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  • Sumo Logic Launches Powerful Global Threat Benchmarking Service for Amazon Web Services

    New Global Intelligence Service for Amazon GuardDuty to Deliver Virtually Real-Time Actionable Insights to Benchmark, Prioritize, and Optimize Security Posture For AWS Workloads and Data

    REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – June 25, 2019 – Sumo Logic, a leading cloud-native, machine data analytics platform that delivers continuous intelligence, today announced at AWS re:Inforce 2019 the Sumo Logic Global Intelligence Service for Amazon GuardDuty to deliver virtually real-time actionable insights that allow customers to benchmark themselves against other adopters of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure to further strengthen cloud security posture, improve threat detection, and enhance regulatory compliance. Sumo Logic will be showcasing the new service at AWS re:Inforce 2019 this week in Boston at booth #714.

    “In today’s hyper-connected world, organizations are facing rapidly evolving business requirements that demand them to completely rethink their architecture, IT environments and application stacks that comprise the backbone of their businesses,” said Bruno Kurtic, founding Vice President of Product and Strategy, Sumo Logic. “As a multi-tenant, cloud-native machine data analytics platform, Sumo Logic is uniquely positioned to deliver rich context into not only how our customers’ applications and infrastructure stack are performing and behaving, but also how that behavior and performance differs from best-in-class organizations. This level of insight helps customers identify unusual patterns, outlier events and key performance and risk indicators that impact application performance and availability, as well as critical threats that could adversely affect an organization’s environment, or worse, their customers.”

    The Sumo Logic Global Intelligence Service for Amazon GuardDuty analyzes globally active threats detected by the Amazon GuardDuty service to provide crucial insights and context into how an organization’s overall threat profile differs from industry peers and identifies rare or critical threats operating in the organization’s environment. For instance, Sumo Logic can detect and highlight threats that rarely occur globally but are actively operating inside a customer’s environment such as attempted communication with XorDDos malware or other threats that might otherwise be hidden underneath a mountain of more common events.

    “As a global consultancy, there are hundreds if not thousands of potential security threats and events that pass through our organization on any given day, making it a challenge to not only track, but prioritize how to handle these events,” said Philip Duldig, senior security analyst at ThoughtWorks. “As an early adopter of Sumo Logic’s Global Intelligence Service for Amazon GuardDuty, the biggest value we’ve experienced is the ability to get actionable insights to prioritize and benchmark rare or non-frequent security events from our AWS workloads so we can optimize our security posture. I also love that I can compare global benchmarking data with my local data, to see how we are stacking up.”

    The Sumo Logic Global Intelligence Service highlights critical differences between a customer’s overall threat profile and forward-thinking leaders that could be a result of misconfiguration, active intrusion or simply a lack of understanding or focus on specific attack vectors. With powerful data insights into how a security program is performing, AWS customers can easily identify abnormal activity directly in the Sumo Logic platform and take immediate action to resolve those security issues before they impact their business.

    “With the rise of DevSecOps and an ever-expanding global threat landscape, it’s more important than ever before for organizations to constantly monitor their environments and workloads for malicious activity,” said Dan Plastina, Vice President, Security Services, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “The Sumo Logic platform can complement Amazon GuardDuty’s existing threat insights, making it even easier for security teams to detect threats and improve their cloud security posture.”

    Using the Sumo Logic Global Intelligence Service for Amazon GuardDuty, customers can gain deep insight into their threat vectors to:

    • Benchmark: Provides additional insights into various threat vectors and attacks to benchmark against what is normal for these attacks, how many users have seen similar attacks, and what is most and least common across AWS users
    • Prioritize: Get the right priority around security events based on rare events
    • Optimize: Take action to improve security postures by triaging and prioritizing efforts toward specific alerts and security best practices

    The Sumo Logic Global Intelligence Service is an operational and security benchmarking service that leverages machine learning and statistical analysis to uncover global key performance indicators (KPIs) and key risk indicators (KRIs). These global KPI and KRI benchmarks allow organizations to measure their technology choice, performance, and behavior against the world’s leading adopters of new technologies, modern architectures and cloud infrastructures.

    “We developed the Sumo Logic Global Intelligence Service benchmark to help our customers accelerate the adoption of modern technologies such as cloud services and new application components that power their digital initiatives and differentiate them from the competition,” said Kurtic. “This not only sets a standard for our customers, but it also provides a clear line of sight into how to improve their current processes and programs to remain competitive in the digital era. That’s why we’re committed to broadening the breadth and depth of the Global Intelligence Service and look forward to providing benchmarking insights to every part of our customers’ development, operations and security management lifecycles.”

    Sumo Logic GIS for Amazon GuardDuty is now generally available to Sumo Logic customers. For more information, visit the Sumo Logic for Amazon GuardDuty page, or stop by Sumo Logic booth #714 at AWS re:Inforce in Boston this week for a demo and to chat with our experts.

    To learn more about the Sumo Logic Global Intelligence Service, check out the press release.

    Additional Resources

    • Learn how to quickly leverage and centralize visibility into the security of AWS environment
    • Download the 2018 “State of Modern Applications & DevSecOps in the Cloud” report
    • Sign up for a free trial of the Sumo Logic Global Intelligence Service for Amazon GuardDuty

    About Sumo Logic

    Sumo Logic is a secure, cloud-native, machine data analytics service, delivering real-time, continuous intelligence from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across the entire application lifecycle and stack. More than 2,000 customers around the globe rely on Sumo Logic for the analytics and insights to build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures. With Sumo Logic, customers gain a multi-tenant, service-model advantage to accelerate their shift to continuous innovation, increasing competitive advantage, business value and growth.

    Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic is a privately held company based in Redwood City, Calif. and is backed by Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, DFJ Growth, Franklin Templeton, Greylock Partners, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tiger Global Management. For more information, visit www.sumologic.com.

     

     

  • Sumo Logic Completes $110 Million Funding Round to Further Fuel Growth and Expansion

    Battery Ventures, Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton Sign on to Back Sumo Logic’s Industry Leading Continuous Intelligence Platform

    REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – May 8, 2019 – Sumo Logic, the leading cloud-native, machine data analytics platform that delivers continuous intelligence, today announced a $110 million funding round led by Battery Ventures, with contributions from new investors including Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton, as well as participation from existing investors.  With a current valuation over $1 billion, a record FY19 achievement of more than $100 million in revenue, and over 2,000 customers worldwide leveraging its service, Sumo Logic is firmly positioned as the SaaS machine data analytics leader of choice for the cloud era.

    “Sumo Logic’s growth is driven by the shift to digital business and cloud adoption across all industries and companies of all sizes,” said Ramin Sayar, president and CEO, Sumo Logic. “We have proven that we are the platform of choice for not only cloud-native companies, but also enterprise companies and their cloud migration initiatives. It’s great to have such a powerful set of leading investors and ecosystem partners as we accelerate our category leadership.”

    This $110 million in funding brings total funding to date to $345 million. The investments will continue to fuel Sumo Logic’s business – spanning engineering, sales, and global operations – with an emphasis on extending the platform analytics capabilities of its service to further address the operational, security and business requirements of modern businesses as they rapidly adopt new multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud infrastructure, architecture, tools, and processes.

    “We have been tracking the Sumo Logic team for some time, and admire the company’s early understanding of the massive cloud-native opportunity and the rise of new, modern application architectures,” said Dharmesh Thakker, general partner, Battery Ventures. “The company’s fast-growing business dovetails with Battery’s larger thesis on “OpenCloud”—open-source and cloud-native technologies working with, not against, new cloud distribution models—and we are thrilled to partner with the team to capture the significant opportunity ahead.”

    “We are excited to join Sumo Logic at this important moment in the industry-wide transition to cloud computing,” said Jonathan Curtis, Vice President, Franklin Templeton. “As the only cloud-native DevSecOps platform built to address the challenges of digital businesses, we believe Sumo Logic is well positioned to capture a significant share of its market.”

    Since the last funding round in June 2017, Sumo Logic’s business has scaled significantly as a result of its focused multi-year growth strategy including:

    Rapid revenue growth and customer acquisition – The company increased its customer count to over 2,000 globally, representing every major vertical and company size, from born-in-the-cloud leaders like Airbnb, Pinterest, The Pokemon Co. International, Samsung SmartThings, and Zuora, to digital transformation enterprises such as ABinBev, Adobe, Alaska Airlines, BBC, Genesys, Hearst Media, Infor, Levi’s, Marriott, Pitney Bowes and USA TODAY NETWORK.

    Platform innovation and company expansion – The Sumo Logic service is among the most sophisticated multi-tenant, cloud-native, analytics platforms in the world. The company has continued to drive innovation of the platform to help meet the ever-changing needs of its customers. A few notable highlights:

    • Unveiled beta cloud SIEM solution to democratize security analytics across traditional IT and new cloud models including DevSecOps
    • Introduced a new category of analytics insights with Global Intelligence Service, designed to extend machine learning and benchmarking data to new teams and use cases across the enterprise
    • Differentiated platform enhancements to better monitor and troubleshoot distributed microservices-based architectures such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Amazon EKS to drive better customer experiences
    • Scaled number of employees to more than 500 and expanded global footprint in Europe, Japan and across Asia-Pacific (APAC) to meet the growing demand for cloud-native machine data analytics

    Addition of key executive leadership – In the past 12 months, Sumo Logic has welcomed a number of new leaders to the team. These include the company’s first independent board members Randy Gottfried, Chuck Robel and Barracuda CEO BJ Jenkins. In addition, Sumo Logic added Sydney Carey as chief financial officer, and Kiki Haar as general counsel, among others.

    Industry recognition – Sumo Logic continues to garner significant industry recognition including: 2019 Best Workplaces in Technology by Great Place to Work® and FORTUNE, Forbes Cloud 100 List, JMP Securities’ 2018 Hot 100 List, Wealthfront 2019 Career Launching Company, CRN 20 Coolest Cloud Security Vendor and Business Analytics Company and more.

    Additional Resources

    • Attend Illuminate 2019, Sumo Logic’s User Conference September 11-12. The event is expected to attract 1,000 experts who build, run and secure modern applications and cloud infrastructure
    • Sign up for a free trial of Sumo Logic

    About Sumo Logic

    Sumo Logic is a secure, cloud-native, machine data analytics service, delivering real-time, continuous intelligence from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across the entire application lifecycle and stack. Nearly 2,000 customers around the globe rely on Sumo Logic for the analytics and insights to build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures. With Sumo Logic, customers gain a multi-tenant, service-model advantage to accelerate their shift to continuous innovation, increasing competitive advantage, business value and growth.

    Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic is a privately held company based in Redwood City, Calif. and is backed by Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, DFJ, Franklin Templeton, Greylock Partners, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tiger Global Management. For more information, visit www.sumologic.com

     

  • Sumo Logic Strengthens Executive Team with Appointments of First-Ever Chief Financial, Marketing, Development and Communications Officers and General Counsel

    Leader in Continuous Intelligence and Machine Data Analytics Deepens Leadership Bench Across Key Functions to Execute Multi-Year Growth Strategy

    REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Nov. 15, 2018 – Sumo Logic, the leading cloud-native, machine data analytics platform that delivers continuous intelligence, today announced the expansion of its executive bench with strategic hires and appointments across finance, marketing, communications, legal and engineering to help lead the company through its next growth phase. Sydney Carey, most recently chief financial officer (CFO) of Duo Security, and Kiki Haar, former general counsel and chief privacy officer (CPO) at Informatica, have joined Sumo Logic as CFO and general counsel, respectively.

    “Sumo Logic is executing on a multi-year strategy to be the category leader in continuous intelligence to ultimately democratize machine data for our customers,” said Ramin Sayar, president and CEO, Sumo Logic. “As part of this journey, we’re growing the business and our teams considerably to scale operations, bring new innovations to market, and meet the processes and requirements demanded of high-growth category leaders. I am honored to have Sydney and Kiki join our executive team, and look forward to working closely with them to accelerate our momentum and continue to deliver on our core purpose of empowering the people who power modern business.”

    Carey is an accomplished and highly regarded executive with deep expertise in public markets, corporate finance and accounting, and has extensive experience in leading public companies and pre-IPO organizations, as both an executive and a board member. Prior to Duo Security, Carey served as CFO of Apttus, Zscaler, MongoDB and TIBCO. A San Francisco Business Times’ Bay Area CFO of the Year, Carey’s broad financial experience includes two decades of operational and strategic leadership roles.

    “Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of helping lead several of the fastest growing and innovative SaaS companies through phases of high growth, and in my view, Sumo Logic is executing at every level to be the next market disruptor,” said Carey. “Significant investments in the platform, talent and go-to-market strategy are a strong indication of the company’s plans for continued global success and I look forward to working with the leadership team to take Sumo Logic through its next phase of growth.”

    Kiki Haar is an established privacy and financial executive with nearly 20 years of experience, most recently serving as senior vice president, general counsel and CPO at Informatica. Prior to that, she spent nearly a decade at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati law firm.

    The company also announced the appointment of John Coyle as vice president of business development. Coyle brings more than 20 years of industry experience and insight across security, DevOps, open source software and mobility. He comes to Sumo Logic from Sauce Labs and also held similar positions at MobileIron, Symantec and more.

    Additionally, the company announced other key appointments, including Suku Krishnaraj as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Aaron Feigin as Chief Communications Officer (CCO) and Sandeep Khanna as Chief Development Officer (CDO). These appointments are a reinforcement of Sumo Logic’s commitment to doubling down on developing a differentiated and world-class machine data analytics platform, driving ongoing growth into enterprise markets and continuing to build a global brand affinity with new and existing customers.

    These executive hires and new promotions come on the heels of record company growth for Sumo Logic as well as the appointment of new independent board members, BJ Jenkins, CEO of Barracuda and Chuck Robel, current chairman of the board for GoDaddy, former chairman of McAfee and veteran board member at AppDynamics, Informatica, Palo Alto Networks and Autodesk. The continued addition of proven and experienced executives enable the company to strengthen its ability to scale all functions across the business that are critical for the company’s go-to-market strategy and ability to continue deliver on its mission to empower the people who power modern businesses.

    Other Recent Corporate Milestones Include:

    • Achieved record revenue for fiscal year 2018.
    • Broadened global footprint with recently established Japan subsidiary, Sumo Japan KK.
    • Announced the industry’s first-ever cloud SIEM solution built for DevSecOps.
    • Added marquee customers and upgrades to its growing customer base, including Hudl, Major League Baseball, Marriott, Pitney Bowes, Salesforce, Samsung SmartThings, the Pokemon Company International, Thomson Reuters, USA TODAY NETWORK, Xero, and more.
    • Hosted Illuminate, the company’s second annual user conference that brought together over 600 Sumo Logic customers, partners and industry thought leaders for 40+ sessions and trainings over two days.
    • Named to the Forbes 2018 Cloud 100 list for a third consecutive year and to the JMP Securities’ ninth annual Hot 100 report of The Best Privately-Held Software Companies in 2018.

    About Sumo Logic
    Sumo Logic is a secure, cloud-native, machine data analytics service, delivering real-time, continuous intelligence from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across the entire application lifecycle and stack. More than 1,600 customers around the globe rely on Sumo Logic for the analytics and insights to build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures. With Sumo Logic, customers gain a multi-tenant, service-model advantage to accelerate their shift to continuous innovation, increasing competitive advantage, business value and growth.

    Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic is a privately held company based in Redwood City, Calif. and is backed by Accel Partners, DFJ, Greylock Partners, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures. For more information, visit www.sumologic.com.

  • Sauce Labs Streamlines DevOps with Sumo Logic

    Sauce Labs Streamlines DevOps with Sumo Logic

    Log management and analysis is a crucial element of effective DevOps. In an effort to work more effectively and efficiently at the same time, gathering and analyzing feedback provides essential input that organizations can use to correct issues and enhance performance. There are a variety of log management tools out there, but Sauce Labs solved its log management and analysis challenge with Sumo Logic.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud recently had a chance to sit down with Joe Alfaro, VP of Products for Sauce Labs, to talk about the decision to go with Sumo Logic’s software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based log management solution.

    Prior to making the switch to Sumo Logic, Sauce Labs was using an ELK stack for log management. Alfaro explained that the ELK stack was tedious to maintain. “Our ELK-based solution required constant care and feeding. We were always having to make sure we had enough disk space and we were always fixing bugs or adding new features. We had a small team dedicated to management of this solution. In addition, it was difficult to bring developers up to speed on the tool, since documentation was not always kept up to date and there were no training materials.”

    The effort required to troubleshoot and maintain the tool itself got in the way of Sauce Labs’ ability to use the tool to debug production issues, and used precious developer resources that were needed elsewhere. Sauce Labs decided it needed a new tool—something that was very flexible and cloud-based, so the company wouldn’t need to worry about maintenance or storage.

    To find this new tool, Sauce Labs did proof-of-concept testing with a handful of well-known vendors: Graylog, Loggly, Splunk and Sumo Logic. Alfaro was emphatic about the Sumo Logic experience. “Implementation was ridiculously easy. We were up and running within a day,” he said, adding, “Sumo won out as it has the combination of: ease of use, includes all of the features we wanted, is cloud-based and within our budget.”

    The switch to Sumo Logic has also helped the company streamline its DevOps practices. Sumo Logic provides a communication tool between the developers and ops engineers, acting as a common language that allows DevOps teams to work together to identify the root of problems quickly and easily.

    Alfaro shared that the bridge between Dev and Ops provided by Sumo Logic has led to improved service, as well as savings in both time and cost. “It also finds patterns in our logs that lead to better analysis in discovering problems. This machine-learning-like pattern discovery is invaluable to getting to the root is issues. These days we spend minutes finding problems rather that the hours or days we used to spend in the past, before Sumo. This leads to more uptime and more developer productivity.”

    Of course, your mileage may vary. Graylog, Splunk and other log management and analysis tools are formidable in their own right. If you’re in the market for a new log management solution, though, Sumo Logic should be on your short list for consideration. If your results are anything like Sauce Labs’ results, it would be a crazy move not to check out Sumo Logic.

    — Tony Bradley

  • DevOps Chat: Christian Beedgen, CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic

    DevOps Chat: Christian Beedgen, CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic

    Christian Beedgen has years and years of experience in collecting large amounts of data and making it useful to Dev, Ops and security teams. I recently had a chance to sit down with Christian and talk about what is driving innovation in the data analysis market and how Sumo Logic is responding. While our conversation is short, Christian gives some great insights that I think you will find useful.

    Below is the streaming audio of our conversation and below that is the transcript so you can follow along.

    Enjoy!

    Alan Shimel:                Hi. This is Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, here for another DevOps Chat. I’m very happy to be joined by Christian Beedgen, CTO and Co-Founder of Sumo Logic. Christian, I didn’t butcher your name too bad I hope.

    Christian Beedgen:     No, it’s quite fine.

    Alan Shimel:                Welcome. Christian, we had set this up some time ago that I wanted to interview you because there’s so much going on with Sumo Logic, but I realize maybe some of our listeners may not be familiar with the company yet though. So before we dive into some details, can you give us kind of a high level, a 50,000 foot overview of Sumo and what you guys are doing there?

    Christian Beedgen:     Absolutely. Sumo is a machine data analytics company. That’s a highfalutin way of saying that we’re doing log management. We have been around since 2010. The big differentiator that we brought to the market, among other things on a high level, is that we actually offer this as a service. So there’s nothing to install. It’s all focused on actually using the product to make sense out of your logs, out of your machine data for troubleshooting and analysis of application logs and everything up and down the stack basically.

    Alan Shimel:                Excellent. So logging as a service. And you’re right; the idea is a very 50,000 foot view of it. Christian, the dev-ops market of course is exploding and it’s a very hot area for tools vendor. Sumo Logic in particular, though, is always sort of at or near the top in terms of awareness among the dev-ops community. What do you attribute that to?

    Christian Beedgen:     Well, I think we are in a very fortunate position of having good product market fit basically. I come from this space of log management, as does my co-founder. We might not know much, but we certainly know a bit about how to build products that help people managing logs.

    Logs and anything that has to do with monitoring really are at the very center of any kind of operational activity. So it’s not a surprise to me that dev-ops folks are excited about what Sumo is doing, because it’s part and parcel of what they have to be able to do and I think we support it really well, and we end up in their toolbox more often than not.

    Alan Shimel:                Excellent. Christian, sort of the new messaging or new functionality that the Sumo folks seem to be really spreading right now is the idea of unifying logs with metrics. Can you give our audience an idea; what do you mean by that?

    Christian Beedgen:     I’m actually extremely happy to be able to talk about that because that has been cooking for a long time, and as of April we are now able to talk about it publicly. This goes back all the way in my mind to 2010. I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time.

    From my own observation, of course at Sumo we’re running a pretty large scale distributed system, so we have a lot of insight into just from of our own sort of dog-fooding as to what we need in order to run a large scale system and in talking to customers and observing what they actually need in order to make their applications run better and troubleshoot them better and get them back in line better.

    Logs are certainly a very important part of that, but the other side of the coin when it comes to machine data are metrics. So what are metrics? Metrics are essentially time series data. It usually comes from the hosts. It starts with CPU, I/O metrics, network metrics, and then goes up the stack all the way into the applications, you know, how many logins per second, what’s your API response times, and those kinds of things.

    While those can be potentially captured in logs, logs are not necessarily the most efficient way of processing metrics. But metrics are extremely important and I think they kind of go together with logs in order to give you kind of a full overview as to what your systems are doing.

    We know about this need from our internal use, from our internal operations use cases, obviously, and we’ve heard it from customers as well that they don’t really like to do what we call sort of swivel chair analytics, where you have to like jump back and forth between different tools, one for metrics, one for logs, one for something else. We think we are in a good position to unify those things and this is why we are now basically bringing to market an additional metrics capability as part of Sumo Logic, and instead of building that as a second separate product, we decided that, hey, it’s really part of the same high level use case and sort of our unique proposition, value proposition there is, that we can do it in the same tool and we can kind of amalgamate the two different data sources and drive integrated use cases out of that, if that makes any sense.

    Alan Shimel:                Great. I just want to make clear to our audience. This is not officially released yet or it’s in a beta or early access form still or what is it?

    Christian Beedgen:     That’s correct. We have announced it. We announced it in April. We have obviously been working with design partners for a while. A number of our customers are actually using it as we speak, and we continue to get great feedback from them, and also, partially stuff that we now realize we probably still need to fix, you know, as usual when you’re deciding to roll out new functionality.

    We are currently planning to make this generally available by the end of July. So we’ll cross our fingers that we’ll hit that date. So it’s actually going to be in the market for everybody really, really soon. In the meantime, we allow folks to basically sign up to get onboard as early as possible and we’ve seen great interest in that as well.

    Alan Shimel:                Excellent. Now if any of our listeners who are not currently Sumo customers are interested in this, and I of course can see why they can, Christian, is there any place they can sign up for this or at least get more information, if not actually become sort of an early user or early access?

    Christian Beedgen:     Absolutely. Just to go SumoLogic.com and it’ll lead you there.

    Alan Shimel:                Great. Christian, if you don’t mind, we have a few minutes left and I want to sort of pivot a little bit. It’s basically my own thing. I actually just started writing – or finished writing a survey we finished up on containers and container technology. It certainly seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. What are you doing? What’s your strategy around that? I want to ask a little bit about: does this pose a challenge for Sumo or a log is a log is a log?

    Christian Beedgen:     That’s actually a very good question. It actually turns out that we had to do a couple of things in order to stay ahead of the curve there, and that started in I think 2014. That’s kind of year that Docker broke, the way that I remember it. Then we started looking at what does this really mean, even for our own operations of course. But then there was a major voice coming from our customers, who of course jumped into this right away.

    It turns out that the way that you collect logs changes actually a little bit when you have the additional abstraction layer of a container. So we basically throughout 2015 wrapped our heads around that and figured out how to actually collect the logs from a containerized environment. There’s been a couple of iterations on that, of course obviously moving very fast, and they have also made some advances on how the logging works as far as Docker is concerned.

    But we now have first-party support for what I call sort of a comprehensive monitoring strategy for Docker. So that includes the logs as well as the metrics or what’s called stats in the Docker world, as well as these sort of Docker events and the additional metadata that can be queried out of Docker. So you know not just what the idea of your container is, but also what the images are that it’s running, et cetera. We can pull all of that into the Sumo and, on top of that, we have a really nice extension to Sumo that we call an app. That’s kind of our app for Docker that our customers are using.

    So it did change. The major change really came from the way that – technically speaking, the major change was that we had to do a couple of things in order to be able to collect they logs and the metrics, because that was basically the biggest change in terms of the low level stuff.

    At the higher level, the good news about the Docker stuff is I think that it provides a good amount of metadata, if you know how to get it, and mostly it’s with the Docker Inspect API that makes the analysis of the environment, which is now even more highly abstracted of course. You might not even know anymore which container runs on which source, et cetera. So there’s a lot of additional metadata that makes that actually really nifty. So I like that.

    Alan Shimel:                Very cool. Christian, we only have a few minutes left here, just another minute or two and I have two other things, two other questions on my list for you. Containers are certainly a very hot item. Dev-ops is very hyped. What do you think is next? What’s the next big thing?

    Christian Beedgen:     That’s one I think everybody is always thinking about that. There was a point when I realized what AWS Lambda actually was, and I was like, “Wow. That is really, really cool.” I don’t know yet exactly where it’s going to go, but I think it’s intuitive to me that in many ways Amazon has actually already invented the future after containers, and at the same time they were releasing the elastic containers. So I thought that was _____.

    Anyway, I think the term that has been emerging there is serverless, serverless computing. I think that is actually super-interesting, considering how complicated the stacks have become. It sort of adds yet another layer of abstraction, but basically one that destroys all the other underlying layers of the stack. I think that’s a really interesting thing that’s going on right now.

    Alan Shimel:                Sure, serverless computing for a no-ops age.

    Christian Beedgen:     There you go.

    Alan Shimel:                Let’s get rid of everything.

    Christian Beedgen:     Let’s make a t-shirt.

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah. Hey, once we get a t-shirt some VC will invest.

    Christian Beedgen:     There you go.

    Alan Shimel:                Anyway, Christian, last question because we are just about out of time. I often ask guests this. For people listening in, one book, if you can recommend one book to people that they should read that you find enlightening, helpful, must read, what would it be?

    Christian Beedgen:     The best thing that I’ve read recently is – oh, man, that’s a heavy-duty one. We are actually doing an internal book club on this and it’s been blowing people’s minds. There’s like matter all over the place. It’s called The Principles of Product Development Flow by a guy called Reinertsen. It’s kind of a second generation Lean applied to product development. The guy’s an academic. I love that book. I think it’s kind of mind expanding, so The Principles of Product Development Flow. That’s an awesome book.

    Alan Shimel:                If it’s on Amazon, I’ll try to include it in the show notes, so people can go look at it. Great. That’s a great suggestion and thank you. Christian, we’re over-time actually, but it’s okay, not too bad. I wanted to thank you for joining us on this edition of DevOps Chats. Continued success with Sumo Logic and we hope to check back in on you soon.

    Christian Beedgen:     Sounds good. Thanks for having me, Alan.

    Alan Shimel:                Okay. Christian Beedgen – and I know I always mispronounce his last name – but CTO/Co-Founder of Sumo Logic, thanks for being this week’s guest on DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Until next time, have a great day.

  • Sumo Logic Enables DevOps With Deep Data Insights Into AWS Lambda

    New Integrations With AWS Lambda Offer Developers Improved Monitoring and Correlate Key Performance Indicators for Better Visibility Into Building Serverless Applications

    REDWOOD CITY, CA–(Marketwired – May 25, 2016) –  Sumo Logic, a leading cloud-native, machine data analytics service, today announced the availability of its Sumo Logic App for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda  allowing DevOps and developers to monitor the health of all AWS Lambda functions and better manage the associated costs. In addition, the Sumo Logic Lambda blueprint is now available to route Amazon CloudWatch logs to Sumo Logic for advanced analysis and real-time visualization. The Sumo Logic App and integration enable deeper, real-time visibility into building serverless applications and optimizing AWS deployments.

    “At The Washington Post, it’s critical that we can get a real-time picture of our app performance and stability since the user experience is paramount,” said Hardip Singh, mobile development manager for The Washington Post. “With the AWS Lambda function built from the blueprint for Sumo Logic, we were able to trigger and route our Amazon CloudWatch logs to Sumo Logic for analysis, accelerating our ability to connect with users to troubleshoot potential issues that arise.”

    AWS Lambda lets developers run code at scale with high availability, without provisioning or managing servers. Users pay only for the compute time they consume, while running code for virtually any type of application or backend service with zero administration. Integration with Sumo Logic’s cloud-native machine data analytics platform allows developers to:

    • Analyze operational and performance trends across all the AWS Lambda functions in an account;
    • Gain visibility into the costs of AWS Lambda functions and optimize resources where appropriate;
    • Track the adoption and performance for different versions of a single AWS Lambda function such as resizing an application to fit a mobile device, tablet or laptop, which can help evaluate the impact of that particular function.

    “AWS Lambda changes the way developers design and scale their dynamic applications built on the AWS Cloud,” said Tim Wagner, General Manager, AWS Serverless Compute, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Sumo Logic has made it even easier for DevOps teams and developers to troubleshoot and monitor modern applications. With today’s release, they can analyze large volumes of data at scale, gaining top-to-bottom visibility in both development and production environments for serverless applications. Using the Sumo Logic app for AWS Lambda, developers can monitor the health of their AWS Lambda functions while easily gaining insights into usage and costs.”

    Sumo Logic helps developers and DevOps teams accelerate the development and deployment of applications in a modern software delivery lifecycle. Its machine data analytics platform is the industry’s first to natively ingest, index and analyze structured metrics data and unstructured log data together in real-time, transforming a variety of data types into real-time continuous intelligence for modern applications and business insights.

    “Development teams are adopting real-time analytic technologies that are integrated with the modern DevOps toolchain to improve all aspects of their application lifecycle,” said Bruno Kurtic, Founding VP of Product and Strategy at Sumo Logic. “As experts in helping organizations build, run and secure modern applications, Sumo Logic delivers a cloud-native, machine data analytics platform that gives AWS users operational insights into their AWS Lambda functions as well as other application components running on AWS so they can quickly and cost-effectively monitor, troubleshoot, and scale their applications.”

    Additional Resources

    • Read the blog to get a deeper look at how the Sumo Logic App for AWS Lambda works
    • Learn more about the Sumo Logic App for AWS Lambda
    • Sign up for a free trial of Sumo Logic

    About Sumo Logic
    Sumo Logic is a secure, cloud-native, machine data analytics service, delivering real-time, continuous intelligence from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across the entire application lifecycle and stack. More than 1,000 customers around the globe rely on Sumo Logic for the analytics and insights to build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures. With Sumo Logic, customers gain a multi-tenant, service-model advantage to accelerate their shift to continuous innovation, increasing competitive advantage, business value and growth.

    Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic is a privately held company based in Redwood City, CA and is backed by Accel Partners, DFJ, Greylock Partners, IVP, Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures. For more information, visit www.sumologic.com.

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  • Netskope Draws Strength from DevOps In Support Of Scrum Development

    Netskope Draws Strength from DevOps In Support Of Scrum Development

    Netskope keeps enterprises and their data secure despite the unbridled mix of approved and unapproved mobile apps in the market and on employee devices. Employees use unapproved mobile apps (BYOA) on their BYOD smartphones, tablets, and laptops when connected to networks away from the enterprise. IT professionals are keenly interested in tools that help them to have visibility into these apps and devices and to secure them.

    Enterprises face many issues with mobile apps. They confront challenges where data location and access as well as security are concerned when complying with PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, FISMA, FERPA, and the ISO standards. Netskope works to control app usage, protect enterprise data, and maintain compliance on various endpoints whether the device is on premise or remote / mobile, all in real-time.

    “Netskope uses a distributed policy enforcement model that lets your people use these apps securely so you don’t have to block them completely,” says Abhay Kulkarni, VP of Engineering, Netskope.

    Netskope’s Security Duties Dictate Its Development Path

    “We do not follow Continuous Delivery,” says Kulkarni. Here are two of the many reasons for that.

    First, Netskope’s customers demand that software releases are predictable. “Our customers are large enterprises that want predictable change windows so they can ensure that they make the necessary changes on their side or that they prepare for our updates,” says Kulkarni.

    Second, because Netskope is a SOC-1 Type-II and SOC-2 Type-II certified company, it must comply with the requirements that comprise these certifications. Tightly-knit change management is critical to SOC certification. “As we do each change, we need to make sure that all changes meet the security, availability, integrity, and confidentiality criteria of these certifications by testing the entire product end-to-end,” says Kulkarni.

    But Netskope follows other DevOps principles such as using its own adaptation of a well-accepted source control workflow model as well as an automation model, a model for bootstrapping machines, and also models for software installation and change management.

    Netskope performs a balancing act between complying with SOC-1 and -2 trust services criteria and principles and maintaining rapid feature development. On the one hand, they manage to limit what individual developers can do on production machines—many times disallowing access. On the other hand, they use Sumo Logic to enable their coders to peruse anonymized logs in order to gauge how the service they instantiated is working.

    Goals, Tools, & Challenges

    “The key goal for Netskope’s DevOps approach is to ensure developer responsibility for running, monitoring, and scaling their services,” says Kulkarni. Netskope’s developers and operations staff work together from design through development while complying with a common framework, which helps in resolving development issues and brings consistency to data center operations, according to Kulkarni.

    Netskope holds developers individually accountable for making their software ready for automated deployment. To help with that, Netskope uses familiar tools such as Ansible, which helps Netskope to automate everything in production. “Right from bootstrapping a machine to changing network configurations, we automate all commonly repeated tasks,” says Kulkarni.

    Netskope deploys Sumo Logic agents using Ansible as a part of bootstrapping so that machines are configured from the get go to send logs to Sumo Logic. “Each service has standard logging methods that allow Netskope to create performance dashboards and to track errors,” says Kulkarni. Netskope uses a number of other tools that are commonplace in DevOps, such as Nagios, a monitoring tool and various external monitoring tools for tracking end user performance.

    The biggest challenge for Netskope was not in tooling but in building a DevOps culture where developers lead the charge in responsibility for quality, error-free operation of their services. “In a non-SaaS world, developers ship a version of their product and celebrate. However, shipping a SaaS product is just the beginning. There is really no celebration since you are now responsible for the upkeep of the services,” explains Kulkarni.

    A Trip Through Netskope’s Development Process

    Netskope starts with a Scrum sprint planning meeting where in they decide what features to address for the given sprint. “We try to be realistic about our expectations in delivering code in a sprint by applying quality criteria—i.e. we expect code to be of a certain quality or else we cannot deploy it,” says Kulkarni.

    Then developers bundle various modules on a single branch, which they test for functionality, security, performance, and integration. As the modules and the branch increase in stability, the developers upgrade them from one stack to the next until everything is deemed fit for a production deployment, explains Kulkarni.

    Results

    “Often we see proactive notifications from developers about issues they see in production. Detecting problems before our customers see them is a key benefit of the DevOps model,” says Kulkarni.