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Tag: quali

  • Beyond IaaS: The Benefits of Using EaaS

    Beyond IaaS: The Benefits of Using EaaS

    Beyond IaaS: The Benefits of Using EaaS

    The market for cloud infrastructure is growing at a rapid clip. Driving factors include IT’s need to cut costs, provide more services, respond faster to business needs, and enable innovation and digital transformation. For many years, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings have been both the first and most used cloud services consumed by businesses. But increasingly, more is needed. That has opened the door for Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS), what some call IaaS Plus.

    To put the demand for such services into perspective, consider cloud spending. While most organizations were already executing on their cloud migration strategies pre-COVID, the pandemic was a serious wake-up call for those lagging behind. Gartner predicts public cloud services global spending will grow to $332.3B this year, up from $270B in 2020. Gartner also anticipates that by 2024 almost half of all IT spending on software, system infrastructure, and process outsourcing will have pivoted from traditional solutions to the cloud.

    Within those numbers, the IaaS segment is predicted to have the largest growth (percentage-wise) over the next few years. The IaaS market will nearly double from roughly $60,000 in 2020 to about $107,000 in 2022. Looking beyond next year, ResearchAndMarkets.com predicts the IaaS market will reach $74.63 billion in 2025 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.8%.

    Why the big jump? Cloud-based service models can provide significant financial advantages for businesses, allowing them to quickly access new functionalities without requiring heavy upfront investments. Cloud services rotate some capital expenditure costs into operational costs, with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) enabling organizations to move fundamental storage and networking functions to the cloud and away from on-premises hardware.

    Enter EaaS

    One of the greatest fundamental changes companies have encountered in the last few years is that business demands for new applications and services have rapidly grown, causing a need to accelerate application development.

    And most importantly, development is no longer a one-time effort, and applications must continuously be patched, updated, and enhanced. Each change or addition requires one or more development environments, plus infrastructure and applications for performance testing, quality assurance and deployment.

    That’s where EaaS helps. EaaS extends the capabilities and benefits of IaaS into the development environment. It offers the infrastructure, applications, and data that DevOps teams need to develop, deploy and maintain their applications.

    An ideal EaaS solution will offer certain features to increase the efficiency of the DevOps staff, reduce costs and help businesses maintain control over fast-paced development environments.

    For example, a well-suited EaaS would use automation to configure servers for a specific application. It would be a self-service offering that integrated with normal DevOps workflows, tools, and methodologies. For example, a business might look for an EaaS offering that gives users a choice in how they access the services. That might include access via a web portal, command-line interface, or directly through a developer’s CI/CD tools.

    That last capability is particularly important today, given the way applications are developed and maintained. An EaaS must integrate into the existing DevOps ecosystem and CI/CD pipeline to support today’s demand for complete, ready-to-run environments delivered on demand. The way to ensure this is to look for an EaaS provider that supports out-of-the-box plugins and an extensive REST API for common CI/CD and DevOps tools.

    One additional issue that businesses need to address is cost control. Costs can quickly add up with the use of cloud services being so easy and with some providers offering self-service options. In many situations, cloud service users have no insights into their cloud spending until after the monthly bill arrives. And even then, there is often no granular view into where the costs were incurred.

    What’s needed is an EaaS offering that incorporates cloud cost management capabilities that are implemented in such a way as to not slow down application development and delivery. In particular, cost visibility and control are required but cannot be implemented in a way that adds friction to the process. Many cost management approaches fail in this regard. A good EaaS solution will provide the needed visibility and control while not hindering development and deployment.

    Last word

    Modern applications development must be based on CI/CD to deliver new applications, services and updates in a timely manner to match fast-changing business opportunities and requirements.

    While IaaS platforms satisfy many of the core infrastructure requirements, EaaS complements these capabilities by offering the complete environments delivered on-demand needed for DevOps to work. EaaS also offers tight integration into DevOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines.

     

  • Quali Raises $54 Million in New Funding to Help Enterprise DevOps Streamline Infrastructure Complexity

    Greenfield Partners and JVP co-lead new round after record sales of CloudShell Platform to Global 2000 and innovators around the world

    Austin – Jan. 19, 2021 – Quali, the Infrastructure Automation at ScaleTM company, today announced $54 million in new funding, co-led by Greenfield Partners and JVP. The company will use the funds to further expand its stellar customer base, enable new partnerships, strengthen its market leadership position, accelerate CloudShell innovation, and grow the Quali team.

    Quali’s CloudShell platform simplifies cloud infrastructure, making it accessible and secure for application development and deployment, accelerating digital transformation. Quali’s mission is to unlock business value encumbered by technology operations, and to unleash the time and talent of technology teams so they are free to build the future—to develop, test, and deploy with simple self-service at any time, on any cloud, or even on-prem.

    Despite COVID-19, Quali has experienced a record year, with significant growth, serving customers such as Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, Verizon, multiple banks, and cloud service providers. Quali investors see the immense potential in bringing automation to the masses. In addition to the continued support from Kreos Capital, this round also welcomes a fund managed by Hamilton Lane as a new investor.

    While traditional Infrastructure as Code (IaC) players have focused on catering to a relatively small set of experts, Quali’s technology simplifies the user experience—effectively making cloud infrastructure, and its complexity, invisible to the application teams who need it.

    “Development teams are burdened by the time and complexity of setting up and operating cloud infrastructure. Quali empowers developers to develop, testers to test, planners to plan, and ops to operate by offering safe and productive access to hybrid cloud infrastructure”, said Quali CEO, Lior Koriat. “Since Quali’s most recent funding in 2018, the company experienced rapid growth in sales, platform innovation, and expanded its own workforce globally.”

    ”Quali has proven its position as a market leader in the DevOps and Infrastructure Automation category, servicing tier-1 customers across multiple segments,” said Erel Margalit, Founder and Chairman at JVP. “This is one of our most fascinating companies, and we are happy to join forces with Shay Grinfeld, Managing Partner at Greenfield partners, and Boaz Dinte, Managing Partner at Qumra Capital, who helped build leading companies in this category such as Jfrog, BigPanda, and others. Alongside Yoav Tzruya, Quali’s Chairperson, and the vast experience of JVP in building international companies such as CyberArk and QlikTech, we are confident that together with Lior and Quali’s great team both in Israel and the US, the company will become the next big thing.”

    Quali’s new Board Member, Shay Grinfeld, Managing Partner at Greenfield Partners, said, “Our investment thesis was built around Quali’s unique ability to streamline cloud and infrastructure complexity for application and technology teams with the growing adoption of DevOps methodology and CI/CD procedures. We are impressed with their recent growth and are excited about the opportunity to build an exceptional business.”

    “With the growing adoption of DevOps and CI/CD best practices, beyond early adopters, challenges related to scaling such practices are becoming more prevalent—removing operational, process and knowledge bottlenecks, reducing costs, assuring governance and unifying infrastructure. This is where Quali shines”, stated Yoav Tzruya, General Partner at JVP and chairperson of Quali, “While Atlassian and JFrog solve needs around process management and streamlining dev-to-prod, Quali focuses on abstracting away and automating infrastructure, and enabling the CRO to focus on sales, instead of the complexities of demos and POCs, the developers to develop instead of spending resources on IT and cloud provisioning, and operations to offer best in class customer experience instead of worrying about costs and governance”.

    “What attracts me to Quali is their ability to bring essential automation technology directly to the masses (developers) without requiring deep expertise,” said Boaz Dinte, a board member of Quali and JFrog. “It’s the same thing that impressed me as an early investor at JFrog and I could not be more excited about Quali’s future.”

    “Quali’s automation framework further enhances our ability to build tomorrow’s future today, allowing Verizon to deliver amazing new technology to our customers at the speed of DevOps,” said John Musa, Manager at Verizon Wireless.

    New Customers: Category-leading companies in consumer electronics, telco, banking, technology, media, and more rely on Quali to deliver more productivity, faster time to market, and reduced business risks.

    New innovation: In addition to 1-click infrastructure setup, Quali’s CloudShell Platform features the industry’s only “no-click” auto-decommissioning of cloud environments as well as its unique auto-tagging capabilities, both of which are essential for cloud cost visibility and cloud cost control.

    New employee growth: With aggressive hiring goals in every functional area, Quali will nearly double its employment, filling multiple new positions at its new offices in Austin and Tel Aviv and across the US, Europe, and Asia.

    More information on open positions can be found at https://www.quali.com/about-us/careers/.

    About Quali

    Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Quali provides the leading platform for Infrastructure Automation at Scale. Global 2000 enterprises and innovators everywhere rely on Quali’s award-winning CloudShell platform to create self-service, on-demand automation solutions that increase engineering productivity, cut cloud costs, and optimize infrastructure utilization. For more information, please visit https://www.quali.com/ and follow Quali on Twitter and LinkedIn.

    About Greenfield Partners

    Greenfield is an Israel-based investment firm focused on early growth stage technology and tech-enabled businesses. With a dual presence in Tel Aviv and New York, the Greenfield team fuses investment and operating experience, deep local Israeli roots, and an expansive global network to support entrepreneurs in their quest to build thriving technology companies. Greenfield’s roots date back to 2016, when it was established by TPG Growth as an investment platform for early growth technology investments in Israel. An independent fund since 2020, its culture remains grounded in this heritage, bringing the rigor and depth of private equity to early growth investing. The Greenfield team continues to serve as Senior Advisors to TPG Growth, and in this context seeks opportunities for collaboration on selected large-check, growth stage investments in Israel. Its portfolio includes such companies as Avanan, BigPanda, Guardicore, and Vast Data. More information about Greenfield Partners is available at www.greenfieldlp.com.

    About (JVP)

    Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), founded and led by Dr. Erel Margalit, is an internationally renowned venture capital fund. JVP has raised $1.4 billion to date across nine funds, and has been listed numerous times by Preqin, and other rankings, as one of the top-ten consistently performing VC firms worldwide. JVP has built over 150 companies, leveraging a broad network of partners and market expertise to help companies become global market leaders. JVP was recently chosen by New York City and EDC to lead the cyber security cyber hub in NYC. Among the pioneering firms of the Israeli venture capital industry, JVP has been instrumental in building some of the largest companies out of Israel, facilitating 12 Initial Public Offerings on NASDAQ, including CyberArk Software, QLIK Technologies, and Cogent Communications among others. https://www.jvpvc.com/

  • Quali Introduces SaaS Cloud Management Platform CloudShell Colony for Accelerating DevOps

    Controlled Availability Introduction Delivers Environments-as-a-Service from Development to Production

    SANTA CLARA, Calif., January 15, 2019 – Quali, the leader in delivering environments-as-a-service for cloud and DevOps automation, today announced CloudShell Colony – a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud management platform for DevOps. CloudShell Colony automates DevOps environments all the way from development to production, while allowing IT and project managers to govern the use of cloud resources from a single pane of glass.

    This announcement follows the recent news highlighting Quali’s $22.5 million Series-C funding round in December 2018. CloudShell Colony initially being released as controlled availability (CA) software equips DevOps teams, developers and testers with reusable application environments on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure with support for Kubernetes deployments. Quali is providing varying levels of the solution based on company size.

    “Setting up environments is error prone, time consuming and difficult to automate and troubleshoot. It’s even more challenging to do it in a scalable way that would serve more than one team, including team members who know nothing about infrastructure, and still work seamlessly with the CI/CD pipeline,” said Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali. “CloudShell Colony is designed to deliver IT environments more efficiently, eliminate configuration inconsistencies, and empower all stakeholders in the DevOps value chain by improving pipeline stability with less code and better error handling.”

    CloudShell Colony features include:

    • Blueprint Modeling – Use YAML or a visual designer to build reusable environment-blueprints on AWS, Azure and Kubernetes (AKS, EKS and native). Environments include containers, compute instances, load Balancers, network and security elements, cloud services and more. Support complex environment with parameters, initial data, configuration and health-checks.
    • Self-Service Environments – Role and policy based on-demand environments from a self-service catalog. Colony deploys environments with automatic setup, health-check and teardown that work out of box.
    • Seamless CI/CD integration – Native integration to the organizational DevOps ecosystem including Azure DevOps, Jenkins, TeamCity, Github and more. Support for manual production update to full automated continuous deployment.
    • Multi-tenancy, Secret Management, Audit Trail, RBAC – Everything required to make sure scaling, security and compliance are covered while increasing release speed.
    • Visibility on Cloud Spend – Automatically tag cloud resources to control, analyze and manage cloud usage and expenses. Add custom tags to cloud resources to support specific business needs.

    A 30-day trial version will be available for all to try out suitability as well as a limited free tier for small teams. Quali also offers a Team tier and a Premium tier for larger groups of users and with a higher number of concurrent environments supported.

    The general availability of this release it targeted for mid-April 2019.

    For more information on CloudShell Colony, visit https://www.quali.com/cloudshell-colony.

    About Quali

    Quali is a software company focused on automation and orchestration software to deliver environments-as-a-service for digital transformation initiatives aligned with cloud, DevOps and Security. Its industry-leading CloudShell platform delivers helps enterprises and service providers increase productivity and efficiency for engineering, sales and security organizations while cutting costs dramatically. Quali’s customers include several of the Fortune 500 and the Global 100. More information about Quali is available at www.quali.com.

     

  • Jerusalem Venture Partners Leads $22.5M Round in Quali to Accelerate Delivery of Public and Private Cloud Environments-as-a-Service

    Funding to Go Towards Boosting Digital Transformation and Automation Initiatives

    SANTA CLARA, Calif., December 11, 2018 – Quali, the leader in delivering environments-as-a-service for cloud and DevOps automation, today announced a $22.5M Series-C funding round led by venture firm Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and with participation from existing and new investors. With more than 200 customers worldwide including several Tier-1 enterprises, service providers and technology vendors, Quali’s CloudShell platform is the industry leader in self-service environments for a variety of use-cases including DevOps automation, technical sales demos as well as cyber security and compliance.

    The funding allows Quali to further increase their momentum in the enterprise accelerating growth in cloud, security and DevOps use-cases. Over the past two years, the company has demonstrated high double digit annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth and expanded into the enterprise. It has added new customer logos across a variety of segments, including the likes of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Department of Defense and IBM, among others. The company has also transitioned to a subscription-led offering from a perpetual license-based sales approach with more than 70 percent of its revenues coming from subscription. Finally, the company has been able to dramatically expand the use-cases that are enjoying significant ROI and lower TCO as a result of implementing CloudShell. With this investment JVP joins the Quali board with Yoav Tzruya, JVP’s General Partner, taking on the role of Board Chairman. Lior Koriat, CEO and Boaz Dinte, Managing Partner at Evergreen Ventures will continue to serve on the board. The board observers would also include representation from Dell Ventures and Kreos Capital.

    “Quali is a proven category leader in the Public and Private Cloud Automation category. With multiple companies addressing the global trend of digital transformation, we constantly witness organizations struggling with streamlining ever-increasing complex deployments. We believe the need for CloudShell will continue to grow,” said Yoav Tzruya, General Partner at JVP. “We are encouraged to see existing customers re-engage to deploy more use-cases, as well as additional industries and geographies that are
    engaging with the company.”

    Quali’s Cloudshell-based solutions improve productivity of dev/test engineering organizations, accelerate the sales cycles for selling organizations and help improve the security and compliance
    posture for security teams. Its blueprint-based, self-service approach has been demonstrated to increase productivity by 30 percent, cut down costs by 40 percent and increase infrastructure efficiency by more than 30 percent.

    “We’re seeing a strong uptake of our solutions with hundreds of customers globally as they invest in digital transformation initiatives,” said Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali. “We’re quite pleased to raise this new round of funding and welcome the investment from JVP that has a demonstrated track record of building great companies. The Quali CloudShell platform is a proven leader in the industry and this new round allows us to accelerate our go-to-market and increase our innovation velocity.”

    In addition to JVP, existing investors including Dell Ventures, Kreos Capital, Evergreen Ventures, Gemini Israel Ventures and ORR Partners participated in the round.
    As part of this expanded funding, Quali intends to expand its sales footprint in the United States with new offices in the city of Austin.

    About Quali
    Quali is a software company focused on automation and orchestration software to deliver environments-as-a-service for digital transformation initiatives aligned with cloud, DevOps and Security. Its industry-leading CloudShell platform delivers helps enterprises and service providers increase productivity and efficiency for engineering, sales and security organizations while cutting costs dramatically. Quali’s customers include several of the Fortune 500 and the Global 100. More information about Quali is available at www.quali.com.

    About Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP):
    Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) is an internationally renowned venture capital fund based out of Israel. Established in 1993 by Dr. Erel Margalit, JVP has raised to date $1.3 billion across 9 funds, and has been ranked numerous times by Preqin as one of the top-ten consistently performing VC firms worldwide. JVP has built over 130 companies, leveraging a broad network of partners and market expertise to help companies to become global market leaders. Among the pioneering firms of the Israeli venture capital industry, JVP has been instrumental in building some of the largest companies out of Israel, facilitating 12 Initial Public Offerings on NASDAQ and numerous industry sales. With a view to building industry leaders, JVP invests in early through growth stage companies in the spaces of Cybersecurity, Big Data, Fintech, Enterprise Software, Storage, Mobile, Media and IoT. More information
    about JVP is available at www.jvpvc.com

  • Culture Becoming Bigger Issue as DevOps Goes Mainstream

    Culture Becoming Bigger Issue as DevOps Goes Mainstream

    Culture and resistance to DevOps processes appears to be growing at many organizations where DevOps projects have started going mainstream and involving more enterprise groups.

    Cloud automation vendor Quali recently surveyed 1,300 DevOps and IT professionals on some of the key barriers to DevOps adoption and found more respondents identifying culture as a top issue compared to last year. Twenty-two percent of the professionals in Quali’s most recent survey cited stagnant organizational culture as the biggest impediment to DevOps—a substantial 8 percent increase over the 14 percent who said the same thing last year.

    Quali interpreted the trend as likely the result of more groups getting pulled into broadening DevOps projects at many organizations. Innovation cultures and processes are being impacted in a broader manner as this is has happened. The trend shows why managing culture has to become a top-down responsibility, the firm said.

    “As technologies, processes and tools go mainstream, they touch a larger number of people who may need to change the things they do or how they do it,” said Shashi Kiran, chief marketing officer at Quali. “Eventually, change is never easy. It is actually a good thing that culture is there at the top, which means change is touching a lot of people across the organization, which eventually should be net positive.”

    An October 2017 report from analyst firm Forrester Research also suggests that more organizations are at least beginning to recognize the need for a cultural shift. Its research shows organizations are making culture a core focus when implementing DevOps projects. The focus is on shifting the mindset of teams to a culture of experimentation, where failure is used as an opportunity to learn and evolve processes instead of as a reason to add more controls and checks. “These mindset transitions are imperative for successful DevOps, and the market trends are encouraging,” Forrester noted.

    Other Barriers to DevOps Adoption

    While culture is a top barrier to DevOps adoption, it is not the only one. Quali’s survey showed application complexity and legacy processes to be major factors as well, with 20 percent and 21 percent respectively identifying the two issues as among their top barriers to DevOps adoption.

    The survey also found that DevOps teams at many businesses are still heavily dependent on their IT organization for infrastructure and continue to use a ticketing system to request and receive required resources.

    Nearly 50 percent, for instance said they had to wait for up to one month to get access to infrastructure resources that they had requested from IT, while the wait was even longer at about 24 percent of the organizations in the Quali survey. Only 27 percent—or barely more than 1 in 4—of the DevOps teams represented in the survey get access to requested infrastructure in less than one day.

    The numbers are important because slow access to required infrastructure often could have a big impact on the speed and productivity of DevOps teams, Kiran said.

    “DevOps teams don’t want to be bogged down by infrastructure. To a large extent, it needs to be invisible to them,” Kiran said.

    However, the fact is that environments need to be set up for DevOps and many times there is an infrastructure dependency on the back end. “This may be someone else’s responsibility, but the DevOps team ends up waiting for infrastructure to be set up and that’s frustrating for them,” he noted.

    Predictability is important in DevOps environment as is planning and being able to accommodate dynamic change environments, Kiran said. “Self-service is a preferred option where people are involved in environment buildouts, modeling different components and in testing and deploying them,” he said. One-third of the respondents, for instance, said they were strongly inclined to adopt platforms that enabled self-service automation.

    The Quali survey found that the degree to which an organization automates processes has a big impact on its ability to enable a self-service capability. More than two-thirds of the organizations surveyed had some form of automation. Of that, 33 percent had implemented a self-service capability for R&D, development and testing initiatives. Generally, organizations with automation and self-service reported improvements in production and agility compared to organizations that had fewer automation and self-service capabilities.

    So, where in the development life cycle is most of the automation happening in DevOps environments? The answer isn’t clear because automation is happening in a somewhat siloed manner, Kiran said. “Continuous integration is a starting point and larger organizations adopt continuous deployment as well, based on their internal methodology.” But, for the moment at least, there is no platform that can navigate creation of DevOps environments, expose them for testing and push them into production—all as a continuous life cycle—with full-on visibility, Kiran said.

    Kiran’s take on automation is similar to that reported by Forrester last year, which also found silos of automation continuing to be a barrier to DevOps success at many organizations. Forrester has identified “purposeful end-to-end automation” as foundational to DevOps success, especially at scale.

    According to the analyst firm, organizations that have implemented complete automation of the CI/CD pipeline have been able to enable rapid deployment. However, despite progress, plenty of opportunity still exists for automation and for deeper collaboration between infrastructure/operations teams and development teams, Forrester has noted.

    Quali also created an infographic illustrating some of the finer points of the survey, which can be accessed here.

    — Jai Vijayan

  • Quali CloudShell Rises to Multi-Cloud DevOps Challenge

    Quali CloudShell Rises to Multi-Cloud DevOps Challenge

    Multi-cloud computing is now an everyday reality for most IT organizations. Because of that, most DevOps teams are trying to figure out how to apply a repeatable set of processes against multiple clouds; rather than having to manage a unique pipeline for each cloud, DevOps teams want to be able to deploy application workloads on any cloud as necessary.

    With that goal in mind, Quali has extended its CloudShell tools for modeling production environments in a sandbox to include support for both Azure and OpenStack environments. Previously, CloudShell only supported Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware.

    Shashi Kiran, chief marketing officer for Quali, says version 8.0 of CloudShell makes it possible for developer, test, QA and compliance teams to create a truly authentic replicas of a production environments. That replica can then be used to create a blueprint of an application spanning all the physical or virtual infrastructure, data, applications, tools and services in that environment.

    CloudShell 8.0 also includes support for application configuration management using either a custom script or playbook created using the open-source Ansible IT automation framework. In addition, DevOps teams now can edit some app details directly within blueprints.

    Via a CloudShell web portal, shells now can be centrally managed, updated and removed. The new version also offers enhanced single sign-on (SSO) support, enabling more SAML security features and integration with third-party identity management tools. Finally, CloudShell 8.0 includes increased control of blueprint max reservation time, advanced search improvements and access to new table views.

    Kiran says CloudShell is unique in that it gives DevOps teams access to a model that eliminates the surprises that commonly occur when developers attempt to move an application into a production environment. Given the level of scale involved in modern applications, it’s not possible for developers to effectively replicate a production environment on their own machines. The result is a lot of rolling back of applications after they’ve been deployed into production. CloudShell eliminates that problem, says Kiran, by giving developers and IT operations teams access to a sandbox in which to make sure that applications work as expected once they are deployed in production.

    Rolling back applications in a multi-cloud world has become especially problematic. IT organizations now need to deploy applications locally on a private cloud and in a public cloud. But from an IT operations perspective each of those clouds is becoming more complex, which means the opportunity is greater for something to go awry when it comes time to deploy an application into production. Include the number of target platforms in the age of the cloud and the probability  that an application will work seamlessly the first time it’s deployed is virtually nil. Multiply all the application deployments and updates an IT organization is trying to manage, and it quickly becomes apparent how much time and effort is being lost.

    Production environments need to be as pristine as possible. The only way to make sure they remain that way is to make sure that every application that runs on them doesn’t ever get the chance to adversely affect their condition.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Quali’s Survey Offers Insights about IT Challenges in Cloud and DevOps

    SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 15, 2017 — Quali, the leader in cloud sandbox software for cloud and DevOps automation, has released new survey findings detailing the challenges that IT professionals face as they pursue adoption of DevOps practices.

    More than 2,000 IT industry executives took the Quali survey online and at tech industry events during 2016, including Cisco Live, VMWorld, DevOps Summit, AWS re:Invent, Delivery of Things and Jenkins World. The survey was executed in the United States with respondents drawn from engineering, managerial, architect and C-level roles.

    “Despite the immense popularity of DevOps today, EMA research data shows a general lack of central governance and automation when it comes to creating new application environments. This leads to pockets of developers using their favorite, often not well integrated, DevOps tools. To clean up this mess, we need a template or blueprint-driven approach with one central management platform or point of access, assuring consistency of deployed application environments, from the app server and backend data to the load testing software,” said Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Hybrid Cloud & Infrastructure Management, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

    Here are the high-level findings from Quali’s DevOps survey results:

    • Fully 54% of respondents indicated they had no access to self-service infrastructure. This meant that more than half of respondents took a ticket-based approach to infrastructure delivery, impacting productivity and increasing time to market.
    • Of those surveyed, only 23% said infrastructure can be delivered in less than one day. Most respondents said DevOps still takes more than one week to deliver infrastructure, with 44% saying it takes up to one month or more to deliver infrastructure. Lack of access to the right infrastructure and environment slows application delivery.
    • DevOps managers are deploying multiple tools to support their DevOps efforts. The current DevOps toolchain ecosystem is quite fragmented with a mixture of open source and packaged offerings. The most popular tools cited by respondents included Jenkins (21%), Docker (16%), Puppet (14%) and Chef (13%).
    • Top barriers to DevOps success included the respondent’s company culture (14%); challenges of testing automation (13%); legacy systems (12%); application complexity (11%); and budget constraints (11%). Other barriers to achieving DevOps included limited IT skills; difficulty managing multiple environments; a lack of DevOps plans and tools; and a lack of executive buy-in.
    • Respondents varied widely on the number of applications they now run in hybrid cloud environments. On average, of those adopting hybrid clouds, the respondents run only 23% of their apps on a hybrid cloud platform, with 65% of respondents running less than 24 applications in hybrid environments and only 8% running more than 75 applications. This can largely be attributed to the complexities of a hybrid IT environment, as several enterprises favor hybrid clouds.
    • Respondents are still burdened by complex applications that make the transition to cloud and DevOps challenging. Over 44% of applications in traditional environments were considered complex for cloud. This indicates that brownfield and hybrid deployments with legacy integration will continue to be important.

    “We were pleasantly surprised by the response to our 2016 DevOps survey with over 2,000 respondents,” said Shashi Kiran, Quali Chief Marketing Officer. “The survey revealed interesting insights on adoption of cloud and DevOps, particularly in the context of hybrid clouds. What stood out most to us were some of the barriers around DevOps including culture, test automation and integration of legacy investments. These issues are consistent with patterns we’re seeing every day. Quali is working closely with our customers and partners to solve these issues to increase cloud and DevOps adoption. We have expanded our 2017 Cloud and DevOps survey and look forward to gaining deeper insights.”

    — Jules Louis

  • Quali CloudShell 7.0 Helps Businesses Deliver Applications Faster with Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud Support and Powerful Sandboxing Features

    Quali Cloud Sandbox Software Allows Full-stack Application Blueprinting and

    Easy Integration with DevOps Tools

    SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 27, 2016 – Quali, the leading Cloud Sandbox software for DevOps automation, today announced the release of CloudShell 7.0 which introduces support for deploying applications into sandboxes and expands the Quali Developer Community to allow more rapid full-stack integrations with cloud and infrastructure resources.

    CloudShell 7.0’s new application deployment feature allows developers to create application templates that can be deployed within sandboxes and which remain agnostic of where the application runs – whether datacenter, public or private cloud. Application stacks can be easily created and added to sandboxes without having to code, allowing rapid design and deployment of complex sandbox environments. CloudShell provides out of the box support for VMWare vCenter as well as support for AWS, OpenStack, and Azure, and Docker via the Quali Community. In addition, advanced VLAN features make it easier to connect virtual and physical endpoints.

    The Quali Developer Community has been expanded to include new standards for Shells, which are the building blocks of Sandboxes. The standards include sample code, templates and guidelines for creating new Shells, allowing rapid integrations with heterogeneous infrastructure and accelerating time to market. In addition, by leveraging a broad set of tool, cloud, and infrastructure integrations, the new Shell standards make it easy for developers to create and share Shells within the developer community.

    With the 7.0 release, Quali’s Shells become Python-based and open sourced via GitHub. This gives Python programmers complete support to rapidly build, modify and extend Shells. Using Python and CloudShell’s object-based modelling rather than just scripts, developers can create more robust and reusable Shell integrations that include custom orchestration commands and metadata such as prerequisites, attributes, and policy data.

    Quali CloudShell 7.0 features a new Sandbox API along with the Python API, enabling integration with DevOps tools like Jenkins and Jira, allowing sandboxes to be used in a fully automated DevOps workflow. In this way, CloudShell allows organizations to create full continuous integration and deployment processes that automate complex, hybrid, production-like sandbox environments.

    “In today’s application economy, every business is a software company, and Quali’s support for full stack automation from applications to infrastructure to hybrid cloud in sandboxes is essential for speeding application delivery,” said William Fellows, Research Vice President of 451Research.

    “We are continuously working to enable our customers to reproduce even the most complex infrastructure – from datacenter to public and hybrid clouds – in a sandbox,” said Joan Wrabetz, CTO of Quali. “Our new application support also means that customers can automate the creation of a full stack environment from network to applications for all of their DevOps activities.”

    Quali CloudShell 7.0 Enterprise Edition is available immediately as a free upgrade for existing customers; Enterprise Edition is available for new users as a subscription of $30,000 per year plus $3000 per concurrent sandbox per year. In addition, the Free Developer Edition is available for immediate download at http://info.quali.com/cloudshell-developer-edition-download

    Links:

    Quali Developer Community: http://www.quali.com/community/

    Quali GitHub: https://github.com/QualiSystems

    Quali CloudShell Free Developer Edition: http://info.quali.com/cloudshell-developer-edition-download

    451 Research Report: http://info.quali.com/451-research-devops-and-cloud-are-now-the-focus-for-quali

    Quali Blog: http://www.quali.com/blog/

     

    Follow Quali on:

    LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, G+

     

    About Quali

    Quali is the leading provider of Cloud Sandboxes for automating the DevOps lifecycle. We give innovators control over their world by enabling them to create personalized replicas of even the most complex production environments. The Global 100 depend on Quali to help them deliver their products and services to market faster with better quality and reduced costs.

    Contact:

    JoAnn Yamani

    Quali@GutenbergPR.com

    408-781-5719

     

  • Polatis and Quali Deliver Dynamic Fiber Layer Management Solution for Automating Network Equipment and System Lab Testing

    New solution enables dynamic provisioning of Layer 1 resources to create flexible “production-like” environments for network equipment and system-wide testing.

    Bedford, MA and Santa Clara, CA – February 4, 2016 – Polatis, the performance leader in all-optical switching, and Quali, the leading provider of cloud sandbox software for DevOps automation, have developed and delivered an integrated fiber layer management solution.  Quali’s CloudShell cloud sandboxing platform integrated with Polatis’ family of fiber layer switching products provides an easy-to-use and extremely flexible solution for configuring fiber layer connectivity on-demand.  The joint solution enables infrastructure vendors, data center operators and network service providers to quickly, and simply, execute complex equipment, system and service testing on high-speed (10/40/100+ Gbps) optical backbones.

    The integration allows Quali’s CloudShell software to control Polatis’ all-optical switching products, providing the ability to reconfigure Layer 1 resources dynamically from anywhere in the world. Further, it enables the orchestration needed to seamlessly manage higher layer network elements, and other connected equipment, from a single control point. Quali’s visual modelling tool dramatically simplifies the process of modelling and provisioning complex connectivity. The low loss and superior optical performance of Polatis switches enable the most accurate and reliable testing, in a wide range of network applications, with virtually no latency and minimal system impairments.

    CloudShell’s cloud sandboxing and DevOps automation platform manages the entire lab and data center infrastructure: inventory, modelling, provisioning, lab-wide connectivity, resource planning and reporting.  Together with Polatis, the result is a highly efficient, multi-tenant system that enables fiber and equipment resources to be easily shared across multiple test topologies simultaneously without concern for conflict.

    “By abstracting complex system environments, CloudShell enables Polatis customers to greatly simplify testing on high speed networks, and greatly increase productivity by enabling our switches to be used independently and simultaneously for multiple test beds,” said Gerald Wesel, president and CEO of Polatis. “Quali truly understands the need for the highest standards in testing, which is evident in the CloudShell platform when coupled with Polatis switches.  Driven by our common customers, we are extremely pleased to partner with Quali to bring them the best possible solution for their testing needs.”

    With CloudShell’s architecture based on abstracting connectivity and Polatis’ rich software interfaces, including NETCONF and OpenFlow, the integration enables testing of SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) applications.  This includes stressing network topologies with intense packet generation, and simulating fiber cuts and degrading optical signals, among other tests.

    “Our customers want to increase the productivity and efficiency of their labs and data centers while at the same time maintaining the highest standard of accuracy and reliability,” said Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali.  “The ability to support existing and emerging environments, along with the flexibility to deploy Polatis’ wide range of fiber layer switches in their environments, makes this an extremely compelling solution.”

    “WWT has been working with both Quali and Polatis for a number of years, and both provide the best solution in their respective market segments of Lab Automation and Optical Switching,” according to Kathi Bomar, WWT Technical Solutions Architect.  “Not only will this partnership provide WWT with a tool for our internal Labs and technical showcases, but we look forward to helping our Networking and Data Center clients implement the combined solutions utilizing Cisco, Polatis and Quali.  We believe our customers will benefit from the automation of these solutions orchestrated by Quali’s CloudShell, as can be seen in WWT’s Advanced Technology Center.”

    Polatis is the only all-optical switch vendor to release a NETCONF interface and associated YANG models required for integration with transport SDN and network functions                           virtualization (NFV) management platforms. Polatis’ range of embedded SDN and network management interfaces include NETCONF, OpenFlow, REST, TL1 and SNMP.
    About Quali Quali is the leading software provider of Cloud Sandboxes.  Their innovative CloudShell software automates the DevOps lifecycle, by providing dev, test, QA, and compliance teams personal replicas of their production environments enabling total control over the development, test, and release of products and applications.  The Global 100 depend on Quali to ensure speed to market while enhancing the quality of the products they deliver to customers. For more information visit www.qualisystems.com.

    About Polatis
    Polatis delivers the world’s lowest loss all-optical switching solutions for remote fiber-layer provisioning, protection, monitoring, reconfiguration and test, with over 3 billion port-hours accumulated in service to date.   Dependable, field-proven DirectLight™  optical matrix switch technology scales from 4×4 to 192×192 ports, applying class-leading performance to provide dynamic optical networking for telecommunications, data center, government, test and video markets.  For more information, please visit www.polatis.com.

    Matt Burke
    matthew.burke@polatis.com
    +1 603.315.0618