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Tag: kubernetes

  • Bitnami Offers Popular Application with Managed Database Configuration in Azure Marketplace

    Multi-tier Packages of WordPress and Drupal with Azure Database Services Remove Complexity of Deploying Enterprise Configurations

    SAN FRANCISCO, CA – January 15, 2018 —Bitnami, the leading provider of application packaging, is excited to announce the availability of WordPress and Drupal pre-configured with support for Azure Database for MariaDB in the Azure Marketplace. Bitnami has collaborated with the Azure Database Services team to deliver packages that make it much easier for companies to deploy enterprise configurations of these popular and widely used applications to Microsoft Azure.

    Deploying one of these new ‘Bitnami Certified’ application packages enables companies to realize the benefits of stability, security, and simplicity, while harnessing the power of a fully managed Azure database. The result is the ability to scale quickly and reach global distribution without worrying about costly downtime.

    “The new Bitnami packages significantly improves enterprise productivity by reducing the effort involved in packaging and deploying complex multi-tier architectures, while offering guaranteed high-availability, security, and dynamic scale with Azure OSS Database services” said Sudhakar Sannakkayala, General Manager, Azure Data engineering. “Our customers can now simply scroll through the Azure Marketplace, select an offering, and click ‘launch’ to deploy one of these applications.”

    “Bitnami has worked with the Azure Database team to create packages that deliver the reliability, security and ease of use of Bitnami Certified applications and the flexibility and power of Azure,” said Bitnami Vice President of Business Development and Sales Pete Catalanello. “Because Bitnami optimizes packaging for Azure, it is easy to utilize platform services such as databases, auto-scaling, and load-balancing. The combination of Bitnami and Azure delivers what customers say they care about most.”

    A long-term Microsoft partner, Bitnami provides a wide range of pre-packaged, easy to deploy open-source applications and development stacks to the Azure Marketplace. It supports Microsoft enterprise customers in multi-tier environments in numerous ways, and actively works with the Azure Database team to provide enterprise solutions and promote best practices. Other multi-tier Bitnami solutions for Azure include:

    • Stacksmith, which enables enterprises to package their own multi-tier applications for Azure and AKS. Users can define best practices once and enforce them when packaging and updating. This includes configuration requirements for the use of Azure Databases for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.
    • Kubeapps, an open-source web-based interface for discovering and provisioning applications on a Kubernetes cluster. Microsoft has partnered with Bitnami to integrate Kubeapps with Open Service Broker for Azure. With Kubeapps, users can create and present Helm charts that leverage Azure-native PaaS services as part of the architecture.

    With this combination, a user could deploy an application tier on AKS and an Azure Database backend to achieve a highly-scalable application with a highly available database. They could then use Stacksmith to maintain and update these applications with their PaaS service integrations going forward.

    Bitnami continues to expand the scope and number of enterprise solutions to make it ever easier for users to set up and deploy complex environments that leverage first party Azure services. For a closer look at these multi-tier enterprise solutions, register for the Create an Application-Centric DevOps Experience with Stacksmith and Azure OSS Database Services webinar. To access the new WordPress or Drupal packages, visit the Azure Marketplace.

    About Bitnami

    Bitnami provides packaged applications for any platform. The Bitnami application automation platform delivers and maintains a catalog of 130+ ready-to-run server applications and development environments in partnership with the world’s leading cloud providers including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle, driving over 1.3 million deployments per month. Bitnami is helping to shape the future of software deployment via its leadership role in the evolution of the Kubernetes ecosystem, including being the authors and maintainers of Kubeless and Kubeapps projects and major contributors to helm. Based in San Francisco and with offices around the world, Bitnami is a privately held, rapidly growing company. For more information, visit https://www.bitnami.com, or follow us on Twitter (@Bitnami) and Facebook.

    Kris Kraves

    Cogenta Communications, Inc.

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    @kriskraves

  • Instana Extends Leading Kubernetes Monitoring Solution to Better Serve Developer Community

    Company’s Latest Release Provides Quickest and Easiest Developer Visibility of Kubernetes Application and System Performance

    Seattle at KubeCon – December 11, 2018 – Instana, the first APM solution provider to monitor kubernetes at the application layer, today announced further enhancements to the company’s automatic application monitoring solution for containerized applications. The new capabilities center around Instana’s Application Perspectives, a unique way to group and analyze all performance metrics and traces from specific application components.

    “While Kubernetes-based orchestration allows DevOps to keep applications operating properly most of the time, it’s quite challenging to understand what is happening,” said Pete Abrams, Instana co-founder and COO. “To help developers quickly and easily understand how their application code is behaving within a Kubernetes environment, Instana has connected Kubernetes and Kubernetes Service monitoring directly to application performance metrics and traces. This happens completely automatically.”

    Instana continues to make headlines at KubeCon conferences. Last December, in conjunction with KubeCon in Austin, Instana announced the expansion of their automatic application monitoring solution to include any applications running in Kubernetes or on Kubernetes services such as Oracle OKE and Google GKE. In May, at KubeCon in Copenhagen, the company announced the ability to correlate application performance metrics and traces with Kubernetes system metrics – becoming the first solution to monitoring Kubernetes, itself, from an application perspective.

    Instana’s Application Perspectives changes the way in which IT organizations, especially development teams, use APM solutions for monitoring and troubleshooting their distributed microservice applications. Using operational tags or allowing real-time ad hoc definitions, Instana’s Application Perspectives gather all the metrics and traces that are related to specific applications, filtering out the noise from other distributed systems.

    “DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers are important, but they aren’t the only application performance stakeholders,” Abrams continued. “Developers are also involved in performance tuning and troubleshooting containerized microservice applications. That’s why Instana has created an entire User Experience specifically for the developer community.”

    Instana’s automatic APM solution for dynamic applications is unique in its ability to automate every step of the application monitoring lifecycle, from monitoring deployment to application discovery and monitoring. The company continues to shake up the monitoring industry by automatically consuming any source of performance and tracing information, including popular open source solutions like Jaeger and Zipkin. Like other Instana APM capabilities, the new Kubernetes monitoring occurs automatically, making it the quickest and easiest way to monitor Kubernetes applications and assure their performance.

  • Build Global Applications in Minutes & Lower Storage Costs Up To 70% with Alfresco Digital Business Platform

    Alfresco Software first vendor in content services market with support for Amazon EKS and Amazon Glacier; delivering capabilities that lower storage costs while increasing speed and scalability

    SAN MATEO, Calif.—November 15, 2018 — Alfresco Software, a leading enterprise open source provider of process automation, content management, and information governance software, today announced major product updates to their Digital Business Platform including support for Amazon EKS and Amazon Glacier.  Alfresco’s support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) empowers solution architects to build modern, cloud ready applications in record time.  Alfresco makes it easy to move fast, deploy efficiently, and operate securely at an unprecedented scale and to “go global” in just minutes with new enhanced capabilities:

    • Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) Support – With Alfresco’s support for Amazon EKS, customers can easily deploy, scale and manage large Alfresco production implementations – going global in minutes while eliminating single points of failure.  The ability to do product upgrades and patches is simpler and faster.
    • Amazon Glacier Support – Integration with Amazon’s long-term, durable and secure storage solution makes a range of use cases dramatically less expensive to support.  For example, Alfresco customers wanting to intelligently optimize the storage costs associated with regulatory compliance and legal discovery can now do so at a significant cost savings over on-premise storage.
    • The New Alfresco Digital Workspace – Architecture matters, but user experience is paramount.  This simple new “out of the box” interface is backed by the power of the Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF) and designed to accelerate end-user adoption of Alfresco solutions. Providing for the most commonly used functions, it can be easily extended with a vast library of pre-built modular UX components and robust open APIs, allowing Alfresco developers and partners to rapidly create the custom, fit-for-purpose applications their users need.

    Its real: Reduce product onboarding time from three days to five seconds

    Pitney Bowes leveraged a combination of technologies including Alfresco and AWS in the development of their Commerce Cloud platform.  Alfresco running on AWS significantly accelerated client onboarding by coordinating a provisioning flow that launches credit checks, sets up a payment account, generates a payment token, and then puts the token in all the right places in all the right systems. The company slashed the onboarding time for a postage payment product offered by Pitney Bowes Global Financial Services from three days to five seconds. New clients can start running mail almost immediately after signing up for an account.

    See Alfresco at re:Invent 2018

    Alfresco will be exhibiting their Digital Business Platform solutions at AWS re:Invent 2018 in The Quad at the Aria Hotel, November 26-30, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  The company invites attendees to stop by their booth (#330) to learn more about how their Digital Business Platform helps make business flow for organizations of all sizes.  One-on-one meetings and product demonstrations are being scheduled upon request. To reserve a meeting time, please go to https://www.alfresco.com/events-and-webinars.

    About Alfresco Software, Inc.

    Alfresco Software, Inc. (“Alfresco”) is an enterprise open source software company focused on advancing the flow of digital business. The company provides a better, more effortless way for people to work, making sure they have the information they need, exactly when they need it most. The Alfresco Digital Business Platform is used to digitize processes, manage content and securely govern information. Alfresco helps over 1,300 industry-leading organizations, including Cisco, Bank of NY Mellon, Capital One, US Department of Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NASA, be more responsive and competitive. Founded in 2005, Alfresco has its U.S. headquarters in San Mateo, California, and European headquarters in Maidenhead, UK. For more information on Alfresco, please visit http://www.alfresco.com.

     

  • LF Deep Learning Delivers First Acumos AI Release Making it Easier to Deploy and Share Artificial Intelligence Models

    First Acumos AI release enables deployment of AI applications in private/public cloud environments, and enhances the platform user interface experience

    SHANGHAI (KUBECON + CLOUDNATIVECON CHINA) – November 14, 2018 – The LF Deep Learning Foundation, a project of The Linux Foundation that supports open source innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL), today announced the availability of its first software release of the Acumos AI Project – Athena.

    Acumos AI is a platform and open source framework that makes it easy to build, share and deploy AI applications. Acumos AI standardizes the infrastructure stack and components required to run an out-of-the-box general AI environment. This frees data scientists and model trainers to focus on their core competencies and accelerate innovation.

    “The Acumos Athena release represents a significant step forward in making AI models more accessible for builders of AI applications and models along with users and trainers of those models and applications,” said Scott Nicholas, senior director of strategic planning at The Linux Foundation. “This furthers the goal of LF Deep Learning and the Acumos project of accelerating overall AI innovation.”

    Major highlights of the Athena release include:

    • One-click deployment of the platform utilizing Docker or Kubernetes;
    • The ability to deploy models into a public or private cloud infrastructure or in a Kubernetes environment on users’ own hardware including servers and virtual machines;
    • A design studio, which is a graphical interface for chaining together multiple models, data translation tools, filters and output adapters into a full end-to-end solution;
    • Use of a security token to allow simple onboarding of models from an external toolkit directly to an Acumos AI repository;
    • Decoupling of microservices generation from the model onboarding process to easily repurpose models for different environments and hardware; and
    • An advanced user portal with the ability to personalize marketplace view by theme, data on model authorship as well as to share models privately or publicly and user experience upgrades.

    All of these features are designed to make it quick and easy to get started deploying and sharing Acumos AI applications.

    Full release notes can be accessed at https://wiki.acumos.org/display/REL/Athena+Release.

    “LF Deep Learning members, including Amdocs, AT&T, Orange, Tech Mahindra and others, are contributing to the evolution of the platform to ease the onboarding and the deployment of AI models,” said LF Deep Learning Outreach Committee Chair Jamil Chawki. “The Acumos AI Marketplace, a catalog of community-contributed AI models with common APIs that can be shared securely across multiple systems, remains open and accessible to anyone who wishes to download or contribute models and applications.”

    “The LF Deep Learning Foundation is focused on building an ecosystem of AI, deep learning and machine learning projects, and today’s announcement represents a significant milestone toward achieving this vision,” said LF Deep Learning Technical Advisory Council Chair Ofer Hermoni of Amdocs.

    “We’re already inspired and energized by the progress of the Acumos AI Project since its initial launch earlier this year,” said Mazin Gilbert, Vice President of Advanced Technology and Systems at AT&T and Governing Board Chair of LF Deep Learning. “Athena is the next step in harmonizing the AI community, furthering adoption and accelerating innovation.”

    What’s Next for Acumos AI

    The developer community for Acumos AI is already working on the next release, which will be available in mid-2019, introducing convenient model training as well as data extraction pipelines to make models more flexible. Additionally, the next release will include updates to assist closed-source model developers, including secure and reliable licensing components to provide execution control and performance feedback across the community.

    Organizations interested in contributing projects and more information about LF Deep Learning Foundation, can go to www.deeplearningfoundation.org.

    Supporting Quotes

    “Amdocs is proud to be an active member of The Linux Foundation, and in particular, a Founding Member of the Acumos AI project. The Acumos AI Athena release is a big milestone for open source AI and its role in driving intelligence, automation and machine learning in the communication and media industries.  Acumos AI is positioned to become the de-facto marketplace for machine learning models, both for open source as well as peer to peer (company to company) models, delivering faster time to innovation.” – Anthony Goonetilleke, Group President of Amdocs Technology

    “As one of the founding members of LF Deep Learning Foundation, Huawei is excited to see this growing AI developer ecosystem continue to help the Acumos AI platform mature, and reach the first major technical milestone – the Acumos Athena release! The Acumos project offers significant value to Huawei SoftCOM AI strategy – building autonomous networks with the goal of automation, self-optimization, and self-healing to help operators significantly improve network utilization and maintenance efficiency. Huawei is proud to be part of this project and will continue to work with the Acumos developer community to further enhance the Acumos AI platform and unleash the power that AI can bring to our operators.” – Xiaoli Jiang, GM, Cloud Open Source Development Team, Huawei

    “Orange has been actively involved in Acumos since April 2018 through a Project Team Leader for the model onboarding module to manage and drive evolutions in the onboarding capabilities. This involvement shows the willingness of Orange to take part and promote the AI ecosystem in the telecom domain. Orange also considered the coherency of integrating Acumos in the continuity of all the works performed in the network automation LFN/ONAP project. Acumos is seen as a common platform that can bridge existing AI technologies and new ones through its openness. It can also favor cross business AI-based developments through its federative approach and thanks to its marketplace.” – François Jezequel, Head of ITsation, Procurement and Operators, Orange

    “As a key contributor to the Acumos Athena release we are excited to foster a collaborative ecosystem through the Acumos AI Marketplace. It is also a testimony to our COPA framework (Co-Create using Open Source to create Platforms and bring in Automation and AI). With companies and customers increasingly adopting Acumos, industrialization of AI through a common standard and marketplace like Acumos is bound to gain more traction.” – Dr. Satish Pai Sr. Vice President, Americas Communications, Media and Entertainment, Tech Mahindra

    About LF Deep Learning

    The LF Deep Learning Foundation, a Linux Foundation project, accelerates and sustains the growth of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning open source projects. Backed by many of the world’s largest technology leaders, LF Deep Learning is a neutral space for harmonization and ecosystem engagement to advance AI, DL and ML innovation. To get involved with the LF Deep Learning Foundation, please visit https://www.deeplearningfoundation.org.

    About The Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

  • Semaphore 2.0 Brings Continuous Delivery to Teams of All Sizes

    Semaphore 2.0 Brings Continuous Delivery to Teams of All Sizes

    Since its inception in 2012, Semaphore has been focused on making code testing and deployment a quick and easy process. The cloud-based CI/CD platform from Rendered Text enables users to get up and running within a matter of minutes—which the company claims is at least twice as fast as other offerings.

    The company is releasing Semaphore 2.0 Nov. 6, which will expand the platform to enable continuous delivery, for a product that allows teams of any size to automate any continuous integration or continuous delivery workflow with custom pipelines so users can model their CI/CD however they prefer. The latest version also better supports CI/CD for containers, giving users the ability to use Docker or Kubernetes tools in building within container environments. Other features of Semaphore 2.0 include support for YAML files and command line interfaces, so teams can manage a large number projects more easily.

    Marko Anastasov, founding partner at Rendered Text, spoke with me about the latest version of Semaphore and his thoughts on the continuous integration and continuous delivery space at large. Read on for his insights:

    Can we start with some background about Semaphore? What was the catalyst for creating it?

    Our company was an early adopter of agile software development practices, including test-driven development and continuous deployment. We relied on cloud-based products like GitHub, which were simple to use and made software development easier.

    However, when it came to implementing continuous integration, we were out of luck. I remember spending days setting up Jenkins for just one of our projects. We saw how expensive and time-consuming it would be to make it fast and scalable. It felt as if by continuously verifying our code, we were doing something wrong. Developers need to set up a fast and functional CI process in minutes, and not worry about how it works.

    What’s new in Version 2.0 that’s worth mentioning?

    Semaphore 2.0 is made to enable continuous delivery in organizations of any size. Previously, like other hosted CI/CD services, Semaphore focused on solving the integration process: building code and running tests. Delivery features were limited and tailored for classic web development.

    This time we asked ourselves, What would a continuous delivery product focused on speed and simplicity look like in the age of cloud-native computing? I’d highlight three things that stood out.

    First, for DevOps transformation to succeed, we need to automate, visualize and accelerate all software development processes in our organizations. So at the heart of Semaphore 2.0 are infinitely customizable code pipelines, configured as code, run as a service.

    Second, infrastructure should be ephemeral and scale in real time. When CI/CD capacity is limited, developers are blocked in busy times of the day. Semaphore adopts the “pay only what you use” cloud model, in which CI/CD resources scale automatically to support the team’s actual needs.

    And third, we can’t manage what we don’t measure. It doesn’t make sense to prescribe the same metrics for every project and organization. So Semaphore lets users choose their own metrics and define their own dashboards.

    What feature or features do you believe will have the most impact with users?

    In building Semaphore 2.0 we were very careful not to add any unnecessary features. All parts are designed to support each other and provide a harmonious user experience.

    For example, Kubernetes wasn’t the first solution to run software in the cloud, but it made vendor-neutral cloud computing as easy as describing what you need to run. Similarly, developers can now describe any CI/CD process they need, and Semaphore will run it immediately at any scale.

    In day-to-day use, I expect users to like how much control they have via command line and autoscaling resources. It’s the overall boost in productivity that will make the most impact.

    How important is Semaphore’s increased support for container environments?

    Containers are the biggest change in the development stack in recent history. In the transition to container-based software delivery, many teams needed to maintain their own CI/CD infrastructure, since none of the existing solutions were flexible or easy enough to use. This takes valuable time away from delivering value to customers. Semaphore 2.0 is built to support the next-generation of cloud architectures based on containers.

    What are some of your thoughts on the current state of the CI/CD market, and where do you see it heading?

    For the continuous integration part of the equation, there are many options to choose from. There’s a wide spectrum from managed to DIY solutions, and from specialized vendors to those who provide basic tools for every aspect of software development. I think the shift that’s going to happen is from basic automation to optimization. For example, Semaphore provides bare-metal performance at convenience of cloud. When a customer tells us that they’ve combined that with our test optimization features to reduce build time from hours to minutes, that makes us so happy because we know what tremendous difference that makes in their workplace.

    On the continuous delivery front, I think there’s less maturity and that the market is still developing. So far, developers have needed to build their own solutions based on complex open source tools and self-managed infrastructure. Cloud vendors have entered the space, not with complete products but low-level tools that leave a lot of complexity for the end user to manage. The next phase will be about making the entire CI/CD process easier and more accessible. At Semaphore, we’re committed to making that happen.

    — Charlene O’Hanlon

  • Canonical announces release of Ubuntu 18.10 ‘Cosmic Cuttlefish’

    Ubuntu 18.10: Multi-cloud, new desktop theme and enhanced desktop snap integration

    London, UK, 18th October 2018; Canonical today announced the release of Ubuntu 18.10, focused on multi-cloud deployments, AI software development, a new community desktop theme and richer snap desktop integration.

    “Ubuntu is now the world’s reference platform for AI engineering and analytics” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “We accelerate developer productivity and help enterprises operate at speed and at scale, across multiple clouds and diverse edge appliances.”

    This year, the financial services industry has engaged significantly with Canonical and Ubuntu for infrastructure efficiency on premise and to accelerate their move to the cloud. The push for machine learning analytics and of fintech efforts around blockchain, distributed ledger applications and cryptocurrencies are current drivers of Ubuntu investments and deployments.

    Optimised for multi-cloud computing

    Ubuntu Server 18.10 images are available on all major public clouds, including minimal images popular for container workloads with a small footprint and fast boot time. For private clouds, Ubuntu 18.10 ships with OpenStack Rocky for AI and NFV hardware acceleration and Ceph Mimic to reduce storage overhead. Ubuntu Server 18.10 includes the latest Kubernetes version 1.12 which brings increased security and scalability by automating the provisioning of clusters with transport layer encryption and is more responsive to dynamic workloads through faster scaling.

    Snap momentum strengthens 

    Ubuntu’s secure Linux app store sports 4,100 snaps published by 1,700 developers and supported across 41 Linux distributions. Official desktop snaps from Spotify, Plex and Skype are popular, and major public cloud and server applications are now available including Google Cloud SDK, AWS CLI, and Azure CLI. The new release enables native desktop controls to access files on the host system.

    Improved gaming performance 

    The Linux 4.18 kernel together with updates in Mesa and X.org significantly improve game performance. Graphics support expands to AMD VegaM in the latest Intel Kabylake-G CPUs, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, B+ and Qualcomm Snapdragon 845.

    Ubuntu 18.10 introduces the GNOME 3.30 desktop and Yaru, the new community-developed default theme. Fingerprint unlock functionality is featured for compatible PCs and the latest versions of Firefox, LibreOffice, and Chromium are included.

    About Canonical

    Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the leading OS for cloud operations. Most public cloud workloads use Ubuntu, as do most new smart gateways, switches, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise support and services for commercial users of Ubuntu. Established in 2004, Canonical is a privately held company.

  • Fission Open Source Serverless Framework Offers Live-Reload, Canary Deployments, Record-Replay, More Features to Improve the Quality and Simplify Release Automation of Serverless Applications on Kubernetes

    Live-reload, Record-replay, Automated Canary Deployments, Prometheus integration, and more give both Dev and Ops confidence in the production-readiness of serverless applications, as well as easy troubleshooting, and cost/performance optimization

    Sunnyvale, CA – October 16, 2018 – Platform9 (https://platform9.com/), the leader in SaaS-managed hybrid cloud, today announced a new release of Fission.io – the popular open source, Kubernetes-native Serverless framework – with new features enabling developers and IT Operations to improve the quality and reliability of serverless applications.

    Fission is the industry’s first serverless solution to offer built-in Live-reload and Record-replay capabilities to simplify testing and accelerate feedback loops. Other new features include Automated Canary Deployments to reduce the risk of failed releases, Prometheus integration for automated monitoring and alerts, and fine-grained cost and performance optimization capabilities. With this latest release, Fission offers the most complete set of features to allow Dev and Ops teams to safely adopt Serverless and benefit from the speed, cost savings and scalability of this cloud native development pattern on any environment – either in the public cloud or on-premises.

    Learn more about Fission, the open source, Kubernetes-native Serverless Framework at: (https://fission.io/).  

    “Fission was created to provide a simpler, easier way for developers to accelerate time to value with Kubernetes. Our goal is to help developers produce quality serverless code, and provide Ops teams with the utmost confidence to run serverless applications in production,” said Soam Vasani, Creator of Fission at Platform9. “Serverless allows developers to move faster and be more productive. The latest release of Fission focuses on accelerating feedback loops and lowering deployment risk, to ensure that teams can not only move fast, but also safely, and at scale.”

    The latest feature set of Fission includes:

    Live-reload: Test as you type

    With Live-reload, Fission automatically deploys the code as it is written into a live Kubernetes test cluster, and allows developers to toggle between their development environment and the runtime of the function, to rapidly iterate through their coding and testing cycles.

    This allows bugs to be found and fixed earlier in the application development lifecycle, when it is cheaper to do so – before they are discovered in the higher environments or cause any service disruption in Production. Further, it simplifies and increases the fidelity of integration tests, by running them earlier in the process using a live environment that’s consistent with the configuration and related services (i.e. database, API calls, etc.) that are used in Production.

    Record-replay: Simplify testing and debugging

    Fission is the first serverless solution that offers out-of-the-box Record-replay functionality for easy testing and troubleshooting. Record-replay automatically saves events that trigger serverless functions and allows for the replaying of these events on demand with detailed information on how the application is used, the inputs and the outputs of the functions. Fission users can configure which functions and workflows to record and for how long to retain the recorded events.

    Record-replay is used by developers to reproduce complex failures during testing or debugging, simplify regression testing, and troubleshoot issues (i.e. inspecting an execution of a function based on past input). In addition, Operations teams often enable recording on a subset of live production traffic to help engineers reproduce issues or verify application updates.

    Automated Canary Deployments: Reduce the risk of failed releases

    Canary deployments are a proven deployment strategy to minimize the risk of failed application releases and avoid service interruptions to end users. In this strategy, the new version of the application is first deployed only to a small percentage of the live traffic, and then gets incrementally rolled out to Production once it has been established that the version is stable. In the case of Production failures, the application can be rolled back to the previous, stable version.

    Fission is the first open source serverless framework to provide fully automated Canary Deployments that are easy to configure. This saves DevOps teams and Site Reliability Engineers the need to manage Canaries manually or invest in cumbersome scripting and testing to execute this advanced deployment strategy – making it intuitive, simple to use, and error-free. Ultimately this minimizes downtime risk for applications.

    With Automated Canary Deployments, Fission automatically increments traffic proportions to the newer version of the function as long as it succeeds, and rolls back to the old version if the new version fails.  Users can configure the percentage of traffic that will receive the new version of the function, the error rate that will constitute as failure, and the release rate at which to roll out the new version.

    Prometheus Integration: Easy metrics collection and alerts

    Out of the box integration with Prometheus enables automatic aggregation of function metrics, including the number of functions called, function execution time, success, failures, and more. Users can also define custom alerts for key events, such as for when a function fails or takes too long to execute. Prometheus metrics can also feed monitoring dashboards to visualize application metrics.

    Cost Optimizations in Fission

    Since Fission is open source and works on any Kubernetes cluster, it enables enterprises to easily run a Lambda-like Serverless service on any infrastructure – using either the cheaper instances on public clouds, or leveraging their own data centers. To allow IT to maximize infrastructure utilization on both public cloud and on-premises resources, Fission offers fine-grained cost and performance optimization controls.

    Serverless functions can be configured with specific CPU and Memory resource usage limits, minimum/maximum number of instances and auto-scaling parameters. These parameters allow for functions to be tuned with an execution strategy that best fits the specific business use case. For example, functions that have severe cost constraints can be deployed into containers on-demand, minimizing costs at the expense of performance. Conversely, functions that need performance above all other requirements can be configured to have instances always running, ensuring low latency but driving up costs. Functions can also take advantage of Fission’s pre-warmed container pools, which aggregate the cost of pooling over a large number of functions, while providing the performance benefits for all of them.

    “Our global photo platform helps hundreds of millions of devoted users preserve their memories by combining all of their favorite photos on thousands of customized products. We are always looking for ways to improve the way we manage the scale and quality of our applications. These new Fission features will help our developers deliver new customer experiences built on serverless applications without the dependency of managing the complexity of scale”, said Kenneth Lam, Director of Technology at Snapfish. “Fission allows our company to benefit from the speed, cost savings and scalability of a cloud-native development pattern on any environment we choose, whether it be the public cloud or on-prem.”

    To install the latest version of Fission, visit: (https://fission.io).

    Share This: New @fissionio features include Live-reload, Record-replay, automated #Canary deployments, #Prometheus, and more improve quality and lower the risk of #serverless application release on #Kubernetes  #faas https://platform9.com/press/fission-open-source-serverless-framework-offers-live-reload-canary-deployments-record-replay-more-improve-quality-releases-automation-serverless-on-kubernetes/ @Platform9Sys

    About Platform9

    Platform9 (platform9.com) delivers a SaaS-managed hybrid cloud solution that turns existing infrastructure into a cloud, instantly. We help enterprises drive digital transformation by enabling them to manage VMs, Containers and Serverless Functions on ANY infrastructure — on-premises, in public clouds, or at the edge – with a self-service, simple and unified experience. Customers such as Cadence, Autodesk, Veritas, Nanometrics, EBSCO, Bitly, LogMeIn, and Aruba see upwards of 300 percent improvement in IT efficiency, 33 percent faster time to market, and 50-80 percent improvement in data center utilization and cost reduction. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, and is backed by Redpoint Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Canvas Ventures, and HPE.

  • SAP Extends Effort to Modernize App Development

    SAP Extends Effort to Modernize App Development

    SAP this week expanded the scope of the SAP Cloud Platform to include support for the ABAP programming language and made available a beta version of a Kubernetes-as-a-service offering, in effort to update its app development portfolio.

    Announced at the SAP TechEd 2018 conference, these two offerings serve as bookends for an evolving SAP strategy that seeks to include organizations that have heavily invested in ABAP over the last 20 years as well as organizations that are shifting toward employing containers to build applications based on a microservices architecture.

    Dan Lahl, vice president of product marketing for SAP, said ABAP has been widely employed by more than thousands of SAP customers to build applications using the same language that SAP employed to build its on-premises IT environment. Those applications now can be built or enhanced using an SAP Cloud platform based on a distribution of the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-as-service (PaaS) environment.

    At the same time, Lahl said SAP is working toward hosting its distribution of Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes in addition to making available a Kubernetes-based platform alongside Cloud Foundry. SAP is also leveraging container-based technologies such as Knative and Kubeless to provide access to a serverless computing framework based on Kubernetes. That capability is also in beta.

    The SAP Cloud Platform Backend Service for generating application programming interfaces (APIs) is now available in beta, while the SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging Service—based on technology developed by Solace—is now generally available.

    Finally, SAP is making available Cloud Application Programming Model for SAP Cloud Platform, a set of framework, tools, languages and libraries based on best practices defined by SAP. Lahl noted that many of those best practices are based on DevOps methodologies that SAP is helping customers embrace as part of an effort to accelerate application development projects.

    Lahl said SAP is, for the moment, focused on modernizing the application development processes of its core developer community. ABAP support, for example, makes it possible to use a venerable programming language that most SAP customers know on a managed instance of the Cloud Foundry PaaS. But the goal is to make SAP Cloud a platform that organizations will use to build applications using multiple programming languages regardless of how many SAP applications they might have running. According to SAP, today there are more than 10,000 customers using SAP Cloud Platform.

    It’s not clear to what degree Kubernetes might supplant Cloud Foundry as a major platform for building applications in the enterprise. Lahl contended that by putting Cloud Foundry on top of Kubernetes, SAP now provides one of the richest application development tools on a platform that is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for orchestrating containers.

    It may take a while before SAP becomes a dominant provider of a platform for building custom applications. But the one thing that is clear is that SAP these days is focused on a lot more than delivering a set of packaged applications that eliminate the need to build a custom application in the first place.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Pivotal Software Extends Development Platform Reach

    Pivotal Software Extends Development Platform Reach

    Pivotal Software announced an expansion of its implementation of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment in addition to extending its support for Kubernetes to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

    At its SpringOne Platform 2018 conference, Pivotal revealed that Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) can now extend a single instance of its distribution of the open source PaaS across multiple data centers. In addition, Pivotal is making it possible to automatically update the operating systems on which its PaaS is hosted, and added a more extensible user interface to its PCF Healthwatch monitoring tool.

    What’s more, Pivotal announced that Pivotal Container Service (PKS), its implementation of Kubernetes, now can be deployed on EC2 instances of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. PKS is currently based on version 1.11 of Kubernetes that has been packaged with a software-defined runtime for spinning up clusters known as Kubo, developed under the auspices of the Cloud Computing Foundation (CFF), which also oversees Cloud Foundry. PKS was developed in collaboration with VMware, which is a sister company of Pivotal operating under the same Dell Technologies umbrella, and the latest version adds the ability to configure a namespace or cluster to emit logs to a specific destination, such as VMware vRealize Log Insight, without operator intervention.

    Richard Seroter, senior director of product for Pivotal, said Pivotal and VMware are collaborating to make Kubernetes clusters more accessible to enterprise IT organizations that typically don’t have engineers available to manage IT operations. By combining automation frameworks from VMware and Pivotal, the expectation is that PKS will gain more traction as IT organizations evaluate which flavor of Kubernetes to deploy in a production environment, he added. A recent research report published by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) would suggest that strategy is starting to gain traction.

    Pivotal apparently is pursuing a dual application development strategy. The first is based on a PCF framework that is highly prescriptive in terms of how applications should be built and deployed. The second is a more flexible container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform based on Kubernetes.

    In general, organizations that have invested in Cloud Foundry to deploy a PaaS are not likely abandon it in favor of a container platform overnight. But Pivotal and the CFF are under some pressure to be more aggressive in unifying Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes: There already are several instances of Cloud Foundry that run on top of Kubernetes, and Pivotal Software revealed earlier this month that it missed Wall Street’s expectations for billing revenue in its most recent quarter by 25 percent.

    It may take a while for the relationship between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes to become more firmly established in the minds of IT professionals. But there are certainly no shortage of options when it comes to developing modern applications—there will be more than a few organizations employing multiple frameworks for building these applications for many years to come. The real issue may lie in deriving value from those investments.

    Survey findings published this week by Pivotal revealed that only 39 percent of global organizations are deploying code on a continuous, hourly or daily basis and only 40 percent deploy code on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. The survey also found that only 35 percent of developers’ time is spent writing code for new products or features to deliver value, as opposed to maintenance or fixing old code. Also, one-third of U.S. respondents (33 percent) reported delaying application releases more than 11 times due to security concerns, compared to 21 percent globally. Clearly, there is much more DevOps work to be done.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Red Hat Takes Virtualization Aim at VMware

    Red Hat Takes Virtualization Aim at VMware

    Red Hat, as part of on going drive to wean enterprise IT organizations off proprietary virtualization technologies, today launched a set of Red Hat infrastructure migration tools and services.

    Joe Fernandes, vice president of cloud platforms products at Red Hat, said that as organizations move to modernize their application environments by lifting and shifting them to the cloud, they are simultaneously looking to take greater advantage of open source virtual machines and containers specifically as an alternative to VMware.

    The Red Hat initiative includes a consulting engagement as well as a pilot project that enables legacy application workloads to be deployed on kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs), an instance of OpenStack or the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on the open source Kubernetes container orchestration software. The core tool used to migrate those workloads is the Red Hat Ansible Automation, Fernandes said.

    As management software stack the company now provides on top of those foundations has matured, Red Hat is finding more customers willing to consider transitioning away from commercial virtualization software, he noted. At the same time, he added, wider adoption of KVM by cloud service providers (CSPs) is making open source technologies a much more attractive option to foster deployment of application workloads across a hybrid cloud computing environment without having to refactor them.

    Those two trends in combination, Fernandes said, are making it easier for Red Hat to make a case for organizations to move way from VMware.

    Red Hat may have lost the virtual machine wars to VMware early on, but it’s clear the company is gearing up for a new phase. Many organizations have adopted an open source-first philosophy that Red Hat clearly is trying to exploit at VMware’s expense. At the same time, rising interest in alternative approaches to virtualization in the form of Docker containers and Kubernetes is creating another wedge that Red Hat is looking to exploit. For example, the company is testing Kube-Virt, an open source project that makes it possible to run KMVs within a container. Red Hat has already signaled its intention to apply that technology to other hypervisors as well.

    It’s unclear to what degree containers and Kubernetes will be deployed on virtual machines and used in place of virtual machines altogether. Red Hat is prepared for either eventually, but Fernandes said virtual machines will continue to remain relevant in enterprise IT environments for many years to come. Reliance on container and virtual machines will come down to both the nature of the application workload and the relative cloud-native maturity of the organization deploying them, he said.

    It also remains to be seen the degree to which VMware can stave off a new virtualization challenge from Red Hat. VMware has allied with Amazon Web Services and IBM in the public cloud, while partnering with sister company Pivotal to embrace Kubernetes running on top of VMware. The issue, of course, will be how much enterprise IT organizations are willing to pay for commercial virtual machine licenses in support of the initiatives.

    — Mike Vizard