Flux7 Blog

How does your organization stack up when it comes to 2020 technology spending? In a first-ever State of Tech Spend Survey, Flexera sought to help companies answer this question, finding that respondents spend 8.2% of revenue on IT, with 56% expecting that number to increase in 2020. The survey found that the top three initiatives are digital transformation, cybersecurity and cloud-first/cloud migration. Further, 43% of respondents say that too many manual processes present a significant challenge to managing IT spend.

DevOps News

• Red Hat announced Red Hat OpenShift 4.2, which adds ready-to-use developer services with Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh that simplifies the development, deployment and management of microservices-based applications on OpenShift; Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, helps to lower costs by running applications that can scale down to zero while remaining responsive to user requests and then scaling up on-demand and; Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, will run each step of the CI/CD pipeline in its own container, allowing each step to scale independently.
• Red Hat also previewed its upcoming Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.9 release which will feature three new additions: 1) Fact gathering will be more standardized and part of a more seamless experience to the automation workflow, 2) Configuration updates back to the device will also be more standardized and seamless, allowing Ansible Modules to manage the latter half of the “round trip” after fact-gathering, and 3) 2.9 will provide an opinionated and supported means of converting the network device configuration into structured data.
• Atlassian made news last week with its announced acquisition of Code Barrel, makers of Automation for Jira, a popular Atlassian Marketplace application.

Cloud News 

• Amazon introduced CloudWatch Anomaly Detection. AWS notes that Anomaly Detection analyzes the historical values for the chosen metric and looks for predictable patterns that repeat hourly, daily, or weekly. It then creates a best-fit model that will help you to better predict the future, and to more cleanly differentiate normal and problematic behavior. You can adjust and fine-tune the model as desired, and you can even use multiple models for the same CloudWatch metric.
• Operators can now configure Amazon API Gateway to send API access logs to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, allowing operators to analyze API access patterns in real-time and quickly troubleshoot issues using Amazon services. Amazon cites the example of a customer who might use Kinesis Data Firehose integration with S3 to create Amazon Quicksight dashboards to visualize live API log data. 
• Amazon RDS on VMware is now available for production use, launching with support for Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
• Amazon GuardDuty introduced three new threat detections last week: 
  • S3-related detection, Policy:IAMUser/S3BlockPublicAccessDisabled, informs you that S3 block public access was disabled, a possible indicator of a misconfiguration or malicious activity. 
  • S3-related detection, Stealth:IAMUser/S3ServerAccessLoggingDisabled, alerts you to a change disabling Amazon S3 server access logging, also a potential misconfiguration or due to malicious activity.
  • EC2-related detection, UnauthorizedAccess:EC2/MetaDataDNSRebind, informs you that an EC2 instance in your AWS environment is querying a domain that resolves to the EC2 metadata IP address, which may indicate an attempt to obtain metadata from an EC2 instance.
• Amazon has grown its FedRAMP compliance with FedRAMP JAB High and Moderate Provisional Authorization across 18 services.
• Google announced the beta of Security Health Analytics, a CIS-compliant security product that integrates into the company’s Cloud Security Command Center (Cloud SCC). According to a company blog, Security Health Analytics helps operators identify and take action on misconfigurations and compliance violations. 

Flux7 News

• Read our latest case study of a Multi-National Pharmaceutical company that created a strategic IT Roadmap with Flux7’s strategic IT consulting services. A juggernaut in the pharma industry whose drugs and vaccines earn it multi-billions in revenue, the IT team saw a clear opportunity to take its practice to the next level, bringing greater throughput, additional repeatability, scalability and reliability to the business. With lots of ideas and no clear starting point, the pharma company called on the team at Flux7 to help.
• We also featured last week a guest blog from Gilad David Maayan in which he shares 5 AWS Automation Tips That Will Save You Time and Money, including how processes and services that lend themselves to automation can help.

Written by Flux7 Labs

Flux7 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.