Flux7 Blog

Security and trust continue to lead DevOps news with The Linux Foundation announcing a new project. The nonprofit organization will host the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, an independent project that is working to grow confidence in data through a robust, common standard that will serve as the foundation for a trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the Internet. Designed to provide businesses the confidence that data is coming from a trusted source, will allow them to innovate with greater speed and scale, according to ToIP.

DevOps News

• GitHub unveils four new products at its virtual Satellite 2020 conference: 
  • Codespaces, which GitHub describes as a complete dev environment within GitHub that lets you contribute immediately; 
  • GitHub Discussions, where people can collaborate outside codebase; 
  • Code and secret scanning that helps GitHub communities create and use more secure code; and 
  • GitHub Private Instances which allow even tightly regulated users to collaborate.
• Microsoft announces the next evolution of its Azure VMware Solution. Currently in preview, the service helps users extend or completely migrate their existing on-premises VMware apps to Azure without needing to re-architect them.
• Cloudera expands Cloudera Machine Learning with new production machine learning capabilities for MLOps. According to a press release, the release with new MLOps features and Cloudera SDX for models provides model and lifecycle management capabilities that help users scale their model deployments and ML use cases.
• New Relic introduces New Relic Edge with Infinite Tracing. The service observes 100% of application traces and provides visualizations and storage for the most actionable data, per the company blog. It is delivered as a fully managed, cloud-native service.
• CloudBees releases CloudBees Feature Flags. From Rollout, which CloudBees acquired last year, Feature Flags allows devs to manage production deployments of new functionality with an on-premise feature manager. CloudBees touts the new offering as extending its core CI/CD strength by extending users’ ability to leverage feature flag technology in both on-premise and cloud environments. 

AWS News 

• Amazon introduces AWS Trusted Advisor Explorer. The new solution helps organizations optimize costs by providing recommendations via a visual dashboard. It does so by automatically provisioning infrastructure that aggregates cost optimization related data and actively tracks cost-related health from the enterprise.
• In this spirit, AWS releases five new cost optimization checks for AWS Trusted Advisor. The app uses best practices aggregated from AWS customers to provide cost-saving recommendations. The new checks include cost-savings recommendations for ElastiCache, RedShift, ElasticSearch and RDS along with Savings Plan recommendations. 
  
  Piggybacking on this news, AWS Systems Manager Explorer also now provides a summary of AWS Trusted Advisor checks across AWS accounts.
• AWS unveils parameter support with service actions in AWS Service Catalog. This allows operators to create service actions that use AWS Systems Manager Automation documents with more than one parameter. The new feature allows users to conduct tasks like creating a backup or filing a ticket based on content they provided. 
• AWS extends EC2 Image Builder to support AWS CloudFormation. The integration allows operators to automate the creation, testing, and deployment of custom AMIs.
• Amazon now integrates AWS Step Functions with AWS CodeBuild. Together the services will make it faster to build continuous integration workflows, according to AWS. This is because operators can now easily create workflows with primitives such as branching, parallel execution, and timeouts to handle software changes from different repository branches.
• Amazon adds additional accuracy to machine learning models with fraud detection. Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning automates the detection of potentially fraudulent activity and flags it for review. Users can deploy it with a sample dataset or their own. The solution also now includes a model to detect anomalies in unlabeled data.
• Our AWS consulting team likes this update from Amazon. Operators can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor Prometheus metrics from Amazon EKS and Kubernetes clusters. Available in beta, the new feature will allow users to automatically discover services for containerized workloads such as AWS App Mesh, NGINX, and Java/JMX. According to an AWS blog post, users will also be able to expose custom metrics on those services and ingest the Prometheus metrics in CloudWatch. 
• Last, our DevOps consultants enjoyed the blog, Enabling AWS Security Hub integration with AWS Chatbot. In it, AWS shares how to configure AWS Chatbot to send security alerts and other findings from AWS Security Hub to Slack. 

Flux7 News

• It delights us to announce that we have received AWS SaaS Competency status. As an APNPremier Consulting Provider, we work with dozens of customers to modernize their legacy applications in the cloud while helping others build greenfield SaaS applications. In both cases, AWS enables them to take advantage of cloud benefits like greater scalability, flexibility, security, and accessibility.
• There is little argument that automated testing has emerged as an industry best practice. Yet, there remains a wide variety of adoption and maturity in the market. Read SA Elysia Lock’s article on why automated testing is imperative for DevOps maturity and success and the Five Common Automated Testing Myths that often stand in the way.

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.