Flux7 Blog

With one in three Americans under a directive to stay at home due to the Coronavirus, enterprises are feeling the impact. To help organizations minimize related risks, the Uptime Institute has issued a set of pandemic risk management recommendations in a new report. Also helping companies remain agile and responsive, are companies like Atlassian who this week increased the number of tools it offers for free. Organizations can now freely access cloud-based versions of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk, and Jira Core to help communication across an increased number of remote work employees. 

In related IT Modernization news, Google Cloud has decided to postpone the Google Cloud Next ‘20: Digital Connect conference. Originally moved to a virtual format, event organizers are now seeking a more opportune time to hold the event. A host of other events have moved online including, Atlassian Summit, Red Hat Summit, the Facebook F8 Developer Conference and more. 

DevOps IT Modernization News

• GitHub will acquire npm. Touted as the world’s largest software registry with over 800,000 code packages, GitHub intends to scale npm to continue to meet developer’s needs. According to the blog announcement, npm will remain free and open source. Specifically, GitHub reports it will:
  • invest in the registry infrastructure and platform to ensure that npm is fast, reliable, and scalable;
  • improve the user experience, and;
  • continue to solicit ideas from the user community.
    
    
• Separately GitHub announced the availability of GitHub for mobile.
• HashiCorp unveils the alpha release of its HashiCorp Terraform Operator for Kubernetes. Per a company announcement, Operator lets users natively define and create IaC in Kubernetes via calls to Terraform Cloud. Users interested in the new Operator may like that it can help harden and configure application-related infrastructure as a Terraform module, creating them with a Kubernetes-native interface. Or, that it can automate Terraform Cloud workspace and variable creation with a Kubernetes-native interface.
  
  
• In other news, HashiCorp brought in $175 million in Series E funding last week. The company is now valued at $5.1 billion.
  
  
• The open source Kubernetes management company, RancherLabs, also announced funding last week. It raised $40 million in a Series D round of funding.
• The open source Git project releases Git 2.26 to market. Highlights include:
  • an updated git sparse-checkout,
  • protocol version 2 is now default,
  • several new config features, and
  • improvements to git grep speed.

AWS News 

• AWS introduces customizations for AWS Control Tower. This new feature allows users to apply custom templates and policies to the AWS Control Tower landing zone.  In addition, it allows users to deploy new resources to existing and new accounts within their organization via AWS CloudFormation templates.
  
  
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk has become a community open source project on GitHub. With the move, AWS has issued a new public roadmap for the service.
  
  
• Amazon shares a new way to reduce AWS machine learning inference costs. Users can now use Amazon Elastic Inference to accelerate inference and reduce inference costs for PyTorch models in Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EC2, and Amazon ECS. According to a blog post, enhanced PyTorch libraries for EI are now available automatically in Amazon SageMaker, AWS Deep Learning AMIs, and AWS Deep Learning Containers. This will allow users to deploy PyTorch models in production with minimal code change.
  
  
• AWS announces that its site-to-site VPN now supports digital certificates for IKE authentication for VPN connections to AWS Transit Gateway.

Flux7 News

• High Performance Computing (HPC) is a balancing act for technologists, balancing demands of research units and the finance organization. High Performance Computing on cloud makes this balancing act even more precarious. Researchers beg for the ‘unlimited compute’ elasticity of the cloud while finance focuses on the new costs. Read our new white paper that helps technologists navigate this balance. How to Talk to Your CFO about High Performance Computing on Cloud.
• A Forbes report called remote work “standard operating procedure” for 50% of the U.S. population. Yet, if you aren’t among those who typically work from home you may be surprised to hear that there are definite skills and strategies to ensure your success. Read our latest blog in which our team of remote employees share their insights for effective remote work. Remote Employees Share Their Tips for a Healthy Remote Work Environment.

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.