Flux7 Blog

New research by Microsoft reveals that COVID-19 has an undeniable impact on IoT investments. According to its IoT Signals edition 2 report, 90% of decision-makers believe IoT is critical to their company’s success with 91% of respondents having adopted IoT and about one-third planning to grow their IoT investments. The leading business objectives for IoT are safety and security, productivity, (specifically operations and employee productivity), and operations optimization.

In taking the pulse of enterprise SaaS use, BetterCloud has found in its 2020 State of SaaSOps report that SaaS has seen a 5x increase over the past three years with the average organization now using 80 SaaS apps. Respondents cite a few motivators with productivity and decreased cost topping the list. CEO David Politis notes that COVID-19 has also contributed, “In the earlier part of the year, organizations around the world were faced with powering their entire workforces from home and turned to SaaS to make the shift with as little disruption to productivity as possible.”

DevOps News

• RancherLabs reveals new Rancher capabilities including “a new installation experience, GitOps at scale for edge clusters, full lifecycle management of EKS clusters and a new security-hardened, certified Kubernetes distribution for government customers.” Rancher 2.5 now:
  • Can be installed on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster
  • Features Rancher Labs’ Fleet open source project
  • Offers full lifecycle management of EKS clusters
  • Introduces RKE Government, a FIPS-enabled, security-hardened derivative of RKE, Rancher’s popular certified Kubernetes distribution.
• GitHub introduces 10 new third-party open-source and SAST tools now available with GitHub code scanning for additional security in the developer workflow. The new tools include Checkmarx, Codacy, CodeScan, DefenseCode Thunderscan, Fortify on Demand, Muse, Secure Code Warrior, Synopsys Intelligent Security Scan, Veracode Static Analysis and Xanitizer.
• Microsoft unveils Advisor Score. The new service features a centralized dashboard that monitors and helps operators work towards cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance optimization of Azure. Specifically, it helps operators assess how closely they are following Azure Advisor and Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework best practices. Based on this assessment, operators can prioritize and optimize deployments and report on progress over time.
• Druva announces its new cloud-based, integrated backup and archive for network attached storage (NAS) systems. According to a press release, the solution improves backup performance by over 5X, introduces intelligent cold-storage tiering, and helps diffuse storage growth with integrated storage insights.
• Checkmarx adds comprehensive, automated static and open source security testing to GitHub with a new GitHub Action. The new solution integrates Checkmarx’s application security testing (AST) solutions with GitHub code scanning to automatically trigger SAST and SCA security scans in the event of a pull request.
  In similar news, Lightstep releases its GitHub action called Lightstep Pre-Deploy Check. It gives operators observability data within GitHub to help ensure smooth code deploys.
• Eggplant launches its cloud platform for AI-driven intelligent test automation. The new cloud solution helps enterprises automate the test life cycle and speed continuous delivery
• Kong unveils the private beta release of Kong Konnect, a comprehensive suite of tools that enable reliable and secure service connectivity across APIs and microservices.

AWS News 

• AWS introduces AWS Lambda The new service, in preview, gives operators a new way to integrate Lambda with their monitoring, observability, security, and governance tools. While operators previously needed add operational and configuration tasks to integrate, AWS Lambda Extensions simplifies the process; extensions from AWS, AWS Lambda Ready Partners, and open source projects can be used with extensions available today for AppDynamics, Check Point, Datadog, Dynatrace, Epsagon, HashiCorp, Lumigo, New Relic, Thundra, Splunk SignalFX, AWS AppConfig, and Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights.
  
• AWS and Grafana Labs launch AWS X-Ray data source plugin. Operators can now use Grafana 2.0 or later to help visualize AWS X-Ray traces in their Grafana dashboards to triage performance issues.
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics adds prebuilt canary monitoring dashboard. Operators can now see snapshots of their canary health, such as data trends over time for latency, availability, and error counts, with Amazon’s monitoring dashboard.
• AWS Security Hub introduces new user interface for security standards like CIS, PCI DSS and AWS’s Foundational Security Best Practices. The new tabular view makes it easier to see the state of your security posture vis-à-vis Security Hub enabled checks, enabling you to focus faster on failed checks.
• AWS makes Amazon ElastiCache available on AWS Outposts, allowing operators to set up, operate, and use cache on-premises.

Flux7 News

• Read our latest blog, Which IaC Tool is Best for You, CloudFormation or Terraform? In it Praveen Kumar breaks down the differences between the two tools and shares ideal use cases for each.
• We are excited to announce the availability of the Ansible AWS Session Manager Plugin, compatible with the 2.10 release of Ansible. Read about the cloud-native connection plugin for Ansible using Session Manager built in partnership with Cleo and AWS. In addition, we share two different scenarios where operators may consider the new plugin, in our article: Ansible AWS Session Manager Plugin Use Cases.

Written by Flux7 Labs

Flux7, an NTT DATA Company, is the only Sherpa on the DevOps journey that assesses, designs, and teaches while implementing a holistic solution for its enterprise customers, thus giving its clients the skills needed to manage and expand on the technology moving forward. Not a reseller or an MSP, Flux7 recommendations are 100% focused on customer requirements and creating the most efficient infrastructure possible that automates operations, streamlines and enhances development, and supports specific business goals.