The post A guide to API management tools appeared first on SD Times.
]]>Apigee is an API management platform for modernizing IT infrastructure, building microservices and managing applications. The platform was acquired by Google in 2016 and added to the Google Cloud. It includes gateway, security, analytics, developer portal, and operations capabilities.
Akana by Perforce provides an end-to-end API management solution for designing, implementing, securing, managing, monitoring, and publishing APIs. The Akana API Platform helps you create and publish secure, reliable APIs that are elegant, easy to consume, built the right way, and running as they should be to improve the customer experience and drive growth in your business.
Boomi’s API management solution provides a unified and scalable, cloud-based platform to centrally manage and enrich API interactions through their entire life cycle. With Boomi, users can rapidly configure any endpoint as an API, publish APIs on-premises or in the cloud, manage APIs with traffic control and usage dashboards.
CA Technologies, a Broadcom company, helps customers create an agile business by modernizing application architectures with APIs and microservices. Layer7 API Management provides the most trusted and complete capabilities across the API life cycle for development, orchestration, security, management, monitoring, deployment, discovery and consumption.”
CData: Connect, Integrate, and Automate your enterprise data. At CData, we simplify connectivity between all of the applications and data sources that power business operations, making it easier to unlock the strategic value of your data. By focusing on established standards for data access, our solutions plug into all of the business applications that you use today (like BI, Reporting, ETL, & Integration) and connect them with live data from just about anywhere.
RELATED CONTENT: Security and integration are key concerns for API management
Cloud Elements delivers an API integration platform on three pillars: “Elements” unify APIs with enhanced capabilities for authentication, discovery, search, error handling and API maintenance. “Formulas” combine those Elements to automate business processes across applications. “Virtual Data Hubs” provide a normalized view of data objects.
IBM API Connect on IBM Cloud is an API life cycle management offering that allows any organization to secure, manage and share APIs across cloud environments — including multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
Kong delivers a next-generation API and service life cycle management platform designed for modern architectures, including microservices, containers, cloud and serverless. Kong is building the future of service control platforms to intelligently broker information across services.
Microsoft’s Azure API Management solution enables users to publish, manage, secure and analyze APIs in minutes. It features the ability to create an API gateway and developer portal quickly, ability to manage all APIs in one place, provides insights into APIs, and connects to back-end services.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint API Manager is designed to help users manage, monitor, analyze and secure APIs in a few simple steps. The manager enables users to proxy existing services or secure APIs with an API management gateway; add or remove pre-built or custom policies; deliver access management; provision access; and set alerts so users can respond proactively.
Nevatech Sentinet is an enterprise class API management platform written in .NET that is available for on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. Sentinet supports industry SOAP and REST standards as well as Microsoft-specific technologies and includes an API Repository for API Governance, API versioning, auto-discovery, description, publishing and Lifecycle Management.
Oracle‘s API Platform Cloud Service provides an end-to-end service for designing, prototyping, documenting, testing and managing the proliferation of critical APIs.
Postman is a collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 7 million developers and 300,000+ companies worldwide. Postman allows users to design, mock, debug, test, document, monitor, and publish APIs – all from one place.
The Progress DataDirect Autonomous REST Connector offers intelligent data connectivity to API sourced data from SQL based applications such as BI, Analytics, and ETL tools
With Autonomous REST Connector organizations can expect:
Red Hat 3scale API Management gives control, visibility and flexibility to organizations seeking to create and deploy an API program. It features comprehensive security, monetization, rate limiting, and community features that businesses seek backed by Red Hat’s solid scalability and performance.
SmartBear Software empowers users to thrive in the API economy with tools to accelerate every phase of the API life cycle. SmartBear is behind some of the biggest names in the API market, including Swagger, SoapUI and ReadyAPI With Swagger’s easy-to-use API development tools, SoapUI’s automated testing proficiency, AlertSite’s API-monitoring and ReadyAPI’s mocking and virtualization capabilities, users can build, test, share and manage the best performing APIs.
SnapLogic Lifecycle API Management is an end-to-end solution designed for managing, scaling and controlling API consumption quickly, seamlessly and securely. Features include request/response transformations, API traffic control and productization, OAuth2 authentication support, advanced API analytics, threat detection, and the developer portal.
TIBCO Cloud Mashery is a cloud-native API management platform that can be deployed anywhere, either as a SaaS service or containerized in cloud-native and on-premise environments. Mashery delivers market-leading full life cycle API management capabilities for enterprises adopting cloud-native development, and its capabilities includes API
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]]>The post Security and integration are key concerns for API management appeared first on SD Times.
]]>Fifty-one percent of respondents said that more than half of their organizations’ development effort is spent on APIs—compared with 40% of respondents in 2020 and 49% last year, according to the 2022 State of the API Report that surveyed 37,332 developers and API professionals and included aggregated data from the Postman API Platform over approximately four weeks in June and July 2022.
“This year, we found not only are most organizations’ development efforts focused on APIs, but firms that go even further and establish an API-first approach tend to outperform and have a more optimistic business outlook. As organizations navigate an uncertain economy, API-first strategies are becoming the backbone that allows organizations to respond rapidly and seamlessly,” said Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman.
Despite two-thirds of C-level executives in the study thinking that the economy is turning sour, the vast majority say that API investment is par for the course and will even grow in the next year.
This vast expansion has led companies to be more API consumers than producers, which has amped up the need for API management to handle many of the tasks surrounding APIs more than ever before.
If Plato had to decide what the ultimate Form of API management is, it would probably be something along the lines of a process that oversees all APIs in a secure, scalable environment with tools and services that enable developers to build, deploy, secure and manage APIs. However in practice, this has proven to be very difficult.
So much so that Gartner research estimates that by 2025, less than half of enterprise APIs will be managed, as explosive growth in APIs surpasses the capabilities of API management tools and “security controls try to apply old paradigms to new problems.”
RELATED CONTENT: A guide to API management tools
Security is a major concern for API management
While on the one hand, API management problems stem from the sprawl of APIs, the other problem is that the platforms that these companies are using were built around the concept of a single gateway, according to Mark O’Neill, a VP analyst and chief of research for software engineering at Gartner.
“[With a single gateway], you put an API gateway in your architecture, and you try to funnel your API traffic through that gateway and the problem with that architecture is, when organizations have lots of different teams and applications that are producing and consuming APIs, there’s no one place to put the gateway,” O’Neill said. “And of course, if you’re using multiple cloud platforms, it’s even worse. On the one hand, the sprawl, on the other hand, you have many API management products that are outdated in their architecture.”
In its recent Magic Quadrant, Gartner included API management tools that weren’t tied to a particular gateway – to the surprise of some people.
“The reason for that is because we now see this multi-gateway world being a reality. We hear people talk about what we would call the ‘Bring Your Own Gateway’ model, where you already have a gateway, but you need the API lifecycle management that goes with that,” O’Neill added.
At the same time, some of the traditional API management vendors start to add at least verbal support for other gateways.
All in all, the two things that are essential to managing API security are strong inventory and real-time discovery to gain visibility into APIs. Although there are some specialized security controls, their API discovery features are limited and don’t have the application logic awareness to create relevant security policies, according to Gartner’s research.
“For APIs, this means that application security teams will deploy perimeter controls with threat inspection capabilities, but will be limited to generic policies and detection signatures,” the research stated.
The API management tools that are so focused on a single gateway actually leave many APIs exposed.
In a lot of scenarios in a typical modern web application stack where one has their front end using React, Angular, or another frontend framework and a lot of APIs in the backend, there usually isn’t a gateway in between, O’Neill explained. Although it would not make sense to put a heavyweight gateway there, those API’s often are falling victim to attack because people reverse engineer the front end, and they directly access the APIs. In many cases of breaches, affected APIs were not even going through an application firewall.
API management encompasses a wide variety of APIs
There’s a wide range of APIs that companies use to carry out business tasks on a daily basis: internal APIs to represent coarse- and fine-grained service interfaces, data elements, and private and public APIs. Most organizations are also net consumers of APIs, notably third-party APIs – while convenient, these can pose security and dependency issues.
By 2025, Gartner predicts that the percentage of third-party APIs used in applications will average 30%, up from less than 10% in 2021, complicating dependency management.
“The first thing you should do is get visibility of your APIs and understand the attack surface by discovering all your APIs,” O’Neill said.
Then there are really two choices, O’Neill explained. One is to put API gateways everywhere and the API management vendors are adapting to this by adding the functionality where they can have distributed API management. The other approach is to tell developers that they’re free to use the API gateway that comes with the platform that they’re building the APIs on, whether that’s the Amazon API Gateway, Azure API Gateway, etc.
“The developers are happy to use the API management that comes with the platform. But of course, the problem then is, you need to have a way to do the overall management of the APIs and to have a consistent way that you’re doing security and consistent design for those APIs,” O’Neill explained.
Another challenge with API management is that getting higher-ups on board to invest in API security can be a hard sell for software engineering leaders. Many organizations continue to believe that general-purpose API management tools sufficiently address API security. By the time the security team gets funding and builds an RFP for a product, hundreds of APIs might already be in production, Gartner’s research continued.
The lackadaisical security surrounding APIs are also ironically the strength of APIs that led them to be so popular in the first place according to O’Neill.
“So it’s like a Greek or Roman tragedy in that APIs are designed to enable quick and easy access to data or access to application functionality. But from a security point of view, of course, those are concerns. If you’re making it easy to access your data and application functionality, then the worry is you’re making it easy for malicious entities to access your data and your applications,” O’Neill said.
Not just a developers’ game
The 2022 State of the API Report found that there was an almost even split with developer and non-developer roles as to who worked with APIs in an organization.
Full stack developers were the largest single group at 25% of respondents, down slightly from last year’s 27%. Backend developers showed a bit stronger representation at 19%, compared with 17% in 2021. Meanwhile, the non-developers included CEOs, business analysts, customer success staff, and more.
“Historically, it has been development teams – either the developers themselves would make the choices regarding API management, or the organization has had an API Center of Excellence, an overall API platform team, or sometimes that would be part of it a digital team that managed the APIs,” O’Neill said.
More recently, security teams have realized that APIs are a major point of weakness and vulnerability.
“They are telling us that they want to take control of API security. They don’t trust that either the developers or the API teams, such as API Centers of Excellence, are strong enough on security, to protect APIs,” O’Neill said. “So we’ll see this trend where security teams want to educate themselves about API security and take control of that in the same way that they’re protecting web, mobile and other types of applications.”
Integration is key
The biggest factor in companies deciding whether to consume or produce APIs, according to the 2022 State of the API report, is how well they integrate with internal apps and systems. This corresponds to the report’s finding that the number of integrated APIs across enterprise teams has jumped twentyfold.
“As more companies recognize APIs as the building blocks of modern software, API tools and services are evolving to meet their needs. These offerings span the API lifecycle, including design, testing, and security. They also include repositories for source code, API gateways, application performance monitoring, and CI/CD—all of which must integrate with API platforms to achieve optimal results,” the report stated.
Integrating APIs can be tricky as users must first define inputs and outputs, and may also have to configure the authentication settings. It can also be a barrier to entry for non-technical users.
Demands for API integration in highly regulated industries have had a big impact in driving the usage of APIs, according to O’Neill.
“The most famous instance is around open banking. So it started in the UK and Europe and then in many other parts of the world there have been open banking regulations. Number one, that required banks to have APIs and then of course being banks they’re naturally concerned about security,” O’Neill said. “But then also, many of the regulations have quite complex requirements for how the access to the APIs is managed. Open banking is all about putting the customer in charge of how their banking information is accessed. That brings in the standards like OAuth and OpenID Connect, so it drives the usage of API management products that support those.”
In the healthcare industry, the United States requires healthcare payers and providers to have API-based integrations as well. This is another field where there is a big focus around security, particularly related to privacy where APIs are being used to access customer information.
“Open banking and healthcare regulations continue to move around the world and become more mature. And that’s been a big driver of API management,” O’Neill said.
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]]>The post MuleSoft announces Anypoint Code Builder and solutions to create APIs and integrations appeared first on SD Times.
]]>Anypoint Code Builder is an IDE with a user experience built on Visual Studio Code. The IDE includes built-in recommendations and includes a library of building blocks for common API and integration patterns.
“The future of work requires every organization to empower their employees with the tools they need to close the skills gap and level up their developers,“ said Shaun Clowes, chief product officer at MuleSoft. “Developers demand modern, easy-to-use tools so that they can focus on innovation rather than dealing with cumbersome code and inefficient processes.”
MuleSoft also announced universal API management capabilities with two new solutions. Anypoint Flex Gateway enables developers to adapt to any architecture with a flexible and lightweight gateway to manage and secure any service. Anypoint API Governance enables companies to operationalize governance across all of their enterprise APIs by building trust without sacrificing agility by defining central governance rules and applying them to any API at scale.
Anypoint Code Builder will be in beta in the coming months and is expected to be generally available in the second half of 2022. Anypoint Flex Gateway and Anypoint API Governance will be generally available in the coming weeks, according to the company.
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]]>The post Blueprint Software announces Business Transformation Platform appeared first on SD Times.
]]>The platform delivers process intelligence that enables enterprise organizations to analyze and assess process value, identify hidden inefficiencies, and execute on data-driven improvement strategies with speed and precision.
“Blueprint’s initial use case in the automation space focused heavily on simplifying and supporting RPA design processes for large organizations. Through our work, however, we found that organizations which were focusing on process automation were encountering upstream problems that Blueprint was uniquely suited to fill,” says Dan Shimmerman, CEO of Blueprint. “For process automation initiatives to be successful, organizations need to start with process improvement, a discovery that ultimately helped drive development of our Transformation Platform.”
Key features include the process hub, which offers people in an organization a meeting point to identify and design process improvement initiatives. The platform also includes process data ingestion to enable users to capture current-state process workflows that can help drive automation, and automation export, which automatically generates automation scripts for any major RPA platform.
Other features include task capture, processing modeling and simulation, workflow accelerators, and integrations.
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]]>The post Azure focuses on feature abundance and integrations to become the all-inclusive cloud experience appeared first on SD Times.
]]>The platform currently stands as the second largest cloud offering in the world with 21% market share, following AWS’s 39% as of Q3 2021, according to Statista. It has a faster growth rate than its larger competitor at 59% for Azure and 32% for AWS.
It offers many features in the data and analytics space, ranging from Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions for data and big data management and analytics, to multiple AI and machine learning offerings, to specialized Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions such as Azure Purview,which is a unified data governance solution that helps users manage and govern their on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS data.
However, from a PaaS perspective of the cloud, Microsoft Azure is the leader.
“So from a whole cloud point of view, from just moving compute and workloads, Amazon is still the market share leader. But when we look at this from (the standpoint of) developing and running applications, Microsoft is the leader with a little bit more than 25% of market share, followed by AWS at 15%,” said Lara Greden, research director for IDC’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) practice.
Azure’s expansion is a combination of both people who are already customers as well as more small and medium-sized businesses that are poised to become larger, especially those that are poised to utilize Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.
“I think Microsoft Azure really has the kind of leadership to tell people to come here to create the new applications to be a digital-first,” Greden said.
The cloud in general has reached an inflection point as 75% of companies already have some combination of rehost, replatform, and refactor into the cloud, said Sambit Ghosh, senior vice president of the Microsoft practice at Datavail. Two-thirds of those are most likely lift-and-shift.
“At this point Azure has definitely been creating and enhancing their cloud-native services in a more accelerated fashion in the last several years,” Ghosh said.
Ghosh noticed that many customers are running applications in Oracle and are looking to move that into Azure Cloud.
Now, Azure has opened up support for Linux and open-source technology to meet that need. Azure now offers full support for common Linux distributions, including Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Oracle Linux and CoreOS. The endorsed Linux distributions are created and published by Linux partners for use in Azure environments.
In addition to pushing cloud-native, Microsoft Azure offers a plethora of features and integrations to entice people into their platform and to advance the way that people can meet their business goals more efficiently if they’re on the platform already.
Part of this comes from meeting developers where they already are, whether they’re collaborating on Microsoft Teams – which doubled in usage from April 2020 to 2021 and now has 145 million worldwide users, according to Statista – or by building on the skill sets that many developers already have.
“Microsoft has the leadership ability there, because so many developers have skills in .NET. And then the integrations can be created in .NET with their integration suite. Now, you don’t just have to have a central team doing it,” IDC’s Greden said. “Integrations with legacy systems continue to be the key enabler in today’s economy and for the foreseeable future.”
Microsoft is helping companies with integrations by dispersing that key scaling capability among all of their developers, rather than having integrations managed by a central integration team.
“They’re providing that flexibility to customers to meet them in their journey, which I think is definitely a smart move in driving adoption onto the cloud, rather than switching platforms,” Datavail’s Ghosh said.
Azure includes features like Azure Cosmos DB, which integrates with Azure services and allows users to choose from multiple database APIs including MongoDB, Cassandra API, and many others.
It also offers plugins for companies that want to run Red Hat or JBoss Enterprise or some other Java apps through the Azure Marketplace.
More people can get their hands on integrations because Azure helps citizen developers utilize integrations through its Power Apps, Microsoft’s low-code offering.
Microsoft recognized the importance an elastic cost model has in alleviating one of the major concerns of moving the cloud: cost. Power Apps are now available in a pay-as-you go model as of Microsoft’s announcement at its Ignite event in November 2021.
“[The pay-as-you-go model] basically allows you to take more risks and create more apps, because you’re going to pay the right amount,” Greden said. “Let’s say you have 1,000 users use it once a month; you’re not going to pay the same as somebody who’s having 1,000 users using it every day.”
Microsoft added many new capabilities to Power Apps such as built-in commenting where users can write and share Office-like comments directly inside the authoring canvases of Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate.
Data insights can now be used to discover inefficiencies in workflows and business processes with Process Advisor in Microsoft Power Automate.
Azure is putting a heavy emphasis on strengthening its low-code capabilities through AI and its ownership of GitHub, according to Greden.
“[Azure] is able to take all the data in GitHub and feed that through AI models to be able to do AI pair programming and we’re just at the cusp of what that will enable companies to do,” Greden said. “This is key to Microsoft’s strategy because it enables more people to develop with better quality because quality is still a really big issue when it comes to applications.”
All of the main AI capabilities that companies seek out have now been bundled into one kind of offering: Azure Applied AI Service, announced at Microsoft’s 2021 Build event. The service includes Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Form Recognizer, and Azure Immersive Reader, in addition to newer offerings like Azure Bot Service, Azure Metrics Advisor, and Azure Video Analyzer. Azure Bot Service makes it easier to build, test, and publish text-, speech-, or telephony-based bots through an integrated development experience. Azure Metrics Advisor, now generally available, automatically detects and diagnoses issues to minimize downtime.
“There are a lot of custom applications out there. We see companies running certain (electronic medical records systems) like hospital systems running more specific custom .NET applications that they have written. A lot of colleges have a lot of custom (learning management systems) applications that are running. Banking also has a lot of customization. So within that, AI has been something that companies are more and more interested in,” said Errin O’Connor, founder and chief architect for EPC Group and the author of four Microsoft Press books covering Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure.
O’Connor said that the number one request he is seeing from Azure customers is that they want to move their existing on-premise SQL servers to Azure and then create a data warehouse.
“Some of the services they’re rolling out around Synapse and Purview are around data governance; that’s all driving and analytics modernization into Azure,” Datavail’s Ghosh said.
Azure Synapse Analytics was launched in 2019 as a service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. Users can query data on their own terms with either serverless or dedicated options at scale.
The service provides a unified experience to ingest, explore, prepare, transform, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.
“It’s a little strange because you have Power BI and then you have Azure Analytics. But Analytics is more for Big Data,” EPC Group’s O’Connor said.
This way, users can easily create a holistic, up-to-date map of their data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage and enable data consumers to find valuable, trustworthy data, according to Microsoft in a post.
“We’re seeing a drive for modernizing applications being motivated by companies wanting to leverage data more and more to convert the data into information that they can then leverage to make intelligent decisions,” Datavail’s Ghosh said. “But in order to do that, you need to first start automating some of your processes and taking the data from your business and bringing it into a common data store.”
Azure is expanding its customizability by embracing hybrid cloud models, and the platform offers ways to accomplish hybrid data integration.
“I think Microsoft has done a good job of making that key and central to their strategy. Like they recognize that hybrid cloud will include other clouds and it will include people’s own data centers,” IDC’s Greden said. “I think AWS is probably still a little heavy on the single cloud sort of point of view, but the rise of Kubernetes is definitely lending itself to that multiple cloud or data center type of operation.”
For hybrid data integration, Azure includes Azure Data Factory, which enables users to build, manage and run ETL and ELT processes at any scale using code-free interactive user interfaces. This allows for many capabilities to be automated since they are exposed through APIs.
“They’re releasing Azure Kubernetes Service and other container instances on top of their hybrid offerings, which allows you to bring your applications into Azure Cloud but you’re not locked into Azure Cloud,” Datavail’s Ghosh said.
Going down the path of a hybrid model and containerization, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Container Apps at Ignite 2021. It functions as a managed serverless container service for developers who want to run microservices in containers without managing infrastructure.
The service offers full support for Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and scales dynamically based on HTTP traffic or events powered by Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA).
When it comes to Azure’s security and governance models, some people are still wary of joining Azure for these reasons, according to Errin O’Connor, founder and chief architect for EPC Group and the author of four Microsoft Press books covering Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure.
“When COVID kicked in, people were moving to the cloud like crazy and a lot of people didn’t do it right. So their governance and security model is terrible,” O’Connor said. “There’s just a lack of Azure governance. And there’s typically one or two or five people that know what the hell they’re doing in the company with Azure. And they’re typically so busy that they don’t have time to do much of anything except the task that’s at hand,” O’Connor said. “They’re doing all these great things, but are they really thinking of the 12 or 24 month roadmap?”
At first, it’s most important to align the business needs and then to work around that in building out which Azure features to take on, according to O’Connor.
“It’s like you have the Honda, the Porsche, and you have the Lamborghini options with Azure. In a lot of cases the Honda’s gonna work just fine. But then you have some CIOs or CFOs that are going to want the Lamborghini option. And so how do you match those together so that regardless of what option they take, it’s still going to flow together and also work via the security model,” O’Connor said. “There are all these event grid services, there’s web functions, functions, API, app logic…you can name all these different features, but I think they really need to dumb down what their services are and make it so that a person that’s been in it for 15 years might know what’s going on.”
When thinking of moving to the cloud, it’s important to first look at one’s existing tech stack and personal skill sets and make the choice around that, according to Datavail’s Ghosh. Other important considerations when moving to Azure would be to do a careful discovery roadmap and planning of the cloud journey and to look at the cost profile.
“If you’re looking to move to Azure and you do the cloud strategy, the cloud planning, careful thought process and looking at what’s the right thing, what is the right provider for your company, I think the cloud journey itself can be much, much less challenging,” Ghosh said.
Incorporation Insight
The main Azure feature that helped Incorporation Insight, a company that helps customers incorporate businesses, to find success is Azure Stack’s ability to store sensitive data and automatically optimize and process it with Azure Cloud, according to Michael Knight, the company’s co-founder.
“We opted for Microsoft Azure particularly for its generous features that will enable us to address anticipated data distribution complexities due to the ever changing digital usage of consumers,” Knight said. “Being able to host DevOps public or private cloud interfaces also gives us greater flexibility as a scaling business.”
Knight also said that his company chose Azure because of its budget-friendly subscription model that charges based on consumption and helps save money on IT. Other top features that he found included Azure’s cybersecurity guarantees and multiple compliance provisions.
CTDev
CTDev, a company that builds custom solutions of various complexity levels in the reinsurance business domain, found that using the Azure DevOps service as a CI/CD managed service provides frees up a lot of value and free-up operation people from managing worker nodes that use nontraditional continuous integration tools like Jenkins.
Viachaslau Matsukevich, a solutions architect at CTDev, said that one can use Azure DevOps as a version control system for storing infrastructure as a code repository. Release management is also greatly implemented here so you can easily track which particular commit was deployed to the end system. Azure DevOps also has great integration with other Azure services.
“Another feature that makes Azure stand out for me is resource groups. It is especially good for (proof of concept) or lab environments where you can clean up everything with a single click and don’t have to worry about some resource leftovers that will cost you money in the future,” Matsukevich said. “The biggest reason for companies to switch to Azure is their partnership with Microsoft. Also, Microsoft offers great discounts if you already have licenses purchased for MS products like Office or Windows.”
Azure Synapse Analytics service (December 2020)
Azure Synapse Analytics brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It enables users to query data using either serverless or dedicated options at scale.
Azure Applied AI Service (May 2021)
The service brings together Azure Cognitive Services, task-specific AI, and business logic to offer users AI services for common business processes. The Azure Applied AI Services are Azure Video Analyzer, Azure Metrics Advisor, Azure Bot Service, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Form Recognizer and Azure Immersive Reader.
Azure support for Linux (August 2021)
Azure now supports common Linux distributions and enables users to create their own Linux VMs, deploy and run containers in Kubernetes, or choose from hundreds of pre-configured images and Linux workloads available in Azure Marketplace.
Azure Purview (September 2021)
This enables users to maximize the value of their on-premises, multicloud, and SaaS data with this unified data governance solution. Users can create a unified map of your data assets and their relationships with automated data discovery and sensitive data classification and get insights.
Partial document update in Azure Cosmos DB (November 2021)
Azure Cosmos DB Partial Document Update feature (also known as Patch API) provides a convenient way to modify a document in a container. This provides an API for developers, performance improvements, and multi-region writes.
Azure Container Apps preview (November 2021)
A serverless container service built for microservice applications and autoscaling capabilities without the overhead of managing complex infrastructure. Users can run containers and scale in response to HTTP traffic or a growing list of KEDA-supported scale triggers including Azure Event Hub, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ Queue, MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
Ultra disks support on AKS (January 2022)
Azure ultra disks offer high throughput, high IOPS, and consistent low latency disk storage for stateful applications. Ultra disks are suited for data-intensive workloads.
Azure IoT Edge tools for Visual Studio extension now supports Visual Studio 2022 (January 2022)
Developers can now code, build, deploy, simulate and debug their IoT Edge solutions in Visual Studio 2022. This includes a new Azure IoT Edge project targeting different platforms, a new IoT Edge module and support of of .NET 6 for the C# module.
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]]>The post SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: EVerest appeared first on SD Times.
]]>EVerest consists of a framework to configure several interchangeable modules which are coupled by MQTT with each other.
The EVerest stack is made out of loosely coupled modules that are orchestrated by the EVerest Dependency Manager (EDM).
The project will help speed the adoption to e-mobility by utilizing all the open source advantages for the EV charging world. It will also enable new features for local energy management, PV-integration, grid friendliness, and many more.
The EVerest project was initiated by PIONIX GmbH, to help with the electrification of the mobility sector. Earlier this week, LF Energy, which is part of the Linux Foundation, announced that it would be accepting the project into the foundation.
EVerest is made to manage communication around energy between different players including cars, local energy generation and batteries, adjacent chargers, grid, cloud backend, and user interfaces.
Additional details on EVerest are available here.
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]]>The post Snyk announces new product innovations and integrations to further developer-led security appeared first on SD Times.
]]>Snyk Code, which offers a dev-first approach to static application security testing tooling just received support for C#, Ruby, PHP and Go added to Java, Javascript, and Python.
Also, Snyk Open Source offers new language support for Elixir and package managers Yarn 2 and Poetry, native integrations with Atlassian BitBucket and AWS CodePipeline, and much more.
Snyk Container gained expanded container registry support for Quay, Github Container Registry, GitLab, Google Artifact Registry, Harbor, and new support for Trivy open-source container scanning tool with Snyk’s vulnerability database.
Updates were also made to Snyk Infrastructure as Code, Snyk API v3, and Snyk Apps.
The company also partnered up with DigitalOcean to help developers secure containerized applications during development and also introduced an integration to HashiCorp Terraform Cloud, which solves configuration security challenges that arise when delivering infrastructure as code.
The newly introduced Snyk Learn offers bite-sized security lessons in the coding language or ecosystem of their choice for free.
“Developer security is the only way we can effectively scale security, and this great community is what’s making it happen. We look forward to a collaborative, inspiring and fun next two days that helps more of the world’s developers to embrace security and build it into their daily lives,” said Guy Podjarny, the founder and president of Snyk.
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]]>The release adds SnapLogic Flows, a modern intuitive user experience for non-technical business users, which enables them to develop application integrations and automate data flows in a self-service manner, without the use of code.
Flows also enables IT to step away from the core development of these solutions but gives them the ability to add requirements and guardrails for non-technical developers.
The release also features API lifecycle management updates and an enhanced developer portal with a ‘zero downtime upgrade’ to minimize any disruption for customers during release updates. Also new is extended ELT support for Databricks’ Delta Lake.
Whenever an API is deprecated in SnapLogic, it is still active but will indicate that a new version should be used instead. In addition, when an API is retired, that API will not be visible in the developer portal, and any request to the API endpoint returns with an appropriate error code and message.
“With the introduction of SnapLogic Flows, we’re adding to our family of purpose-built, easy-to-use interfaces to help non-technical business users realize the vision of self-service, enterprise-wide automation,” said Craig Stewart, the CTO at SnapLogic. “In addition, our new zero downtime commitment to customers as well as our expanded API management and ELT capabilities enable business and IT groups to work together on a single, powerful platform to drive productivity, collaboration, and results.”
New snaps have been added to support out-of-the-box connectivity to Shopify, Zuora REST APIs, and Tableau.
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]]>It drastically reduces the time to set up, run, and scale machine learning tests and expands on the functionality of Ray.
Also, CodeFlare pipelines run with ease on IBM’s new serverless platform IBM Cloud Code Engine and Red Hat OpenShift to allow users to deploy anywhere and extend the benefits of serverless to data scientists and AI researchers.
It also makes it easier to integrate and bridge with other cloud-native ecosystems by providing adapters to event triggers (such as the arrival of a new file), and load and partition data from a wide range of sources, such as cloud object storages, data lakes, and distributed filesystems.
“CodeFlare should also mean developers aren’t having to duplicate their efforts or struggle to figure out what colleagues have done in the past to get a certain pipeline to run,” Carlos Costa and Priya Nagpurkar, research staff member and director of cloud platform research at I.B.M.’s T.J. Watson Research Center, respectively, wrote in a blog post. With CodeFlare, we aim to give data scientists richer tools and APIs that they can use with more consistency, allowing them to focus more on their actual research than the configuration and deployment complexity.
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]]>The post SD Times news digest: GitHub Issues gets new beta features, Amazon CodeGuru announces new integrations, Brave launches Brave Search beta appeared first on SD Times.
]]>“Often, we find ourselves creating a spreadsheet or pulling out a notepad, just to have the freedom to think. But then our planning is disconnected from where the work happens and quickly goes stale,” Mario Rodriguez, the vice president of product at GitHub wrote in a blog post.
The Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer updates include new Java detectors and CI/CD integration with GitHub Actions.
The 20 new security detectors for Java help users identify more issues related to security and AWS best practices and the new CI/CD experience allows users to trigger code quality and security analysis as a step in the build process using GitHub Actions.
CodeGuru Reviewer helps with identifying detect potential defects and bugs that are hard to find in your Java and Python applications, using the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI.
Additional details are available here.
Brave Search beta is now available in the Brave browser, which is built on a completely independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches or their clicks.
Brave Search is now available in beta on all Brave browsers as one of the search options alongside other search engines. It will also become the default search in the Brave browser later this year.
“Unlike older search engines that track and profile users, and newer search engines that are mostly a skin on older engines and don’t have their own indexes, Brave Search offers a new way to get relevant results with a community-powered index, while guaranteeing privacy,” said Brendan Eich, the CEO and co-founder of Brave. “Brave Search fills a clear void in the market today as millions of people have lost trust in the surveillance economy and actively seek solutions to be in control of their data.”
Mozilla teamed up with Princeton University to announce their new platform, Mozilla Rally. According to Mozilla, the platform puts users in control of their data in a way that allows them the choice to contribute their browsing history to crowdfund projects. The goal here is to give users the power to control their online experience.
As part of the announcement, Mozilla also launched the new Rally research initiative in collaboration with Professor Johnathan Mayer’s research group at Princeton University. According to Mozilla, the primary goal of this initiative is to hold major online providers accountable for the data they collect from users without their permission.
Alongside this, Mozilla announced that they are releasing a new Toolkit, WebScience. According to Mozilla, the Toolkit focuses on data minimization, a core aspect of how the Rally Platform plans to respect users and their data. This Toolkit is another result of the company’s collaboration with Johnathan Mayer as he and his team developed the software that is now maintained in collaboration with Mozilla.
The June 2021 Cumulative Update Preview for .NET Framework includes many quality and reliability improvements.
The new version addresses a regression introduces in previous updates and now honors the WinTrust policy setting “Ignore timestamp revocation checks” setting when validating timestamps in ClickOnce manifests.
Additional details on the fixes in CLR, Windows Forms and WPF in the new version are available here.
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