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Category: News

  • CircleCI Automates Configurations Across CI/CD Platform

    CircleCI Automates Configurations Across CI/CD Platform

    CircleCI has unveiled what it describes as the first package manager designed specifically to address configuration tasks involving software delivery automation.

    Matt Wyman, vice president of product for CircleCI, said the Orbs package manager condenses commands, executors and jobs into single, reusable lines of code that automate tasks on the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform the company provides as a cloud service. The initial set of Orbs being made available by CircleCI are focused on automating more than 25 different cloud deployment scenarios to enable organizations to employ DevOps processes at scale, he said, noting those Orbs can then be validated and shared via an Orbs registry that CircleCI is making available.

    CircleCI is also launching a technology alliance program through which Jfrog, Twistlock, Anchore, Aqua Security, Cypress, Postman, Coveralls, datree, Rollbar and Codacy have committed to building Orbs.

    Wyman said shareable Orbs that require only a few lines of code to develop makes it possible to share configurations across multiple CI/CD workflows. Those Orbs then can be integrated with any number of third-party tools.

    CircleCI is making a case for a CI/CD platform delivered as a managed cloud service that eliminates the need for DevOps teams to set up and manage on their own. Open source CI/CD platforms can be too complex for the average IT organization to set up. Alternatively, CircleCI makes available a version of its CI/CD platform that organizations can deploy behind their own firewall. The CircleCI approach is designed to enable DevOps teams to flexibly create workflows that can be executed sequentially or in parallel.

    There are 12 million builds a month being generated by more than 300,000 developers taking advantage of the CircleCI cloud service to build applications, Wyman said. One of the primary drivers of that success is a cloud service that allows organizations to apply more of their limited resources to developing applications versus managing CI/CD infrastructure, he noted.

    Most IT organizations have yet to standardize on a specific CI/CD platform. Competition between providers of CI/CD platforms has never been more fierce as more enterprise IT organizations embrace DevOps. As DevOps processes continue to mature, it’s also clear that DevOps processes will need to be extended across multiple clouds in addition to on-premises IT environments.

    In general, CI/CD platforms are initially set up by developers who have embraced DevOps processes to accelerate development and deployment of applications without sacrificing quality. The most widely used CI/CD platform is the open source instance of Jenkins. Developers often can adopt Jenkins on their own without requiring anyone to sign off on a purchase order. But as organizations move to scale up their DevOps processes, CircleCI is betting interest in a commercial service that can be easily accessed across an entire enterprise will increase as organizations move to standardize their CI/CD environments.

    In the meantime, pressure to increase the rate at which applications are built and deployed is only going to increase as organizations become more aggressive about digital business process transformation. The issue now isn’t so much whether they will have a CI/CD platform, but rather to what extent—and, in some cases, how many.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Extends Scope of Alliance with IBM

    VMware Extends Scope of Alliance with IBM

    On the heels of IBM announcing its intent to acquire Red Hat, VMware announced at the VMworld Europe 2018 conference this week an extension of its longstanding cloud alliance with IBM.

    Red Hat competes directly with VMware; yet, there are also more than 1,600 customers running VMware on the IBM cloud. Ajay Patel, senior vice president of product development for cloud services, said VMware remains committed to the IBM cloud alliance even while its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to expand.

    VMware and IBM jointly announced this week they have opened Joint Innovation Lab and that IBM Cloud Private Hosted can now be installed on VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud. In addition, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions are now integrated with the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. IBM is also adding support for VMware NSX-T Data Center to provide VMware customers with access to a network virtualization (NV) overlay on IBM Cloud.

    In addition, VMware vRealize Operations automation software is now available on IBM Power Systems, and VMware will use the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform within VMware customer support portals.

    Despite the obvious tension between VMware and Red Hat and IBM and AWS, Patel noted that VMware has more customers running on the IBM cloud service than any other cloud environment. In addition, IBM, VMware and Red Hat all are committed to advancing Kubernetes. Point of fact: VMware, separately at the conference, announced its plans to acquire Heptio, a provider of management tools for Kubernetes and added support for Kubernetes running on top of VMware virtual machines in version 3.5 of VMware Cloud Foundation.

    VMware, via its alliance with IBM, is making a case for enabling customers to run stateless components of an application on Kubernetes, while maintaining stateful components such as databases on virtual machines, which provide better support for persistent storage.

    IBM said it intends to treat Red Hat as an independent subsidiary capable of making independent alliances, in much the same way VMware operates as an independent unit of Dell Technologies. It may take a while for IT organizations to get used to navigating strange-bedfellow relationships in the era of the cloud; for example, Red Hat has an extensive relationship with Microsoft that spans both Microsoft Azure and on-premises IT environments.

    What remains to be seen is the degree to which DevOps teams will navigate conflicting vendor alliances in isolation from one another instead of trying to unify the management of all those clouds under a common framework. A recent IDC report finds that while most customers (64 percent) are employing multiple clouds, the degree to which those clouds are interoperate varies widely. IDC finds that only 24 percent of IT organizations have a high degree of interoperability between their cloud environments. Another 40 percent say they have achieved low interoperability between their clouds. Only 7 percent say they have a true hybrid cloud in place.

    As the number of organizations with hybrid cloud capabilities starts to increase, the next battle in the cloud won’t be focused on what platforms are employed as much as what management plane might be employed to unify them all.

    — Mike Vizard

  • IBM Acquires Red Hat to Create DevOps Behemoth

    IBM Acquires Red Hat to Create DevOps Behemoth

    In a move that has massive implications for DevOps teams across the enterprise, IBM today announced it is acquiring Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion.

    Red Hat will join IBM’s Hybrid Cloud group as a distinct independent unit. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat’s current management team. Whitehurst will join IBM’s senior management team and report to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat’s headquarters, facilities, brands and services practices.

    IBM expects to close the deal, which will be financed using both cash and debt, in the latter half of 2019. IBM also said the deal will be accretive within 12 months after close, as the combined entity moves to address a total market that spans application development and deployment, IT services and security and collectively exceeds $1 trillion, or more than one-fifth of the total global IT market valued at $3.7 trillion in 2018 by Gartner.

    IBM and Red Hat have had a partnership in place for 20 years, spanning everything from reselling and supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to collaboratively working on open source projects such as Kubernetes.

    IBM officials said they expect Red Hat to significantly bolster IBM’s hybrid cloud business, which already generates $19 billion a year in revenues. IBM noted that about 80 percent of application workloads have yet to move to the cloud.

    The move to acquire Red Hat comes on the heels of Red Hat acquiring CoreOS, which augments the company’s existing open source expertise with a container management platform built on top of Kubernetes.

    Once the deal is closed, IBM said the two companies will remain committed to open source software licensing, including initiatives such as Patent Promise, GPL Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network.

    IBM and Red Hat also plan to continue to build and enhance existing Red Hat partnerships, including those with major cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and others that compete directly with IBM Cloud.

    It’s too early to say to what degree those cloud service providers will be open to continuing to work with Red Hat as unit of IBM. In recent months Red Hat increasingly has been positioning itself head to head against VMware, which operates as a unit of Dell Technologies. IBM also has a strong relationship with VMware that could change in the years ahead. What is clear, however, is that any deal of this magnitude usually begets others in very short order.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CloudBees Further Extends Jenkins CI/CD Reach

    CloudBees Further Extends Jenkins CI/CD Reach

    CloudBees announced it is expanding the scope and reach of its Jenkins open source continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform into the realms of compliance and serverless computing frameworks.

    Announced at the DevOps World | Jenkins World conference in Nice, France, a new plugin for Jenkins adds support for the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS). That model spans AWS Lambda functions, application programming interfaces and Amazon DynamoDB tables and is natively supported by AWS CloudFormation. The AWS SAM plugin supports both classic FreeStyle jobs and Jenkins Pipeline to make it possible to read and deploy serverless applications.

    In effect, CloudBees is making it possible to treat AWS Lambda as a natural extension of any CI/CD pipeline. Longer term, serverless computing frameworks will play a larger role in the cloud-native instance of CloudBees as well.

    In the meantime, CloudBees is also extending its CI/CD platform to address compliance issues that arise from identity management. CloudBees Core is now integrated with the LDAP-based directory Google makes available within its Cloud Identity service. This capability makes it possible to centralize user management policies by using the same Google Cloud Identity or G Suite credentials to connect to CloudBees Core.

    Christina Noren, chief product officer for CloudBees, noted governance and compliance are becoming much bigger issues within best DevOps practices as more responsibility for security continues to shift left toward developers.

    The CloudBees community continues to grow, even as the number of CI/CD rivals continues to expand. At the conference, CloudBees executives revealed the Jenkins community has grown 24 percent in the period Sept. 30, 2017, to September 30, 2018, reaching 192,623 active installations. That number only applies to installations that permit usage information to be transmitted to the Jenkins project, so this number is not representative of the total Jenkins user population. All told, it’s estimated there may be anywhere from 15 million to 23 million developers globally relying on Jenkins. CloudBees also noted the combined number of defined Jenkins Pipeline and other jobs increased during this same annual period, from 10,509,706 million to 20,664,054 million, with Jenkins Pipeline jobs demonstrating growth of 309 percent from last year.

    Noren said one of the primary reasons for that continued success is that unlike other CI/CD platforms that provide a highly opinionated framework accessible only as a cloud framework, the Jenkins environment makes it possible to deploy a more flexible framework on-premises or in a public cloud.

    Of course, there are still millions of developers that have yet to be exposed to any type of CI/CD framework. But as DevOps practices continue to become the primary method through which application development and deployment is increased, it’s now only a matter of time before most developers are working within the context of a CI/CD platform.

    In fact, it’s arguable that those organizations that don’t soon embrace CI/CD platforms will be overwhelmed by rivals capable of updating applications at rates that are increasingly being measured in days and hours versus weeks and months.

    — Mike Vizard

  • SAP Embeds Integration Services in PaaS Environment

    SAP Embeds Integration Services in PaaS Environment

    SAP, at its SAP Tech-Ed Europe 2018 conference, expanded the scope of the integration services it provides within SAP Cloud Platform, the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment it provides for building custom applications based on the open source Cloud Foundry project.

    Dan Lahl, global vice president of product marketing for SAP Cloud Platform, said SAP is now adding a Content Advisor service that makes use of machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend what integrations should be created next based on those that have been previously deployed on the platform.

    In addition, SAP announced the general availability of SAP Cloud Integration Automation Service, which provides deeper integration with a standard set of metadata SAP is in the process of defining for all its packaged application software, and SAP Cloud Platform Open Connectors, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) based on code SAP has licensed from Cloud Elements.

    SAP also revealed that it will start making an on-premises edition of SAP Cloud Platform available via partners including IBM and Atos beginning in 2019. Lahl said that decision was driven by customers that for either regulatory or intellectual property concerns did not want to deploy custom code on any cloud service. Those efforts become more feasible once SAP finishes porting its distribution of Cloud Foundry to run on top of Kubernetes, which presents a more efficient approach to deploying an application development platform using a cloud-native platform that can run anywhere. While SAP remains committed to Cloud Foundry, the cost and effort of standing up instances of a Cloud Foundry PaaS in its original form are considerable.

    Finally, a new SAP Business Partner service on SAP Cloud Platform, planned for general availability in November, will provide access to a set of master data services that simplify access to and orchestration of enterprise business applications. The master data services can be shared and reused for any LOB-specific intelligent business processes to ensures a consistent and comprehensive view of customers, sales and products. In effect, SAP is now providing compliance as a service, said Lahl.

    The integration additions to the SAP Cloud Platform should improve performance and help drive down costs, he said, because  collectively they eliminate the need to rely on an external integration service when building and deploying applications on SAP Cloud Platform.

    SAP has put considerable effort into building out SAP Cloud Platform as part of a strategy that provides a layer of isolation between SAP applications running on the HANA database and custom applications running on Cloud Foundry. That approach enables SAP to deliver a quarterly cadence of updates to both its packaged applications and HANA running on a cloud service without having to worry about the impact those updates might have on custom applications. One of the reasons why so many SAP customers are several releases behind on SAP packaged applications is because they have all been customized extensively in on-premises IT environments.

    As part of that effort, SAP is now also making available a series of best practices for implementing DevOps processes across its platforms. It may be a while before organizations that have standardized on SAP platforms master those processes. But modernization of those platforms is now more a matter of when rather than if.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Electric Cloud Extends Continuous Delivery Platform

    Electric Cloud Extends Continuous Delivery Platform

    Electric Cloud is making available a software-as-a-service (SaaS) pricing option available for its ElectricFlow application release management and continuous delivery (CD) platform.

    In addition, version 8.5 of ElectricFlow adds support for a Kanban-style pipeline view, object tagging for custom reporting and improved searchability and a continuous integration (CI) dashboard to track and analyze build processes, failures and successes.

    The SaaS option doesn’t fundamentally change the existing Electric Cloud pricing model as much as it does provide a different location to host ElectricFlow, said Electric Cloud CTO Anders Wallgren. Pricing for ElectricFlow is still based on nodes and the number of users rather than consumption.

    The CI dashboard, meanwhile, provides organizations that have one or more types of CI platforms being employed with visibility into, for example, Jenkins, Git and Bamboo pipelines using a single dashboard. Many organizations today have multiple CI pipelines in place largely because of the preferences of individual developer teams, Wallgren noted.

    The Kanban-style pipeline also provides a mechanism for managing multiple application development projects based on a just-in-time process originally developed by Toyota that is employed to identify bottlenecks in car manufacturing. That same issue, of course, applies to software development, where the number of dependencies between various modules is increased exponentially. That issue is becoming even more pronounced as organizations move to build and deploy cloud-native applications based on various types of runtimes. DevOps teams now can approve and observe release progress and deployment status within ElectricFlow in near real time, Wallgren said.

    Finally, tagging functionality on all objects allows release managers and product owners to create more granular, real-world reports quickly and easily. Universal data segmentation replaces code-based report creation and can be applied across any object type.

    Wallgren noted that adoption of DevOps best practices generally continues to advance at uneven rates. Electric Cloud is now working closely with the DevOps Institute on an online training and certification program dubbed Electric Cloud University. The goal is to increase the number of IT teams that are exposed to modern CD processes at whatever pace they choose. Electric Cloud is making four certifications available: Build Accelerator, Test Accelerator, Administrator and Agile Master.

    Wallgren said the next major frontier when it comes to continuous delivery will be applying deep- and machine-learning algorithms to tame what has become an exceedingly complex management challenge. DevOps toolchains continuously create vast amounts of data originating from numerous tools, and machine learning algorithms can harness that data to automate a range of DevOps processes in a way that is not only makes those processes more accessible, but also easier to demonstrate how an application release meets a specific compliance mandate. To achieve that goal, Electric Cloud has been embedding more algorithms into every release cycle of ElectricFlow, says Wallgren.

    It may take a while longer for algorithms to minimize all the complexity associated with continuous delivery today. But as DevOps continues to evolve, it’s apparent that many of the manual tasks that have often conspired to limit adoption of DevOps will one day soon disappear.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Akamai Further Extends Reach into DevOps Realm

    Akamai Further Extends Reach into DevOps Realm

    Akamai is extending its campaign to make content delivery networks (CDNs) a natural extension of DevOps processes by adding more application programming interfaces (APIs) and other automated functions to simplify a variety of tasks.

    Specifically, Akamai has added an Akamai Sandbox that makes it simpler to conduct tests within the context of the Akamai continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) framework.

    In addition, the company now makes it possible to cache GraphQL responses using the Akamai application programming interface (API) gateway, which provides a more efficient mechanism for caching REST APIs using the Akamai Intelligent Edge service.

    Akamai is also making it possible to run a series of what-if analyses using the mPulse metrics it exposes now all the way down to specific resource levels. That real-time and historical data can be employed within the context of A/B testing on the CDN platform. Akamai has also made available Single Point of Failure (SPOF) protection within the Ion Script Management tool, which makes use of real user performance data to identify problematic first and third-party scripts on a user’s site. SPOF can automatically defers or blocks any scripts that don’t meet standards for performance.

    Finally, Akamai has added an API for securing entire web application footprints within a Bot Manager tools, in addition to support for OAuth protocols for securing API calls.

    Ari Weil, vice president of product marketing at Akamai, said the CI/CD framework that Akamai provides makes it possible to push updates to multiple CDNs. Akamai obviously would prefer all those CDNs to be provided by Akamai, but it recognizes that, in many instances, organizations will be taking advantage of CDNs provided by cloud service providers alongside Akamai, he said.

    Weil noted that Akamai is trying to position its CDN as the first tier on which a wide variety of applications will be deployed and secured. Rather than deploying those applications on a local web server, the Akamai CDN provides a layer of isolation between cybersecurity attacks aimed at web applications and the infrastructure the rest of the enterprise relies on, said Weil. As part of that effort, Akamai has been exposing its CI/CD platform with the CDN, which organizations can employ to apply DevOps processes to applications that are deployed and updated on the Akamai CDN.

    Many of the DevOps motions these days assume the application will be deployed either on a public cloud or in an on-premises IT environment. Akamai contends that a CDN not only provides a better platform for deploying and managing distributed applications, but those applications will be inherently more secure as Akamai absorbs the brunt of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, for example, and less costly as the amount of data that needs to be moved in and out of a public cloud sharply declines.

    Naturally, not every developer may fully appreciate the role CDNs can play within the context of a larger set of DevOps processes. But as applications become more distributed, there may come a day when the CDN service chosen winds up being a lot more relevant than any of the platforms being connected to the web.

    — Mike Vizard

  • NGINX Unveils Hybrid Application Delivery Controller Platform

    NGINX Unveils Hybrid Application Delivery Controller Platform

    NGINX this week announced it has developed a common framework for managing application delivery that can be applied across both monolithic and microservices-based applications.

    Announced at the NGINX Conf 2018 conference, the NGINX Application Platform has been rearchitected to provide traditional load balancing capabilities and a web application firewall (WAF), as well as a built-in service mesh for managing microservices and an integrated application programming interface (API) management platform.

    Sidney Rabsatt, vice president of product management at NGINX, said an update to NGINX Controller is at the heart of a much more comprehensive to approach to integrating load balancing, service mesh technologies and API management. Due out later this year, NGINX Controller 2.0 is based on a modular architecture that enables additional functions to be added via plug-in modules. The module for API management is slated for release in the fourth quarter, while the service mesh module is scheduled to become available in the first half of 2019.

    Rabsatt said it’s become clear IT organizations don’t want to replicate existing application delivery controllers just to manage microservices. There will never be such a thing as an enterprise IT environment this is made up entirely of microservices. The latest release of the NGINX Controller makes it possible to manage application delivery across the broad spectrum of applications that need to be addressed within modern IT environments, he said, noting that in effect, it’s a one-size-fits-all approach to managing application delivery via a single fabric.

    As part of that effort, NGINX this week also revealed that NGINX Plus R16, an enterprise-grade version of the core NGINX load balancing software, has been updated to apply load balancing algorithms to microservices running on Kubernetes clusters, in addition to support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) PrivateLink integration.

    Finally, NGINX announced version 1.4 of Unit, an open source web and application server that support TLS encryption, dynamic reconfiguration via an API and experimental support for JavaScript with Node.js to extend existing support for Go, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby languages support. Full support for JavaScript and Java is planned for 2019.

    In general, Rabsatt said it’s clear organizations that have embraced DevOps are the most advanced when it comes to the need to unify management of application delivery. In fact, much of the recent success NGINX has enjoyed as of late starts with developers downloading an open source instance of NGINX to embed within their applications. As those instances of NGINX start to proliferate across the enterprise, more IT operations teams become exposed to the rest of the NGINX platform.

    It may take a while for microservices-based applications to achieve enough critical mass to force organizations to rethink their approach to application delivery. But it’s now a matter of time before organizations need to decide the degree to which they want to deploy standalone application delivery controllers and service meshes for microservices applications instead of pursuing a more hybrid approach. NGINX is clearly betting on the latter, given the number of legacy monolithic applications that will be running for years.

    — Mike Vizard

  • SentryOne Introduces Mobile App for SentryOne Monitoring

    CHARLOTTE, NC – October 9, 2018 – SentryOne announced the SentryOne Monitoring Mobile App, which empowers data professionals and IT managers to view SQL Server, SSAS, and SentryOne Cloud Sync monitoring data on iOS and Android mobile devices and receive push notifications for specified conditions as they occur. The mobile app expands data professionals’ options for proactively managing database performance to ensure continuous delivery of business-critical information.

    “The SentryOne Monitoring Mobile App meets the need for data professionals to have constant access to monitoring data, particularly notifications of critical events that demand quick response,” said Andy Mallon, SentryOne Product Manager.

    The app provides insights regarding overall database health and wait times for user sessions. From the app, data professionals can flag events for later reference, set customized filters to refine the views based on various parameters, and share snapshots of the database environment health score with others in the organization. Data managers can simply tap on an event to see the details they need to address potential performance problems.

    “The SentryOne Monitoring Mobile App is another breakthrough that supports our mission to help data professionals proactively manage database performance,” said Jason Hall, SentryOne VP of Product. “With constant, convenient access to monitoring insights, they can respond quickly and efficiently to emerging performance trouble areas before data users are affected.”

    The SentryOne Monitoring Mobile App requires a SentryOne Cloud account and at least one actively monitored database. For more information about the SentryOne Monitoring Mobile App, visit https://www.sentryone.com/mobile.

  • Akamai Announces Platform Enhancements Designed to Bolster Security and Agility for Digital Businesses

    Adds intelligent security automation, advanced threat protection for web apps, deeper real-time insights, and improved efficiencies to the edge

    CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences, today announced significant enhancements to its platform. These updates can drive insight, agility, and quality for businesses delivering digital experiences using the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform to secure and enable cloud-based applications and web-based experiences. These new capabilities are designed to:

    • Improve resiliency for apps with automated protections, streamlined workflows, and support for additional apps and use cases;
    • Enable unparalleled visibility and insight to facilitate prioritization, streamline decision making, and ensure better business outcomes;
    • Drive significant cost reduction associated with egress from public clouds, and enhance performance, security and quality for streaming TV experiences;
    • Provide powerful APIs and automation to empower developers and simplify complex tasks, and empower developers to maintain agile development practices.

    “As more companies move their operations and apps to the cloud, they are striving to balance the demands for security and agility, often firefighting point problems instead of directing their digital strategy. They need greater insight, agility and quality from their service provider partners to get there in a cost effective way,” said Ari Weil, vice president of product marketing at Akamai. “Akamai is innovating to help organizations meet continuously evolving challenges, threats, and competitive pressures.”

    Leveraging the Internet Securely
    Akamai is launching new features to address the growing risks that an expanding threat surface presents as cloud adoption accelerates and architectures continue to evolve toward a zero trust model. As botnets become larger, more sophisticated and better able to harness the power of AI to target web applications, security pros need tools that can layer detection methods such as statistical analysis of user behavior, sensor inputs from connected devices, and continuous updates to reputational scoring.

    With today’s release, Akamai customers will benefit from edge security platform improvements that support business insight with streamlined workflows and real-time and historical reporting abilities, so that customers can understand the impact that hacker techniques like botnets are having on protected endpoints. Added agility comes from automated protections and built-in API protection to secure the entire web application footprint, and new client connectors that secure employee and application access from anywhere. Akamai has also expanded its platform for instant DDoS attack mitigation to provide additional capacity and regional coverage.

    Meeting Performance and Budget Expectations in the Cloud
    Akamai is also introducing new features designed to help businesses balance the challenge of enabling developers to create cutting-edge experiences that maximize customer experiences, while maintaining rigorous cybersecurity discipline. The Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform already surrounds and extends enterprise and cloud solutions so organizations can benefit from increased resiliency and quality while cost-effectively executing their cloud migration strategies.

    Now, customers using Akamai to support their cloud-delivery operations can benefit from real user insights to understand the impact that changes to a web page or application can have on user experience, enabling them to make better decisions. That insight can be leveraged by organizations to implement automated performance and quality improvements, drive delivery efficiency, accelerate rendering, and eliminate errors that negatively affect the user experience. Akamai has also added support for federated development, containerized environments, and microservices architectures, empowering developers to iterate and test site changes and Akamai configurations before deploying them.

    Getting to Better-than-broadcast Quality at Scale
    For media companies, leveraging the internet to deliver TV experiences with broadcast quality is becoming a business imperative. Akamai is introducing solutions that help to make streaming TV easier and more cost effective from multiple origins – including scenarios where content is hosted by cloud providers – while also helping customers provide better viewing experiences. Akamai Direct Connect is designed to help customers achieve reliable, secure and cost effective first-mile transit for linear video. This platform update also provides ultra low latency support for live and linear streaming typically within one-to-two seconds of traditional broadcast, using the common media application format (CMAF). In addition, Akamai Cloud Wrapper is architected to provide flexibility for customers using public clouds, improve offload performance and reduce transit costs. These platform updates will be particularly useful as broadcasters shift more of their content workflows to the cloud.

    To learn more about the fall 2018 updates to the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform, visit the Akamai website at Akamai.com/October2018.

    About Akamai
    Akamai secures and delivers digital experiences for the world’s largest companies. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps, and experiences closer to users than anyone — and attacks and threats far away. Akamai’s portfolio of edge security, web and mobile performance, enterprise access, and video delivery solutions is supported by unmatched customer service, analytics, and 24/7/365 monitoring. To learn why the world’s top brands trust Akamai, visit www.akamai.com, blogs.akamai.com, or @Akamai on Twitter. You can find our global contact information at www.akamai.com/locations.

    Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
    This release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai’s management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, failure of the cloud adoption to increase as expected, failure of enhancements to the Akamai platform to operate as expected or to provide intended benefits, a failure of Akamai’s network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in Akamai’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.