devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Miles Blatstein

  • VersionOne® Spring 2016 Release Helps Organizations Successfully Scale Agility with SAFe® and DevOps

    VersionOne Enables Program Boards, PI Planning, and WSJF Ranking to Align with the Scaled Agile Framework®

    Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) April 22, 2016

    VersionOne, the independent leader in agile lifecycle management, today announced its Spring 2016 Release to help organizations successfully scale agility with SAFe and DevOps. New features in VersionOne Lifecycle that directly support SAFe include: a new Program Board for coordinating across teams and visualizing cross-team dependencies; interactive, multi-team Program Increment (PI) Planning capabilities; and Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) Ranking. In addition, VersionOne Continuum™ for DevOps now includes the ability to view a graphical timeline of work item history and a visual depiction of the development, test, and stage phases of a DevOps product workflow.

    VersionOne’s Spring 2016 Release includes the following:

    • Program Board – Coordinate efforts and visualize cross-team dependencies at the portfolio item level across each iteration in a release. These visualizations help teams avoid risks and costly delays that often result from unforeseen dependencies with other teams.
    • PI Planning – Plan complex, multi-team releases on a single screen with flexible, interactive team assignment and context sensitive filtering of backlog items during large-scale planning sessions.
    • WSJF Ranking – Rank portfolio items, epics, features, and capabilities based on the cost of delay. The cost of delay algorithm is based on estimated business value, risk reduction, time criticality, and effort.
    • DeliveryStream – Give teams the ability to trigger pre-configured Continuum actions within Lifecycle work items.
    • Continuum Product Workflow – Define the workflow for any product that is defined in Continuum and visualize the development phases.
    • Continuum Work Item History Visualization – See a visual representation of all the steps and automation a particular work item has participated in, all in a single place.
    • ALM Connect™ – Connect VersionOne to the world’s most popular application lifecycle management (ALM) systems and manage the integrations from one intuitive, web-based interface. ALM Connect ensures visibility and coordination across today’s complex development processes and heterogeneous environments.

    “While agile adoption continues to grow, ensuring successful large-scale agile implementations can be challenging without the right framework, solutions, and services,” said VersionOne CEO and Co-founder Robert Holler. “The Spring Release is further proof of our ongoing commitment to helping our customers successfully scale across the entire software delivery value stream.”

    Learn more about the VersionOne Spring 2016 Release.

    About VersionOne

    VersionOne is a recognized leader and visionary in agile lifecycle management software and services. Our mission is to help companies envision and deliver great software. Our promise is to promote and serve the best interests of the agile software development community with respect and humility. Every day, we work hard to make a difference in our community and with our customers.

    Today, more than 50,000 teams at 1,000 companies, including 33 of the Fortune 100, use our solutions to help scale their agile initiatives faster, easier, and smarter. Whether a small team just starting out with agile or a global enterprise scaling agile, VersionOne customers get the best solutions in the industry backed by the pioneers in agile lifecycle management. VersionOne has offices in Atlanta and in Amsterdam.

    VersionOne is a registered trademark and ALM Connect and Continuum are trademarks of VersionOne Inc. Scaled Agile Framework and SAFe are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.

  • DBmaestro To Expand Globally With Appointment of Former Microsoft Executive

    DBmaestro expands to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, APAC and Japan

    Houston Texas, April 21, 2016 – DBmaestro (http://www.dbmaestro.com/), the pioneer and leading provider of DevOps for Database solutions, announced today that it’s expanding its focus globally with the appointment of Danny Neuberger as Senior VP of Sales in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and Japan to further expand their client base and global network of strategic partners. DBmaestro currently partners with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, CA Technologies, Perforce, Xebialabs, Serena, Clarive and many other top technology vendors.

    Neuberger has spent the past five years serving as Managing Director and Country Manager at EMC and has held a number of senior positions at Microsoft including SMS&P Senior Director for the Middle East & Africa. This hiring comes on the heels of a $3 million Series A round of funding by DBmaestro.

    DBmaestro’s DevOps for Database solution offers a comprehensive approach to the database development life cycle, addressing enterprises need to deliver changes faster. DBmaestro has been at the forefront of Continuous Delivery for the database, delivering innovative methods for safe database automation and allowing companies to reduce costs in development and deployment.

    Yariv Tabac, co-founder and CEO of DBmaestro said, “With our solution currently deployed in some of the largest enterprises in North America, the time was right to focus outwards to the European and Asian markets. Danny’s wealth of experience and industry knowledge has already made him a key addition to the DBmaestro executive team. His appointment is a sign of our commitment to bringing DevOps solutions to the databases. It’s very fortunate that we were able to find someone of Danny’s caliber to fulfill this role and I’m confident that Danny will take DBmaestro to new heights on a global scale.”

    Danny Neuberger commented: “I am truly excited to join the DBmaestro team and look forward to working with them to further develop their global client base and network of partners. Having spent the last 20 years involved in the sales and marketing of software solutions, I have seen first-hand how the database is often left behind when it comes to DevOps and Continuous Delivery. DBmaestro brings those latest methodologies to the database, ensuring it is not the weakest link in the chain”

    About DBmaestro

    DBmaestro is a pioneer and leading DevOps for database solution provider. Its flagship product, DBmaestro TeamWork, enables agile development, Continuous Integration and Delivery for the Database.

    TeamWork supports streamlining of development process management and enforcing change policy practices. The solution empowers Agile team collaboration while fostering regulatory compliance and governance. With DBmaestro, organizations can facilitate DevOps for database by executing deployment automation, enhancing and reinforcing security as well as mitigating risk.

    DBmaestro’s solutions are deployed at many major international companies, including Barclays, Visa, Isracard (MasterCard), Frost Bank, Thomson Holidays, Bank Leumi, and others.

     

  • Bonitasoft Fuses BPM and DevOps with Continuous Integration

    SAN FRANCISCO–(Business Wire)–Bonitasoft recently publicly affirmed its commitment to supporting digital transformation of business with its award-winning application platform.

    Bonitasoft founder Charles Souillard headed Bonitasoft’s 2015 initiative to deliver Bonita BPM 7, to support high demand, short development cycles and associated constraints through a decoupled architecture. In April 2016, he revealed to the innovators atbpmNEXT a fresh look at a set of tools to help DevOps automate and scale their applications via Continuous Integration.

    bpmNEXT is the definitive showcase for the next generation of Business Process Management software. In his address to the innovators, Souillard fused BPM and software industry standards, emphasizing that there is no need for BPM to “reinvent the wheel.” “A business process can be viewed as a complex algorithm with different execution paths,” he pointed out. “This makes it perfectly adapted to automated testing as already practiced by DevOps.”

    One of the “power tools” of DevOps is Continuous Integration, which Souillard demonstrated with an example of an of e-commerce order management application.

    “With the help of cutting edge technologies such as Docker, we can greatly reduce the pain and cost of setting up continuous integration and test platforms,” said Charles Souillard. “We empower DevOps by letting them focus on mission-critical tasks while building and testing confidently over time.”

    Jim Sinur, a former Gartner analyst and now an independent thought leader in applying business process management to innovative and intelligent business operations, has commented on Bonita BPM’s strengths as a digital business platform. “Bonitasoft’s Bonita BPM, as a digital business platform (DBP), brings capabilities that allow for experimentation and incremental development of digital capabilities quickly while leveraging instant feedback on the resulting living digital system,” he said. “The power here is that Bonita BPM empowers incremental approaches because it can be modified quickly even in production and leverages power testing that allows for speedy iterations. This is ideal for digital experimentation and rapid development. As business needs and requirements arise the resulting applications, user interfaces and processes can change with great agility and speed.”

    Vance McCarthy, Editor of Integration Developer News, has noted the role of front-end enablement in escalating digital transformation efforts. “I see Bonitasoft as a pebble in a pond, with this whole innovative cycle happening. Other vendors are making the pivot to BPM-as-app. We’re seeing a whole new wave of developers, and front-end developers, who are now engaged with our BPM-CON conference.”

    About Bonitasoft

    Bonitasoft builds a BPM-based application platform — so it’s easier to create business applications without the cost and rigidity of long, unpredictable custom development cycles. With Bonita BPM 7, developers can build “living” business applications that adapt in real time to changes. As the world’s fastest-growing BPM provider, Bonitasoft has thousands of customers and a community of more than 120,000 members.

    Bonitasoft
    Press Contacts
    Carol Winqwist, +33 623 465 205
    carole.winqwist@bonitasoft.com

  • Sysdig raises $15 million in Series B funding to expand container monitoring for enterprises

    Sysdig raises $15 million in Series B funding to expand container monitoring for enterprises

    The container­native monitoring company surpasses 100 enterprise customers

    San Francisco, CA ­ DATE ­ Sysdig, the container­native monitoring company today announced a $15 million Series B funding round by existing investors Accel and Bain Capital Ventures. Sysdig will use the funds to accelerate growth, to continue building out its core technology for container and microservice environments, and to scale its operations and world­class support infrastructure to meet growing demand.

    “Containers are the building block for microservices, and represent the next great platform shift for software developers in enterprises of all sizes,” said Loris Degioanni, CEO and founder of Sysdig. “While containers deliver efficiency and agility for developers, they introduce additional complexity for monitoring, troubleshooting, and operating production environments. Sysdig was born to address these specific needs for containers and the microservices built on top of them.”

    According to a recent survey, 81 percent of respondents expect their companies to increase the investment in container­based technology. Respondents ranged from industry verticals including retail, banking/finance, manufacturing, and Internet infrastructure.

    Accel Partners and Bain Capital Ventures co­led this round of funding. “Containers will address the majority of use cases that heavier virtual machines do today, plus more that virtual machines cannot,” said Salil Deshpande, Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures, who joins the board of Sysdig. “What’s needed now is software that natively understands containers, applications running within them, and services built on top of them. Sysdig has all of these capabilities and more.”

    Sysdig Cloud is based on sysdig, the open source troubleshooting tool that has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of developers, devops, and sysadmins around the world. Its patent‐pending ContainerVisionTM technology provides deep, request‐level visibility inside containers without invasive instrumentation. This approach succeeds for container monitoring where legacy monitoring fails, and at the same time makes monitoring applications and microservices simpler and more robust.

    Company sails past 100 enterprise customers

    “The service and support I’ve received from the Sysdig team was really impressive. I encourage anyone looking to run containers in a production environment to talk to them first.”
    ­ Branden Makana, Senior Software Engineer, CDK Global

    “From exploration down to deep system captures, Sysdig has a complete approach to monitoring containerized environments.”
    ­ Zachary Smith, CEO of Packet

    In less than 8 months since general availability, Sysdig has passed 100 enterprise customers. More than a third of those have signed up in this year alone. These customers represent a broad range of industries and company sizes. For example:

    • ●  Industries such as finance, healthcare, media, telecommunications, technology, and consulting are using Sysdig Cloud
    • ●  Multiple Fortune 500 companies
    • ●  Companies from North America, Europe, and Asia­Pacific are adopting thesolutionCustomers are adopting Sysdig cloud for the ability to monitor production environments that require deep visibility into not only containers but also the microservices built on top of them. Chris Crane, VP of Product at Sysdig noted, “Our strategy combines container­native monitoring with native integration across ecosystem players like Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere, as well as cloud providers like AWS and Google. These native integrations customers service­oriented visibility, and the flexibility to choose the right mix of tools for their environment.”

      About Sysdig

      Sysdig (Twitter: @sysdig), the container­native visibility company, is creating a new generation of performance management solutions to deliver monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting in a microservices­friendly architecture. The company’s open source sysdig technology has attracted a community of hundreds of thousands of developers, administrators and other IT professionals looking for deep visibility into systems and containers. Sysdig Cloud is the first and only comprehensive, container­native monitoring solution for applications and infrastructures.

     

  • IT Revolution Announces First Speakers For DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2016

    Technology leaders from Disney, IBM, Ticketmaster, Pearson and Salesforce among the first to join the premier DevOps Enterprise event speaker lineup

    PORTLAND, Oregon, April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced its first round of speakers for DevOps Enterprise Summit London (DOES16), the premier industry conference for the leaders of large, complex organizations implementing DevOps in the UK and Continental Europe (http://events.itrevolution.com/eu/). Tickets for the conference, which is scheduled for June 30-July 1at the Hilton London Metropole, can be found at: (http://bit.ly/doesldnreg). Early Bird registration ends May 2 and is highly encouraged, as the popular DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco event has sold out the past two years, while doubling in attendance.

    Logo – http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160322/346968LOGO

    The first speakers to be included in the DOES16 London program include:

    • Antony Collard, Deputy Director at HMRC
    • Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering at The Walt Disney Company
    • Justin Dean, SVP, Platform and Technical Operations at Ticketmaster
    • Robin Hughes, Head of Development Services at LV=
    • Chris Jackson, Director of Cloud Product Engineering at Pearson
    • Finbarr Joy, Group CTO at Lebara
    • Amy Philipps, Head of Test at Songkick
    • Rosalind Radcliffe, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for DevOps for Enterprise System at IBM
    • Gareth Rushgrove, Senior Software Engineer at Puppet Labs, Inc; ex-UK GDS
    • Jeremy Waite, Chief Digital Strategist at Salesforce

    “The speakers assembled at the DevOps Enterprise Summit are technology leaders who are pioneering the practices of how large, complex organizations transform and deliver software,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.” “They have all overcome immense challenges to help their organizations win in the marketplace, and we can all learn from their experiences.”

    IT Revolution and Premier Sponsor HPE Software are excited to present the inaugural DOES16 London event this summer. As a vendor-neutral conference, DevOps Enterprise Summit curates stories from the enterprise point-of-view. Most of the presentations follow a very specific “experience report” structure—each speaker describes their organization and their industry, the business problem they faced, where they started their transformation, what they did, and the business outcomes. It’s a simple yet powerful format that reveals solutions to shared problems and new practices that can be used in other business contexts.

    For more information about DOES16 London, please visit: (http://events.itrevolution.com/eu/).

    Share This: DevOps Enterprise Summit Announces Invited Speakers http://bit.ly/doesldnreg @DOESsummitEU #DOES16#DevOps

    About IT Revolution
    IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of one million IT professionals by 2017.

    Contact:
    Jeremy Douglas
    Catapult PR-IR
    303-581-7760, ext. 16
    jdouglas@catapultpr-ir.com

  • Threat Stack Secures $15.3 Million in Series B Funding to Drive More Efficiency for Cloud Security Teams

     

    Scale Venture Partners Leads Round; Market Demand and Rapid Customer Growth Key to Series B Funding Round

    BOSTON – April 19, 2016 – Threat Stack, a leader in cloud security and compliance management, today announced it secured $15.3 million in Series B funding, led by Scale Venture Partners (Scale), with participation from all existing investors, including Accomplice and .406 Ventures. Threat Stack today also announced that Ariel Tseitlin, a partner at Scale, will join the company’s board of directors. The latest round of funding brings total investment in Threat Stack to more than $26 million.

    Threat Stack Series B funding comes on the heels of the company’s record year of customer growth in 2015 and the launch of the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform™ (CSP) in early 2016. The new capital will be used to double headcount in the next year, bolstering sales, marketing and engineering to further enhance product capabilities and user experience. Threat Stack will also use funding to support expansion into a new Boston headquarters in the coming months.

    “We are thrilled to bring Threat Stack into our strong portfolio of cloud businesses. Threat Stack’s rapid quarter-over-quarter growth and industry-leading approach to cloud security made this a compelling investment for us. There is a big gap in the security needs of cloud-native application and the capabilities of security tools in the market, and Threat Stack fills that gap with a unique product that’s easy to use and scale,” said Tseitlin. “I look forward to Threat Stack’s further expansion in the market as enterprises of all sizes continue to build rapidly and securely in the cloud.”

    “Threat Stack’s Cloud Security Platform has enabled us to grow faster by replacing point tools and using security resources dedicated to our cloud environment more efficiently,” said Jarrod Sexton, senior security engineer for Interactive Intelligence. “By enabling us to more quickly and cost-effectively identify and resolve security issues, Threat Stack has proven to be an invaluable partner.”

    The cloud-native, fully-integrated Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform supports security insight across all environments, cloud security providers and containers, eliminating the need for fragmented solutions and reducing the complexity of security concerns facing IT leaders and CISOs. With integrated security data from all aspects of the cloud environment, customers achieve a faster time to resolution and an overall lower total cost of ownership. Threat Stack’s CSP is used by companies in the healthcare, fintech and SaaS sectors, among others.

    “Since I joined Threat Stack a year ago, we’ve experienced incredible business momentum. Our growth is not only across our customer base but also as a team working passionately to build a security and compliance solution that meets the growing needs of modern cloud infrastructure,” said Brian M. Ahern, chairman and CEO, Threat Stack. “This latest round of funding validates our approach to the market, and will fuel further enhancement of Threat Stack’s Cloud Security Platform to improve operational efficiency, while resolving security and compliance challenges for customers across all industries.”

    Today’s fastest growing companies are relying on modern cloud infrastructure to fuel speed to market, innovation and scale. Resources are at a premium while security risk is greater than ever. According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey of cyber security and IT professionals,“34 percent said their organization finds it challenging to monitor workloads across clouds. This could be related to workloads within hybrid clouds, or it could indicate monitoring challenges with workloads across heterogeneous private or public cloud infrastructure.”

    For more information on Threat Stack, please visit https://threatstack.com.

    About Threat Stack

    Threat Stack enables growth-driven companies to scale with confidence by identifying and verifying insider threats, external attacks and data loss in real-time. The only fully integrated, cloud-native continuous monitoring solution that gives customers instant visibility and automatically responds to changes in their environment, Threat Stack provides the coverage needed to run secure and compliant, in all environments, without sacrificing speed and efficiency. For more information, or to start a free trial, visit threatstack.com.

     

  • Mesosphere Democratizes the Container-Based Datacenter with DC/OS Open Source Project; Backed by Accenture, Cisco, Equinix, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft and Many Others

    More than 60 leading technology companies collaborate to deliver first 100% open source datacenter-scale operating system for running containers and distributed apps in production.

    SAN FRANCISCO — (Marketwired, April 19, 2016) — A broad alliance of leading companies today joined forces with Mesosphere to unveil the beta release of DC/OS, the first open and comprehensive platform for building, running and scaling modern enterprise applications. Derived from Mesosphere’s revolutionary Datacenter Operating System, the 100 percent open source DC/OS offers powerful capabilities for container operations at scale and single-click, app-store-like installation of 20+ complex distributed systems (called DC/OS “services”), including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra and more. DC/OS lets every company deploy the automated infrastructure powering applications at some of the world’s largest technology companies.

    “The world needed a better architecture for all modern apps, not just containers,” said Florian Leibert, CEO & Co-Founder of Mesosphere. “DC/OS represents a major industry transformation, delivering today’s enterprises an open source datacenter-scale operating system that pools compute resources into what looks like one big computer, running containers, microservices, big data systems and other components of modern applications with ease. The open source community has come together around DC/OS to deliver an amazing ecosystem of products and datacenter services.”

    More than 60 partners— including Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Microsoft — have had early access to DC/OS leading up to its launch and have pledged to help grow and shape the project through technology integrations and open source software contributions. DC/OS brings the industry’s most proven approach for container operations, and its Universe “app store” brings single-click deployment and simplified operations for the latest generation of services designed to run in distributed environments.

    View a list of supporting quotes from DC/OS launch partners.

    “DC/OS is the inevitable next step for Apache Mesos,” said Benjamin Hindman, Co-Creator of Mesos and Mesosphere Chief Architect and Co-Founder. “Organizations that run Mesos quickly discover they need all of the components we’ve built into DC/OS. DC/OS will democratize large-scale distributed systems and the applications they power, building on the work of the Apache Mesos kernel. By open sourcing DC/OS we’re enabling organizations of all sizes to harness the same computing infrastructure as the Twitters and Apples of the world.”

    Organizations and individuals are invited to join the DC/OS community at dcos.io. The DC/OS name and trademarks are attached to the open source community, and Mesosphere is committed to working with the community to determine the right long-term home for the project.

    Read more about DC/OS on the Mesosphere blog.

    Partners Driving Deployments

    One of the earliest DC/OS collaborators—Microsoft—announced today the general availability of Azure Container Service, including support for DC/OS. First announced in September, Azure Container Service is a completely open-source-based, production-ready container service. Azure Container Service is the easiest way to get started with DC/OS and is uniquely designed to give customers flexibility and easy deployment while taking advantage of proven technology and vibrant community support. DC/OS is also available for cloud deployment via the Azure Marketplace.

    “DC/OS takes an open source approach ideally suited for applications that will define the next decade of business,” said Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure Chief Technology Officer. “Microsoft selected DC/OS for the Azure Container Service so our customers can easily build, deploy and manage modern applications on our enterprise-ready Azure cloud platform, as well as in private and hybrid cloud environments.”

    Read Microsoft’s blog post about why it supports DC/OS.

    Other DC/OS partners from across the IT spectrum are already delivering strong integrations between DC/OS and their products and services. These include industry leaders such as Accenture, Equinix and HPE, as well as many innovative enterprise IT startups.

    “DC/OS is specifically designed for organizations seeking highly scalable, agile application development with continuous improvement and robust, reliable deployment,” said Edy Liongosari, managing director, Accenture Labs. “Accenture is mature in its ability to implement container-based solutions and DC/OS is a powerful underlying technology that will provide us with the implementation agility needed for custom development projects. We look forward to continuing our participation in the DC/OS open source project and supporting the evolution of the ecosystem.”

    “Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments are the new reality,” said Ihab Tarazi, CTO of Equinix. “We see DC/OS as a critical part of the true hybrid cloud. Equinix is home to 1,100 network providers across 145 datacenters in 21 countries and we will be using DC/OS to form the foundation for an open source ecosystem that innovates around multi-cloud and IoT. We believe that DC/OS, combined with other initiatives like Open Compute, will drive rapid innovation in the manageability, performance, security, and reliability of modern applications in hybrid environments.”

    “Businesses want to accelerate the development and delivery of secure and scalable cloud native services,” said Manoj Nair, Vice President, CDI Converged Product Management, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “HPE is excited to partner with Mesosphere to simplify this process for customers by bringing together container orchestration, big data, and composable technologies for modern data centers.”

    Read HPE’s blog post about why it supports DC/OS.

    A Universe of Services

    DC/OS Universe, an app-store-like experience for exploring and installing services, is a built-in component of DC/OS. The Universe provides an open catalog of services built to run on DC/OS. making it easy for developers and operators to install and run complex distributed systems like Spark, Cassandra, Kafka and NGINX—the building blocks of modern applications—with ease. The DC/OS Universe simplifies packaging and delivery of its services for use in datacenter and cloud environments and provides a low-friction distribution path for ISVs that is analogous to app stores on desktop and mobile devices. With a single command or click within the DC/OS CLI or GUI, users can install services on the DC/OS. Any software developer can build services that run on DC/OS and publish them to Universe—thus inheriting the scalability and high availability of DC/OS.

    “We’re excited to join the DC/OS community in this launch, as developers and operators can now easily access and deploy NGINX as part of their DC/OS environment through Universe,” said Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, Inc. “NGINX is one of the most widely deployed application tools in containerized environments, enabling organizations to confidently build and deliver their next-generation applications at scale. We see a huge opportunity for the DC/OS Universe to bring plug-and-play services and apps such as NGINX and NGINX Plus to the distributed enterprise.”

    The Open Source Community Behind DC/OS

    DC/OS is an evolution of the Apache Mesos technology originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. Mesos was inspired by the types of systems that manage datacenter resources for companies such as Microsoft and Google, and simplifies the work of managing datacenters and the process deploying modern datacenter-scale applications. It works essentially by aggregating datacenter resources—tens of thousands of servers in its largest deployments—into a single logical computer on which many workloads (Docker containers, Hadoop, Spark and Kafka, to name a few) can run simultaneously.

    “Using new architectural principles such as containers at carrier-scale, Verizon is taking new applications from idea to production with greater speed than traditional deployments,” said Larry Rau, Director of Architecture & Infrastructure, Verizon Labs.  “Combining resources from the greater open source community and DC/OS technology, Verizon will be able to better standardize operations and maximize efficiencies across multiple datacenters. The launch of the DC/OS open source community is another step toward accelerating innovation in the datacenter.”

    “At Cisco we are interested in using DC/OS to deliver Mantl (mantl.io), our batteries included end to end solution for your microservices infrastructure,” said Ken Owens, Chief Technical Officer, Cloud Infrastructure Services at Cisco Systems. “The design point for Mantl is to focus a community around an end to end solution, not around an individual component; designed to solve business and team challenges, one glue, improved by the community, tested everywhere. We are very excited to be working with Mesosphere on DC/OS as this project that will greatly improve the stability and reliability of the microservices platform deployment and runtime.”

    The DC/OS platform, originally developed by Mesosphere, includes Apache Mesos as core technology (or kernel) but adds significant functionality above and around Mesos. Marathon is the native container-orchestration engine for DC/OS, and already runs large-scale Docker environments and other long-running applications at many large companies. DC/OS packages for Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, HDFS, Jenkins and other distributed systems increase operational simplicity and flexibility beyond what’s possible running them on non-Mesos platforms. Other DC/OS components—there are more than 30 overall, ranging from the build kit to the user interface—make it simpler than ever to install, run and manage modern applications on a wide range of platforms.

    “Yelp is a heavy user of DC/OS technologies for managing a large Docker environment that spans our private datacenters and the public cloud,” said Michael Stoppelman, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Yelp. “We even built our in house PaaS—PaaSTA—on top of DC/OS’s Marathon. Adopting these technologies has given Yelp’s developers and operators remarkable agility, and we believe DC/OS can bring the same results to all companies as they embrace technologies such as containers and cloud computing.”

    DC/OS is currently v1.7 and in beta. Based on the community’s confidence in the code, Mesosphere expects it to transition to general availability (GA) by Q3 of this year.

    DC/OS Founding Partners

    10th Magnitude (www.10thmagnitude.com), Accenture (www.accenture.com), Alluxio (www.alluxio.com), ArangoDB (www.arangodb.com), Autodesk (www.autodesk.com), Avi Networks (www.avinetworks.com), Big Industries (www.bigindustries.be), Big Switch (www.bigswitch.com), Buoyant (www.buoyant.io), Cake Solutions (www.cakesolutions.net), Canonical (www.canonical.com), Capgemini (www.capgemini.com), Cervoo (www.cervoo.com), Chef (www.chef.io), Cisco (www.cisco.com), Citrix (www.citrix.com), Cockroach Labs (www.cockroachlabs.com), Confluent (www.confluent.io), Container Solutions (www.container-solutions.com), Data Art (www.dataart.com), Data Dog (www.datadog.com), Data Fellas (www.data-fellas.guru), Datera (www.datera.io), Dynatrace (www.dynatrace.com), Element Analytics (www.elementanalytics.com), Elodina (www.elodina.net), EMC (www.emc.com), Equinix (www.equinix.com), HPE (www.hpe.com), Iguaz.io (www.iguaz.io), InfoSiftr (www.infosiftr.com), Ishi Systems (www.ishisystems.com), Joyent (www.joyent.com), Kovarus (www.kovarus.com), Lightbend (www.lightbend.com), Linker Networks (www.linkernetworks.com), Magnetic.io (www.magnetic.io), MapR (www.mapr.com), MemSQL (www.memsql.com), Mesosphere (www.mesosphere.com), Metaswitch (www.metaswitch.com), Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), Miracl (www.miracl.com), NetApp (www.netapp.com), NGINX (www.nginx.com), Offscale (www.offscale.io), OpenCredo (www.opencredo.com), Packet (www.packet.net), Puppet (www.puppet.com), QCT (www.qct.io), Quobyte (www.quobyte.com), Redapt (www.redapt.com), Samsung SAMIIO (www.samsungsami.io), SolidFire (www.solidfire.com), Sumologic (www.sumologic.com), Sysdig (www.sysdig.com), Vapor.io (www.vapor.io), Verizon (www.verizon.com), Weaveworks (www.weave.works), Xentaurs (www.xentaurs.com), Yelp (www.yelp.com)

    Additional Materials

    About Mesosphere

    Mesosphere (Twitter: @Mesosphere) is leading the enterprise transformation toward distributed computing and modern applications with its Datacenter Operating System, and is the principal founding member of the DC/OS open source project. DC/OS is a production-proven datacenter-scale platform for container operations and simple installation of complex distributed systems—including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra and more. Mesosphere was founded in 2013 by the architects of hyperscale infrastructures at Airbnb and Twitter, along with the co-creator of Apache Mesos.  Backed by A Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Partners and Microsoft, Mesosphere is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in New York and Hamburg, Germany.

    In March, Mesosphere announced that it closed $73.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, with Microsoft joining as a new strategic investor. The round brought Mesosphere’s total funding to date to nearly $126 million and supports the company’s accelerating growth as DC/OS becomes the de facto standard for enterprises operating containers and distributed systems in production.

  • Threat Stack Announces Webhook API Integration Capabilities

    Customized Workflows Enable Collaboration to Streamline Security 

    BOSTON – April 14, 2016 – Threat Stack, a leader in cloud security management and compliance, today announced its webhook API integration capabilities to reduce security and operations workflow challenges. This capability allows Threat Stack customers to enable a webhook API to build custom workflows based on security alerts. These custom workflows extend the Threat Stack Cloud Security PlatformTM (CSP) and help customers to further integrate security into their existing monitoring operations.

    Security concerns continue to be a challenge for IT leaders and CISOs facing increased threats daily. It is more important than ever that departments within organizations collaborate to streamline and automate processes. Threat Stack’s webhook API integration makes it easier for security and operations teams to automatically trigger alerts and remediation to speed time to resolution.

    “In cloud environments, automation is key when it comes to monitoring for and resolving incidents. Threat Stack’s webhook API integration takes automation past a simple alert and actually quarantines the instance until it can be addressed,” said Venkat Pothamsetty, vice president of products and customer advocacy at Threat Stack. “These types of capabilities have a measurable impact on internal team efficiency and is one of the many ways that Threat Stack has developed automation to improve time to resolution.”

    Threat Stack customers using webhooks can now more easily and efficiently:

    • Integrate the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform with custom internal applications
    • Integrate with other monitoring platforms to more easily identify issues
    •   Build new escalation and/or remediation workflows based on Threat Stack alerts

    Threat Stack users can custom configure their own webhook integrations to subscribe to specific, prioritized events. When an event is triggered, the webhooks integration sends a summary of alert information in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format, and every alert results in a separate call to the webhooks API. Users are then able to interpret their alerts and take actions based on their unique needs.

    Examples of custom workflows for cloud security teams include:

    • Generating a custom AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) notification based on severity 1 Threat Stack alerts
    • Creating a Jira ticket from a severity 2 Threat Stack alert
    • Archive severity 3 Threat Stack alerts into a S3 bucket for long-term storage

    The cloud native, fully-integrated Threat Stack webhook API integration enables collaboration to drive faster mean time to resolution of critical security events. Threat Stack customers across healthcare, fintech, SaaS fields, and other industries benefit from greater efficiency, streamlined services, and the automated integration of security events from across the infrastructure.

    For more information on Threat Stack, please visit www.threatstack.com.

    About Threat Stack

    Threat Stack enables growth-driven companies to scale with confidence by identifying and verifying insider threats, external attacks and data loss in real-time. The only fully integrated, cloud-native continuous monitoring solution that gives customers instant visibility and automatically responds to changes in their environment, Threat Stack provides the coverage needed to run secure and compliant, in all environments, without sacrificing speed and efficiency. For more information, or to start a free trial, visit threatstack.com.

  • Rackspace Becomes AWS DevOps Competency Partner

    SAN ANTONIO, TX–(Marketwired – April 14, 2016) – Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) has achieved Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) DevOps Competency within the AWS Partner Competency Program, which recognizes members of the AWS Partner Network who have completed a rigorous third-party audit demonstrating their expertise in DevOps practices, tools, and proven customer success. Customers can access this expertise and 24×7 operational support through Fanatical Support® for AWS architects and engineers, who collectively hold over 270 AWS Professional and Associate certifications across the globe.

    Historically, the process of deploying and managing applications has been manually intensive and customized. Manual deployment and management of applications generally leads to outcomes such as fewer release cycles, longer lead times, and unpredictable quality, all of which impact time to market and stable operations. Applying those manual and custom practices in a cloud environment negates the inherent advantage of software defined infrastructure. DevOps is the use of practices, tools and automation that can improve the efficiency of how businesses run applications in the cloud.

    Fanatical Support for AWS provides businesses access to certified AWS experts who can help implement and operate workloads on AWS using DevOps practices and tooling, both from AWS and leading 3rd parties. Rackspace DevOps expertise can help customers improve the speed, frequency, and quality of their software deployments and the accompanying operational processes. Customers using the Aviator™ service receive ongoing support for native AWS DevOps tools such as AWS OpsWorks, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeCommit. As an additional service, Rackspace engineers can utilize a broad range of leading third-party DevOps tools, such as Chef™, SaltStack, and Ansible to help ensure that customers have choice around their preferred DevOps toolset.

    “Rackspace has been active in DevOps practices since 2012, working to help customers increase speed and consistency in their operations. We are excited to be recognized by AWS and to apply our knowledge to customers working on the AWS platform,” said Chris Cochran, senior vice president and general manager of AWS at Rackspace. “Not all customers start with a high degree of expertise in this area, but Rackspace can help these businesses continually improve their efficiency with running apps in the cloud.”

    For more information about Rackspace’s achievement of the AWS DevOps Competency, please visit http://blog.rackspace.com/rackspace-achieves-aws-devops-competency/.

    For more information on Fanatical Support for AWS, please visitwww.rackspace.com/aws.

    About Rackspace
    Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the challenge and expense of managing complex IT infrastructure and application platforms on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise on top of leading technologies developed by AWS, Microsoft, OpenStack, VMware and others, through a results-obsessed service known as Fanatical Support®. The company has more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including two-thirds of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace was named a leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, and has been honored as one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For in six of the past eight years. Learn more atwww.rackspace.com.

    Forward Looking Statement
    This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with Fanatical Support for AWS; anticipated operational and financial benefits from Fanatical Support for AWS; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions including the possibility that expected benefits from Fanatical Support for AWS may not materialize because this product is not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the product cost effectively, differentiate the product from competitive products or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the product, (iii) changes in technology which adversely effect the product’s benefit, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the product, and (vi) other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015, filed with the SEC on February 26, 2016. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

    Media Contact:
    Brandon Brunson
    brandon.brunson@rackspace.com
    210-312-1357

  • Optimizing an Effective CI/CD Pipeline

    Optimizing an Effective CI/CD Pipeline

    Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are often cited as pillars of successful DevOps. To establish and optimize the CI/CD development model and reap the benefits, companies need to build an effective pipeline to automate their build, integration and testing processes. This requires architecting CI/CD with five key ingredients which, when combined effectively, operate as a successful cornerstone of DevOps and provide myriad bottom-line benefits.

    Building the Pipeline

    Let’s first take a look at the five essential ingredients needed for a healthy CI/CD architecture, following up with a discussion of their benefits to the business:

    • Micro-agility in the form of testing and committing code frequently: The development life cycle begins with a request to development, which then takes the request and designs a solution, codes it, tests it and commits it a code repository. From here, the code is tested by QA and then deployed to production. While each step is important, we begin here, as local testing occurs most frequently and bugs found at this stage of the process help avoid the large expense of bugs found in production.To achieve micro-agility, developers must have a clear understanding of where they are expected to commit their code after changes are made and they should be expected to test and update their code frequently—many times a day. This means development testing should be easy to run locally and is a subset of QA. The result is that code pushed by development is by definition QA-ready.
    • Automated QA: In my work I see many organizations whose QA team is one of the largest bottlenecks in the process. It’s not for a lack of skill, but too few staff who spend a good portion of their time waiting on the QA test environments they need to do their work. To avoid this situation, the QA process should be fully automated, from QA ready code coming in the door to one-click promotion on the other side. In between the two, QA should have a constant feedback loop with development where communication about—and tracking of—bugs is clear and easy to follow, allowing development to easily repair issues and recommit the code for further testing. Moreover, automated QA in a CI/CD environment should focus on microcycles consisting of small test batches rather than weeklong macro tests. Automation and communication are the overriding imperatives here, exhibited by reports to developers that are communicated immediately and code commits that are fail-rejected automatically.
    • Production-like environments: To increase efficiency and effectiveness, development and testing environments should mirror production as closely as possible. They should follow the PRQ rule, as I like to call it—production-like, repeatable and quick. Specifically, it should be fast and easy to set up new environments, to the point where developers can, with the push of a button, deploy new environments for their development and testing needs. Doing so allows developers to fail fast, breaking and re-creating environments without fear as they know they can easily recreate the same environment every time. I often recommend using tools such as Jenkins to help with this process; if developers and IT operations use the same tool, it makes it that much easier to streamline the CI/CD process and achieve the promise of DevOps.
    • One-click promotion: As I alluded to earlier, a well-architected CI/CD pipeline provides one-click promotion to production. This ensures changes are seamlessly moved to the overall production environment with the least amount of friction possible between development and operations. To that end, this reduction in friction should occur across all the steps of the process, with efficient code delivery pipelines that are designed to balance security and agility from the outset. Cloud infrastructure coupled with container technology and automation can easily optimize the process across teams and throughout the DevOps journey.
    • Fully automated deployments: The last factor of an efficient CI/CD pipeline is full automation of deployment. Any configuration changes made by development and accepted by QA should automatically be applied. Continuous integration in this way helps avoid system downtime and human errors are decreased greatly. Deployments also should be continuously monitored so that IT is the first to learn of potential problems. This helps nip issues in the bud, allowing for faster rollback and return of code to development to fix anything that may not be functioning properly. Catching issues before customers do helps ensure customer satisfaction and strength of reputation.

    Benefits of the Pipeline

    In addition to these benefits, when combined effectively, these ingredients minimize the time and cost of local test, QA and production processes; reduce the time it takes to identify problems and their causes; and accelerate delivery of production-ready code. We can see this throughout the CI/CD pipeline:

    • Developers have greater control over the process and can respond more quickly to market demands by quickly bringing up new environments, testing against them and easily starting over, if need be. Moreover, developers can quickly adjust to new environments—an approach that has proven to decrease failures and resolution time when they do occur.
    • Operations benefits as reduced friction in the CI/CD pipeline created by automation decreases repetitive, manual work and with it the opportunity for “fat finger” mistakes and the greater opportunity to introduce inefficiency into the process.
    • And, less manual, repetitive work provides everyone in the process with more time for strategic work, which provides direct bottom-line value to the organization.

    CI/CD is a pillar of successful DevOps and according to research by CA, organizations that apply DevOps discover an 18 percent reduction in time to market of new applications and a 21 percent increase in delivering new software that they would not otherwise be able to complete. Teams that master an efficient CI/CD pipeline deliver faster, higher-quality applications to market bringing with it a 19 percent increase in revenue. Mixing these ingredients together results in an efficient, streamlined CI/CD pipeline that serves as a fundamental pillar of DevOps success that, when mixed together, delivers direct business benefits.

    About the Author/Aater Suleman

    Aater SulemanAater Suleman, CEO & co-founder at Flux7, is an industry veteran in performance optimization on servers and distributed systems. He earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also currently teaches computer systems design and architecture. As a faculty member at UT-Austin, Mr. Suleman focuses on optimizing DevOps architectures involving the AWS cloud. Along with the Flux7 consultant team, he works at every step of the dev flow, from creating local developer environments using Vagrant and Docker, to continuous integration and continuous delivery using Jenkins or RunDeck, to configuration management using Chef/Puppet/Ansible, to creating efficient systems for deploying new code from Git using Capistrano/Fabric/bash. His background is as an architect, and he has experience with both hardware and software. This combination brings a unique perspective and broad view to development and operations.