It also includes a robust business intelligence and training module that simplifies the collection, visualization, analysis, and distribution of business-critical data.

Integrations with ServiceNow, Jira, Microsoft Power Automate, and Ethereum Blockchain were also added. 

Parasoft and Lattix team up on embedded software security
The partnership combines Parasoft C/C++test’s automated software testing tool suite and Lattix Architect, which provides a fast, visual representation of an application’s architecture for continuous compliance and quality enforcement. 

“Software delivery pipeline automation coupled with Lattix expert services provides embedded safety-critical software development organizations a stable, scalable, and comprehensive DevOps workflow,” Parasoft wrote in a post.

Lattix can provide services to optimize a variety of CI/CD platforms, such as GitLab, using the combination of Lattix Architect and Parasoft C/C++test to improve software delivery.

App Store subscription server notifications to provide real-time data updates on subscriber status
The App Store server notifications provide real-time updates on a subscriber’s status so that developers can create customized user experiences. 

DID_RENEW lets developers know when a subscriber successfully auto-renews and PRICE_INCREASE_CONSENT lets developers know when the App Store starts asking users to agree to a subscription’s new price, so developers can remind them of their service’s value as encouragement to stay subscribed.

A few notifications and top-level objects detailed here will be deprecated in March 2021. 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud P4d instances announced with EC2 UltraClusters Capability
The next-generation accelerated computing instances are powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and AWS petabit-scaled networking to provide a 3 times faster training time and 60% lower costs than previous generation instances. 

P4d instances also offer 400 Gbps network bandwidth with Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA network interfaces to enable direct communication between GPUs across servers for lower latency and higher scaling efficiency, helping to unblock scaling bottlenecks across multi-node distributed workloads, according to Amazon. 

CertTech acquires Butterfield Engineering for test capabilities 
With the acquisition, CertTech aims to focus on custom test system development. 

“The CertTech approach of acquiring companies like Butterfield Engineering and WTI brings these competencies together with fluid teams and interdisciplinary skill sets to transition test programs seamlessly from one step to the next,” CertTech wrote in post

Butterfield Engineering is a specialized test engineering firm focused on modular test systems and test software development.

The post SD Times news digest: AgilePoint PaaS version 8, Parasoft and Lattix team up on embedded software security, and App Store subscription server notifications appeared first on SD Times.

“Even though Kubernetes has emerged as a middle ground between PaaS’s convenience and the control of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), it is still somewhat complicated,” Apurva Joshi, vice president of products at DigitalOcean, wrote in a post. “With the App Platform, you can build, deploy, and scale apps and static sites quickly and easily — much as you can with other PaaS solutions — by simply pointing to your GitHub repository.”

The App platform leverages the power, scale, and flexibility of Kubernetes without exposing developers to its complexity, DigitalOcean explained. Additionally, the platform is built on open standards that provide more visibility into the underlying infrastructure than in a typical PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) environment, according to the company. 

The App Platform supports many popular languages and frameworks including Python, Node.js, Go, PHP, Ruby, Hugo, and Static sites. 

Users can deploy the source code directly from their GitHub repositories with support for GitLab and BitBucket coming soon. With ‘Autodeploy on Push,’ the platform automatically re-deploys the app each time the branch containing the source code is pushed. 

“The App Platform is one of the few PaaS products built on a shared Kubernetes platform. We automatically analyze your code, create containers, and run them on Kubernetes clusters. Since we embrace open, cloud-native standards, there’s little to no code customization needed to use the App Platform,” Joshi stated. 

The solution is now available in three tiers: starter that allows users to build and deploy three static sites for free, basic to prototype apps, and professional to deploy production apps. 

The post DigitalOcean App Platform launched for building, deploying and scaling apps appeared first on SD Times.

I’d take the idea one step further. In its highest form, DevOps is not just any factory, but a ‘lights-out’ factory.

Also called a “dark factory,” a lights-out factory is one so automated it can perform most tasks in the dark, needing only a small team of supervisors to keep an eye on things in the control room. That’s the level of automation DevOps should strive for. 

In a lights-out DevOps factory, submitted code is automatically reviewed for adherence to coding standards, static analysis, security vulnerabilities and automated test coverage. After making it through the first pass, the code gets put through its paces with automated integration, performance, load and end-to-end tests. Only then, after completing all those tests, is it ready for deployment to an approved environment. 

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As for those environments, the lights-out DevOps factory automatically sets them up, provisions them, deploys to them and tears them down as needed. All software configuration, secrets, certificates, networks and so forth spring into being at deploy time, requiring no manual fidgeting with the settings. Application health is monitored down to a fine-grained level, and the actual production runtime performance is visible through intuitive dashboards and queryable operator consoles (the DevOps version of the factory control room). When needed, the system can self-heal as issues are detected.

This might sound like something out of science fiction, but it’s as real as an actual, full-fledged lights-out factory. Which is to say, “real, but rare.” Many automated factories approach lights-out status, but few go all the way. The same could be said of DevOps.

The good news is that you can design a basic factory line that delivers most of the benefits of a “lights-out” operation and isn’t too hard to create. You’ll get most of the ROI just by creating a DevOps dark factory between production and test.

Here is a checklist for putting together your own “almost lights-out” DevOps solution. Don’t worry. None of these decisions are irreversible. You can always change your mind. It will just take some rework.

1. IaaS or PaaS or containers – I recommend PaaS or Containers. Infrastructure as a Service has its place, but it has its downsides on price-point and configuration management. When you’re running a VM, it’s always on, so your spend for the resource is 100 percent though your utilization isn’t maxed out, so you’re paying to keep the VM running even while it’s not in use. The setup and configuration are also more complex, as you have to deploy the bare-metal instance and then deploy a configuration. Lastly, running IaaS, it’s all too easy to just run bespoke VMs and fall back into old habits. I’m a big fan of PaaS because you get a nice price point and just the right amount of configurability, without the added complexity of full specification. Containers are a nice middle ground. The spend for a container cluster is still there, but if you’re managing a large ecosystem, the orchestration capabilities of containers could become the deciding factor.

2. Public cloud or on-premises cloud – I recommend public cloud. Going back to our factory analogy, a hundred years ago factories generated their own power, but that meant they also had to own the power infrastructure and keep people on staff to manage it. Eventually centralized power production became the norm. Utility companies specialized in generating and distributing power, and companies went back to focusing on manufacturing. The same thing is happening with compute infrastructure and the cloud providers. The likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft have taken the place of the power companies, having developed the specialized services and skills needed to run large data centers. I say let them own the problem while you pay for the service.

There are situations where a private cloud can make sense, but it’s largely a function of organizational size. If you’re already running a lot of large data centers, you may have enough core infrastructure and competency in place to make the shift to private cloud. If you decide to go that route, you absolutely must commit to a true DevOps approach. I’ve seen several organizations say they’re doing “private cloud” when in reality they’re doing business as usual and don’t understand why they’re not getting any of the temporal or financial benefits of DevOps. If you find yourself in this situation, do a quick value-stream analysis of your development process, compare it to a lights-out process, and you’ll see nothing’s changed from your old Ops model.

3. Durable storage for databases, queues, etc. – I recommend using a DB service from the cloud provider. Similar to the decision between IaaS and PaaS, I’d rather pay someone else to own the problem. Making any service resilient means having to worry about redundancy and disk management. With a database, queue, or messaging service, you’ll need a durable store for the runtime service. Then, over time, you’ll not only have to patch the service but take down and reattach the storage to the runtime system. This is largely a solved problem from a technological standpoint, but it’s just more complexity to manage. Add in the need for service and storage redundancy and backup and disaster recovery, and the equation gets even more complex. Again, the cloud providers are more than willing to own those problems, and offer cost-effective, scalable solutions for common distributed services that need high durability.

4. SQL vs. NoSQL – Many organizations are still relational database-centric, as they were in the 90’s and 00’s, with the RDBMS the center of the enterprise universe. Relational still has its place, but cloud-native storage options like table, document, and blob provide super-cheap high-performance options. I’ve seen many organizations that basically applied their old standards to the cloud, and said, “Well, you can’t use blob storage because it’s not an approved technology,” or “You can’t use serverless because it’s an ‘unbounded’ resource.” That’s the wrong way to do it. You need to re-examine your application strategy to use the best approach for the price point.

I once had a client whose data changed fairly slowly (every few weeks) but had to be accessed much more frequently. First they tried querying the same static data with the same queries, over and over. The performance was OK, but execution time went down significantly when the DB cache was primed. Then there was a push to give the DB instance more RAM so it could hold more data in the cache. We offered an alternative where we just precomputed static read models and dumped them in blob storage. The cost of the additional storage was a couple dollars a month, where increasing the specs of the DB would have cost more than a hundred a month. We achieved faster performance for less cost, but it required re-evaluating our approach.

5. Mobile – Mobile builds are one of the things that can throw you for a loop. Android is easy, Mac is a little more complicated. You’ll either need a physical Mac for builds, or if you go with Azure DevOps, you can have it run on a Microsoft Mac instance in Azure. Some organizations still haven’t figured out that they need a Mac compute strategy. I once had a team so hamstrung by corporate policy, they were literally trying to figure out how to build a “hack-intosh” because the business wanted to build an iOS app but corporate IT shot down buying any Macs. Once we informed them we couldn’t legally develop on a “hack-intosh,” they just killed the project instead of trying to convince IT to use Mac infrastructure. Yes, they abandoned a project, with a real business case and positive ROI because IT was too rigid.

6. DB versioning – Use a tool like Liquibase or Flyway. Your process can only run as fast as your rate-limiting step, and if you’re still versioning your database by hand, you’ll never go faster than your DBAs can execute scripts. Besides, they have more important things to do.

7. Artifact management, security scanning, log aggregation, monitoring – Don’t get hung up on this stuff. You can figure it out as you go. Get items in your backlog for each of these activities and have a more junior DevOps resource ripple each extension through to the process as its developed.

8. Code promotion – Lay out your strategy to go from Dev to Test to Stage to Prod, and replace any manual setup like networking, certificates and gateways with automated scripts.

9. Secrets – Decide on a basic toolchain for secrets management, even if it’s really basic. There’s just no excuse for storing secrets with the source control. There are even tools like git-secret, black-box, and git-crypt that provide simple tooling and patterns for storing secrets encrypted.

10. CI – Set up and configure your CI tool, including a backup / restore process. When you get more sophisticated, you’ll actually want to apply DevOps to your DevOps, but for now just make sure you can stand up your CI tool in a reasonable amount of time, repeatedly, with backup.

Now that you’ve made some initial technology decisions and established your baseline infrastructure, make sure you have at least one solid reference project. This is a project you keep evergreen and use to develop new extensions and capabilities to your pipelines. You should have an example for each type of application in your ecosystem. This is the project people should refer to when they want to know how to do something. As you evolve your pipelines, updated this project with the latest and greatest features and steps.

For each type of deployment — database, API, front end and mobile — you’ll want to start with a basic assembly line. The key elements to your line will be Build, Unit Testing, Reporting, Artifact Creation. Once you have those, you’ll need to design a process for deploying an artifact into an environment (i.e. deploying to Test, Stage, Prod) with its runtime configuration.

From there, keep adding components to your factory. Choose projects in the order that gets you the most ROI, either by eliminating a constraint or reducing wait time. At each stage, try to make “everything as code.” Always create both a deployment and rollback and exercise the heck out of it all the time.

When it comes to tooling, there are more than enough good open-source options to get you started.

To sum up, going lights-out means committing to making everything code, automated, and tested. You may not get there with every part of your production line, but just by tackling the basics, you’ll be surprised how much you can get done in the dark. 

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Organizations across every industry want to remain competitive, and there is a strong sense of urgency to adapt quickly, or become irrelevant. The pressing need is to secure the right amount of infrastructure flexibility and performance elasticity to manage unpredictable usage volume and geographic dispersion. Many companies are already on this journey, with varying degrees of success.

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A recent Cloud Foundry survey of approximately 600 IT decision makers revealed more than 75 percent are evaluating or using Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), whereas 72 percent are evaluating or using containers. Nearly half (46 percent) are evaluating or using serverless computing. Notably, more than one-third are employing some combination of all these technologies, and it’s in those companies using all three technologies that cloud-native computing is gaining momentum.

Adopting cloud-native architecture is much more than merely moving some workload over to a public cloud vendor. It is an entirely new and different approach to building infrastructure, developing applications and structuring your teams. Below are six steps enterprises must take to ensure a successful transition.

1. Plan to transition to cloud native

The first step in a successful transformation is to make a plan. Many organizations don’t move in the right direction because they begin with the technology. While new technology can be exciting, it can also be daunting. Otherwise, highly beneficial technology can be misused to the point of frustration and abandonment.

At the outset, it’s critical to involve your leadership, partners and customers. Present your findings and high-level plans. Assemble the right team and work together to divide your cloud native journey into phases. Then, break these phases into development projects, sprints and actions. Set clear expectations and frequently collect feedback. Ultimately, both the leadership and the engineering team must be aligned on both the business goals and the key results that the organization hopes to achieve in the short and long term by initiating a transition. Without this mutual understanding, the engineering team risks to prematurely optimize the architecture for use-cases that are irrelevant to the business.

Resist the temptation to pursue the technology before you align your business mission, vision and people with your cloud native aspirations.

2. Transition away from silos to DevOps

Despite the prevalence of Agile methodology, application development is still commonly organized into the following silos: software development, quality assurance and testing, database administration, IT operations, project management, system administration, and release management.

Typically, these silos have different management structure, tools, methods of communication, vocabulary and incentives. These differences correspond to disparate views regarding the mission and implementation of the application development effort.

DevOps is both a methodology and an organizational structure. It aims to break silos open and build a common vocabulary, shared toolsets and broader channels of communication. The goal is to cultivate a culture that intensely focuses on frequent releases of high-quality deliverables. DevOps replace heavy procedures and unnecessary bureaucracy with autonomy and accountability.

3. Move from Waterscrumfall to Continuous Delivery

Today, many Agile teams find themselves immersed in what Dave West calls the waterscrumfall. Yes, it’s good to embrace Agile principles. Too often, however, the organization does not. On many Agile teams, the result of each iteration is not actually a production-grade deliverable. Incidentally, this is the original intent of the Agile Manifesto principle of working software.

What is more common is that the new code is merely a batch that gathers together with other batches downstream. This closely resembles the conventional waterfall model. This apparent reversion to conventional development actually diminishes two key benefits of Agile delivery. Firstly, customers go several weeks without seeing any addition to the value of the application under development. Secondly, the development team endures the same period of time without receiving any truly valuable feedback.

To develop cloud-native apps and realize the benefits of cloud-native architectures, it’s necessary to make complete a shift to continuous delivery (CD). In CD, application changes are deployed automatically—several times a day.

4. Decompose your monolith

Conventional multi-tier monolithic applications are rarely found to function properly if they are moved into the cloud. This is because such a move is usually made with several major, unsupportable assumptions about the deployment environment.

Another inhibitor is that a monolith deployment is closely bound to a static, enduring infrastructure. This is largely incompatible with putative cloud computing expectations for an ephemeral and elastic infrastructure. Since cloud infrastructure doesn’t provide good support for monoliths, it’s necessary to make a plan for breaking a monolithic application into components that can live happily in the cloud.

5. Design a collection of services

In essence, a cloud-native architecture is commonly seen to be a service-based architecture. Optimally, cloud-native applications should be deployed as a collection of cloud services or APIs.

However, while the concepts are readily understood, many developers still have a strong tendency to create tightly coupled applications. Such apps align and bind tightly with the user interface. To leverage cloud-computing assets and benefits effectively, a cloud-native application should expose supporting functions as services that are independently accessible.

When developing an application architecture for the cloud, it must be built to interact with complex, disparate, widely distributed systems. These systems can support multiple loosely coupled applications. Such apps are built to employ many services and also remain decoupled from the data. Developers can build up from the data and use it in communicating with services. These services can be combined into composite services—and composite applications—that remain flexible and scalable.

6. Decouple and decompose the data

It’s not enough to simply decompose monolithic applications into microservices. It’s also essential to decouple the data model. If a development team is given the freedom to be “autonomous” yet must still contend with a single database, the monolithic barrier to innovation remains unmoved.

If the data has been tightly bound to an application, it can’t find a good home in the cloud. Think about it: it’s necessary to decouple the data for the same reasons we know it’s best to decompose application functions into services. The effort to decouple the data will be richly rewarded with the ability to store and process the data on any cloud instance.

Moving to a cloud-native architecture will include time-consuming challenges requiring diligence and dedication. It’s not simply getting apps to run in a cloud-computing environment. Cloud native demands major changes in the supporting infrastructure and a shift to designing apps around microservices. In addition, foundational change requires new tools for cloud-native operations.

But the long-term gains will be extraordinary. Enterprises can go from idea to app in the shortest amount of time. No other app development paradigm is more efficient. This is one of the smartest investments an enterprise can pursue.

To learn more about containerized infrastructure and cloud native technologies, consider coming to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon San Diego, Nov. 18-21.

The post Six steps for making a successful transition to a cloud-native architecture appeared first on SD Times.

As organizations mature in both their cloud and mobile strategies, the underlying infrastructure plays an important role. Why do the cloud and mobile make a perfect pairing?

• Ability to manage the data overload

The cloud is a natural fit for storing and managing the data that flows between back-end systems and services and the mobile device. With businesses maturing in their adoption of mobile, apps that run on mobile devices are both generating and consuming more data – more than can be stored locally. Add to this the fact that mobile business apps can interchange sensitive data that cannot reside on the device for security reasons, and the need for a cloud-based layer that manages services between device and back-end systems becomes clear. From a mobile device, information can be transmitted via the cloud without the need to connect directly to back-end data sources, which can compromise security and cause resource overload on those systems.

• Ability to scale on-demand

Mobile apps, especially business-to-consumer apps, may need to scale quickly when inundated with a large and sometimes unpredictable volume of users. This places demands on the flexibility and responsiveness of the underlying infrastructure. The elasticity of the cloud offers greater and more immediate scalability for mobile apps than physical hardware. When preparing for long term mobile success and growth, companies should turn to the cloud to support the growth and performance of their mobile projects.

• Extensibility and future proofing

Many companies still rely on legacy systems, which were not designed with mobile in mind. This should not stop them from going mobile and missing out on mobile’s benefits. Also, the combination of mobile capabilities with data from these legacy systems can often uncover additional business value. Cloud-based mobile backend services can store data, manage the business logic, and via  RESTful APIs, enable apps to more easily consume this data without impacting the legacy system. It also enables mobile apps to access other cloud services through APIs, rather than forcing the developer to write code directly to the cloud service. Further, it provides greater flexibility for future updates as these can be pushed from the cloud to the app on the device.

• Accelerating mobile app development

The key to developing a mobile app is making sure it has access to the appropriate storage, security features, caching and business logic, all of which can be provided as back-end services. By shifting these back-end needs to the cloud, and making them discoverable and available to enterprise mobile developers, organizations can bring apps to market faster. Mobile developers may find that using cloud-based back-end services can add a greater degree of agility, reusability and control for mobile app development projects. This can lead to faster mobile app development, especially when multiple mobile apps are being created where the app developers can reuse some of the same mobile back-end services and APIs across many app projects.

• The growth of Platform-as-a-Service

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offers a cloud infrastructure environment and resources that can make it easier to develop, run and manage apps. App development and delivery is benefited by integrating DevOps tools and processes, container technology, and lightweight architectures on a platform that can be deployed in cloud or on-premise environments. Containers are valuable to mobile app development, as they help bring mobile into mainstream enterprise application development, enabling mobile apps to run alongside other enterprise apps but taking advantage of a common platform and resources without restricting the individual application runtime environments. Platform technology can bring a new level of consistency, efficiency, and portability, not only to mobile app development, but to other enterprise application workloads.

There are many advantages to pairing mobile and cloud. The two technologies are instrumental to digital business transformation, creating benefits for application developers and enabling increased business value.  Companies that do not take advantage of how cloud and mobile technologies complement and support each other risk falling behind their competitors.

The post The mobile and cloud imperative appeared first on SD Times.

“Delivering unified cloud services, quickly, simply and in a pay as you use model on premises is groundbreaking for the enterprise. I am not aware of any other company in the world that can combine these capabilities with the ability to manage multiple clouds using a single platform,” said Nariman Teymourian, HyperGrid CEO and president. “By continuing to grow the capabilities that HyperCloud provides and simplifying how it is delivered, we are bringing our unique service value proposition to an ever-growing base of client use cases.”

The HyperCloud service is its fully managed service offered as an on-premises pay as you use model, and this news comes on the heels of HyperGrid’s announcement last year of HyperCloud, its on-premises cloud-as-a-service.

CA announces new agile capabilities
CA announced new and improved features across its agile management portfolio designed for a clearer and more connected view of work in progress, and to align and execute on strategy. The features include the latest release of CA’s project and portfolio solution (PPM), new features for teams in CA agile central, and additional integration across the product portfolio.

The PPM solution features new integrations for unified portfolio funding approval, backlog management, people planning and cost management.

“Success in today’s fast-paced and quickly changing market requires empowered teams that can easily align their work with overall business strategy. For success at scale, the solutions and tools teams use need to be intuitive, flexible and powerful – and need to support modern ways of working, not slow them down,” said Angela Tucci, general manager, agile management, CA Technologies. “To help companies adapt and win, CA’s Agile Management solutions give business stakeholders clear visibility into the execution and delivery of business plans and financial investments, while also supporting the practices used by today’s teams.”

VMware vRealize cloud management platform
VMware announced updates across its VMware vRealize cloud management platform to improve software-defined data center and cloud operations and accelerate application and infrastructure service delivery across hybrid clouds. The release includes VMware vRealize Operations 6.6, VMware vRealize Automation 7.3, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3, vRealize Log Insight 4.5 and vRealize Network Insight 3.4. These tools are meant to provide users with advanced intelligent operations and automated IT capabilities.

The company is also releasing more support for containers and configuration management solutions.

“VMware is committed to supporting our customers’ digital transformation initiatives by helping them to modernize their data centers as well as integrate their public clouds,” said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, cloud management business unit, VMware. “These latest updates to our vRealize platform will help customers get more out of their hybrid cloud investments today, and put them on a path for cross-cloud management of applications and infrastructure regardless of where the workload is running.”

The full list of updates is available here.

AtScale releases AtScale 5.5
AtScale introduced AtScale 5.5, its flagship and patented software solution that provides key capabilities required to make BI on any Big Data platform work.

“Historically, data stored in data lakes goes unused because the organization has not figured out a way to match the performance, security or business tool integration they created with their legacy system,” said Matt Baird, CTO and co-founder at AtScale. “When they deploy AtScale, customers not only get better performance than traditional systems, they can do it on unlimited data and seamless end-user experience.”

With the 5.5 release, AtScale enhanced its ability to handle complex multi-fact models. The release includes improved unrelated cell handling to support multi-level metrics for use cases like sales planning. Also in 5.5, users can deploy all AtScale services in a “hot-hot” deployment mode.

More information on the release can be found here.

The post HyperGrid introduces pay as you use model, CA’s new agile capabilities, and VMware platform updates — SD Times news digest: June 6, 2017 appeared first on SD Times.

“Data engineering workloads are foundational for today’s data-driven applications,” said Charles Zedlewski, senior vice president of products at Cloudera. “Altus simplifies the process of building and running elastic data pipelines while preserving portability and making it easy to incorporate data engineering elements into more complex BI, data science and real-time applications.”

MapR Distributed Deep Learning Quick Start Solution
MapR is training complex deep learning algorithms with its new data science solution. The MapR Distributed Deep Learning QSS provides a framework for continuous learning, experimentation and operationalizing deep learning applications.

The solution provides the ability to extract insights from video and images, understand and predict sequence of events, and classify and forecast models. “Our expertise in advanced machine learning deployments coupled with the unique design of the MapR Platform form the foundation for our new offering. The QSS will enable companies to quickly take advantage of modern GPU-based architectures and set them on the right path for scaling their deep learning efforts,” said Anil Gadre, chief product officer for MapR.

Fugue launches Fugue Team Conductor
Fugue announced new cloud governance capabilities to AWS infrastructure operations, as well as the launch of Fugue Team Conductor, which extends Fugue’s code validation, access control, multi-account management and continuous policy enforcement capabilities.

With Fugue Team Conductor, customers can manage their environments across AWS accounts. It also allows customers to avoid issues like wasteful spending, security vulnerabilities, and audits.

“Every enterprise that scales out its cloud operations runs into the same challenges of managing ever-increasing complexity and ensuring governance, resulting in wasted spending, increased risk, and agility loss,” said Josh Stella, founder and CEO of Fugue. “Fugue collapses the complexity of managing the cloud at scale and enforcing compliance and security policies at every step of cloud operations. Fugue doesn’t force customers to make tradeoffs between control, speed, and spend.”

Realm announces logic layer to Realm Mobile Platform
Mobile developers can now build enhanced applications and features that rely on server-side functionality with Realm’s new logic layer to the Realm Mobile Platform. The layer gives developers the ability to build application functionality without requiring backend development skills or assistance from other programmers.

According to the company, Realm Functions is an approach for Android and iOS developers to add server-based features right into their apps, in a serverless fashion. Developers can get access to sample code from the public GitHub repository and find more information here.

Quest adds new releases to its database management portfolio
Quest Software announced new releases to its database management and performance monitoring solutions. The new releases are meant to give organizations the ability to easily manage, monitor and optimize Microsoft SQL Server environments.

The new release of Spotlight on SQL Server enables database monitoring for SQL Server on both Windows and Linux. Quest also announced the Spotlight Extensions for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, as well as the SharePlex release, which enables source replication from Microsoft SQL Server for database replication on-premises and into AWS and Azure cloud platforms.

Also, Quest announced the new release of Toad for SQL Server, which supports SQL Server 2016 and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2015 Version Control, so database administrators can run faster and more reliable databases, according to Quest.  

New Relic adds capabilities to New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform
In order to give enterprises more visibility into the performance of their capabilities, New Relic unveiled new features to its New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform. New Relic’s Health Map feature brings in insights from applications and infrastructure performance, so teams can understand the source of the performance issue and get it resolved quickly.

New Relic is also bringing in the power of New Relic APM and New Relic Infrastructure so teams can view their applications and the infrastructure supporting those applications. In addition, New Relic announced a new SDK, where system administrators and DevOps teams can standardize the monitoring of custom services, according to the company.

Syncfusion’s Essential Studio 2017 Volume 2 release
Syncfusion is updating its entire product line with a focus on Xamarin, UWP and ASP.NET MVC. The company’s Essential Studio 2017 Volume 2 release features a sunburst chart and image editor for Xamarin, a Gantt control for UWP, a data range picker for ASP.NET MVC, and a list view control for Xamarin.

“Anticipating the needs of our developer community is the most important part of our planning process,” said Daniel Jebaraj, vice president of Syncfusion, Inc. “They have expressed interest in more controls for the Xamarin platform, and we have delivered with this release. With the addition of the sunburst chart, image editor, and list view controls, we continue to lead the industry with more than 90 controls for Xamarin.”

The post Cloudera introduces Altus, MapR’s new Quick Start Solution, and Realm Functions — SD Times news digest: May 24, 2017 appeared first on SD Times.

RELATED CONTENT: Three cloud PaaS trends to watch in a serverless world

1. Reducing headcount
Rob Reagan, CTO of Text Request

At Text Request, we’re able to also reduce headcount using Azure’s PaaS offerings. Without PaaS, we’d have to staff a very senior infrastructure and security expert. It’s pretty rare to find developers who really know how to harden servers. However, our developers are very familiar with hardening an application.

Azure really shines with PaaS, far outpacing Amazon. If you’re looking for IaaS, Amazon leaves Microsoft in the dust.

Note: There is likely a point where the cost curve for PaaS bends backwards. If you’re maintaining a site like Reddit and have a few hundred servers, an infrastructure team is probably cheaper than multiple PaaS services.

With PaaS like Azure Web Apps, I don’t stay awake at night worrying about network-level intrusions. Microsoft’s security experts at their Azure data centers are probably going to do a much better job than our comparatively smaller team.

2. Conserving startup cash flow
Peter Kirwan, CEO of Collexion, Inc.

My latest startup, Collexion, has built its entire product on PaaS. Our core features are built on AWS, but we have gone a lot farther than other companies by making the commitment to develop critical parts of our application architecture incorporating many specialized AWS applications.

For example, we use AWS’s Cloudsearch to index millions of items to increase performance and take the load off our database. There are other examples, like their AI tools and image recognition, that are pay-per-query via an API so that we use the platform but don’t manage any of the infrastructure. In addition to AWS, we integrate with third-party cloud-based applications through APIs, Zapier and IFTTT.

I made a strong push when founding the company to use as many PaaS and cloud applications to rent vs. build, which not only saves a massive amount of software development, but eliminates the need for 24/7 management of the site in the early stages of the company.

3. Accelerating HMI development
Kim Rowe, CEO and founder of RoweBots Ltd

PaaS allows us to accelerate analytics and human-machine interface (HMI) development, while still having embedded solutions that are secure and precisely meet embedded sensor requirements. For example, we built a concussion sensor demonstration in 30 calendar days with 2.5 developers. This would have been impossible without the Microsoft Azure framework.

The powerful analytics developed by the cloud vendors are readily available for a price, accelerating development by years in some cases, which is certainly a superpower.

A system that would have taken 6-8 months to complete can now be completed in 30 calendar days. An Azure system that will scale to multiple wireless routers and hundreds of end users is underway with an extra month of effort in total.

Our favorite tools are MQTT (a machine-to-machine connectivity protocol for IoT-type publish/subscribe messaging transport) and Azure — and we’re currently looking at Ayla, MediumOne and Watson for other clients.

4. Building a DevOps pipeline
Marek Sadowski, IoT advocate

As a Bluemix developer, I can spend more time on the business logic of the application itself. Before developing on Bluemix, a large amount of my time was unfortunately consumed by implementing container fixpacks, upgrades, etc. Now it is all provided for me. I have access to enterprise grade systems — regardless if I’m developing for a large corporation or a startup. Also, all of the configuration and the connectivity to the other elements of the system are elevated now — I use what is provided in the description of the service table.

As an architect, it is very easy to rely on the availability of the system. Simple scaling up (or down) mechanisms take care of the irregularities of traffic to my apps and services. Furthermore, there is no need for system administrators — this role is taken over by Bluemix as well.

If I deploy an application on Bluemix it can be reachable globally, and I can achieve this reach quickly without database administrators, system support teams or hardware engineers.

Finally, there is no need for upfront investment, so startups can now match large enterprises with access to infinite resources — paying for them as they go, starting small and growing with the user base and app usage flexibly and as needed.

Recently, I started to leverage DevOps services on Bluemix to automate deployment from development to test and to production. The production cycles are counted in single weeks instead of months or even quarters. So everything becomes very efficient. The most modern languages (Javascript, Swift) and standards and concepts (cognitive services, Kubernetes, serverless computing) also become instantly available to my team.

5. Faster prototyping
Hernan Santiesteban, Founder of Great Lakes Development Group

PasS has definitely changed the way I build software. The ability to quickly get a system up that contains all the necessary tools is a great time-saver. I mainly work with Azure, but the same can be said for most of the cloud services providers. With PaaS tools, you can get a fully functional web application up in just a few minutes. This includes all the basic necessities like a database, web API scaffolding and authentication.

The ease with which you can get a system up makes prototyping a breeze. This gives you ability to focus on the problem you’re trying to fix. No need to spend valuable time settings up the foundation of a system that may not be in existence for more than a few hours or days.

If you’re running a production application, the ability to automatically scale if your app encounters an unexpected traffic spike can help you rest at night.

However, if you’re just running an app with a small number of users, you have no need to prototype, and you can easily handle all the maintenance yourself, then PaaS may not be the right answer.

6. Microservices architectures
Gal Oppenheimer, Senior product manager for Built.io

A proper, stable PaaS can be a breath of fresh air. When we launched PaaS as a feature in Built.io Backend in October 2013, it enabled both our internal teams and developers. Any developer could now build a fully automated application — frontend, backend and mobile — on their own.

If you factor in the time it takes to setup, secure and scale a server, you could easily bring a three-month project down to 1.5 months or less. For a project with one web developer and one application developer, you can completely forgo a 50% DevOps engineer.

At Built.io, we’re very big fans of Docker and Node.js. Combined, they offer significant simplifications in your server stack and enable cleaner cross-compatibility of code and content by eliminating data transformations between your APIs and server code.

If you’re doing work that benefits from direct resource access (i.e. processing video or graphics), it’s often important to have fine-tuned control of your infrastructure. However, in the modern, microservices approach to development, we’d recommend separating this feature and either using a third-party service that solves this need or build it from scratch.

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Vidyo, a video-enabling technology company, spent the last year gearing up for its open developer platform and beta API, which would let developers easily video-enable literally any application with minimal coding and no hosting required. The Vidyo.io communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) is now ready for developers and enterprises to embed reliable and scalable video features into any WebRTC, mobile or native application.

Besides its newly released CPaaS, developers can create a simple video chat application on iOS with Vidyo’s GitHub project, Hello World. Developers can download the latest Vidyo.io iOS package here, then copy the framework to the root directory of where the repository was cloned (i.e. parallel to its README.md file), according to Vidyo’s GitHub page.

For the project, developers can use any version of Xcode. Then they simply connect an iOS device to a desktop via USB and select the iOS device as the build target for the application.

Vidyo cares a lot about the open and free software world, according to its product expert, Ben Pinkerton. Vidyo is part of the Alliance for Open Media, and its team is passionate about video technologies, especially as they relate to communications.

“We have worked to add Scalable Video Coding (SVC) to all the modern video codecs, including H.264, H.265 and VP9,” said Pinkerton. “When we learned about the Alliance for Open Media, we absolutely wanted to be part of the development of a royalty-free codec that also supports SVC.”

Developers are able to use all of the necessary infrastructure to make real-time multi-party video collaborations with Vidyo. They will also be provided with SDKs for browsers (as both WebRTC and plug-ins), iOS, Android, macOS and Windows.

“Our mission is to better visually-connect the world; using Vidyo.io, developers can ensure a consistent user experience by embedding high-quality, reliable, resilient multi-party video into any application,” said CEO of Vidyo Eran Westman in a statement. “We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Vidyo.io, and invite developers to experience the platform firsthand.”

Developers can get started with Vidyo’s GitHub project here and check out its new communications platform here.

Top 5 trending GitHub projects of the week
#1. FreeCodeCamp: Hi, I’m FreeCodeCamp and now I am in the No. 1 spot. Fork me!

#2. Pipenv: Pipfile, Pip and Virtualenv, all thrown together.

#3. Public APIs: A curated list of APIs from around the web.

#4. Engineering Blogs: A curated list of engineering blogs.

#5. WebSlides: A tool for HTML presentations.

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Ramji is no stranger to the cloud and its ever-changing landscape. Before heading the Cloud Foundry Foundation, he was a senior executive in charge of strategy at Apigee, a company whose acquisition by Google was completed earlier this week. Ramji will now be working under Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google’s cloud business.

Kearns herself has extensive experience with cloud and the business of enterprise software in general. She was director of IT services for Verizon, and eventually rose to head of product management for that company’s integration services. After a stint managing Cloud Foundry at Pivotal, she joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation in April as head of strategy.

(Related: Software-defined networking carves out its niche)

Now, as executive director, Kearns has chimed in on the future of the Foundation and the platform-as-a-service project in a blog post. “As Cloud Foundry moves into its next phase, it will continue to drive innovation deeper into the enterprise. We will continue to empower developers to build applications quickly, while helping CIOs transform their businesses. In 2017, our work at the Foundation will focus on expanding the Cloud Foundry ecosystem and addressing the cloud developer gap,” she wrote.

We spoke to Ramji about the future of Cloud Foundry at the Cloud Foundry Summit in May, where he discussed the rising popularity of the open-source platform for cloud applications.

“There are so many segments who want it for different reasons,” he said. “If you’re line of business, you could care less about multi-cloud; you care about velocity. ‘Can I go from an app a quarter to an app a week? Can you get me deployments on an app-per-day basis?’ If you’re a CIO, or if you’re in IT management and in a cost control stance, multi-cloud matters.

“If you’re a developer, you don’t care about those benefits; you care about being able to spend more time writing code, and less time writing servers. The businessperson is saying, ‘How do I get more features?’ The developer is saying ‘How can I do cool things with cool languages?’ ”

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