devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Veronica Haggar

  • DataCore Debuts Enterprise-Grade Container-Native Storage Software for Higher Performance and Scalability

    DataCore Bolt dynamically provisions fast, persistent storage for Kubernetes environments using NVMe-oF in the cloud and on-premises; applying innovations of the open-source OpenEBS project to latency-sensitive containerized workloads

    Fort Lauderdale, FL and Valencia, SPAIN, May 17, 2022 – DataCore Software, the largest independent vendor of Software-Defined Storage solutions, today announced DataCore Bolt, enterprise-grade container-native storage software for DevOps. Stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters in the cloud and on-premises benefit from Bolt’s dynamic provisioning of high-performance persistent storage. Bolt’s containerized microservices stack exploits low-latency and high IOPs characteristics of NVMe-oF/TCP along with Kubernetes’ intrinsic orchestration and resilience at scale. DataCore made the announcement at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Valencia, Spain, where Bolt is being showcased through May 20.

    “Early on we recognized that containers were going to be a once-in-a-generation transformation, where data storage has a singular impact on the deployment and responsiveness of microservice based applications. This is a market where modern storage technologies such as NVMe over Fabrics and platform-independent data services are in strong demand,” said Dave Zabrowski, CEO, DataCore Software. “With DataCore Bolt, we are proud to continue the heritage of innovation begun by MayaData by offering performant, scalable, flexible, reliable enterprise software that enables organizations to take the leap into the containerized world and respond quickly to change.”

    Bolt is the company’s first commercially licensed Kubernetes storage product based on its acquisition of MayaData, the original developer of OpenEBS. Traditional storage infrastructures, by themselves, do not meet the data persistence and portability needs of today’s modern stateful workloads. In DevOps uses, their dependency on repetitive manual tasks slows down continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines – diminishing the advantages that containerization can bring.

    Bolt is a storage solution purpose-built for Kubernetes that facilitates the deployment and release of production-ready software while enabling the agility required in a large-scale DevOps environment. Harnessing the benefits of NVMe hardware and NVMe-oF/TCP protocol, Bolt supports a composable and disaggregated storage architecture removing the overhead and sluggishness experienced with other storage products.

    “The rise of Kubernetes has placed greater emphasis on storage architected from the ground up for widely distributed, containerized deployments,” said Dave Raffo, senior analyst, HCI, cloud storage and container storage at Evaluator Group. “Container-native storage players including DataCore are bringing essential enterprise capabilities to DevOps and IT Ops teams looking to roll out stateful workloads that require faster performance and hands-free automation.”

    Whether in the cloud or on-premises, Bolt eliminates storage-related delays and accelerates code progression to ensure seamless application delivery through the DevOps pipeline, allowing teams to meet their deployment goals. Bolt also allows DevOps to:

    • Accelerate responsiveness of stateful workloads through low-latency access to NVMe drives
    • Streamline DevOps CI/CD pipeline with containerized storage services orchestrated directly from Kubernetes
    • Replace complex storage management with native Kubernetes automation
    • Gain observability to storage behavior not possible with external systems
    • Ensure portability of storage services by removing kernel/OS dependencies
    • Enhance data resilience though volume replication across K8s nodes

    Bolt works alongside other Kubernetes tools used for version control, configuration management, CI/CD automation code repository and artifact management, test automation, monitoring, and deployment.

    Bolt is available for commercial use and is licensed per Kubernetes node. A typical 1-year term license of Bolt includes annual license cost and support fees. To learn more or meet with DataCore executives at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, May 16-20, Booth #S76, Level 0, Hall 2, Feria Valencia.

    Resources:

    About DataCore

    DataCore Software delivers the industry’s most flexible, intelligent, and powerful software- defined storage solutions for block, file, and object storage, helping more than 10,000 customers worldwide modernize how they store, protect, and access data. The company’s comprehensive product suite, intellectual property portfolio, and its unrivaled experience in storage virtualization and advanced data services, position DataCore as the authority on software-defined storage. To request more information, visit datacore.com/company/contact-us/.

    ## #

    DataCore and the DataCore logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

    Contact
    For media & PR inquiries:
    A3 Communications on behalf of DataCore Kim Pegnato or Mary Kae Marinacdatacore@a3communicationspr.com

  • The Era of Containerization Is Coming! Gaia Helps Enterprises Innovate and Transform in Three Ways: Training Courses, container Security and Professional Services

    Optimistic about the impact of container technology in the industry, Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production and up from less than 30% today. As a result of the growing use of containers, the demand for container management is increasing for enterprises. Worldwide container management revenue will grow strongly and reach $944 million in 2024. Accordingly, Gaia not only strengthens the skills for employees to provide Kubernetes consulting, deployment services, and to obtain certifications to provide official Kubernetes Chinese courses, but also introduces container tools, such as CI/CD platform – Gitlab and vulnerability scanning service, which can help organizations to build a containerized architecture step-by-step and ensure the operation of each business works efficiently. Wu Bing-jun, the founder and CEO of Gaia, said, “In order to help organizations to stay ahead of the curve, Gaia not only invests heavily in cultivating certified instructors, but is also devoted to fostering more talents through training courses.”

    In order to reduce the reliance on virtual machines, keep system resources effectively utilized in a more economical way, and respond quickly to changing markets, container  technology has attracted market attention in the past few years. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud computing platforms embrace container technology actively. Many organizations are also starting to deploy containers. As the best partner for enterprises to create and deploy cloud services, Gaia not only actively embraces container technology, such as developing official websites, customer services, accounting management and other systems in a containerized environment, but also gains a lot of experience in providing container deployment and consulting services as well as negotiating cooperation with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is the part of The Linux Foundation, to provide authorized Kubernetes training courses, and help students to prepare for certificates like CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) and CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer).

    “Gaia is the first CNCF certified hybrid cloud provider in Taiwan, but is also an institution with the most certified instructors. Last year(2021) alone, five of our employees became CNCF certified instructor (there are only 26 certified instructors in Greater China). This year (2022), we will extend the number of instructors to seven .”

    Lin Hou-nian, R&D director of Gaia, explained that there are two reasons why Gaia starts with education services: Firstly, the rapid growth of container technology, and secondly, container management is related to a variety of technical skills, such as development, infrastructure architect, microservice management, and decouple design skills etc. Therefore, it is not easy to cultivate talents, and the world is experiencing an ongoing talent shortage.

    In order to ease the dilemma of talent shortage, Gaia cooperates with CNCF to provide (officially authorized) training courses in Chinese, and actively shares practical experience with the market by writing articles in the open source community and participating in technical forums, etc. Gaia also plans to make tutorial videos to help IT engineers, software engineers, fresh graduates or people changing their careers to become a master of container technology faster.

     “Within 3 months after launching the training courses, we have successfully assisted transportation and semiconductor organizations to cultivate a total of 40 talents specialized in container technology, and helped more than 30 students successfully obtain the license. We also achieved high customer satisfaction around 98%. Gaia will continue to offer more CKA and CKAD courses in response to market demand. In addition, we are willing to cooperate with education institutions to cultivate more talents,” Wu Bing-jun said.

    It is not enough to only provide Kubernetes training courses. Gaia implements platform services for practical needs: Gitlab and vulnerability assessment service. Lin Hou-nian said that Gitlab is a one-stop DevOps platform, which not only helps enterprises manage and track the progress of containerization projects at the same time, but also has powerful CI/CD functions. Gitlab can easily connect to GitHub, Bitbucket and other services.

     “As for vulnerability assessment services, we can carry it out when developing containerized applications, which can reduce security risks in the first place for our customers. We have helped many financial and manufacturing customers introduce this service. “

    In addition to plan training courses and platform services, Gaia also provides customized services according to customer requirements, such as helping enterprises deploy containerized applications through proof-of-concept (PoC) methods. Wu Bing-jun said: “Our goal is to provide customers with one-stop services, thereby lowering the threshold for customers to deploy containerized applications, and enjoy the maximum benefits of cloud-ready infrastructure. With the popularization of container services, we will further expand our business to hosting service.”

    Looking forward to the future, Gaia will continue to strengthen the existing containerized products and services, develop more diversified DevOps and DevSecOps services, and respond to the containerization trend – Infrastructure as Code, automated deployment, scalable expansion, Cloud-to-Cloud Integration – by expanding service offerings to help customers create a cloud-ready system environment that keeps pace with the times through container technology to drive business performance.

  • Ingest OpenTelemetry Traces and Metrics with the Datadog Agent

    OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) initiative that provides open, vendor-neutral standards and tools for instrumenting services and applications. Many organizations use OpenTelemetry’s collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools to collect and export observability data from their environment to their preferred backend.

    As part of our ongoing commitment to OpenTelemetry, we are proud to have contributed our distributed tracing libraries to the CNCF community. We also offer multiple solutions to ensure that OpenTelemetry users have the flexibility to easily send their observability data to Datadog support for OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) in the Datadog Agent, enabling you to reliably ingest traces and metrics from applications that have been instrumented with OpenTelemetry libraries. OTLP is a specification for encoding and transmitting telemetry data between sources, intermediaries (e.g., collectors), and backends. With native support for OTLP, the Datadog Agent now enables you to get deep visibility into your OpenTelemetry-instrumented applications without updating your code or migrating away from your existing workflows.

    Send OpenTelemetry traces directly to the Datadog Agent

    If you’ve instrumented your applications with OpenTelemetry libraries, you can export OTLP traces directly to the Datadog Agent (version 7.35+) through gRPC or HTTP, without installing a separate OpenTelemetry Collector. The snippet below shows how you can update your Datadog Agent configuration file (datadog.yaml) to enable the Agent to ingest OpenTelemetry traces over gRPC:

    datadog.yaml

    otlp_config:
    receiver:
    protocols:
    grpc:

    You can also configure trace ingestion by setting environment variables. See our documentation for Kubernetes (including Helm) and other configuration examples.

    Once you’re collecting your OTLP traces, you can start visualizing and monitoring that data with Datadog APM. You can also use this method to collect OTLP-formatted metrics.

    Because the Datadog Agent can also collect application profiles, network data, infrastructure metrics from 500+ integrations, and other telemetry from your environment, you can get rich context around your OTLP traces and gain a better understanding of your systems and applications. You can also connect traces with logs to get a more complete picture of your stack.

    Alternatively, you can export OTLP traces and metrics to our platform by using the Datadog exporter and the OpenTelemetry Collector. This option helps streamline your workflows, for backends.

    Observability with Datadog APM and OpenTelemetry

    Whether you ingest OpenTelemetry data with the Datadog Agent or the Datadog exporter, Datadog APM will enable you to get deep visibility into your applications by:

    – Querying all your traces in real time to troubleshoot business-critical application performance issues.

    – Visualizing dependencies to understand how data flows through your architecture by inspecting the Request Flow Map and Service Map.

    – Understanding key insights from each service with the APM Service Page, which provides a centralized view of telemetry, SLOs, relevant incidents, deployment-tracking data, and more.

    – Automatically detecting performance anomalies, faulty deployments, outliers, and root causes of critical failures with Watchdog, Datadog’s AI engine

    Opening more paths to observability

    Datadog is dedicated to ensuring that our users get deep visibility into their services and applications, regardless of whether they’re using our open source APM libraries, OpenTelementry SDKs, or other OpenTelemetry-compatible instrumentation methods. We are excited to continue instrumentation by providing flexible, extensible solutions for collecting telemetry data from services and applications.

    Read our documentation to learn more about the Datadog Agent’s support for OpenTelemetry. Or, if you’re new to Datadog, get started with a 14-day free trial.

  • Wanclouds Debuts VPC+ DRaaS with IBM Cloud Satellite Functionality at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022

    Enabling simplified backups, restores, and extension of on-premise Kubernetes environments to the hybrid cloud

    Valencia, SPAIN, May 16, 2022 – Wanclouds, a leading multi-cloud SaaS and managed service provider, will debut its VPC+ Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) with IBM Cloud Satellite functionality at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain, this week. The new functionality extends Wanclouds partner integrations with IBM Cloud and follows Wanclouds VPC+ DRaaS launching on the IBM Cloud Marketplace in March.

    With IBM Cloud Satellite, companies can use their own compute infrastructure within their on-premise data center, other cloud providers, or edge networks to create a satellite location. From there, they can utilize the capabilities of IBM Cloud Satellite to run IBM Cloud services on their infrastructure and consistently deploy, manage, and control application workloads and containers.

    Wanclouds new functionality for IBM Cloud Satellite means that companies can now leverage VPC+ DRaaS to orchestrate and manage on-demand cloud backups and multi-cloud migrations for cloud-native workloads and restore them when needed to a satellite location. The functionality joins Wanclouds previous DRaaS coverage of IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) and IBM Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Service (ROKS). Wanclouds can now backup Kubernetes applications from any of these IBM environments, or another cloud provider, and restore in the same cluster where the application is running or select a different Kubernetes cluster altogether.

    “We’re excited to debut our expanded partner integrations with IBM at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 and look forward to working together to help our joint customers embrace a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy that can transform their business,” said Faiz Khan, CEO of Wanclouds. “IBM Cloud Satellite gives cloud-native developers the advantage of running apps consistently across on-premise and public cloud environments from any cloud vendor. While providing disaster recovery for this type of hybrid cloud environment would typically be complex, Wanclouds eliminates the need to learn dozens of tools, complex scripting, and expensive consulting engagements to make backup and restore effortless.”

    Wanclouds VPC+ DRaaS on the IBM Cloud Marketplace offers a 30-day free trial (lite plan) and an enterprise plan. Both provide the ability to backup existing Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters on IBM Cloud and on-prem or edge Red Hat OpenShift clusters across IBM cloud environments. In addition, customers can migrate applications across Kubernetes clusters, visualize infrastructure and resource relationships, set up compliance policies against infrastructure, and get alerts.

    Visit Wanclouds at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 at Booth #SU02 or check out their Virtual Booth.

    To book a demo of Wanclouds DRaaS for Kubernetes and cloud-native resiliency, contact: sales@wanclouds.net.

    About Wanclouds

    Wanclouds is a leading multi-cloud SaaS, solution, and managed service provider. It helps enterprises with cloud deployments, migrations, and protecting their cloud infrastructure in time and cost-efficient ways. The company’s cloud Migration as a Service (MaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) reduce the financial investment and remove the technical complexities that halt or delay businesses from migrating on-premise to the cloud, moving across clouds, or setting up backup and restore protection. Its SaaS-based automation suite VPC+ provides a single pane of glass for managing and protecting multi-cloud environments through a centralized cross-cloud solution. Wanclouds is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA. For more information, visit: https://www.wanclouds.net/

  • CodeZero Launches Surf, a New Developer Tool for Observability in Pre-production Kubernetes Environments

    Vancouver, May 16 2022 — CodeZero, a leader in modern developer tools for the Kubernetes Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) announces the general availability of Surf https://k8s.surf, a developer tool that provides real-time, collaborative, rich-querying capability for pre-production Kubernetes environments. Surf allows developers and teams to de-mystify Kubernetes artifacts, provides powerful troubleshooting capabilities and improves collaboration.

    “Developers have been neglected when it comes to Kubernetes observability,” said Lawrie Gaffney, VP Product Operations at CodeZero. “They have to mix and match multiple tools that were designed for DevOps, Operations and Site Reliability Engineers, correlate the data, then try to make sense of it. With Surf, developers have a powerful querying tool that shows them only what they want to see, provides real-time status and they can quickly share what they’re looking at with their colleagues”.

    Surf is free for anyone to use at https://k8s.surf, and the source code is available to the community to add and share their own ideas. Features include:

    Rich, simple querying

    Surf provides a developer-first interface combining rich but simple querying and understandable results. The query interface supports arbitrary fields, wildcard searches and easy conjunctions.

    Hot results

    Developers can see results change in real-time as other factors impact the environment. Color coding makes it easy to see warnings or errors.

    Extensible UI

    Developers can use keyboard first navigation in a browser app. Plugins will allow users to look at resource specific details, like pod logs and node health. Developers can also use other CodeZero actions like Teleport and Intercept based on the result set.

    Collaboration

    Users can share queries and real-time results with colleagues by simply pasting bookmarks into Slack or email.

    About CodeZero Inc.

    CodeZero, a leader in modern development tools for the Kubernetes Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) enables seamless real-time collaboration across development teams. Because CodeZero has no local dependencies and integrates into any existing environment – moving traffic, not containers is instantaneous and saves developers time while providing a better overall experience. Organizations that use CodeZero eliminate environment drift, scalability challenges and overtooling.

    Deploy your application to Kubernetes | Install CodeZero on your workstation | Point it to your cluster | Start developing locally.

    Media Contact
    Lawrie Gaffney
    VP Product Operations
    Lawrie@codezero.io
    https://k8s.surf

  • Armory Makes Continuous Deployment Achievable and Effortless, at Any Scale, for All Developers

    Armory makes continuous deployment to Kubernetes, easier, safer, repeatable, and reliable.

    San Mateo, CA, May 16, 2022 — Armory, the Continuous Deployment company empowering development teams to easily, reliably, safely, and continuously deploy software at any scale, today announced public early access to their new Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service product. Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service delivers declarative deployments, across multiple environments, that support advanced strategies, so developers can focus on building great code rather than deploying it.

    “We believe deploying software continuously, at any scale, should be achievable and effortless for all developers of the world, not just the likes of Google and Netflix” said Jim Douglas, President and CEO, Armory. “It’s our vision and mission to unlock innovation through software to make software continuous, scalable, secure, and safe, so developers can improve and protect their customers’ experience with confidence and ease”.

    To effectively compete in a software-defined world, development teams must ensure a stellar customer experience. Some do this by focusing on velocity, others do this by ensuring their software is both always available and reliable. Delivering on both velocity and stability has remained difficult and elusive… until now. Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service plugs into any existing Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and can be invoked from any existing toolchain or Continuous Integration (CI) system, including Amazon CodePipeline. This allows development teams to easily leverage the power of Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service when deploying to Kubernetes services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

    A single hour of downtime can cost more than $100,000 for many companies. Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service prevents this type of loss, both as a standalone product for cloud-first companies — and as an extension of a leading Continuous Delivery (CD) solution — SpinnakerTM. Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service provides easy-to-use, environment-specific controls to specify how much traffic is exposed to new changes and to automatically roll back if needed. This enables development teams to continuously verify a service is healthy before routing all traffic to the new version, limiting risk exposure and protecting the customer experience.

    “I really like Armory Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service. It’s also a fantastic extension for our Spinnaker users. I don’t see anyone else doing that in the industry, which is really cool.” — Damian Myerscough Software Engineer, DoorDash

    Additional Resources

    About Armory

    Armory enables developers to continuously improve and assure their customer experience.

    Software developers should be able to deploy their code effortlessly, without writing scripts, managing underlying tooling, or worrying about whether their customers are going to experience an outage. But, software deployment often is complex and full of manual process that leads to customer outages and less time spent on innovation. The bottom line, it remains disruptive, time-consuming, and unreliable.

    Armory makes continuous deployment achievable and effortless, at any scale, for all developers. By providing easy-to-use continuous deployment solutions that eliminate the need to migrate away from existing tools, minimizing disruption to an existing software delivery lifecycle; developers can easily and declaratively deploy new versions alongside live versions, incrementally scale up new versions, enable manual reviews prior to scaling up, effortlessly rollback to an old version, and, manage the deployment across multiple targets and environments; continuously improving and protecting their customer experience.

    Founded in 2016, Armory is funded by B Capital, Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator, and Javelin Venture Partners.

    Learn more at www.armory.io.

    Contact
    Adam Frank
    adam.frank@armory.io

  • SphereEx DB-Plus-Suite V1.0: A One-Stop Solution for Enterprise Data Management Challenges

    SphereEx launched an enterprise-level pluggable data service enhancement platform: SphereEx DB-Plus-Suite V1.0 Business Suite, which includes SphereEx-Boot, SphereEx-Console, and SphereEx DB Plus Engine. The Business Suite is designed to provide enterprises with a one-stop solution that includes installation, deployment, O&M monitoring, and plugin management for SphereEx DB-Plus-Engine clusters, and provide efficient, flexible and comprehensive management capabilities for enterprises.

    Installation and deployment: SphereEx-Boot

    SphereEx-Boot is the ideal solution to install and manage a variety of cluster management tools.

    SphereEx-Boot V1.0 is a Python-developed command line tool for easy management of SphereEx DB Plus Engine-Proxy clusters, providing significant usability and compatibility improvements.

    • In terms of usability, SphereEx-Boot provides an offline installation mode that allows users to install and deploy products in an offline environment with a single command.
    • In terms of compatibility, SphereEx-Boot supports the installation of Prometheus, allowing for the easy monitoring of SphereEx’s product components.

    In the context of the growing Apache ShardingSphere ecosystem, SphereEx-Boot manages many components within the SphereEx DB Plus Engine ecosystem, and acts as a cluster management tool in enterprise production environments.

    Data management and control: SphereEx-Console
    SphereEx-Console, a data visualization platform for the management and control of the SphereEx enterprise data services platform, provides a user-friendly experience. It’s integrated into a solution including resources, instances, plugins and more to provide a one-stop user experience with SphereEx DB Plus Engine at its core.

    The newly released SphereEx-Console V1.0 further expands product capabilities in terms of cluster adaptation, DistSQL (Distributed SQL), and visualization.

    • Cluster management: SphereEx-Console can manage the SphereEx DB-Plus-Engine cluster with one click and seamlessly access users’ existing platforms, significantly improving product compatibility.
    • DistSQL: SphereEx-Console fully supports DistSQL for its operation, enabling users to create and bind various kinds of tables – greatly improving usability for DBAs.
    • Visualization: SphereEx-Console V1.0 enables users to customize monitoring indicators and interface management visualization.

    SphereEx-Console, a SphereEx business data services cluster platform centered on managing Apache ShardingSphere, simplifies user configuration, operation and deployment processes. Lowering entry barriers for beginners while solving enterprise management and control pain points, it delivers enhanced operation & management to enterprises.

    Enterprise-level data services enhancement engine: SphereEx DB Plus Engine
    SphereEx DB Plus Engine is is an enterprise data service platoform, built with Apache ShardingSphere at its core. In addition to ShardingSphere’s functionality, DB Plus Engine provides features such as enterprise security, high performance clusters, high availability clusters and more. It consists of two products, SphereEx DB Plus Engine-Driver and SphereEx DB Plus Engine-Proxy, to be deployed in combination or independently.

    The newly released SphereEx DB Plus Engine-Proxy V1.0 focuses on updating capabilities in encryption and decryption, dual routing, and user privileges.

    Data features:
    • Data encryption and decryption: supports user-defined data types.
    • Dual routing: JDBC and Proxy integration based on dual routing capability.

    User privilege management:
    • Adds a new login mode: LDAP authentication.
    • Adds role management.
    • Adds table-level privilege control.
    • Adds column-level privilege control.
    • User privileges can be changed online.

    Both SphereEx DB Plus Engine-Driver and SphereEx DB Plus Engine can provide standardized data scale-out, distributed transactions and distributed governance capabilities — applicable to Java isomorphic & heterogeneous languages scenarios, and cloud native environments.

    ——

    The SphereEx Business Suite will continue following the Database Plus design concept for distributed database systems, to build an ecosystem on top of fragmented, heterogeneous databases to scale and enhance original database computing capabilities. The interaction between applications and databases will be oriented to the standard of Database Plus, minimizing database fragmentation on upper-layer services, achieving the three core goals of Database Plus: Connect, Enhance and Pluggable.

    The “cloud” is a key technology development trend for SphereEx. Today, cloud native has become key to hosting large-scale applications and mastering the future of technology. SphereEx will actively adapt to the data needs of cloud native scenarios, bringing cloud native databases closer to users and providing enterprises with flexible and efficient cloud data governance to accelerate their transition from on-premise to cloud.

    Official website: https://www.sphere-ex.com/

  • Timescale Announces OpenTelemetry Tracing Support For Promscale

    Following its recent $110 million Series C investment, Timescale announces general availability of OpenTelemetry tracing support in Promscale, its unified observability backend for metrics and traces powered by SQL. With today’s announcements, Timescale furthers its mission to enable developers worldwide to analyze their time-series data effectively; enabling them to know what is happening, why it is happening, and how to fix it.

    New York, NY, May 16, 2022 – Today, Timescale – the creators of TimescaleDB, the industry-leading relational database for time-series built in PostgreSQL – announced the full availability of OpenTelemetry support in Promscale. Promscale is the unified observability backend for Prometheus metrics and OpenTelemetry traces powered by SQL built on TimescaleDB and PostgreSQL. It provides users of cloud-native applications the power and flexibility to interrogate their observability data using a query language they already know and gain unprecedented insight about their distributed systems to troubleshoot problems faster and build better software. With traces now generally available, Promscale provides a single database and unified query language for metrics, traces, and business data.

    In 2021, Timescale announced the beta release for OpenTelemetry traces in Promscale. With today’s announcement, support for OpenTelemetry traces is now fully available, making tracing data more accessible and valuable to developers so they can better monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their distributed systems.

    What this means for developers

    OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework for cloud-native service and infrastructure instrumentation hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Second only to Kubernetes as the project with the most activity and contributors, It focuses on solving the challenges of operating distributed systems by making telemetry data very easy to collect and universally available.

    Today’s cloud native architectures generally experience a debugging problem due to the numerous components, interactions, autoscaling and frequent deployments that occur within them. This makes it hard to identify the troubled zones within these systems. Observability addresses this by providing insight into where and why it is happening. It does this through the collection of comprehensive telemetry from modern software systems in the form of three signals (metrics, logs, and traces) and through the ability to flexibly analyze that telemetry in real-time. Observability is essentially an analytics problem.

    Metrics and logs are well known and have been widely adopted for many years through tools like Nagios, Prometheus, or the ELK stack. They are however disjointed and do not provide the level of detail required to identify anomalous behaviors in distributed systems. Traces, on the other hand, capture a connected view of how the entire system works together to process requests. This makes it possible for users to figure out the full scope of a problem as well as the real-time behavior and interaction of the different system components.

    With tracing support, Promscale equips every developer with observability powered by SQL. Observability is a data analytics problem, and SQL is a powerful language for data analytics: by using SQL to analyze tracing data, developers can get unprecedented insights about their distributed systems, identifying production problems faster and reducing mean time to recovery.

    What’s new

    OpenTelemetry tracing support in Promscale includes the following features:

    • A fully customizable out-of-the-box experience within Grafana to help users understand the performance of their distributed systems, enabling a deep dive into the behavior of microservices.
    • A native ingest endpoint for OpenTelemetry traces that understands the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) to easily ingest OpenTelemetry data.
    • Trace data compression and configurable retention to manage disk usage.
    • Seamless integrations to visualize distributed traces stored in Promscale using Jaeger and Grafana so users don’t have to learn new tools or change existing workflows.
    • Support for ingesting traces in Jaeger and Zipkin formats via the OpenTelemetry Collector so users can also benefit from the new capabilities.

    “Observability is an analytics problem; SQL is the lingua franca of observability. By combining SQL with OpenTelemetry traces, you can get new insights not possible with existing observability query languages. Promscale is the only observability solution that makes this possible, thanks to its full SQL support and its support for OpenTelemetry traces” said Ramon Guiu, VP, Observability at Timescale. “With this feature launch, users have access to out-of-the-box dashboards that will help them understand the behavior of their applications, so they can start troubleshooting immediately.”

    Looking Ahead

    With the release of full OpenTelemetry support, Promscale is now even more robust and suited for simple and enterprise-grade deployments; offering unified storage for Prometheus Metrics and OpenTelemetry traces, full SQL and PromQL support, providing users the ability to create unique dashboards, and ask questions aimed at better understanding the systems being monitored. This is an important step towards the goal of enabling every engineer to store all observability data (metrics, logs, traces, metadata, and other future data types) in a single mature and scalable store, and analyze it through a unified and complete SQL interface. More details here

    Get started by deploying Promscale today in your environment or install the lightweight OpenTelemetry demo which includes a microservices application and a complete OpenTelemetry observability stack running on Promscale. 

    ABOUT TIMESCALE

    Timescale is the creator of TimescaleDB, the industry-leading relational database for time-series and Promscale, the observability backend powered by SQL. Tens of thousands of organizations trust TimescaleDB today with their mission-critical time-series applications, and Promscale builds on TimescaleDB to deliver a full observability stack for cloud-native applications. Timescale is a remote-first company with a global workforce and is backed by Tiger Global, Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Redpoint Ventures, Icon Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and other leading investors. For more information, visit www.timescale.com or follow @TimescaleDB.

    Contact
    Kelvin Steve
    Senior Communications Manager
    press@timescale.com

  • NexClipper Introduces OpenStack Observability Solution

    El Segundo, CA, May 16, 2022 — Observability software provider NexClipper Inc. introduces solution for OpenStack environments to specifically cater to the observability needs of customers using the popular open cloud computing platform.

    OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing infrastructure software and one of the most active open source projects worldwide. Building on the experience of providing observability for cloud native and hybrid environments of large enterprises, NexClipper now introduces an observability solution to the market that has been developed with the specific needs of OpenStack users in mind.

    NexClipper’s OpenStack observability package consists of NexClipper’s observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana dashboards, alert manager, and exporters), logging and tracing capabilities as well as high availability support.

    In addition to leveraging the power of proven open technology, the package also includes managed services based on NexClipper’s own open source projects: DS Switch supports high availability of Prometheus stacks and ExporterHub functions as an information hub for key Prometheus exporters.

    “We had many conversations with customers from a variety of industries and learned a lot about their pain points when trying to implement observability in their OpenStack environment. Therefore, we are happy to now introduce a solution that specifically addresses those aspects effectively. We have always been dedicated to the open source community, and the package builds on exactly this expertise,” says Jerry Lee, Managing Director for Global Business at NexClipper Inc.

    NexClipper is currently showcasing its observability solutions at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain. Experts are available for product demos at booth S83 at Pavilion 1 or by contacting the company via their virtual booth at the online edition of the event. Meetings can be arranged via pr@nexclipper.io.

    About NexClipper

    NexClipper B2B infrastructure software supports customers on their observability journey with managed DevOps services. As an established expert in open source technology, the company offers solutions for optimized and user-friendly management of cloud-native infrastructure, such as managed Prometheus for Kubernetes, and other environments.

    With offices in North America and APAC, NexClipper provides its flagship software solutions and open source tools to customers worldwide.

    Press Contact
    Sabine Schatzer
    Head of Global Marketing
    NexClipper Inc.
    sabine.schatzer@nexclipper.io
    +82 10 9935 5384

  • Akuity Announces $20 Million Series A Funding Round

    The company will use the investment to modernize the cloud-native application delivery landscape and provide a robust end-to-end developer experience

    Sunnyvale, CA, May 16, 2022 — Akuity, provider of Kubernetes-native application delivery software powered by the Argo Project, today announced the completion of a $20 million (USD) Series A funding round. Lead Edge Capital and Akuity’s existing investor Decibel Partners led the financing that will allow the company to build the most advanced application delivery platform for Kubernetes, powered by the Argo Project.

    Akuity Co-Founder and CEO Hong Wang,Co-Founder and CTO Jesse Suen and Co-Founder and Chief Architect Alexander Matyushentsev are also the co-creators of the Argo Project, a suite of open source tools purpose-built for deploying and running applications and workloads on Kubernetes. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) 2021 Annual Survey, production use of Argo has increased by 115% year-over-year as more developers began using it to enable continuous software delivery in their enterprise environments.

    Kubernetes and containerization have revolutionized cloud applications in a manner not seen since Linux and virtualization’s disruption of the server market. But Wang，Suen, and Matyushentsev realized Kubernetes’ operational complexities require new approaches to how applications are managed, monitored, and deployed. They founded Akuity to help developers use the four Argo projects (Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, Argo Workflows, and Argo Events) to overcome these challenges of working in the cloud-native era.

    “Argo will always remain an unencumbered open source project, but we realized it would benefit from commercial backing and a vendor to help take it to the next level,” said Wang. “The Akuity Platform will provide DevOps with battle-tested patterns packaged into a solution that delivers the best possible developer experience.”

    “The additional funds will enable us not only to launch the Akuity Platform but also make Argo even better,” added Suen. “Open source is in our DNA and we are 100% committed to making Argo the most successful project for Kubernetes. We will use the Series A financing to scale the team and contribute even more to the community.”

    Akuity is developing two commercial solutions:

    1. Akuity Platform: A fully-managed DevOps platform powered by the Argo project which solves real-life enterprise use-cases and focuses on providing an exceptional developer experience. The Akuity Platform is currently available as a closed beta with general availability coming later this year.
    2. Akuity Enterprise: The open source version of all four Argo projects backed by enterprise support and complemented with additional tools to make Argo even more useful and enterprise-ready. Akuity Enterprise is available today.

    “Argo is purpose built to address the unique challenges faced when building and deploying Kubernetes applications. Evidenced by Argo’s rapid adoption and active open source community, it is clear that its suite of tools has won the hearts of developers. As the co-creators of Argo, the Akuity team is uniquely positioned to give enterprises the solutions they need to deploy at scale, and we’re thrilled to partner with them on the exciting opportunity ahead.”
    – Nimay Mehta, Partner at Lead Edge Capital

    “The founding team at Akuity has built an amazing community around the open source Argo project which has been widely embraced by engineering teams around the world. They have spent years helping the largest and most innovative companies leverage the power of Kubernetes and the cloud, and are committed to helping teams large and small unlock the speed and scalability of DevOps and GitOps. We are excited by their rapid growth and look forward to partnering with them in the years to come.”
    – Jon Sakoda, Founder at Decibel Partners

    For more information on this Series A funding round and the exciting things happening at Akuity, please visit the company’s blog.

    About Akuity

    Akuity is the enterprise company for Argo, the leading open-source suite of cloud-native application delivery software. Its mission is to empower DevOps teams with the best tools to deliver their apps simpler, safer, and faster. Akuity was founded by Argo creators Hong Wang, Jesse Suen and Alexander Matyushentsev. The Akuity Platform provides a best-in-class developer experience with enterprise readiness, and enables organizations to modernize their toolchain for the cloud-native era. Learn more about Akuity at https://akuity.io. Follow the company on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest news and expert insights.