devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Miles Blatstein

  • BlazeMeter Uses the Force of Performance Testing to Prepare MovieTickets.com for the Release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”

    SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Movie releases are major traffic events for online ticket providers. So when the most storied movie franchise in history comes out with a new chapter, it creates a unique performance challenge. That’s whyMovieTickets.com, a worldwide leader in advance movie ticketing, turned to BlazeMeter to ensure that its new Amazon Web Services infrastructure could manage the volume of online ticket orders around opening weekend for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

    The majority of online advance ticket buying occurs 1-2 weeks prior to a release date, but the release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” marked a historically unique buying trend, as MovieTickets.com was inundated with pre-orders months prior to the film’s December 2015 release date.

    “The demand for advance ticketing during the first buying opportunity was unprecedented,” said Craig Lefkowitz, Director of Infrastructure Systems at MovieTickets.com. “We had not seen that type of volume two months before a movie release, so we needed to make sure we were well prepared for opening weekend.”

    To prepare its site to meet demand, MovieTickets.com wanted to upgrade its infrastructure to manage spikes in volume, migrating to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment that could scale alongside demand. However, in order to make sure the new cloud-based infrastructure could perform optimally, the company enlisted the help of BlazeMeter’s continuous performance testing technology.

    “We chose BlazeMeter because it’s the leader in performance testing,” said Lefkowitz. “BlazeMeter is a standout and very well-respected in the industry. We needed to utilize a proven solution to get us ready for such an important event.”

    MovieTickets.com used BlazeMeter’s performance testing solution to examine various load volumes and times across the AWS infrastructure. A member of the AWS CodePipeline partner network, inaugural DevOps Competency Program member and trusted partner, BlazeMeter’s testing solution can integrate directly into an AWS DevOps or continuous delivery framework, identifying trouble spots in real-time and readying the site for major traffic events.

    With BlazeMeter’s help, MovieTickets.com tested their infrastructure to manage more than 30,000 simultaneous users per second. As they continued to extend their infrastructure, that number expanded to more than 300,000 concurrent visitors.

    “The higher the performance expectation from an event, the greater the need to ensure an infrastructure can support the required service level,” said Alon Girmonsky, CEO and Founder of BlazeMeter. “The trust that large companies have in our technology around critical events speaks to the importance of performance overall. The inability to manage the volume directly equates to lost sales, making performance testing a critical investment for any company that needs to maintain peak performance at all times.”

    “Performance is our top priority,” said Lefkowitz. “Our customers have high expectations and we need to meet those expectations.”

    For more information on how MovieTickets.com works with BlazeMeter, visit https://www.blazemeter.com/case-study/movietickets?utm_source=BM&utm_medium=newswire&utm_campaign=MovieTickets. And for more information on how to improve site performance through continuous performance testing, visit https://blazemeter.com/.

    About BlazeMeter
    BlazeMeter ensures delivery of high-performance software by enabling DevOps teams to quickly and easily run open-source based performance tests against any mobile app, website or API at massive scale to validate performance at every stage of software delivery. The rapidly growing BlazeMeter community has over 100,000 developers and includes prominent global brands such as Adobe, Atlassian, Gap, NBC Universal, Pfizer and Walmart as customers. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, California with Research & Development in Tel Aviv, Israel.

    For more information, sign up for a free 14-day trial at www.blazemeter.com, visit our blog or find us on Twitter @BlazeMeter and on LinkedIn.

    About MovieTickets.com
    MovieTickets.com is the leader in advance movie ticketing with nearly 250 theater chains, representing over 28,000 screens in its group, offering moviegoers a quick and convenient way to purchase tickets online, via mobile devices and at 877-789-MOVIE. The company currently enables remote ticketing for consumers across 21 countries/territories including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean. Fans can stay connected with MovieTickets.com through Facebook (facebook.com/MovieTicketscom), Twitter (twitter.com/movietickets) and YouTube (youtube.com/c/movietickets).

    Contacts

    Press Contact:
    PAN Communications
    Adam Novak, +1-617-502-4300
    blazemeter@pancomm.com

  • PagerDuty Selects Threat Stack to Enable High-Velocity Security and Compliance in the Cloud

    Threat Stack’s Continuous Security Monitoring Helps Assure Security and Scalability

    BOSTON– March 16, 2016 – Threat Stack, a leader in cloud security management and compliance, today announced that PagerDuty, the pioneer in agile incident management, selected Threat Stack Cloud Security PlatformTM to protect and secure its rapidly growing infrastructure within its Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. PagerDuty’s decision to adopt Threat Stack was driven by its need for continuous security monitoring and complete visibility into its users, data, and expanding AWS and Microsoft Azure infrastructure.

     

    “As a rapidly growing organization committed to delivering reliability and uptime, it’s critical that we leverage the scalability and flexibility of the cloud, while keeping our resources safe and secure,” said Arup Chakrabarti, Director of Infrastructure Engineering at PagerDuty. “Not only is Threat Stack easy to deploy, it’s also easy to integrate with both new and existing tools. We now have complete visibility into our processes and activities for continuous monitoring and security management across our environment.”

     

    The PagerDuty platform allows IT Ops and DevOps teams to manage and respond to incidents quickly and efficiently, reducing the chance of outages or setbacks of any kind. Threat Stack’s continuous, real-time security monitoring helps the PagerDuty team to quickly identify top-level threats, streamline processes within the operation’s workflow and increase security across the organization.

     

    “We are longtime fans of PagerDuty, and are excited to partner with them to deliver granular, integrated visibility into user activity, processes, files and network connections,” said Venkat Pothamsetty, Vice President, Products and Customer Advocacy at Threat Stack. “We are proud to deepen this relationship by helping PagerDuty scale their cloud-based business while keeping them secure and compliant.”

     

    PagerDuty is using Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform’s full suite of features and special integrations across its AWS environment to provide host-level visibility and other key capabilities including:

    • Autoscaling: Threat Stack’s cloud-native architecture automatically scales up or down with the capacity of PagerDuty’s AWS and Microsoft Azure infrastructure to ensure continuous visibility across its dynamic environment.

     

    • Insider Threat Identification: Continuous monitoring for unauthorized actions, such as escalation of user privileges, unauthorized installs, new users added/deleted, suspicious commands, anomalous behavior, changes to security groups, user session information and process stops.

     

    • External Attacks Early Warning: Automatic detection of abnormal login attempts/failures, wide open security groups, launches of new processes or kernel modules, user session information, process stops, external connections for command and control.

     

    • Data Security Verification: Automated access, editing or copying of customer or personal data intellectual property, as well as internal configuration, passwords, certificates and keys.

     

    • Compliance Reporting: Real-time visibility, detailed audit trails and built-in compliance reporting provide the historical record needed to meet compliance regulations and ensure data and infrastructure are protected.

     

    To learn more about how PagerDuty uses Threat Stack, please visit the Threat Stack blog.

    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.

    About PagerDuty

    PagerDuty is an agile incident management solution that integrates with IT Ops and DevOps monitoring stacks to improve operational reliability and agility. From enriching and aggregating events to correlating them into actionable alerts, PagerDuty streamlines the incident management lifecycle by reducing noise and resolution times. With hundreds of native integrations with operations tools, automated scheduling, advance reporting and guaranteed availability, PagerDuty is trusted by over 7,000 organizations globally to increase business and employee efficiency. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, Ignition Partners and others. To try PagerDuty for free, or to get more information, visit www.pagerduty.com

    Media Contact

    Ashley Crutchfield

    fama PR for Threat Stack

    (617) 986-5025

    threatstack@famapr.com

  • Jelastic Cooper 4.6 Unlocks Reselling of PaaS and CaaS for Hosting Service Providers

    Jelastic Cloud launched its new reselling program for hosting providers and MSPs to offer DevOps platform with support of Docker containers without upfront investments

    Palo Alto, Calif (PRWEB) March 15, 2016

    Jelastic, Inc., the cloud software company for automation of DevOps processes with the help of containers, today has announced the launch of their latest release – Jelastic Cooper 4.6. The main focus of this version is a new reselling option that makes PaaS and CaaS business accessible for a wide range of hosting companies and MSPs.

    The inspiration for this release name lies in the words of Joseph Cooper, the main character from Interstellar: “We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known.” In these words it is explained the main aim of Jelastic 4.6 release – to make such fast growing trends like DevOps and microservices available for hosting business, to provide hosting companies of different sizes with ability to reach new market, to let them try something unknown (but perspective) without upfront investments, and in this way to break the barriers.

    ”Cooperation is a key point to unlock new opportunities and reach new horizons. Working together hosting providers are able to conquer DevOps space faster and easily adapt to quickly transforming cloud market. The new Jelastic release allows service providers to cooperate across countries and continents, regardless of their size and without risky investments,” told Ruslan Synytsky, Jelastic CEO and co-founder.

    Many hosting companies face a set of problems while fighting for their place at the current cloud hosting market: lack of expertise and knowledge to handle new business opportunities, new markets exploration risks, not enough sales and marketing force, low hardware utilization, budget limitations to speed up growth and many more.

    To overcome these difficulties Jelastic offers a smart franchising system between existing Jelastic hosting partners and resellers. A reseller can use the infrastructure and billing system of a parent hoster. As a result, the parent hosting provider will obtain a wider area of influence, a better local presence and higher selling, while the reselling partners can easily start their new hosting business out-of-the-box with zero investments:

    • no installation fee or investments in hardware
    • no minimal commitment
    • production ready PaaS and CaaS with Docker containers support
    • built-in billing system
    • support and marketing tools
    • marketplace with pre-packaged applications

    “Adding a partner portal to the main panel is truly innovative and logical step. This capability now gives small and medium sized hosting companies an opportunity to expand their service portfolio literally with a single click and open up a cloud playing field which was historically available only for big players. All this is achieved without any investments or commitments! I talk to hosting companies quite often and I am constantly hearing about new investment risks and diminishing margins. MIRhosting pioneered this initiative and now we want to open new business opportunities for all and we are happy that Jelastic supported us and unlocked new functionality within their platform. Now our partners can enjoy true cloud features and will add highest flexibility to their business to become more successful!” told Andrey Nesterenko, CEO, Innovation IT Solutions Corporation.

    Starting from this release, our hosting partners can easily create a special reseller account with a dedicated dashboard for users and a cluster admin panel for management and customization. User dashboard and all the settings can be fully customized and white labeled, so the reselling partner can sell the product under own brand, with own prices, quotas and permissions.

    Besides reselling opportunity, Jelastic 4.6 release included a set of improvements like advanced containers hibernation control, automatic horizontal scaling of Docker containers and wider range of load alerts for their monitoring, pricing tutorial within the dashboard and many other enhancements. A full list of new features and improvements can be seen in the Release Notes 4.6.

    About Jelastic

    Jelastic is an enterprise DevOps PaaS for containers deployed on bare metal hardware or any IaaS. Jelastic customers and partners, such as ISVs, hosting service providers, systems integrators, outsourcing companies, DevOps teams and enterprises, can choose between Public, Private, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud options. The platform provides certified containers for Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python and .NET and the ability to use custom Docker containers. Jelastic offers agile deployment models without coding to proprietary APIs, flexible automatic scaling for stateless and stateful applications, collaboration, access control, monitoring, backup and disaster recovery, built-in billing and business analytics tools, while driving down TCO with high density and hardware utilization. Jelastic multi-cloud functionality enables customers to achieve high-availability through geo-distribution across different data centers or clouds, easily relocate the projects to the superior hardware with the help of live environment migration, choose between higher quality or more cost affordable hardware and host applications with the trusted cloud vendors. For more information, visit us at http://www.jelastic.com

     

  • DBmaestro Mitigates DevOps Security Risk with CyberArk

    DBmaestro Customers Gain Solution to Better Secure and Manage Privileged Credentials in Oracle Database Environments

    Houston, Texas, March 15, 2016 – DBmaestro (http://www.dbmaestro.com), the pioneer and leading provider of DevOps for database solutions, today announced a technology integration with the market leading CyberArk Privileged Account Security Solution. This integration helps improve security and compliance in DevOps environments by allowing DBmaestro to secure the powerful privileged access needed across the range of DevOps actions.

    Successful application development is dependent on the efficient management of multiple Oracle database environments including development, integration, internal testing, user acceptance testing, production and disaster recovery. To mitigate security risk, powerful access associated with the privileged credentials used by in-house/custom applications in DevOps environments needs to be effectively managed and secured.

    Privileged credentials are frequently targeted in cyber attacks due to their broad, often unfettered access to an organization’s most sensitive assets and information – including databases and applications. Without this security in place, privileged credentials can be hijacked by attackers, leaving the organization susceptible to significant theft or destruction of data, or even complete network takeover.

    DBmaestro integrates with CyberArk Application Identity Manager, part of the CyberArk Privileged Account Security Solution. This enables DBmaestro TeamWork to automatically retrieve and securely use the target database credentials that are stored in and managed by CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault. Enforcing multi-factor authentication to the CyberArk Vault to retrieve a credential indicates that it is a valid, trusted application requesting and gaining access to their key applications and targets.

    As part of a proactive cyber security program and to address evolving compliance requirements, passwords can be automatically rotated based on the organization’s security policy for both in-house/custom applications running on Oracle, and the DBmaestro TeamWork Oracle solution. CyberArk Application Identity Manager enables automated synchronization of credentials in the background without requiring any code or file changes while reducing downtime and maintenance windows caused by manual credential rotation.

    DBmaestro TeamWork is a secured DevOps for database solution that brings continuous delivery best practices to the database. Offering features and functionality far beyond what’s achievable using manual work or simple compare-and-sync tools, DBmaestro TeamWork will transform development operations, while dramatically increasing productivity and reducing development costs.

    “This integration helps companies successfully manage and secure multiple database environments in order to create applications and drive business results,” said Yariv Tabac, co-founder and CEO of DBmaestro. “By combining security and database change management capabilities, customers can better address critical database security vulnerabilities and their ability to meet audit and compliance requirements.”

    To achieve secure DevOps for Oracle databases, CyberArk Application Identity Manager enables organizations to protect critical business systems by eliminating embedded credentials from application scripts, configuration files and database tables. In addition, implementing both these solutions leads to combining individual accountability with detailed, centralized tracking and reporting on all application privileged account activity, thus enabling organizations to meet diverse sets of compliance requirements.

    “Privileged accounts and credentials, including those that allow applications to access sensitive databases and systems, are targeted by attackers in virtually every cyber attack,” said Adam Bosnian, executive vice president, global business development, CyberArk. “CyberArk reduces the risk of unsecured privileged accounts and credentials use across the enterprise. For developers utilizing solutions like DBmaestro, CyberArk complements existing agile workflows to empower developers to balance security and productivity, while enabling organizations to automate compliance based on their security policies.”

     

    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 Visa, MasterCard, Frost Bank, Bank of the West, Knight Capital, Thomson Holidays, Bank Leumi, Barclays, and others.

  • CLOUDBEES ANNOUNCES INDUSTRY’S FIRST CERTIFICATION PROGRAM FOR JENKINS ENGINEERS

    New Technical Certification for Jenkins and the CloudBees Jenkins Platform adds value for engineers, teams and employers

    SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 15, 2016 – CloudBees, Inc., the enterprise Jenkins company and continuous delivery (CD) leader, today announced the rollout of a professional certification program for both Jenkins and CloudBees Jenkins Platform engineers. Though Jenkins and the CloudBees Jenkins Platform are utilized in over 128,000 projects globally by countless engineers, no formal certification existed until now. CloudBees developed the certification program in collaboration with a Certification Advisory Board comprised of Jenkins subject-matter experts, as well as CloudBees customers and partners. Registration opens on March 15 and engineers can take the exam in Prometric test centers around the world as of May 12.

    The program offers two options for certifications:

    • Certified Jenkins Engineer, for demonstrated knowledge and hands-on experience in the use of the open-source Jenkins server and plugin ecosystem
    • Certified CloudBees Jenkins Platform Engineer, for certification of additional, specific knowledge and hands-on experience in the use of the CloudBees Jenkins Platform, which adds enterprise functionality on top of the open source Jenkins server

    Achieving certification can benefit engineers in several important ways. Along with recognizing them for their Jenkins skills, certification helps engineers build credibility with colleagues, differentiate themselves from their peers and gain additional knowledge through the certification preparation process.

    The certification program offers benefits to employers and organizations, as well. Hiring managers can more easily identify qualified candidates and have confidence that they are acquiring an employee with a documented level of expertise. Alternatively, if an IT manager contracts a services organization employing certified staff, the IT manager will feel more confident that they will receive competent, skilled Jenkins experts for their project. Finally, services organizations who employ certified staff will be confident that their teams have the right skills, showcasing the organization’s qualifications and differentiating their services from competitors.

    “I volunteered to be part of the Certification Advisory Board created by CloudBees,” said Senior Director of DevOps at Ellucian, Jason Shawn. “I see the certification program as very strategic – for both the community of practitioners who are using Jenkins or the CloudBees Jenkins Platform and for hiring managers, such as myself, who want to be sure they are getting someone with a documented level of skills.”

    Attaining Certified Jenkins Engineer status will mean the engineer possesses the technical skills and knowledge necessary to effectively implement and use Jenkins with a proven level of proficiency. The exam questions are designed to test an engineer’s knowledge and hands-on experience with Jenkins throughout all stages of the software delivery process – from development to build, test, stage and deployment. Achieving Certified CloudBees Jenkins Platform Engineer status means the candidate has answered additional exam questions related to functionality specific to the CloudBees Jenkins Platform.

    “As the popularity of Jenkins for continuous delivery grows, the market demand for advanced skill levels in Jenkins as a discipline is tracking right alongside that growth,” said VP of Customer Success at CloudBees, Francois Dechery. “We’re proud to offer Jenkins and CloudBees Jenkins Platform certification opportunities. We’re looking forward not only to helping engineers build knowledge and improve their career prospects as domain experts, but also to making a contribution to the overall improvement of DevOps and CD practitioner skills available in the marketplace.”

     

    The customary certification exam fee is $200. However, for the first year of the Jenkins Certification Program, the exam fee is based on registration date, as follows:

    • Early bird: $50 for registrations between March 15 – March 31, 2016
    • Extended early bird: $150 for registrations between April 1, 2016 – March 31, 2017
    • Ongoing: $200 for registrations as of April 1, 2017

    Additional Resources

    About CloudBees

    CloudBees (www.cloudbees.com), the Enterprise Jenkins Company, is the continuous delivery (CD) leader. CloudBees provides solutions that enable DevOps teams to respond rapidly to the software delivery needs of the business. Building on the strength of Jenkins, the world’s most popular open source continuous delivery hub and ecosystem, the CloudBees Jenkins Platform provides a wide range of CD solutions that meet the unique security, scalability and manageability needs of enterprises. The CloudBees Jenkins Platform supports many of the world’s largest and most business-critical deployments.

    Backed by Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Verizon Ventures, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite team of continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps professionals. Follow CloudBees on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

    Media Contacts:

    Katelyn Campbell / Gaby Berkman

    PAN Communications

    +1.617.502.4300

    cloudbees@pancomm.com

     

  • Black Duck Announces Open Source “Rookies of the Year”

    BURLINGTON, Mass.–(Business Wire)–Black Duck, a global leader in automated solutions for securing and managing open source software, today announced the eighth annual Open Source Rookies of the Year, recognizing the top new open source projects initiated in 2015.

    The selected projects show how diverse and ambitious open source software development has become. From communications to healthcare and beyond, they offer innovative solutions to a range of consumer- and enterprise-grade problems.

    The 2015 Rookies class reflects three industry trends shaping the future of open source software:

    • Docker Containers: Docker, a 2013 Rookies of the Year selection, established containers and DevOps as the heirs apparent to server virtualization. In 2014, a number of Docker ecosystem players emerged, and the trend continues this year with several, including projects sponsored by Red Hat and Capital One.
    • Open Collaboration: Email isn’t dead, but it’s not as important as it used to be. The success of Facebook messaging and Skype for personal use fuels demand for similar solutions in the office, with real-time tools like Slack and GoToMeeting becoming standards. However, proprietary solutions face competition from open source alternatives which promise all the same features of the originals, but without the lock-in downside of proprietary solutions.
    • Artificial Intelligence: We may be a long way yet from truly “sentient” machines, but development teams are helping computers get smarter at getting smarter. Deep learning techniques aim to teach computers to teach themselves by using a system of multiple processing layers to model the neural network of a human brain. This year we recognize two new projects in the field of deep learning.

    The 2015 Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year are:

    • Rocket.Chat – an open source web chat platform built for communities and companies wanting to privately host their own chat service.
    • Mattermost – an open source, on-premise Slack alternative, written in Golang and React.
    • Hubl.in – a free and open source video conferencing solution.
    • MXNet – a lightweight deep learning library created by DMLC, the people behind CXXNet, Minerva and Purine2.
    • Bazel – a subset of Google’s internal software development tools, building software quickly and reliably through a shared code repository in which all software is built from source.
    • React Native – a Facebook-sponsored framework for building native mobile applications using the React JavaScript library.
    • Kontena – an open source container management solution “built to maximize developer happiness.”
    • Nulecule – a specification for packaging complex multi-container applications while ensuring smooth deployment across all instances.
    • InSpec – an open source compliance testing framework for specifying compliance, security and policy requirements.
    • Hygieia – Capital One’s enterprise DevOps dashboard, released last year as an open source project on GitHub.
    • Glucosio – the world’s first open source diabetes monitoring application.
    • Honorable Mention: Vault – a tool for securely accessing API keys, passwords, certificates, employee credentials and other sensitive resources.
    • Honorable Mention: RancherOS – a miniscule Linux distribution specially designed to be the easiest way to manage Docker containers.
    • Honorable Mention: OWASP Security Knowledge Framework (SKF) – a free, open source web app security system based on OWASP security standards.

    “This year’s Rookies are impressive examples of how far open source has come, with start-ups like Mattermost and Glucosio as well as big players like Google, Facebook and Red Hat leveraging the open source community to help drive innovation in everything from DevOps and Docker container solutions to diabetes monitoring and real-time communication,” said Patrick Carey, Director of Product Management, who headed the Rookies selection process.

    “These are sophisticated initiatives where the open source approach is a core part of the business strategy for speeding development, promoting adoption and providing the most value to their customers,” Carey said.

    For more information about the Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year, please visit www.blackducksoftware.com/open-source-rookies.

    About Black Duck Software

    Organizations worldwide use Black Duck Software’s industry-leading products to secure and manage open source software, eliminating the pain related to security vulnerabilities, open source license compliance and operational risk. Black Duck is headquartered in Burlington, MA, and has offices in San Jose, CA, London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

    Black Duck
    Brian Carter, 508-277-7570
    Director of Strategic Communications
    bcarter@blackducksoftware.com
    or
    PAN Communications
    Michael O’Connell, 617-502-4300
    blackduck@pancomm.com

  • Vapor IO Introduces OpenDCRE 1.2, the First True DevOps Platform for Physical Infrastructure

    OCP, AppliedMicro and BASELAYER team with Vapor IO to further efforts to modernize today’s data centers through open source projects, bringing out-of-the-box management capabilities that eliminate complexities and significantly lower CapEx and OpEx

    AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Vapor IO, provider of the world’s first intelligent, hyper modular data center solution, today announced a new release of the Vapor Open Data Center Runtime Environment (OpenDCRE). With broad community support including technology partners Open Compute Project (OCP), AppliedMicro Circuits Corporation (Nasdaq:AMCC), and BASELAYER, OpenDCRE is the first true infrastructure automation and DevOps platform connecting IT and physical infrastructure. These partnerships highlight Vapor IO’s goal of furthering development of hyper converged data center architectures within the open source community.

    OpenDCRE is an open source solution created by Vapor IO to simplify data center infrastructure communication. The new release now supports AppliedMicro X-Gene server family and BASELAYER Anywhere modular data center (MDC) products. OpenDCRE is a superior alternative to competing proprietary rackscale architectures/infrastructure, eliminating vendor lock-in.

    “As a founding member of the Open Compute Project, we are proponents and early adopters of open source solutions,” said Grant Richard, Managing Director, Technology, at Goldman Sachs. “OpenDCRE presents an opportunity to simplify data center infrastructure communication and advances OCP’s mission to build the most efficient server architecture possible. We are pleased to be working with Vapor and our partners in the open-source community toward this mission.”

    “The Open Compute Project is dedicated to ensuring community led standards are brought to market through open interfaces,” said Corey Bell, CEO, Open Compute Project. With Vapor IO’s OpenDCRE hardware, which was submitted for contribution, end users now have the ability to remotely manage OCP compatible infrastructure via a completely free and completely open API.”

    Creating an Intelligent, Hyper-Modular Data Center

    OpenDCRE provides a secure, RESTful API for monitoring and completely controlling your entire data center and IT equipment. It can be used as an open platform for monitoring and managing data center hardware, software and environmental characteristics. The OpenDCRE API enables easy integration with third-party monitoring, management and orchestration providers. An alternative to proprietary interfaces and custom silicon, it provides a simple, curl-able interface for common and custom DevOps tasks. There are a wide variety of possible applications, deployments, physical mounting strategies, and network connectivity options for which Vapor IO is working to foster community support.

    OpenDCRE 1.2 provides the following capabilities to enterprises:

    • Out-of-the-box management to the Open Compute Project (OCP) community while removing the complexities, CapEx, and OpEx of top-of-rack, out of band management switches and complex network architecture.
    • Ability to speak directly with data center critical environment systems removing additional CapEx from the M&E cost of the building
    • Linux-like compatibility with its licensing under GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2)

    The Applied Micro ARMv8-A 64-bit quad-node X-Gene based OCP platform is the first of its kind and marks the entry of ARM servers into OCP,” said Kumar Sankaran, associate vice president, software and platform engineering, AppliedMicro. “This platform is particularly suited for the high density compute market segment. With the integration of OpenDCRE into this platform, it paves the way for a very highly efficient management infrastructure within the data center.”

    BASELAYER founder and CEO William D. Slessman stated, “We are pleased to be working with Vapor IO. The combination of Vapor IO’s OpenDCRE with BASELAYER’s modules and RunSmart data center operating software extends the range of our platform, and enables our customers to achieve improved operating performance.”

    “Data center environments are becoming increasingly complex and filled with a myriad of hardware and software solutions and tools from various vendors. In order for IT organizations to succeed they need to run efficient and agile environments. The collection of resources that make up today’s data centers must work together seamlessly, but at the same time exist as independent components so they can be replaced, repaired or upgraded as necessary,” said Cole Crawford, founder and CEO, Vapor IO. “Our mission is to take the disaggregated data center, and turn it into a highly efficient, well-connected but intentionally decoupled IT system.”

    Vapor IO was founded by Cole Crawford, an industry veteran with deep expertise in open source hardware and software technologies. With over 20 years of experience in the data center industry, Crawford has co-founded companies and nonprofits alike dedicated to transforming IT including OpenStack, where he served on the foundation formation committee and the Open Compute Project, where he served as its founding executive director.

    Supporting Resources

    About Vapor IO

    Vapor IO provides the industry’s first intelligent, hyper modular data center solution. Significantly lowering capex and opex costs when building and running data driven data centers, Vapor IO provides an integrated solution to integration problems. Eliminating complex structures and parking lot data centers, Vapor IO offers a true intelligence platform for any data center workload. For additional information, please visit www.vapor.io.

    Contacts

    Mindshare PR
    Heather Fitzsimmons, 650-279-4360
    Heather@mindsharepr.com

  • Chef Makes DevOps Workflow Faster and Safer for Enterprises Amid Rapid Business Growth

    New Chef Delivery Product Enhancements Come as Company’s Annual Recurring Revenue Grows 94 Percent Year-Over-Year in 2015 and Chef Nears 1,000 Customers

    SEATTLE, WA–(Marketwired – Mar 10, 2016) – Chef, the leader in automation for DevOps, today introduced Dependency Management, a new feature of its Chef Delivery product, that enables faster and safer developer collaboration by allowing Chef Delivery to know which services and applications in the pipeline depend on one another. With Dependency Management, not only must changes pass local tests, but related, downstream components or services must pass those tests, as well. Only service changes that pass are promoted, so deployments to production are safe. Dependency Management enables a reliable, repeatable and scalable process for cross-team collaboration in large enterprises. It doesn’t matter if there are two developers or thousands of staff — teams can create and safely deploy interconnected services on diverse runtime environments, including containers.

    Chef also today announced enhanced capabilities for Chef Compliance to enable automated management of compliance policies that are based on the broadly used Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. Users can now implement CIS and other compliance policies as code, called “compliance profiles.” In addition, Chef Compliance offers an enhanced Windows experience by allowing users to import Windows policies from the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager.

    By using compliance profiles in conjunction with Dependency Management, users can enforce these policies with Chef Delivery to ensure that changes to infrastructure and applications meet all requirements across the pipeline. Together these two new features enable users to easily input, track, and test service runtime dependencies. Simultaneously, users can incorporate CIS benchmarks profile into Delivery’s automated testing pipeline to create a foundation for meeting Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.

    Software is now the competitive currency of the enterprise. However, software is also becoming increasingly complex and composed of interdependent services that reside in the cloud. Businesses must be able to develop and maintain these intricate applications, along with the infrastructure that supports them, while moving at high velocity. It is critical that any changes to applications and infrastructure be versioned and tested before they are deployed to production. Because multiple teams often work on a single application, cross-team collaboration and transparency are critical to the success of a project. The DevOps workflow, which uses both culture and technology to foster these values, is becoming the most effective approach to developing software quickly and safely. Chef has distilled its customers’ successful workflow patterns into Chef Delivery, where service dependencies can be predefined and compliance requirements become part of the development pipeline. Chef Delivery eliminates silos and project segregation, enabling developers and operations personnel to begin committing code to the primary development pipeline in their first week on the team, instead of waiting weeks or even months in traditional environments.

    “Enterprises need comprehensive solutions to safely implement DevOps in the push toward ever-greater development velocity. Unlike other frameworks and tools, Chef Delivery doesn’t just help you build a change management pipeline, it is the pipeline,” said Alex Ethier, vice president of product, Chef. “We’re committed to advancing our product in a way that enables developers, operations and IT to collectively manage the speed and scale of enterprise business.”

    Company, Customer and Community Growth
    The new product enhancements reflect Chef’s rapidly growing footprint in the enterprise. Today, more than 80 percent of the company’s revenue comes from enterprise organizations, and more than half of the Fortune 50 use Chef. Chef has tens of millions of machines under management on any given day. To date, the Chef client has been downloaded more than 27 million times, with more than 13 million client downloads in 2015 alone. Among the increased demand from the enterprise, Chef’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew 94 percent year-over-year in 2015.

    Regionally, Chef’s EMEA business continues to rapidly expand. Q4 2015 was a record quarter for Chef EMEA, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the company’s total ARR for the quarter. Chef’s EMEA business now serves more than 150 customers and ARR for 2015 grew 91 percent year-over-year.

    Chef is closing in on 1,000 customers worldwide, with Chef’s commercial offerings used by organizations including Nordstrom, Facebook, Disney, Target, Standard Bank, and Etsy.

    Critical to Chef’s success is its open source community, which has more than doubled in size – at a clip of more than 100 percent year-over-year for three consecutive years – to nearly 70,000 registered members and thousands of active constituents contributing code daily. As adoption of open source technologies rise and more developers adopt Chef skills, the value of those abilities is reflected in enterprise careers. Dice recently noted that developers who cultivate Chef skills see return in a more than $130,000 annual salary.

    Recently, Chef announced a new Partner Cookbook Program to allow even greater collaboration and integration for its open source community. Some of our partners include 3Scale, Alert Logic, CloudPassage, Dynatrace, Infoblox, and NetApp.

    Availability
    Chef Delivery’s new Dependency Management capability is now available to all current Delivery customers. Read more on accessing and utilizing this new feature. Register for a webinar demonstrating Chef Delivery with Dependency Management on April 7, at 10 am PT.

    The CIS and Microsoft Security Compliance Manager profiles for Chef Compliance will be available on March 31 and demonstrated via a webinar that day at 10 am PT. Register here for this webinar and for more information on the profiles’ availability.

    Additional Resources

    About Chef
    Founded in 2008, Chef Software is changing the way companies build and deliver software to delight customers. Chef is the leader in automation for DevOps, empowering customers to build and operate high velocity organizations. Built on a strong open source foundation, we have distilled the proven patterns and practices for fast and scalable software development into our leading IT automation platform. Chef automates the continuous and unified delivery of applications and infrastructure, enabling enterprises worldwide to deliver software much faster with minimal risk. With hundreds of commercial customers and tens of thousands of open source community members, we are leading one of the strongest technology movements today. Our company is based in Seattle, WA, and financed by DFJ Growth, DFJ Ventures, Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Ignition, and ScaleVP. Learn more about Chef at www.chef.io.

    CONTACT INFORMATION

  • Radisys Introduces DCEngine – Hyperscale Data Center Infrastructure Solution

    SAN JOSE, Calif.–(Business Wire)–Radisys® Corporation (NASDAQ:RSYS), the services acceleration company, today launched DCEngine™, the newest addition to Radisys’ portfolio of solutions designed to help service providers solve the complex challenges of next-generation networks. Based on principles evangelized by the Open Compute Project (OCP), together with enhancements designed specifically to meet the unique needs of communication service providers, DCEngine provides a disruptive cloud platform that goes well beyond software-defined networking to create a truly open, software-defined services delivery infrastructure that fully embraces open source hardware and software technologies and offers DevOps agility to service providers.

    Radisys has already received initial orders and began shipping DCEngine into one of the world’s largest mobile operators late in 2015 as this operator works to evolve its infrastructure to a DevOps-enabled data center environment. Additional meaningful deployments are anticipated as this operator continues to build out its infrastructure, with other trials with service providers and cable operators around the globe expected to accelerate over the course of this year.

    “Radisys’ 25-plus years of communication software DNA, coupled with our leadership in open telecommunication platforms, positions us as the ideal partner for communication service providers looking to evolve from existing central office architecture to the cloud,” said Brian Bronson, President and Chief Executive Officer at Radisys. “DCEngine’s seamless scalability and efficient lifecycle management, coupled with our proven track record of understanding and addressing the needs of the service provider, positions Radisys to be a leader in enabling the evolution of next-generation operator infrastructure.”

    “As Verizon introduces open, flexible technology that paves the way for central office transformation, we look to companies like Radisys to assist us in that journey,” said Damascene Joachimpillai, architect, cloud hardware, network and security, Verizon Labs. “Network modernization will rely on solutions such as DCEngine that meet service provider needs with open source hardware and software technologies.”

    DCEngine offers:

    • A pre-installed, ready-to-deploy frame inspired by OCP as an open architecture for Radisys and third-party partners. This open systems approach helps to propagate the DCEngine innovations through the open source community and allows operators to avoid vendor lock-in typical of alternative rack solutions.
    • Unparalleled performance and scalability through a collection of easily deployed and serviced compute, storage and networking sleds. DCEngine leads the market in terms of density in a single rack with up to 2.4 petabytes of storage and up to 152 Intel® Xeon® class processors in a standard 42 RU frame.
    • A flexible software and management framework enabling the most demanding service provider workloads. This framework is based on leading open source projects including the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) initiatives being led by On.LAB.
    • A design that meets next-generation central office and service provider data center specifications, including NEBS temperature, EMI and seismic requirements where required.
    • Professional services and cradle-to-grave lifecycle management of DCEngine hardware and fully validated and supported software stacks, including design, installation, configuration, deployment and ongoing maintenance and validation.

    The convergence of IT and service provider domains, coupled with new economic pressures and service challenges driven by 5G, IoT and OTT are forcing communication service providers to rethink their network and cloud computing architectures. DCEngine is designed to help service providers address their unique cloud requirements and deliver on a new era of rapid service delivery and flexibility. DCEngine’s low cost infrastructure provides a platform for unified workloads and the elimination of purpose built-hardware traditionally deployed for specific workloads and applications. DCEngine enables services to be deployed much more quickly by decoupling those services from the underlying infrastructure and offering an adaptive, software programmable platform that reduces costs, streamlines operations and increases efficiency in the service provider domain.

    “Radisys has developed an open, vendor agnostic solution for central office transformation,” stated Michael Howard, Senior Research Director and Advisor, Carrier Networks, IHS. “Its DCEngine has a disaggregated and flexible data center architecture and Radisys set its platform apart by designing DCEngine with the concept of 3rd-party open source hardware and software, while meeting telco NEBS and environmental requirements where necessary. We believe that operators will want to closely examine the DCEngine approach for Central Office transformation projects.”

    Meet with Radisys’ DCEngine Experts at ONS 2016

    In addition to participating at this week’s OCP U.S. Summit, Radisys will be exhibiting and speaking at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2016 in Santa Clara, California, March 14-17. To learn more or to schedule a meeting with Radisys’ experts, visitwww.radisys.com/ons-open-networking-summit-2016.

    About Radisys

    Radisys helps communications and content providers, and their strategic partners, create new revenue streams and drive cost out of their services delivery infrastructure. Radisys’ hyperscale software-defined infrastructure, service aware traffic distribution platforms, real-time media processing engines and wireless access technologies enable its customers to maximize, virtualize and monetize their networks. For more information about Radisys, please visit www.radisys.com.

    Radisys® is a registered trademark of Radisys. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

    Radisys
    Ray Adensamer, +1-604-918-6318
    Director of Marketing
    ray.adensamer@radisys.com

  • Threat Stack Cloud Security and Monitoring Now Integrates With Slack For Real-Time Response to Security Threats

    New Integration Provides Security Alerting and Immediate Collaboration for Security and DevOps Teams

    BOSTON– March 9, 2016 – Threat Stack, a leader in cloud security management and compliance, today announced its integration with team communication platform Slack. The Slack integration with Threat Stack’s Cloud Security Platform™ alerts channel members to security concerns and enables instant workflows for cloud-based security operations center (SOC) teams. The Threat Stack Slack integration improves the speed at which team members can respond to and communicate about real threats the instant they happen.

    “Threat Stack’s integration with Slack alerts our entire DevOps team to security concerns and alerts in real-time,” said John de Freitas, principal software engineer, OnShape.”Threat Stack helps us to collaboratively detect potential security issues, and Slack allows us to communicate and address them immediately.”

    “Today’s fast growing businesses leveraging modern infrastructure for scale need to incorporate security into day-to-day workflow tools,” said Pete Cheslock, senior director of operations and support, Threat Stack. “Integrating Threat Stack security alerts into Slack allows for context and conversation around important events, providing valuable insight into activities happening across your infrastructure.”

    Threat Stack’s Slack integration automates SOC team’s processes, delivering only the most important security alerts directly into a designated Slack channel. After all alerts are thoroughly analyzed and baselined within Threat Stack, Severity 1 and 2 alerts are delivered to Slack, including:

    • Abnormal user behavior (e.g., insider threats)
    • Abnormal process behavior (e.g., new process behavior)
    • Abnormal network behavior (e.g., connections to new and bad IPs)
    • File tracking and copying of files
    • Abnormal infrastructure and CloudTrail activity

    The Slack integration works alongside Threat Stack’s audit trail capabilities, and improves SOC teams’ workflows by pinning alerts, dismissing alerts and identifying new patterns and rules. Additionally, Slack Plus users can easily archive conversations for audit and compliance purposes.  By leveraging the benefits of Slack’s real-time communication, users gain deeper context on Threat Stack security alerts and the ability to collaborate pre- and post-alert to determine the best course of action.

    To learn more about Threat Stack’s Slack integration, please visit our blog.

    Availability

    Existing customers can get started by simply providing their webhook API and alert severity preferences in the Threat Stack dashboard.  New customers can get started here: http://get.threatstack.com/threat-stack-free-trial

    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 companies 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.