many organizations now face is that as various providers of platforms have made IT automation tools available, organizations now are managing multiple islands of automation, he said, adding Ansible provides a means to unify IT automation under a common open source framework.

    The pace at which organizations have been automating the management of IT is expected to increase substantially in the weeks and months ahead. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations that are reducing IT staff will look to automate processes to enable the remaining IT employees to manage more efficiently IT environments that continue to grow in size and complexity.

    That increased reliance on automation should also advance adoption of best DevOps practices, as more IT operations teams embrace managing IT infrastructure as code.

    Ansible, of course, is not the only platform capable of automating IT processes. However, because of its reliance on a declarative approach, Ansible is more accessible to IT operations staff who lack programming skills. In theory, DevOps teams are increasingly taking control over the management of IT infrastructure using programmatic tools. However, there are still many IT organizations that prefer to have access to IT infrastructure centrally managed by IT operations teams that typically make resources available to developers via a self-service portal. However, while there may be a debate over who will automate IT processes, the one thing everyone does agree on is the time to do so is now more than ever.

  • Report Finds Much Room for CD Improvement

    Report Finds Much Room for CD Improvement

    A report published by Harness, a provider of continuous delivery (CD) platform accessed via the cloud, finds organizations are spending on average $109,0000 per year just to deploy per application.

    Based on a survey of more than 100 organizations, the report finds organizations are struggling with deployment frequency, lead time and meantime to recover after a failed release.

    On average, organizations are deploying code to production every four days, which takes about eight hours to complete, according to the report. An average of 11% of those deployments fail and those failures take an average of 60 minutes to manually roll back.

    Steve Burton, CMO at Harness, said that while a lot of progress has been made in recent years in terms of implementing continuous integration (CI), the continuous delivery (CD) side of the DevOps equation remains challenging. Each platform an application gets deployed on is a unique “snowflake” that requires organizations to rely on custom scripts to deploy an application. The report finds deployment pipelines are expensive to create and maintain, requiring two to three dedicated full-time employees and up to 66 hours to onboard a new application. New artifacts on average took 5.5 hours to reach production and then 10 hours per deployment.

    Harness has been making a case for a dedicated CD platform that is accessed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. That approach provides a way to automate application delivery in a way that more easily complements the variety of tools and platforms organizations rely on to build applications, he said.

    The Harness report finds 71% of respondents employ the Jenkins CI/CD platform. Other popular tools and platforms include Jira project management software (76%), Selenium for testing (63%) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud deployment (65%). While Jenkins can be employed to deliver applications, Burton said the survey results make it clear there’s not been a lot of progress when it comes to CD.

    It’s too early to say to what degree changing economic conditions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic might encourage IT organizations to rethink their approach to DevOps. Organizations are undoubtedly going to be more sensitive to cost. Much of the cost involved in DevOps comes from first standing up and maintaining the DevOps environment and then hiring IT professionals with DevOps skills to manage it. A SaaS platform, in contrast, is maintained by the provider, comes with built-in analytics tools, enables automatic rollbacks and is paid for on a consumption basis, notes Burton.

    No one knows for sure at what rate organizations might be rolling out new applications in the months ahead. While some may choose to pull back, others are advancing various digital business initiatives as part of an effort to become more resilient. In many cases, that means replacing many legacy applications with fewer modern applications that run natively in the cloud.
    Regardless of the path forward, the one thing that is certain is the level of scrutiny being applied to DevOps efficiency is about to substantially increase.

  • GigaSpaces Embraces Kubernetes Alternative for DataOps

    GigaSpaces Embraces Kubernetes Alternative for DataOps

    GigaSpaces has added a DataOps framework to its in-memory computing platform that provides an alternative to Kubernetes by employing Nomad software from HashiCorp as a scheduler.

    Yoav Einav, vice president of product for GigaSpaces, said many enterprise IT organizations aren’t in a position to adopt Kubernetes, yet they still need a means to embrace best DataOps practices to process massive amounts of data in real-time.

    Version 15.2 of the company’s namesake platform adds a GigaOps Stack module based on ElasticGrid, an alternative to Kubernetes; and Ops Manager; gsctl; and a monitoring tool. GigaSpaces already natively supports Kubernetes, but Einav said there is a significant number of IT teams that don’t have the skills required to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters.

    DataOps has emerged as a corollary to DevOps in that it defines a set of practices for automating the provisioning of storage systems that makes data readily accessible to applications. The need to automate those processes has become more acute as organizations build and deploy applications infused with machine learning algorithms, noted Einav.

    ElasticGrid is designed to provide a more declarative alternative to achieve that goal without having to learn how to programmatically spin up Kubernetes clusters, Einav said. That approach makes ElasticGrid more accessible to the average IT administrator, he added.

    In addition to being able to support both virtual machines and containers, Einav said ElasticGrid is approximately 20% faster than Kubernetes.

    Other capabilities added to the latest release of GigaSpaces include a stream iterator optimization tool that increases throughput for read-intensive workloads by a factor of two and support for memory-level encryption and compression per property to better adhere to data privacy regulations.

    GigaSpaces is making the case for an in-memory computing platform that is optimized to run applications in near real-time. As organizations embrace a wide range of digital business applications, legacy IT infrastructure that was optimized to process applications in batch mode needs to be updated to support applications that need to process data in memory to support applications that are processing data in near real-time.

    It’s not clear to what degree organizations will be investing in new platforms during the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no doubt some organizations will pull back on those investments. However, a significant number of organizations are also accelerating the rate at which they are building digital business applications to drive a newly minted business continuity strategy. Recognizing the need for more resilient applications that can be accessed by customers and suppliers from anywhere, many organizations are accelerating the deadlines for delivering many of these applications in the wake of the pandemic.

    Of course, there are multiple options available when it comes to deploying an in-memory computing platform to support these applications. The challenge many organizations will encounter, however, is finding an in-memory computing platform that also addresses the inherent challenges associated with moving large amounts of data in and out of the platform on-demand.