devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: devops

  • REP SPOTLIGHT: TaUB Solutions

    REP SPOTLIGHT: TaUB Solutions

    DevOps Institute: Tell us about your organization.

    TaUB Solutions: TaUB Solutions is a consulting-cum-training organization based in Bangalore India. Our vision is to take the customers beyond the existing state of maturity to envisioned business outcomes.

    We serve a lot of customers in southeast Asian region by delivering consulting assignments on ITSM, IT governance, project and program management and business relationship management. This also includes delivering business simulations on the respective domains and make our customers gain benefit from learning by doing.

    DOI: What other topics do you teach or consult?

    TaUB Solutions: ITSM, IT governance, agile, DevOps, business relationship management, cybersecurity, project and program management and ISO standards (20000,27001, 22301)

    DOI: What type of interest in DevOps are you seeing in your region?

    TaUB Solutions: At the moment, we have successfully delivered around 11 batches of DevOps Foundation and Certified Agile Service Manager courses. We appeal to our customers because of the practitioner focus that we bring to the table and take them through case studies to understand the end-to-end value chain. Our current run rate indicates a strong pipeline of interest in southeast Asian countries who want to apply the DevOps principles and philosophy in their workplace. We also see great traction from Indian corporates to plunge in to the DevOps journey to serve their respective customers better.

    DOI: How do you think DevOps contributes to the business’ value stream?

    TaUB Solutions: One of the things that appeal most to me is the ability to articulate the end-to-end value chain. Business today does not care about which framework or methodology you adopt for the customers. All that matters is to deliver an end-to-end value chain and get a common understanding among different functions and leverage the best across the enterprise. I see tremendous value of leveraging agile, ITSM and lean principles with culture and tool chain to demonstrate key business value.

    DOI: What topic area in DevOps excites you the most?

    TaUB Solutions: There are three things:

    • Culture change
    • Power of automation using tool chain
    • Business KPIs and Common Metrics across the organization

    DOI: Why should enterprises and individuals consider formal DevOps Training?

    TaUB Solutions: Today, DevOps is still at its infant stage and has not yet been codified. So people have their own perspectives, thoughts and misconceptions. So in order to be certain with the path they traverse, it is increasingly important to step in the right direction. This is where a formal DevOps training from DOI can help people to understand fundamentals and DevOps trends from practitioners.

  • 5 Reasons DevOps Needs NetDevOps

    5 Reasons DevOps Needs NetDevOps

    Networking’s role in DevOps is not accurately defined.

    Up to this point, networking has been integrated into DevOps through infrastructure as code (IaC), which has been around since the beginning of the DevOps movement. Although important, this does not quite encompass all of what networking needs within DevOps.

    A few of the current terms being used for networking in DevOps are:

    • Infrastructure as code (IaC)
    • DevOps networking
    • NetOps

    We have not agreed upon a universal, concrete philosophy to determine how to effectively bring networking into the DevOps conversation.

    This is why we need NetDevOps.

    NetDevOps is a construct of principles that aligns the networking team more closing with DevOps in your organization. It takes what traditionally are manual procedures in network infrastructure and applies the principles of automation and scalability.

    Why do you need yet another term or concept? This isn’t a new term; it just needs to be widely adopted.

    Therefore, here are five reasons you need NetDevOps.

    Networking + DevOps = NetDevOps

    DevOps needs networking and networking needs DevOps. The two may not admit this, but the open communication is essential. Networking’s biggest concern is network uptime, while DevOps’ ultimate goal is continuous delivery. The result is DevOps having a high interest in network availability to ensure updates can be delivered.

    Adopting a NetDevOps approach promotes networking to apply the same principles as DevOps. The goal of replicating and automating tasks—not automating for the sake of automation, but to take the processes that work effectively on one server and apply them to multiple servers.

    Remote Deployment for Cloud Adoption

    As cloud adoption increases, the need to deploy updates and changes remotely is essential. Cloud computing provides the necessary environment to implement the NetDevOps approach, which installing a hardware infrastructure allows for code deployment.

    In a cloud environment, such as AWS, infrastructure needed to implement this approach is available already. For example, AWS CloudFormation provides the necessary infrastructure for IaC.

    Infrastructure as Code

    IaC has been fundamental to the DevOps movement, and this is the foundation for NetDevOps: The ability to take network hardware and apply a set of code to the environment. The code allows you to automate an environment, which typically has needed to be updated manually.

    Automation is one of the core principles DevOps and NetDevOps share. Automation results in predictable network uptime, which provides an environment to better assist DevOps in achieving continuous delivery.

    Software-Defined Networks

    Software-defined networks (SDN) are a subset of the IaC discussion. It is the enterprise network version of cloud architecture. NetDevOps works in this environment through the use of white-box switches.

    Implementing white-box switches and installing Linux will create an SDN environment, which is conducive to NetDevOps. It is the necessary infrastructure for NetDevOps.

    Current Stack is Providing the Tools

    Once the above is implemented, a NetDevOps environment is ready to integrate with your current Ops stack. Ansible, Red Hat, Puppet and Chef already are providing the tools necessary to create a NetDevOps environment. Now you and your team need to implement it.

    NetDevOps is taking the traditional manual nature of networking and applying a set of DevOps principles. It is an environment of automation that brings networking full circle with DevOps.

  • Red Hat Launches Ansible-Native Container Workflow Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Supporting Quote

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

    Additional Resources

    Connect with Red Hat

    About Red Hat, Inc.

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

    Forward-Looking Statements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    CONTACT INFORMATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Customer and Partner Quotes

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

    <INTC QUOTE IN APPROVAL>

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

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

    Media Resources

    About AppFormix

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

    ###

    Media Contact:

    Robert Cathey

    Cathey Communications for AppFormix

    robert@cathey.co

    +1 865 386-6118

    @robertcathey

  • Q&A: CNCF on Instilling a DevOps Culture, Part 2

    Q&A: CNCF on Instilling a DevOps Culture, Part 2

    In part one of this two-part series, devopsy.kinsta.cloud introduced the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a nonprofit organization with 49 members engaged in promoting the development of cloud native applications. Let’s continue with the CNCF’s thoughts on instilling a DevOps culture.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: Why do developers need the freedom to choose how they build software? What kinds and levels of freedom? Is this about approaches, development tools or something else?

    Brian Grant: All of the above: approaches, tools, languages … Different solutions work better for different workloads, scenarios, environments and people. Even new applications developed from scratch to be cloud-native aren’t typically developed in a vacuum—their developers may be familiar with particular languages or tools, the new application may need to interact with legacy applications; it may need to be built with and/or deployed onto existing infrastructure, etc. Often developers need to be able to adopt new technologies or approaches incrementally.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How do you recommend providing this freedom to developers? How do you help provide it?

    Grant: Containers provide an ideal mechanism for providing this freedom, since they can be used to deploy both new and legacy applications, written in any language, built by any tool, into any environment. It’s a goal of the CNCF to foster an ecosystem of composable technologies, such as Kubernetes that facilitate the management of container-packaged applications.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?

    Grant: Because containers are small and fast, one application can be packed in each container image. Consequently, immutable container images can be created at build/release time rather than deployment time, since each application doesn’t need to be composed with the rest of the application stack nor integrated into the production infrastructure environment. This empowers developers to deliver deployable artifacts to operations.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How is code reuse a need of the developer?

    Craig McLuckie: The vast majority of the actual code that is run in any given deployment is written by others. Only a tiny fraction of code in any given instance is actually written by the developer. The rest is everything from common libraries, to full OSS subsystems, to commercial software that systems, to adjacent software projects that provide some business functions. Developers need a common way to integrate with existing systems (when it makes sense) or to find and reuse existing code in a way that is controlled and operations-friendly.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How do you recommend giving developers the ability to reuse code? How does your organization help with this?

    McLuckie: CNCF stands behind two technologies that are critical to code reuse. The first is the use of containers, which represent an intrinsically easy and predictable way to reuse even a relatively complex piece of software. The second is microservices-based architecture that make it easy to wire together systems and reuse existing services versus having to build their own.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?

    McLuckie: Containers make operations far more predictable and reduce possible avenues of error when deploying and updating systems. Rather than run potentially error prone imperative configuration systems to reuse code, containers are simple, lightweight and predictable, and reduce the potential for errors.

    Microservices allow for better operations specialization and create systems that are more intrinsically agile and easy to evolve. They allow for smaller teams that are focused on delivering a specific function versus having to align around large system boundaries. This creates a more productive and operationally viable environment.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: What is cloud-native? What does that mean?

    McLuckie: For CNCF, ‘cloud native’ is about a new pattern of application development that was pioneered by the internet companies, but that is equally applicable to developers and operators running more traditional workloads.

    We see three common attributes that make systems ‘cloud-native’:

    Container-packaged: Applications and processes are run in software containers as a unit of application deployment, which facilitates reproducibility, transparency and resource isolation. This improves overall developer experience, fosters code and component reuse, and simplifies operations.

    Dynamically managed: Applications are actively scheduled and managed. This radically improves machine efficiency and resource utilization while reducing the costs associated with maintenance and operations.

    Microservices-oriented: Applications are loosely coupled, with dependencies explicitly specified. This significantly increases the overall agility and maintainability of applications.

    Together, these three capabilities allow developers to build systems that are intrinsically agile and scale well. They significantly reduce the operational complexity of running an application, allowing operators to be more focused on application-level concerns and relying heavily on smart systems to do the operations heavy lifting.

  • DevOps Matchmaking: APM + CI = A Perfect Marriage

    DevOps Matchmaking: APM + CI = A Perfect Marriage

    As anyone who has ever been set up on blind dates by friends can attest, finding the right match in today’s world is a tricky feat.

    There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that the frantic pace of life makes such matchmaking more difficult than ever. That said, when the right set of complimentary traits exist and there’s a willingness to find common ground, things can work out.

    Spike Jonzian-notions of artificial intelligence aside, certain technological partnerships are increasingly being perceived as “a perfect marriage” within the context of DevOps automation.

    Register today for the upcoming webcast: “Using APM to Turbocharge Continuous Integration”

    These technological matrimonies closely support the underlying tenets of DevOps methodology—collaboration, experimentation and increased velocity. In fact, it’s easy to wonder why no one ever conjoined them before. But we were using traditional waterfall development and operations and so couldn’t conceive of such a thing. On the other hand, emerging availability of tooling supporting new integrated workflows represents a significant catalyst.

    Finding the Perfect Fit

    One such DevOps confederation getting a lot of attention is the matchmaking of continuous integration (CI) and application performance management (APM) technologies. Tying together these once-disparate systems makes a lot of sense, despite the fact that few tools would seemingly appeal to more (traditionally) polarized constituencies.

    Continuous integration has been a staple of the development community for many years. It emerged as teams evolved the practice of long build times into more frequent check-ins to deliver code and look for potential errors more quickly. Today, with the rise of CI tools such as the Cloudbees Jenkins platform, some development teams are touting tens of thousands of builds per day.

    On the other end of the spectrum, squarely on the turf of IT operations, APM has been evolving rapidly over the past few years as organizations have sought to improve use experience and applications reliability via dedicated monitoring. Enabling this ability to identify and address emerging issues has resulted in APM becoming the fastest-growing segment in the IT ops management market, according to Gartner.

    DevOps matchmaking factors in when you bring these tools together to create an automated workflow that spans their respective use cases. A cross-functional team can leverage APM-level monitoring and KPIs within the domain of CI and testing to identify potential performance obstacles introduced in new code. Doing so then rather than waiting to respond later in the applications life cycle benefits everyone.

    Reaping the Benefits

    For example, say an e-commerce applications developer has implemented a new inventory search functionality—something considered a key differentiator by business management. The developer knows this feature could rely heavily on some back-end database system and wants to ensure it’s tested properly, even as the code is being introduced.

    Integrating APM and CI allows the entire team to monitor the process and test various conditions related to the update, tracking multiple builds and looking out for related performance issues. Such integration also allows for centralized tracking of other key attributes such as build number, status and build date, to further ease management.

    Most importantly, by tying these two critical aspects of the applications delivery life cycle together, the collaboration and feedback loops required to truly embrace DevOps methodology become ever more valuable as these core Dev and Ops functions become intrinsically linked.

    If this type of DevOps advancement gets your heart pumping, you’re not alone. Later this month, we’ll host a webcast here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud featuring experts from CA Technologies and Cloudbees. They’ll be discussing the benefits of matchmaking with APM + CI integration. They’ll also detail real-world benefits organizations leveraging integration of our respective technologies (CA APM and Cloudbees Jenkins) enjoy.

    We obviously feel that this is a DevOps tooling marriage that will mature, change and stand the test of time. We’d love to garner your questions and feedback on the topic.

    Which is all good, because thankfully there’s no such thing as Tinder for DevOps … yet.

  • Continuous Delivery Dependent on Who, What, Where

    Continuous Delivery Dependent on Who, What, Where

    Without the right people, positions and talents, it is difficult for a business to engender a DevOps culture. It is even more frustrating to facilitate a continuous delivery pipeline successfully producing quick bursts of innovative genius, without a full complement of qualified souls harmonizing on the same DevOps theme song as they toil away on the company’s next release.

    Some enterprises have a handle on the go-to people or hired guns they need to help spread a DevOps mindset—and exactly where to plug them into the organizational hierarchy. Other organizations have progressed to cloning these folks across Dev, Ops and the rest of the business. Some of those have laid some pipe as they extend a conduit from build to production. Those that are, by now, the “old guard” of DevOps have well-run pipelines brimming with fresh, robust software goodness.

    No one company has a “secret sauce” that works across all industries and organizations. How your company should connect the dots depends on who you ask. This time devopsy.kinsta.cloud has asked Renato Quedas, vice president of Solutions and Enablement at Micro Focus.

    Wrong People, Wrong Result

    The right people will produce significant changes to code, creating new value that is worthy of promotion to production. The right people will ensure that the release is ready, reliable and fit to go live anytime the business wants to give its blessing.

    “If a continuous feedback loop doesn’t exist between everyone involved in defining, building, testing, releasing and operating an application, the right people will not understand or feel enabled to pull the trigger in a release. Essentially that ‘any time’ will turn into ‘sometimes,’” says Quedas.

    The company must maintain business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) while accelerating continuous delivery; if continuous delivery moves too fast, it will push BC/DR off the rails and into disaster. Testing is an important ingredient in ensuring BC/DR remains once the software reaches the end of the development pipeline. “Customers will not care if applications are delivered faster if they don’t perform or function properly on their platform and devices of choice. Not having the right people involved will turn continuous delivery into an unreliable minefield and create an uncertain application delivery pipeline, which businesses will never accept as part of any improvement initiative,” he says.

    The Right Stuff

    According to Quedas, the following positions or profiles are examples of people who would have the communications skills, ruthless negotiation tactics, sound decision-making processes and customer-first mentality—with little tolerance for poor quality—that are necessary to make a DevOps culture and continuous delivery work:

    • Product Managers who own responsibility for product quality can keep software product focus and development on track. They can communicate the business needs for the software, the capabilities it must have, and mediate the sometimes chaotic process that comes with continuous delivery. “Product Managers are used to prioritizing the work based on market trends, competitive landscape, customer requests and other internal/external pressures. Product Managers are accustomed to making decisions based on trade-offs, which helps CD focus in delivering the right outcomes to the business faster,” says Quedas.
    • QA Managers who readily communicate to test, development and operations teams as well as nontechnical folks about what is necessary to maintain software reliability. They also can bring development to a halt and send innovations back to the drawing board when validity and reliability are at risk.

    Creating the DevOps Culture

    A thriving DevOps culture will build a software delivery pipeline that can duplicate quality results—as any truly repeatable business endeavor should be able to do. To bring this culture to life, the company must demolish team and departmental silos to get everyone on the same page regarding what the organization must do and when it should do it. “Companies will need to streamline production via automation in order to make decisions faster,” says Quedas.

    A working, vibrant DevOps culture should give everyone a voice and ownership of a certain amount of control of their part of the process. “There is always pressure on information technology but there needs to be an understanding that it should be acceptable to put pressure back on the business,” says Quedas. “The business expectations need to be realistic or it won’t work. All sides need to be responsive.”

    A healthy DevOps culture and mindset includes a shared understanding that scope with value must be achievable in a reasonable amount of time. “The faster you demonstrate value, the easier it becomes to earn the right to continue in the journey and on to the next phase of development,” he says.

    Right People + Right Careers + Right Culture = Continuous Delivery

    Having the right people in positions such as the aforementioned product manager and QA Manager gives an organization the ability to hone its continuous delivery pipeline. The right culture ensures that everyone will follow these and other leaders and stakeholders so that each new innovation comes as quickly and smoothly as it can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    About Threat Stack

    Threat Stack enables growth-driven companies to scale with confidence by identifying and verifying insider threats, external attacks and data loss in real-time. The only fully integrated, cloud-native continuous monitoring solution that gives customers instant visibility and automatically responds to changes in their environment, Threat Stack provides the coverage needed to run secure and compliant, in all environments, without sacrificing speed and efficiency. For more information, or to start a free trial, visit threatstack.com.

     

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

    The New Integration Enables Customers to Rightsize Complex Cloud Environments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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