Author: Parker Yates

Customers Include the Fortune 500 and Major Government Organizations

San Francisco, CA – July 20, 2017 – Insight Engines, the company that lets anyone ask questions of machine data and get insights in seconds, today announced that it has raised $15.8 million in Series A funding led by August Capital, with participation from Splunk, Real Ventures, Data Collective and industry luminaries Erik Swan and Simon Crosby. August Capital General Partner David Hornik, an original investor in Splunk, and Swan, a co-founder and the former CTO of Splunk, will join the board.

Insight Engines has quickly gained market traction within Fortune 500 and major government organizations since releasing its first product — Insight Engines Cyber Security Investigator for Splunk — in the Fall of last year. The funding will be used to accelerate its product roadmap and expand its sales and marketing teams.

Hornik said: “Insight Engines is addressing a massive, multi-billion dollar market opportunity and solving meaningful customer pain with a truly differentiated product. Their unique technology and strong value proposition is reflected in their fast market traction. Insight Engines is already addressing important challenges for some of the biggest organizations in the country.”

Swan said: “I’ve been in the Valley a long time, and it’s rare I’ve seen a company with this kind of traction and revenues at this stage which is why I was stoked to invest and join the board. Insight Engines is solving a real problem and has awesome technology and happy customers. I see a lot of similarities to Splunk which is now doing close to a billion in revenues.”

Organizations have found that the value of big data is limited because highly-trained analysts need to craft complex, proprietary queries in order to creatively search and visualize machine data. These languages are difficult to learn and use which results in a small subset of technical employees being able interact with a subset of the machine data.

Grant Wernick (CEO) and Jacob Perkins (CTO and author of “NLTK Cookbook” and contributor to O’Reilly’s “Bad Data Handbook”) founded Insight Engines in 2015 to unlock the value of machine data to make it accessible and actionable to everyone, from an analyst to an executive. Only with Insight Engines’ natural language processing (NLP) technology can everyone in the organization ask direct questions in plain English of their machine data and get back valuable answers in seconds. Users no longer need to craft complex, optimal big data queries — Insight Engines frees users’ time to analyze more and search less.

“We started this company because every organization is making massive investments to harness their machine data but they all suffer from the same hiring, training and accessibility issues around it. We enable companies to expand their hiring pool, simplify training and accelerate their ability to extract knowledge from their data,” said Grant Wernick, co-founder and CEO of Insight Engines. “Today our technology is primarily used for security purposes, transforming novices into ninja analysts and enabling the most advanced analysts to move faster. Long term, we will apply similar innovations to solve problems beyond security, such as IT operations, application delivery and business analytics.”

About Insight Engines
Insight Engines enables organizations to unlock the value of machine data so it becomes accessible and actionable to anyone in an organization, from an analyst to an executive. Its unique and powerful natural language search technology enables everyone to ask the questions that matter in plain English and generates highly optimized queries against their data in real time, eliminating the need to spend years becoming an expert in complex search languages and days crafting queries. Customers include the Fortune 500 as well as major government organizations. Insight Engines is backed by August Capital, Splunk, Real Ventures and Data Collective and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit http://www.insightengines.io or follow the company on Twitter @InsightEngines.

— Parker Yates

Successful candidates of the new the DevOps Practitioner® role-based course will earn the DevOps Leader (DOL) certification

BOCA RATON, Fla. – July 13, 2017 – The DevOps Institute (DOI), the continuous learning community around emerging DevOps practices, training and certification, is proud to announce the launch of a new  certification: DevOps Leader (DOL). This unique course provides the insights, techniques and innovative approaches needed by modern IT leaders involved in a DevOps cultural transformation within their organization. DevOps Leader is the newest certification in the DevOps Institute’s DevOps Practitioner® certification series and will be delivered by DOI’s global channel of Registered Education Partners.

The DevOps Leader course was authored by Mustafa Kapadia (@MKapadiaTweets), a well-respected DevOps service line leader and digital transformation expert. Kapadia designed the course around the ideal DevOps Leader–a tactical or strategic individual who helps design, influence, implement or motivate the cultural transformation proven to be a critical success factor in DevOps adoption. The most successful DevOps leaders understand the human dynamics of cultural change and are equipped with practices, methods, and tools to engage people across the DevOps spectrum.  The need for transformational leaders was also cited in the recently published 2017 State of DevOps Report from Puppet Labs and DORA and is addressed in this course.

“Through DevOps, organizations can bring software to market faster, with better quality, fewer defects, reduced risk and shortened lead times,” says Kapadia. “This course is essential for any IT professional involved in transforming their enterprises’ digital strategy.”

IT team leaders, managers, directors, business stakeholders, practitioners and change agents, tool providers and systems integrators, and DevOps consultants will find this course particularly helpful as they explore key DevOps leadership topics, including:

• DevOps and time to market
• Business and IT perspectives
• Key differences between DevOps IT and traditional IT
• Planning and organization
• Performance and culture
• Measurement differences
• Becoming a DevOps organization – design principles
  • Focusing on what matters
  • Organizing work
  • Sharing information
  • Metrics
• Value stream mapping
• Squad model
  • Squads
  • Tribes
  • Chapters
  • Guilds
• Managing culture change
  • Types of culture
  • Types of changes
  • Managing change
• Popular tools and key practices

“The DevOps Leader course exemplifies the true meaning of being an effective DevOps Leader,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute. “This is not your typical leadership management class. The content represents the most current and emerging practices that are delivering real value to real organizations.  After taking DOL, candidates will be equipped to lead an innovative DevOps transformation within their organization, which will enable them to deliver high-quality software faster and more frequently.”

For more information, visit http://devopsinstitute.com/courses/#DOL.

About the Course Author

Mustafa Kapadia is a Service Line Leader for IBM’s Digital Transformation DevOps practice, a business advisory practice focused on helping large enterprises transform their software and application delivery. He is an expert in DevOps, cloud, mobile, analytics, application development, outsourcing, and offshoring. Prior to joining IBM, Mustafa was a management consultant with Deloitte’s Strategy & Operations practice. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, is an avid blogger (when time permits), a speaker, and an advisor to startup companies.

About the DevOps Institute
The DevOps Institute is the global learning community around emerging DevOps practices and is bringing enterprise level DevOps training and certification to the IT market. Working with digital influencers from our Board of Regents, strategic examination partner PEOPLECERT, and the DevOps Express vendor consortium, DOI has set the quality standard for relevant, current and sustainable DevOps course content and certification.

Web | http://devopsinstitute.com/
Twitter | @DEVOPSINST
LinkedIn | /devops-institute
Facebook | /DevOpsInstitute/
YouTube | DevOps Institute
Instagram | /devopsinstitute/

Contact
for DevOps Institute
Manny Varela, 561-325-8101
manny(at)devopsinstitute(dot)com

— Parker Yates

SmartBear to Collaborate with Red Hat, IBM, Fujitsu, Oracle and Others to Optimize the Development of Microservices Using Enterprise Java

SOMERVILLE, Mass. – July 12, 2017 – SmartBear Software, the leader in software quality tools for teams, has joined the Eclipse MicroProfile Group, an open source collaboration community for developers and vendors to optimize the development of microservices using Enterprise Java. Microservice architecture has increasingly become the preferred way of developing enterprise applications, particularly when support for a wide range of platforms and devices is required. Members actively involved in the MicroProfile Group include Red Hat, IBM, Fujitsu, Oracle, SOUJava, Hazelcast, Hammock and kumuluzEE.

“We’re pleased to have SmartBear join MicroProfile and bring their expertise to the group,” said Ian Robinson, IBM WebSphere CTO and Eclipse MicroProfile founding member. “The MicroProfile project will continue to drive innovation, standardization and adoption of microservices best practices for Enterprise Java with the help of SmartBear.”

“Java is an excellent choice for enterprise-grade microservices given its maturity and stability,” said Ole Lensmar, CTO at SmartBear. “We are excited to partner with industry leaders to develop the standardization of microservices development.”

SmartBear has a history of supporting cutting-edge technology for modern application development, including the shift toward microservices. In 2015, SmartBear acquired Swagger and donated the Swagger Specification later that year creating the Open API Initiative. The Open API Initiative, under the Linux Foundation, governs the continued evolution of the Swagger Specification, now referred to as the Open API Specification. Later this month, the Open API Specification 3.0 is expected to be released, adding additional support for microservices.

With the Open API Specification 3.0 enabling microservice applications, SmartBear has a vision for making microservices production and consumption as easy as possible with Swagger tooling. Additionally, the company will build MicroProfile solutions into its products, including SwaggerHub.

The MicroProfile Group launched at DevNation in June 2016. MicroProfile 1.0 was released in September and became an Eclipse Project in December. For more information, visit: https://microprofile.io/.

About SmartBear Software
Supporting more than six million software professionals and over 22,000 companies in 194 countries, SmartBear is the leader in software quality tools for teams. The company’s products help deliver the highest quality and best performing software possible while helping teams ship code at nearly impossible velocities. With products for API testing, UI testing, code review and performance monitoring across mobile, web and desktop applications, SmartBear equips every development, testing and operations team member with the tools to ensure quality at every stage of the software cycle. For more information, visit: http://smartbear.com, or for the SmartBear community, go to: LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

— Parker Yates

Network Automation and Integrated Tools Needed Before Machine Learning

SAN FRANCISCO – July 12, 2017 – Kentik, the leader in network traffic intelligence, today released the initial results of a survey to determine how network challenges are affecting digital transformation. The company surveyed 203 IT professionals attending Cisco Live 2017, Cisco’s annual conference which offers educational sessions to help organizations “thrive in the world of digital business.”

The results reveal that cloud adoption is still the most vexing factor in increased network complexity, ahead of the internet of things (IoT), software-defined networking (SDN), and network functions virtualization (NFV). In addition, while machine learning is strongly embraced as an important technology for network management, most organizations aren’t yet ready for network automation. In fact, most are still in the process of gaining sound operational visibility, integrating network management tool stacks, and implementing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) security for their cloud and digital initiatives.

Key findings include:

• Cloud adoption is still the largest factor in increased network complexity: 36% of respondents indicated that the cloud adds the greatest network complexity to their organization, topping IoT (21%), SDN (12%), and NFV (3%).
• Most organizations still have room to improve operational visibility for cloud and digital business networking: Only 20% of survey respondents think their organizations are doing an excellent job of monitoring the performance and security of their cloud and internet dependencies (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, web APIs and web services). Another 25% reported that their organizations are doing a below-average to poor job.
• Organizations need better DDoS detection capabilities: Despite the spike in DDoS attacks, including those hitting Dyn in October and Cloudflare in December, only 32% of respondents reported that their company is using DDoS detection technology to manage security of their cloud and internet dependencies.
• Most organizations lag in integrating their management tool stacks: 70% of respondents recognized that using the same stack of tools to manage both network performance and security can significantly improve operational efficiencies. However, the majority of respondents (59%) said their organization is not yet using the same stack of tools to manage both network performance and network security.
• Machine learning is a priority, but most aren’t ready for automation: 60% of respondents said machine learning is “extremely important” or “very important” for network management. However, only 14% said their organization is ready for full network management automation.

“There is a lot of noise in our industry right now about intuitive systems and new-age machine learning that can monitor, identify and react to network conditions before issues occur. However, dozens of our largest customers have been telling us, and our survey results from Cisco Live support, that the key 2016 and 2017 enterprise efforts have focused on getting complete visibility into increasingly hybrid network complexity; detecting and preventing DDoS; and integrating tools that can provide operational and business value from network analytics,” said Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik. “Full automation outside of constrained data center and cloud topologies is still a vision that customers are tracking, but network operators say that they need deeper and comprehensive visibility into their network’s performance and security before they can let their networks run autonomously.”

“Real-time network traffic intelligence is a critical component for network operators supporting their organizations with digital transformation,” he added.

Survey Methodology

Kentik’s findings are based on responses from 203 IT professionals surveyed during Cisco Live 2017. The respondents spanned more than 12 industries, including education, government, healthcare, finance, retail, software, telecommunications and transportation sectors. Respondents varied in job titles, from network engineers and network architects, to infrastructure managers, directors and executives. The majority of respondents came from organizations with 1,000 or more employees.

ABOUT KENTIK

Kentik is the network traffic intelligence company. When nearly everything critical to a modern business crosses a wire, the network doesn’t just serve the business, it sees the business. Kentik turns your network traffic ㅡ billions of digital footprints ㅡinto real-time intelligence for both business and technical operations. Network operators, engineers, and security teams use Kentik to manage and optimize the performance, security, and potential of their networks and their business. The company was founded by network and big data technologists and executives from companies such as Akamai, CloudFlare, YouTube, and Netflix, with decades of experience in operations, architecture, and distributed systems. Kentik is headquartered in San Francisco. Visit www.kentik.com or follow @KentikInc on Twitter.

— Parker Yates

Latest release includes significant updates and performance improvements including Cloud Native App Firewall and new Vulnerability Explorer

SAN FRANCISCO — July 11, 2017 — Twistlock, the leading provider of cloud container security solutions, today announced the availability of Twistlock 2.1. The latest release of Twistlock’s flagship product includes a first of its kind cloud native app firewall, vulnerability risk ranking that uses knowledge of an enterprise’s unique environment to prioritize what to fix first, a brand new dashboard and integrated secrets management based on Twistlock’s latest work in the Docker open source project.

Twistlock’s 2.1 release comes on the heels of continued momentum for the company. In April, Twistlock announced its $17M Series B funding round led by Polaris Partners, with participation from existing investors YL Ventures, TenEleven and Rally Ventures. Twistlock also announced significant updates to its product in the 2.0 release. Twistlock is proud to be protecting mission critical cloud native workloads at over 60 enterprise customers. Recent customer additions include a top 5 financial institution, a top 5 industrial and IoT manufacturer, the industry-leading gaming engine, additional agencies in the US defense and intelligence community, and a top 5 global coffeehouse chain.

“Twistlock 2.1 uses our deep knowledge of container threats to give organizations all the tools needed to prevent problems before they occur,” said John Morello, chief technology officer at Twistlock. “As the industry’s most comprehensive, automated and scalable container security solution, Twistlock dynamically simplifies the flow of app traffic to prevent attacks on organizations, making it an obvious choice to secure their containers against the next generation of threats.”

Cloud Native App Firewall

In 2.1, Twistlock introduces a Cloud Native App Firewall (CNAF) that combines Twistlock’s knowledge, placement and visibility, and automatically protects customers’ apps at scale, with far less manual interaction and in a completely ‘software defined’ manner. Critically, this all happens without having to change anything in an organization’s images, containers, or infrastructure. Twistlock can dynamically learn where to apply these filters, transparently filter application traffic against common attack patterns like SQL injection and cross site scripting, transparently block requests from malicious endpoints, and ensure that only safe traffic reaches an organization’s app, all without having to configure external devices or ever enter an IP address.

Vulnerability Explorer

Twistlock has always looked at vulnerability management broadly and focused on giving enterprises the tools to prevent problems before they occur. Twistlock 2.1 takes this a step further by giving customers an actionable, stack-ranked view of the most critical risks in the environment, based on the organization’s unique deployments. For example, Twistlock will prioritize vulnerabilities that impact containers exposed to the internet or running without a mandatory security profile. This visibility provides the knowledge of which risks are most important, so teams can prioritize their work to identify and remediate critical problems more rapidly.

Additional new capabilities and features available in Twistlock 2.1 include:

• Twistlock collections: For organizations that have different teams working on many different apps sharing the same environments, collections enable the company to centrally create and manage pre-defined filters in rules and views across the product. Collections provide multi-tenancy and can be created for any arbitrary structures a company would like, such as by project, organizational hierarchy, geography or some combination thereof.
• Compliance alerting and enforcement in Jenkins: Twistlock has long supported the ability to alert on and enforce vulnerability thresholds during the CI process via the native Jenkins plugin. In Twistlock 2.1, this CI integration is expanding to cover image compliance. A company can now use Twistlock to check, alert on, and fail builds based on compliance posture. This capability is all about the ‘shift left’ concept, helping organizations move both security and compliance further upstream in the development process.
• Secrets manager: The new Secrets Manager in Twistlock 2.1 allows customers to integrate their secret management platforms, such as HashiCorp or CyberArk, and securely distribute secrets from those stores into specified containers. Twistlock’s secrets manager is built on the latest work Twistlock is contributing to the open source Docker project, enabling pluggable secrets stored directly in Docker Swarm.
• Vulnerability push alerts: Enhanced capabilities in Twistlock 2.1 allow organizations to create configurable alerts, and automated processes for development teams to get push notifications about new vulnerabilities discovered in the apps they maintain.

To learn more about Twistlock 2.1, please visit our website.

Additional Resources:

• Twistlock blog
• Twistlock Twitter
• Twistlock LinkedIn

About Twistlock

Twistlock is the industry’s first enterprise security suite for container security. Twistlock’s technology addresses risks on the host and within the application of the container, enabling enterprises to consistently enforce security policies, monitor and audit activity and identify and isolate threats in a container or cluster of containers. Twistlock’s mission is to provide a full, enterprise-grade security stack for containers, so organizations can confidently adopt and maximize the benefits of containers in their production environment. For more information, please visit www.twistlock.com

— Parker Yates

New Aqua Guide Outlines Controls to Drive PCI Compliance for Applications Developed and Run on Containers 

 July 11, 2017 – Tel Aviv, Israel — Aqua Security, the leading provider of container security solutions, announced today that it has joined the PCI Security Standards Council as a new Participating Organization. Aqua will work with the Council to achieve and improve payment data security worldwide through the ongoing development and refinement of the PCI Security Standards as it relates to securing containerized applications and development environments.  Demonstrating its strong support of the standard, Aqua today published an in depth White Paper that maps specific controls to all sections of the standard that apply to container-base development environments.  The white paper can be found here.

“Because of its prescriptive nature, we believe that The PCI DSS standard is one of the most useful security standards around today, ” said Amir Jerbi, CTO, Aqua Security. “Since software containers can run anywhere and be used for ephemeral workloads, they create new challenges for PCI compliance – challenges that the Aqua Container Security Platform addresses, and we are delighted to contribute to its ongoing evolution.”

As a Participating Organization, Aqua Security adds its voice to the standards setting process and will receive previews of drafts of standards and supporting materials in order to provide feedback to shape their final versions, as well as engaged in a growing community of more than 800 organizations united to improve payment security worldwide.

Endorsed by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc., the PCI Security Standards require merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit customer payment card data to adhere to information security controls and processes that ensure data protection – not just once a year, but as part of a business-as-usual security posture.

“In an era of increasingly sophisticated attacks on systems, adhering to the PCI DSS represents an entity’s best protection against network security threats and data breaches,” said Stephen W. Orfei, General Manager of the PCI Security Standards Council. “By joining as a Participating Organization Aqua Security demonstrates they are playing an active part in mitigating the threats and improving the security of the payment chain globally by driving the security standards to higher levels of adoption and strength.”

Aqua will also have the opportunity to recommend new initiatives for consideration to the PCI Security Standards Council, participate in exclusive webinars and question and answer sessions with Council representatives, and review and discuss new versions of the PCI Security Standards while sharing cross-sector experiences and best practices at the annual Community Meetings.

To learn more, download Aqua’s PCI-DSS Compliance Guide for Containers.

— Parker Yates

Zenko Multi-Cloud Data Controller Provides Control of Unstructured Data

While Leveraging the Efficiency and Scale of Both Private and Public Cloud Storage

San Francisco, CA – July 11, 2017 – Scality, a world leader in object and cloud storage, today announced the open source launch of its Scality Zenko, a Multi-Cloud Data Controller. The new solution is free to use and embed into developer applications, opening a new world of multi-cloud storage for developers.

Zenko provides a unified interface based on a proven implementation of the Amazon S3 API across clouds. This allows any cloud to be addressed with the same API and access layer, while storing information in their respective native format. For example, any Amazon S3-compliant application can now support Azure Blob Storage without any application modification. Scality’s vision for Zenko is to add data management controls to protect vital business assets, and metadata search to quickly subset large datasets based on simple business descriptors.

“We believe that everyone should be in control of their data,” said Giorgio Regni, CTO at Scality.

“Our vision for Zenko is simple—bring control and freedom to the developer to unleash a new generation of multi-cloud applications. We welcome anyone who wants to participate and contribute to this vision.”

“With Zenko, Scality makes it even easier for enterprises of all sizes to quickly and cost-effectively deploy thousands of apps within the Microsoft Azure Cloud and leverage its many advanced services,” said Jurgen Willis, Head of Product for Azure Object Storage at Microsoft Corp. “Data stored with Zenko is stored in Azure Blob Storage native format, so it can easily be processed in the Azure Cloud for maximum scalability.”

Zenko builds on the success of the company’s Scality S3 Server, the open-source implementation of the Amazon S3 API, which has experienced more than 600,000 DockerHub pulls since it was introduced in June 2016. Scality is releasing this new code to the open source community under an Apache 2.0 license, so that any developer can use and extend Zenko in their development.

Zenko Multi-Cloud Data Controller expands the Scality S3 Server, and includes:

• S3 API – Providing a single API set and 360° access to any cloud. Developers want to have an abstraction layer allowing them the freedom to use any cloud at any time. Scality Zenko provides a single unifying interface using the Amazon S3 API, supporting multi-cloud backend data storage both on-premises and in public cloud services. Zenko is available now for Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3, Scality RING and Docker and will be available soon for other cloud platforms.
• Native format – Data written through Zenko is stored in the native format of the target storage and can be read directly, without the need to go through Zenko. Therefore, data written in Azure Blob Storage or in Amazon S3 can leverage the respective advanced services of these public clouds.
• Backbeat data workflow – A policy-based data management engine used for seamless data replication, data migration services or extended cloud workflow services like cloud analytics and content distribution. This feature will be available in September.
• Clueso metadata search – An Apache Spark-based metadata search for expanded insight to understand data. Clueso makes it easy to interpret petabyte-scale data and easily manipulate it on any cloud to separate high-value information from data noise. It provides the ability to subset data based on key attributes. This feature will be available in September.

Application developers looking for design efficiency and rapid implementation will appreciate the productivity benefits of using Zenko. Today, applications must be rewritten to support each cloud, which reduces productivity and makes the use of multiple clouds expensive. With Zenko, applications are built once and deployed across any cloud service.

“Cityzen Data provides a data management platform for collecting, storing, and delivering value from all kinds of sensor data to help customers accelerate progress from sensors to services, primarily for health, sport, wellness, and scientific applications,” said Mathias Herberts, co-founder and CTO at Cityzen Data.  “Scality provides our backend storage for this and gives us a single interface for developers to code within any cloud on a common API set.  With Scality, we can write an application once and deploy anywhere on any cloud.”

For more information on the Scality Zenko Multi-Cloud Data Controller and to download it for free, visit www.zenko.io.

Register for the Zenko webinar at: www.zenko.io/webinar.

About Scality

Scality, a world leader in object and cloud storage, develops cost-effective Software Defined Storage: the RING, which serves over 500 million end-users worldwide with over 800 billion objects in production; and the open-source Scality Zenko. Scality RING software deploys on any industry-standard x86 server, uniquely delivering performance, 100% availability and data durability, while integrating easily in the datacenter thanks to its native support for directory integration, traditional file applications and over 45 certified applications. Scality’s complete solutions excel at serving the specific storage needs of Global 2000 Enterprise, Media and Entertainment, Government and Cloud Provider customers while delivering up to 90% reduction in TCO versus legacy storage. A global company, Scality is headquartered in San Francisco.

Follow us on Twitter @scality and visit us at www.scality.com to learn more.

— Parker Yates

Peter Fenton joins board of directors as former Twitter infrastructure team’s “service mesh” technology rapidly gains open source adoption

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Globenewswire —  July 11, 2017) —  Buoyant, the company behind the popular open source Linkerd project and creator of the new “service mesh” category of cloud infrastructure software, today announced the close of $10.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Benchmark Capital, with additional participation from #Angels, a female-led investment group of current and former Twitter executives. Also joining the round were previous investors A Capital Ventures, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, SV Angel, and the Webb Investment Network. The round brings Buoyant’s total funding to date to $14 million and adds Peter Fenton to the Buoyant board of directors, just weeks after stepping down from the Twitter board.

“As the entire software industry moves to cloud computing, the way that applications are built and operated is changing dramatically,” said Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark Capital and member of the board of Docker, New Relic and Yelp. “Buoyant’s introduction of the service mesh has the potential to be as fundamental a component of microservices and cloud native software as TCP/IP was to network programming, and Linkerd’s dramatic open source adoption over the past year is evidence of just how immediate of a need that is for companies.”

The open source Linkerd service mesh provides reliability and safety to cloud applications by managing the communication between the “services” in an application. In applications designed for the cloud, this internal service-to-service communication forms a critical part of runtime behavior, but is often hidden and unmanaged, leading to unpredictable and potentially catastrophic cascading failures. By managing runtime communication and decoupling it from the application, Linkerd not only increases end-to-end system reliability, it allows companies to migrate their application between infrastructure implementations, data centers, and cloud providers, dramatically reducing risk of adoption and of provider lock-in.

“A service mesh like Linkerd can be one of the easiest ways for organizations to incrementally introduce something like Kubernetes into their existing tech stack,” said Joe Beda, Kubernetes co-creator and co-founder of Heptio. “By abstracting service identity and discovery, Linkerd decouples application code from the infrastructure it runs on, allowing companies to migrate business logic from legacy systems to Kubernetes incrementally and to have a uniform layer of visibility and control across their entire stack, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.”

Since its launch in 2016, Linkerd has seen widespread adoption across industries and verticals, ranging from startups like RocketLawyer, Zooz, and Monzo Bank, to established enterprises like PayPal, Oath,  and Credit Karma. Earlier this year, Linkerd became the fifth hosted project with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open source group that also hosts the Kubernetes container orchestration project. This May, the service mesh category received further validation with the launch of Istio, a service mesh collaboration between Google, IBM and Lyft. Buoyant’s recent announcement of Linkerd and Istio integration ties these projects together, allowing Linkerd and Istio to be used together as a unified service mesh. For more on our Istio integration, please read our blog here.

“The service mesh is essential to making cloud native software operationally viable,” said William Morgan, Linkerd co-creator and CEO of Buoyant. “It brings one of the most critical part of your cloud application’s behavior—the runtime communication between services—out of the realm of the invisible, implied infrastructure, and into the role of a first-class member of the ecosystem, where it can be monitored, managed and controlled. ”

Linkerd’s user base, which currently numbers in the thousands of engineers and billions of production requests per day, is comprised of DevOps practitioners, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), platform engineers, and anyone responsible for reliability of web-scale operations across distributed systems.

About Buoyant

Buoyant (www.buoyant.com) builds open source software for cloud-native applications. Founded in 2015 by senior Twitter infrastructure engineers William Morgan and Oliver Gould, Buoyant’s mission is to make cloud-native software faster, more scalable, more reliable and more secure. Buoyant is based in San Francisco and is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top investors, including A Capital, Benchmark Capital, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, SV Angel, #Angels and Webb Investment Network

— Parker Yates

Technology provides complete DevOps & DevSecOps solution to accelerate digital transformation

Boston – July 5, 2017 – DBmaestro, a leading provider of DevSecOps solutions for database technology, today announced a $4.5 million financing led byVertex Ventures, with participation of existing investors Stage 1, Lool Venturesand iAngels. The investment will help the company launch its next-generation database automation solutions and extend its global sales and marketing reach.

DBmaestro technology ensures operational integrity of release automation, versioning, and policy control, increasing productivity and automation and delivering a fast ROI. DBmaestro has experienced exceptional growth, doubling revenues year over year. Major Global 2000 enterprises, such as banks, insurance companies, energy, and technology companies, use DBmaestro for continuous delivery for databases within DevOps and DevSecOps environments.

“By 2019, more than 60% of DevOps initiatives will have adopted version control and tight management of infrastructure automation tools, up from less than 5% in 2016,” says Gartner Report DevSecOps: How to Seamlessly Integrate Security Into DevOps, 30 September 2016. “Information security architects must integrate security at multiple points into DevOps workflows in a collaborative way that is largely transparent to developers, and preserves the teamwork, agility and speed of DevOps and agile development environments, delivering “DevSecOps.”

“DBmaestro offers the best solution for database automation, management, and delivery for DevOps,” said Emanuel Timor, General Partner, Vertex Ventures Israel and the newest member of DBmaestro’s board. “The company’s market traction demonstrates that DBmaestro is addressing a genuine need.”

“DBmaestro technology directly addresses the challenges of bringing databases into the DevOps and DevSecOps environments – from automation to complete policy management,” says Yariv Tabac, Co-founder & CEO of DBmaestro. “With this round of investment, we can make a significant impact on the market, supporting our Global 2000 customers with achieving their digital transformations and allowing more organizations to enjoy faster time-to-market.”

About DBmaestro

DBmaestro accelerates the pace of digital transformation by delivering the last mile of DevOps and DevSecOps – database change automation. A major player in DevOps and DevSecOps, DBmaestro completes the database automation cycle from initial coding to final deployment while ensuring enforcement of corporate development, security, and compliance policies. With DBmaestro companies can reduce errors, increase efficiency, and streamline the development process. Customers include major global enterprises, such as banks, insurance companies, energy, and government institutions. For more information visit: www.dbmaestro.com

About Vertex Ventures Israel

Vertex Ventures is a leading global venture capital group supporting entrepreneurs to transform their innovative ideas into world-class businesses. With cumulative committed capital in excess of $2.5 billion, Vertex invests in early-stage IT and healthcare opportunities in China, Silicon Valley, India, Israel, and South East Asia. Since 1988, Vertex is honored to have partnered with the founders of global leaders such as Waze, 91, Grab, IGG, CyberArk, Reebonz, SolarEdge, Force10, FirstCry, Yatra and Changba. Vertex Ventures Israel is one of the pillars of the Vertex Group’s network of Funds focusing on early stage opportunities in the Information Technology sector in Israel. Learn more at: www.vertexventures.com/israel/

— Parker Yates