devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Miles Blatstein

  • Akana Platform Wins Cloud Platform Innovation Award

    LONDON–(Business Wire)–Akana, a leading provider of API Management, API Security, API Analytics and Microservices solutions for Digital Businesses, announced today that its Akana Platform won the Cloud Platform Innovation of the Year category. The award was given at the 4th Cloud & DevOps World Awards ceremony on 21 June 2016. Other great companies have won this award in the past. In 2015, this award was won by Amazon Web Services.Cloud and DevOps Awards celebrate excellence and innovation in Cloud Computing. The awards have 8 different categories. The Platform innovation of the Year Award is designed for that game-changer solution provider whose PaaS offerings are able to significantly minimize the cost and complexity of IT. The Judges looked for a platform that enables further agility, scalability, collaboration and facilitates the development environment in the most cost efficient, high quality and secure manner. See more information at https://cloudanddevopsworldawards.com/

    “We are thrilled to receive this cloud innovation recognition,” said Roberto Medrano, Executive VP of Akana. “Akana has developed a proven API Management solution that exceeds customer expectations. As a category leader working with Fortune 1000 accounts, we will continue helping customers in their digital transformation journey.”

    The Akana Platform provides an end-to-end API Management solution for designing, implementing, securing, managing, monitoring, and publishing APIs. It is available as a SaaS platform, on-premises, and as a hybrid deployment. For more information and a free trial go here http://bit.ly/1sIsUHE

    About Akana

    Akana’s comprehensive suite of API Management, API Securityand Microservices solutions helps businesses accelerate digital transformation by securely extending their reach across multiple channels – mobile, cloud and “Internet of Things.” Akana enables enterprises to quickly deliver scalable applications, share data as APIs, connect and integrate applications, drive partner adoption, monetize their assets and provide intelligent insights into their businesses and operations. The world’s largest companies including Bank of America, Pfizer, and Verizon use Akana to harness the power of their technology and transform their businesses. Akana is also recognized as a “Leader” by several analyst firms. For more information on Akana’s Platform , please visit http://www.akana.com.

    For more information, please contact: pressroom@akana.com

    All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners. Akana, SOA Software, Community Manager, API Gateway, Lifecycle Manager, OAuth Server, Policy Manager and Cloud Integration Gateway are trademarks of Akana, Inc.

    Follow Akana:

    • Blog: https://blog.akana.com/

    • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AkanaSoftware

    • Twitter: https://twitter.com/AkanaInc

    • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/akana

    • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4QdcCn-FDCqN7gao7wp24g

    • RSS: http://www.akana.com/index.php/news/feed

    Akana
    Lisa Blank, 323-708-2651
    pressroom@akana.com

  • Puppet 2016 State of DevOps Report Addresses the Most Pressing Issues in DevOps Today

    Report Helps Organizations Understand the ROI of DevOps, Why Quality and Security Should Be Built In, and More

    PORTLAND, OR–(Marketwired – Jun 22, 2016) – Puppet, the standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us, today announced the findings of the 2016 State of DevOps Report. Over the past five years, Puppet has surveyed more than 25,000 technical professionals, making the State of DevOps Report the largest, most comprehensive and longest-running study on the topic of DevOps. Written in partnership with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), the fifth annual State of DevOps Report includes findings on some of the most debated topics in DevOps, including understanding the ROI of DevOps; how building quality and security into the development cycle affects business outcomes; the role of lean product management; and the relationship between employee engagement and organizational success.

    “Today, every company is a software company. Yet there’s a huge delta between the organizations that get it and are able to ship software on demand, and the organizations that take days, weeks or even years to ship simple upgrades,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO of Puppet. “The 2016 State of DevOps Report shows that gap is widening. We hope the report will help organizations identify their own inhibitors of change so they can drastically increase their competitiveness and ultimately, their revenue.”

    The Widening Performance Gap
    The 2016 State of DevOps Report shows that high-performing organizations are widening their lead against lower-performing organizations. Compared to low performers, high-performing organizations deploy 200 times more frequently, have 2,555 times faster lead times, and recover 24 times faster from failed changes, with three times lower change fail rates. Because high performers build quality into each stage of the development process, they also spend 22 percent less time on unplanned work and rework than lower-performing organizations, and thus are able to spend 29 percent more time on new work.

    Understanding the ROI of DevOps
    Since the first State of DevOps Report was published five years ago, it’s been widely accepted that DevOps significantly affects IT performance and organizational performance. The 2016 State of DevOps Report builds on this body of knowledge and provides example formulas (based on survey findings and industry averages) to help organizations understand the potential cost savings of DevOps practices, and the additional value to be gained from investing in DevOps.

    Security
    All too often, security testing is tacked on at the end of the delivery process, leading to expensive and painful fixes once development is complete. The 2016 State of DevOps Report confirms that integrating security into each stage of the development process has a positive impact on IT performance and security outcomes. Organizations that better integrate information security objectives into daily work spend 50 percent less time remediating security issues than low performers.

    Employee Engagement (eNPS)
    Employee engagement is more than a feel-good metric: Companies with highly engaged workers have been shown to increase revenues two and a half times as much as companies with lower engagement levels. The 2016 State of DevOps Report found that employees in high-performing organizations are more than twice as likely to recommend their organization to a friend as a great place to work. This indicates a high level of engagement and identification with the company, and as many business studies show, highly engaged employees are more productive and creative, and provide better experiences to customers.

    Lean Product Management
    The 2016 State of DevOps Report looked at lean product management practices to see if changes upstream in the product management process affect downstream business outcomes. Analysis shows that teams that implement continuous delivery practices and take an experimental approach to product development build higher-quality products and feel more connected to the overall organization.

    The 2016 State of DevOps Report also reveals:

    • Respondents who report they are part of a DevOps team increased from 16 percent in 2014 to 22 percent in 2016.
    • High-performing organizations get more new or planned work done, because they have less unplanned work to cope with.
    • And more insights into how organizations are transforming their cultures and outcomes.

    Sponsors
    Atlassian, Automic Software, CA Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IT Revolution, Splunk Inc., and ThoughtWorks

    The full 2016 State of DevOps Report is available for download athttps://puppet.com/resources/white-paper/2016-state-of-devops-report

    Additional resources:

    About Puppet
    Puppet is driving the movement to a world of unconstrained software change. Its revolutionary platform is the industry standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. More than 32,000 companies — including more than two thirds of the Fortune 100 — use Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to adopt DevOps practices, achieve situational awareness and drive software change with confidence. Based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with more than 400 employees around the world. Learn more at puppet.com.

  • mLab Launches Private Environments on AWS

    Developers can now peer their AWS VPCs to their mLab Private Environments to create their own private networks isolated from the rest of the cloud datacenter
    San Francisco – June 22, 2016 – mLab, the fully managed cloud database service featuring automated provisioning, scaling, and management of MongoDB databases, today announced the private beta of Private Environments. mLab Private Environments are virtual private networks that customers can provision to house their various database deployments hosted with mLab.
    Private Environments provide the security benefits of self-hosting database deployments without the headache of self-hosting. With Private Environments, customers can use all of the traditional network security best-practices and techniques for designing their application. Customers can:
    • isolate their database from public networks while allowing secure access to their application infrastructure
    • create sophisticated network topologies to ensure least privilege access to their database deployments using CIDR ranges and AWS Security Groups
    • auto-scale their application tier without having to modify database firewall rules

    “As an early beta user of Private Environments, we’ve appreciated the added level of security it provides,” said Chris Lambert, CTO, Lyft. “The private network created by Private Environments keeps our infrastructure secure as we continue to grow, and makes it easy for our team to provision new application servers and auto-scale without needing to modify database firewall rules. We’ve been using mLab’s cloud-hosted MongoDB for several years and it has played a big role in helping Lyft scale.”

    The new solution is engineered to be a novel way for customers to use virtual private networks through a DBaaS provider. With Private Environments, mLab has created an isolated and self-contained solution that securely and seamlessly integrates into an existing stack as though the databases were inside a customer’s own VPC. The result is network security that is both operationally easy and flexible.

    mLab’s cloud database-as-a-service platform hosts over 300,000 MongoDB deployments, powering companies like Turner, Lyft, and Whole Foods Market. Private Environments is the first of several releases slated for 2016 as mLab continues to debut new cloud infrastructure capabilities.

    “mLab is hands-down the easiest way to run MongoDB on AWS,” said Will Shulman, CEO, mLab. “We believe that constantly managing database infrastructure isn’t something most developers should have to worry about; mLab’s platform and tools are designed to automatically provision, host, scale, monitor and backup your MongoDB databases. Private Environments is a powerful new capability that furthers mLab’s goal of providing cloud infrastructure solutions that are both simple and secure. We’re excited for developers to try it out.”

    Resources

    About mLab

    mLab is a fully managed cloud database service featuring automated provisioning and scaling of MongoDB databases, backup and recovery, 24/7 monitoring and alerting, web-based management tools, and expert support. mLab’s Database-as-a-Service platform powers hundreds of thousands of databases across AWS, Azure, and Google and allows developers to focus their attention on product development instead of operations.

    Headquartered in the Mission/Potrero area of San Francisco, mLab is backed by premier venture and angel investors including Foundry Group, Baseline Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and David Cohen of TechStars.

  • VictorOps Enterprise Edition expanded with Incident Automation Engine

     

    VictorOps helps the most innovative companies bypass traditional Network Operations Centers in order to proactively ingest, transform, route, and solve problems using end-to-end automation.

    BOULDER, Colo. – June 22, 2016 – VictorOps, the real-time incident management company for DevOps teams, announced the Incident Automation Engine, a set of cutting-edge features for on-call teams to automate their way to faster MTTR through use of intelligent alerts, sophisticated routing, and smarter system outputs.

    Unlike other incident management tools that focus on triaging alerts and notifications, the VictorOps Incident Automation Engine offers a truly innovative combination making system inputs intelligent and relevant outputs fully actionable. The Engine automates human behavior in order to quiet the noise of unnecessary alerts, deliver real-time remediation solutions, and provide visibility and documentation into all communications and actions that took place during an incident. Additionally, through the use of outbound webhooks the entire VictorOps solution can now be configured to send information to other tools, take automatic actions, and sync with other alert sources and reporting systems already in place. The combination providing unsurpassed control and insight throughout the incident lifecycle.

    “With the Incident Automation Engine our customers are are now better empowered to resolve and even prevent future incidents, thereby protecting revenue loss, driving customer satisfaction and maintaining brand reputation,” said Todd Vernon, VictorOps CEO and co-founder. “More and more the best way to speed organizational innovation is through enabling developers to move quickly. When it comes to a company’s uptime this same concept applies. Today valuable time is lost with archaic alerting systems and manual processes. The Engine now becomes a foundation to automate out these inefficiencies, gain clearer access to actionable information and to continuously evaluate and improve the inputs driving on-call processes.”

    Key features of the Incident Automation Engine include:

    • Alert Transformations– Quiet unactionable alerts and automatically route specific alerts to the correct team members
    • Alert Annotations– Automatically append alerts with runbooks, monitoring graphs and other relevant information, giving the alert recipient immediate remediation steps
    • Outbound Webhooks– Extend VictorOps platform data into other systems and integrate VictorOps incidents into other service dashboards
    • API– Leverage the VictorOps API to extend VictorOps to existing legacy tools and reporting systems
    • Post-Mortem Report Generator – The ability to automatically pull a snapshot of all activities (alerts, conversations and remediation actions) associated with an outage. This information translates easily into SLA reporting and the facilitation of team retrospectives.

    Organizations of all sizes are increasingly looking to adopt incident management solutions in order to reduce the impacts of IT downtime. According to Gartner, the potential cost of downtime for organizations can approach $540K an hour. If reduced, mean time to resolution (MTTR) can prevent a modest 300 minutes of downtime in a single year, and businesses could save upwards of $2.5M.

    “Visibility at velocity is very important to us so engineers know what needs to be addressed from problems identified in production. [The] VictorOps Incident Automation Engine is allowing us to inform more team members in a timely fashion. We are lowering our MTTR and increasing the reach of our incident alerting audience without waking up everyone for the wrong reasons,” said Mike Perttula, DevOps Specialist at Signiant.

    For more information about the Incident Automation Engine, visit [URL].

    About VictorOps

    VictorOps is the real-time incident management platform focusing on incident lifecycle management and collaboration for IT and DevOps teams. The solution combines the power of people and data to solve IT problems in real-time. The VictorOps platform seamlessly orchestrates team situational awareness, incident creation, escalation, notification, and remediation with team members regardless of physical location or time of day. Privately held, VictorOps is backed by Costanoa Venture Capital and Foundry Group. For more information, visit www.victorops.com and follow the company on Twitter @VictorOps.

  • Red Hat Launches Ansible-Native Container Workflow Project

    RALEIGH, N.C.–(Business Wire)–Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of Ansible Container under the Ansible project, which provides the leading simple, powerful, and agentless open source IT automation framework. Available now as a technology preview, Ansible Container allows for the complete creation of Docker-formatted Linux containers within Ansible Playbooks, eliminating the need to use external tools like Dockerfile or docker-compose.While standardization is emerging for container formats in the form of the Open Container Initiative, the tooling space is still fragmented, with developers often forced to work outside of the enterprise workstream to create and deploy containerized applications. Ansible Container changes this dynamic, by bringing Linux container development into the existing workstream through the easy-to-consume Ansible Playbook, adding cloud-native application development side-by-side with traditional application building.

    Alongside Ansible Container, the Ansible project has also launched new Kubernetes modules which allow for the production of Kubernetes templates directly from an Ansible playbook. Combining the two new offerings, IT teams can now build Linux containers directly from a playbook and deploy to a Kubernetes-based container application platform, like Red Hat OpenShift, in a more streamlined and efficient manner.

    Ansible enables developers and IT operators to more easily and quickly deploy IT applications and environments, empowering them to remove barriers between IT teams by automating routine activities such as network configuration, cloud deployments, and creation of development environments. Ansible’s modular code base, combined with ease of contribution, and a community of contributors in GitHub, enables the powerful IT automation platform to manage today’s infrastructure, but also adapt to new IT needs and DevOps workflows.

    With the capabilities of Ansible Container, users will be able to automate their existing infrastructure and networks with Ansible playbooks, while using additional playbooks to containerize their applications and deploy them on a container application platform. This allows for continuity of operations by preserving existing IT investments and critical applications/systems without sacrificing innovation in the form of cloud-native applications and container orchestration at scale.

    The automated container creation and deployment offered by Ansible factor into Red Hat’s existing container infrastructure stack, which now includes:

    • A stable, container-centric operating system in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.
    • An enterprise-grade, Kubernetes- and Docker-native container application platform through Red Hat OpenShift and the recently announced next-generationOpenShift Online public cloud service.
    • Infrastructure management, automation and monitoring across hybrid environments with Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Insights, Red Hat Satelliteand Ansible Tower by Red Hat.
    • Massively-scalable private and hybrid cloud architecture for large-scale container deployments through Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Suite, which also includes Red Hat OpenShift.

    Red Hat’s container stack provides a fully-open, enterprise-grade experience, from developers building cloud native applications to operations teams managing and monitoring a diverse set of hybrid applications and environments. Built entirely from upstream, community-driven projects, Red Hat’s container portfolio provides the innovation to drive the next-generation of enterprise IT while also allowing for the retention of mission-critical modern and legacy systems.

    For more details or to try it in its current form, visit the Ansible Container project.

    Supporting Quote

    Greg DeKoenigsberg, director, Ansible community
    “Many users in our community have already grown accustomed to using Ansible to deploy and manage their containers, and the Ansible Container project is an encapsulation of many of the community’s best ideas, brought together into a single tool. The user traction we’ve received in a fairly short period of time indicates to us that we’re targeting a critical need in the container tooling space.”

    Additional Resources

    Connect with Red Hat

    About Red Hat, Inc.

    Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.

    Forward-Looking Statements

    Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the ability of the Company to compete effectively; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; delays or reductions in information technology spending; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the effects of industry consolidation; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

    Red Hat, the Shadowman logo and Ansible are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc.or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.

    Red Hat, Inc.
    Anna Eusebio, +1-919-754-4519
    aeusebio@redhat.com

  • Docker Automates and Democratizes Container Orchestration

    SEATTLE–(Business Wire)–DockerCon – Docker today announced Docker Engine 1.12 with built-in orchestration, a powerful combination that provides Developers and IT Operations with a simplified and automated experience to deploy and manage Dockerized distributed applications – both traditional apps and microservices – at scale in production. By adding this additional intelligence to Docker Engine, it becomes the orchestration building block, creating a model for engines to form a self-organizing, self-healing pool of machines on which to run multi-container distributed applications. When integrated into Docker Engine, these new capabilities optimize ease of use, resiliency, performance-at-scale and security – all key requirements that are missing in other orchestration systems. As a result, organizations can be assured that their dev and ops teams are aligned on unifying the software supply chain to release applications into production more rapidly and frequently.“Orchestration is at the same stage today as containerization was before Docker. You either need an army of experts to build it, or you lock yourself to a monolithic platform which will drastically reduce your choice of suppliers,” said Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO at Docker. “Three years ago we brought containerization into the mainstream by making it usable for non-experts, without lock-in. We think it’s time to do the same for orchestration. This is a necessary step for the industry to move forward, and as the leaders of the containerization market it’s our responsibility to lead this change.”

    As with all Docker tooling, this integration is always about choice and flexibility for users. “Swarm mode” is an optional feature that users can select to “turn on” built-in orchestration, or they can also elect to use either their own custom tooling or third-party orchestrators that run on Docker Engine. This approach aligns with the Docker platform’s batteries included but swappable architecture, which has spurred the growth of a vibrant and collaborative ecosystem.

    “As the adoption curve for Docker continues to grow, developers have encountered growing pains with orchestration at scale,” said Fintan Ryan, industry analyst with RedMonk. “With the inclusion of secure built-in orchestration in the 1.12 release, Docker is providing developers with a simple-to-use, yet extremely powerful, orchestration tool while further investing in a consistent, easy-to-manage experience for operations.”

    As organizations begin to make increasing investments in containerization, and with more than 60 percent of them running Docker in production, they are seeking more sophisticated orchestration tooling to expand their deployments across both applications and teams. Docker 1.12 addresses these requirements with functionality that spans the entire application stack across compute, network and storage.

    Ease of Use

    Docker 1.12 dramatically simplifies the process of creating groups of Docker Engines, also known as swarms. The self-organizing, self-healing capabilities of swarms are now backed by automated service discovery and a built-in distributed datastore. As a result, it takes just one command to add a Docker Engine and horizontally scale a swarm.

    Resilient

    The new service deployment API describes all the resources and components with a single command that allows operations teams to run and scale a service. Through the API, the swarm is aware of the application defined and will continuously check and reconcile the environment against the requirements of the application when something adverse happens. Unlike other systems, the swarm itself has no single point of failure. The state of all services is replicated in real time across a group of managers so containers can be rescheduled after any node failure.

    Performance at Scale

    Docker orchestration includes a unique in-memory caching layer that maintains state of the entire swarm, providing a non-blocking architecture which assures scheduling performance even during peak times. Additionally, the system has a built-in routing mesh technology that addresses the challenge of how to provide container-aware load balancing. The routing mesh ensures that requests are made to the right containers regardless of where they have been scheduled within the swarm.

    Secure By Default

    Each Engine is automatically assigned a cryptographic identity which ensures that only validated Engines can be accepted into a swarm. Moreover, Docker Engine comes with mutually authenticated TLS, providing authentication, authorization and end-to-end encrypted communications among every node participating in the swarm, without the operator having to take any steps to enable it.

    Availability

    There are three ways that users can get Docker 1.12, which is currently a release candidate with general availability planned for July 2016. First, it is available now as part of the newly opened public beta of Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows athttps://www.docker.com/getdocker. Second, it is available through cloud-optimized experiences that bundle custom plugins that provide deep integration between Docker and the target platform capabilities including networking, load balancing and SSH key management. Docker for AWS and Docker for Azure are the best ways to deploy Docker Engine on these platforms and are available in private beta at https://beta.docker.com. Last, Docker 1.12 is also available as a binary download or a package for all major Linux distributions at https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux.

    For more information:

    About Docker, Inc.

    Docker, Inc. is the company behind the Docker open source platform, and is the chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem. Docker is an open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship and run distributed applications. With Docker, IT organizations shrink application delivery from months to minutes, frictionlessly move workloads between data centers and the cloud and can achieve up to 20X greater efficiency in their use of computing resources. Inspired by an active community and by transparent, open source innovation, Docker containers have been downloaded more than 4.1 billion times and Docker is used by millions of developers across thousands of the world’s most innovative organizations, including ADP, Baidu, the BBC, Goldman Sachs, Groupon, ING, Yelp, and Spotify. Docker’s rapid adoption has catalyzed an active ecosystem, resulting in more than 4,300,000 “Dockerized” applications, over 100 Docker-related startups and integration partnerships with AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Rackspace, Red Hat and VMware.

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

  • Dataloop.IO Raises $5 Million Series A Round From Battery Ventures and Open Ocean

    As Software Seeps Into More Facets of the Enterprise — and Into the Cloud — Dataloop.IO’s Next-Generation Monitoring Tools Keep Infrastructure Running

    SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – Jun 20, 2016) – Dataloop.IO, an innovator in cloud IT-monitoring whose products help organizations save time and money, has raised $5 million in Series A financing from Battery Ventures and Open Ocean, a European early-stage venture capital firm.

    Dataloop.IO — whose product is already in use with customers such as Moz.com, BBC Worldwide and Criteo — will use the funds to ramp up product development, sales and marketing. The company is also opening a new headquarters in San Francisco to attract talent and build on its sales momentum in the U.S.

    What separates Dataloop.IO from other IT-monitoring tools — which are critical in today’s highly complex datacenters — is its focus on making cloud monitoring a self-service platform that many people in an organization can use. Other solutions still require a central operations team to set up a monitoring function, which can be difficult to scale as the organization grows or moves to new IT architectures like microservices. Dataloop.IO enables its customers to standardize and consolidate all their monitoring functions into one solution, while staying agile by empowering individual teams to set up the monitoring they need in minutes.

    “Today, organizations and DevOps teams are managing data and building applications more quickly than ever with new methods, at huge scale, both on- and off-premise,” said Dataloop.IO Co-founder and CEO David Gildeh. “In this world, you need to provide monitoring as a self-service solution, or risk losing agility as the number of teams relying on your monitoring solution grows. Dataloop.IO is the only solution designed to solve this problem from the ground up.”

    Dataloop.IO was founded by three colleagues from Alfresco, an open-source company specializing in online document management. Gildeh, Steven Acreman and Colin Hemmings identified the need for a service like Dataloop.IO’s when they helped Alfresco build its first cloud service. They saw firsthand how existing IT-monitoring tools were designed for old IT models and couldn’t adequately handle complexity of cloud environments.

    “Dataloop.IO is at the forefront of some of the biggest trends shaping IT today, such as the rise of cloud computing and microservices,” said Richard Muirhead, the general partner leading Open Ocean’s investment. Muirhead previously founded and/or was active with companies including Orchestream, Tideway Systems and Automic Software.

    He added: “As every business becomes a software business, the need for more-modern, and self-service monitoring tools becomes even more acute. I am convinced Dataloop’s team is the right one to tackle the problem.”

    “As our architecture becomes increasingly complex, accurate monitoring is an absolute must,” said Scott Ehnert, VP of TechOps at Moz.com. “Dataloop.IO enabled us to standardize and consolidate all our monitoring across the teams with a self-service solution, saving us time, money and a lot of headaches.”

    Dataloop.IO previously raised $1.2 million in seed capital.

    About Dataloop.IO
    Dataloop.IO is an emerging software company on the cutting edge of major IT-infrastructure trends including cloud computing and microservices. The company, founded in the U.K. but now based in San Francisco, is developing the next generation of cloud monitoring required for microservices and DevOps.

    CONTACT INFORMATION

  • AppFormix Ships ContainerFlow, Leveraging Intel(r) Technology for Advanced Monitoring and Scheduling with Cloud-Native Applications

    Latency and jitter fall 70 percent with ContainerFlow; response times improve 51 percent—benchmarking study.

    SEATTLE — Dockercon — June 21, 2016 — Developers writing applications with microservices tools like Docker containers and the Kubernetes container cluster management system today gain a new tool built for the DevOps era, resulting from a collaboration announced in March between AppFormix and Intel(r).

    ContainerFlow is a cloud service optimization tool that provides advanced monitoring, scheduling and performance management for DevOps environments, where containers and VMs can have life cycles much shorter than in traditional development environments. ContainerFlow is currently the only tool that integrates Intel Resource Director Technology to provide major improvements in application performance, especially with container-based applications.

    The collaboration that led to today’s product announcement kicked off via a joint announcement between the two companies at Intel Cloud Day in March.

    In a solution brief, “Realize The Performance Of Your Cloud Infrastructure,” testing shows improved response times averaging 51 percent with ContainerFlow. The testing also shows an average 27 percent improvement in throughput. By actively managing cache allocation in real time, ContainerFlow reduces latency and jitter by 70 percent.

    Importantly, the variances of the average and peak latency are significantly reduced. Peak latency is reduced by 70 percent to 146 milliseconds, and the standard deviation of peak latency is 17 milliseconds, compared to 95 milliseconds without ContainerFlow.

    ContainerFlow works out of the box for microservices built using Docker containers, using Kubernetes an open source system for managing containerized applications.

    *** More at: http://www.appformix.com/intel/ ***

    ContainerFlow is the first scheduling and monitoring tool built specifically to address the unique needs of cloud-native applications and DevOps environments. Applications built with containers and microservices run in environments where many thousands of containers are created, used and discarded in only a few minutes. ContainerFlow works in real time, delivering a critical improvement over monitoring tools built for traditional, monolithic applications.

    Before ContainerFlow, microservice application developers and infrastructure operators were stuck with old tools designed for those monolithic technologies, where it is common for schedulers to take several minutes to do their work. With containers and microservices, however, the actual lifetime of processes being scheduled is less than the amount of time legacy tools need to schedule and monitor performance.

    “The next generation of cloud depends on the industry’s ability of create technologies that make apps built on microservices easy to write, deploy, scale and iterate,” said Sumeet Singh, CEO and founder of AppFormix. “Conventional tools take longer to do their jobs than the lifespan of the services they’re scheduling and monitoring. Effective tools cannot be more complex and time-consuming than the problems they are trying to solve. Current tools were begging for replacement, so we built ContainerFlow to give users the experience they expect.”

    Customer and Partner Quotes

    “When isolation is imperfect, containers cannot prevent interference in resources the operating-system kernel doesn’t manage, such as level 3 processor caches and memory bandwidth,” said David Aronchick, Senior Product Manager for Kubernetes. “The approach taken by AppFormix offers hope for operators struggling with managing performance in container-based environments reliably, by giving them a tool designed for that use case.”

    <INTC QUOTE IN APPROVAL>

    “With AppFormix, Rackspace gets a team that’s solely focused on solving scheduling and management issues that arise in a world where the lifecycle of compute instances is very short,” said Bryan Thompson, senior director, product management of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. “The Appformix software aligns with our mission to help customers remove the complexity of deploying and operating OpenStack Private Clouds while driving benefits for their business.”

    “Our applications demand reliable performance,” said Joshua Barry, product director, cloud at ViaSat. “The combination of technologies in Intel RDT and AppFormix ContainerFlow has the potential for our operators and developers to better understand and manage cloud environments, delivering better user experiences and infrastructure efficiency.”

    Media Resources

    About AppFormix

    AppFormix is a startup delivering a cloud service optimization platform targeting enterprise devops teams. Via real-time analytics, capacity planning, and orchestration tooling, AppFormix software gives cloud operators and applications developers a shared dashboard to understand performance across the entire cloud stack, for hybrid, private, and public enterprise clouds. AppFormix works with popular cloud environments like AWS, OpenStack, Azure and Kubernetes. AppFormix software captured the Grand Award winner at Interop 2016 and was named a technology to watch by the MIT CIO Symposium. The company is backed by August Capital and is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. More atwww.appformix.com.

    ###

    Media Contact:

    Robert Cathey

    Cathey Communications for AppFormix

    robert@cathey.co

    +1 865 386-6118

    @robertcathey

  • Threat Stack Speeds Up Cloud Security Operations with New Alert Tagging and Daily Vulnerability Management Reporting

    Only cloud security provider to offer alert tags to accelerate incident resolution; Daily vulnerability reporting including Amazon Machine Images (AMI) IDs

    BOSTON – June 16, 2016 – Threat Stack, a leader in cloud security and compliance management, today announced feature enhancements designed to speed up security team velocity and improve efficiency with new alert tags and vulnerability management reporting capabilities of the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform™ (CSP). Threat Stack CSP alert tags and vulnerability reporting provides security and operations users with previously unattainable, in-depth context about AWS instances, improves security incident response and allows organizations to easily track and manage vulnerabilities with detailed, easy-to-follow daily reports.

    “Both alert tags and vulnerability reports are features that enable customers to get even more visibility into what is happening on each server, across the infrastructure, saving hours of investigation during critical events or in depth audits,” said Venkat Pothamsetty, vice president of products and customer advocacy, Threat Stack. “We continue to work tirelessly to deliver features and enhancements that help to securely increase security and ops efficiency and productivity.”

    Threat Stack’s alert tags integrate host data alerts with infrastructure tag information to provide detailed server-specific context to each alert. By clicking on a tag, users can now easily see the process details and cloud context behind each alert, including identifying the user that may have been involved. Typically, this level of detail is only attainable through hours spent manually reviewing logs. By automatically identifying which server the alert is related to, these tags enable security engineers to resolve the issue in minutes instead of hours. Over time, these alerts will provide even more context as the CSP scours increasing amounts of data.

    Daily vulnerability reporting from Threat Stack gives users a comprehensive breakdown of system-wide vulnerabilities including Amazon Machine Images (AMI) ID’s for Amazon EC2 users, not commonly available in traditional vulnerability reports. This level of reporting not only provides details on remedial actions or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) management, but also creates a record to demonstrate daily vulnerability management in case of an audit.

    “Threat Stack provides an unmatched level of security and visibility across our infrastructure,” said Jon Debonis, VP of Information Security/CISO, Blend Labs. “Using one single dashboard, we always know who is doing what on our machines saving us hours of investigation and reducing our time to resolution.”

    Both features are now immediately available to all Threat Stack users. For more information on Threat Stack, please visithttps://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.

     

  • CloudHealth Partners with Datadog, Connecting Cloud Performance Metrics to Cloud Costs for Enterprise and Fast-Growing Technology Companies

    The New Integration Enables Customers to Rightsize Complex Cloud Environments

    BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CloudHealth Technologies, the leader in Cloud Service Management, today announced an integration partnership with Datadog, the leading monitoring service for dynamic cloud applications. The integration of the CloudHealth and Datadog platforms offers customers end-to-end visibility across every dimension of their cloud environments, giving them recommendations and analysis to make analytically driven rightsizing decisions in the cloud.

    While the decentralized management and dynamic provisioning of cloud resources greatly improves application development agility, it creates new challenges for organizations, related to cost allocation, infrastructure rightsizing and governance. The CloudHealth-Datadog partnership addresses the major challenge enterprises face as they embrace agile processes and cloud-based infrastructures: an inability to effectively manage cloud resources at scale.

    Datadog provides a SaaS platform that monitors data across the entire infrastructure stack and presents that data in elegant and easy to understand dashboards, allowing for actionable insight. The CloudHealth platform simplifies cloud management, enabling enterprises to consolidate, evaluate, analyze, optimize and automate their clouds.

    By connecting cloud metrics to costs, the integrated platforms allow customers to manage assets in a more strategic and holistic fashion. CloudHealth Technologies and Datadog bring together granular performance data, end-to-end visibility and powerful analytics to help customers continually make the best decisions about provisioning and rightsizing in the cloud. The CloudHealth-Datadog partnership provides customers with the following benefits:

    • Rightsizing analysis: Customers can use data from both solutions to receive recommendations about where to adjust resources that are over- or under-provisioned, saving them time and money.
    • Visualization of key assets: Using CloudHealth, customers can zero in on the cloud data they care about – looking by department, line of business, or any relevant Perspective. Using Datadog tags, they can get a centralized view of all their assets in one place alongside other tools and services.
    • Advanced performance metrics per asset: Customers can maneuver between the tools to really understand their environments. They can jump into CloudHealth to track trends or scan through performance data or jump over to the Datadog console to explore individual assets in more detail.

    “To optimize your cloud resources, you need to have tools that help you visualize your data, understand it and act on it,” said Joe Kinsella, CTO and founder of CloudHealth Technologies. “Putting Datadog’s best-in-class cloud monitoring assets together with CloudHealth’s Cloud Service Management capabilities gives customers the ability to truly solve the issue of cloud complexity.”

    “The cloud cost allocation and optimization is a significant challenge for many of our enterprise customers who spin up tens of thousands of cloud instances across various business units,” said Amit Agarwal, Chief Product Officer at Datadog. “We look forward to partnering with CloudHealth to provide customers who use both products a solution that helps customers quickly allocate and minimize costs, while ensuring that their critical applications are adequately provisioned at all times.”

    Many joint customers are already using CloudHealth and Datadog together, including Elastera, a provider of managed cloud hosting environments for ecommerce sites. The company moved to the cloud to innovate and get to market faster and adopted CloudHealth and Datadog to get accurate rightsizing recommendations for its AWS infrastructure.

    “CloudHealth takes information collected from Datadog and connects the metrics to the money. It shows us if an instance is under-utilized and how much we could save by making a change,” said Zachary Stevens, co-founder and chief architect, Elastera. “Using this powerful set of data analytics, we are able to downgrade over-provisioned assets, saving us time and money.”

    About CloudHealth Technologies
    CloudHealth Technologies gives organizations a new, more efficient way to visualize, optimize, and automate their cloud environments. The CloudHealth Cloud Service Management platform integrates with services across the datacenter and cloud, giving enterprises, startups, and service providers access to a centralized hub of robust data analytics. Using a policy-driven approach aligned to business processes, customers leverage CloudHealth to drive cost savings, improve agility, enhance security, and reduce complexity. With CloudHealth, customers are able to innovate faster without sacrificing governance or control.

    The world’s cutting-edge companies rely on CloudHealth to meet their cloud management needs, including Amtrak, Dow Jones, Acquia, and Sumo Logic, among others. Based in Boston, MA, the company is backed by Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, .406 Ventures and Sigma Prime Ventures. For more information, visit www.cloudhealthtech.com or follow us on Twitter @cloudhealthtech and LinkedIn.

    About Datadog
    Datadog is the world’s leading monitoring service for cloud-scale applications, bringing together data from servers, databases, tools and services to present a unified view of your entire stack. These capabilities are provided on a SaaS-based data analytics platform that enables Dev and Ops teams to work collaboratively to avoid downtime, resolve performance problems, and ensure that development and deployment cycles finish on time. Since launching in 2010, Datadog has been adopted by thousands of enterprises, including Twilio, Airbnb, Netflix, EA, Spotify, Warner Bros. Games and AdRoll.

    Learn more about the integration on the CloudHealth Tech blog and the Datadog blog!