Flux7 Blog

In DevOps news this week, Dell confirms rumors that it may spin-off VMware. In a press release statement, Dell said it is exploring a potential spin-off of its 81% equity ownership interest in the company. It was careful to note that any potential spin-off would not happen before September 2021. Further, Dell expects any agreement would include a continuation of the existing mutually beneficial commercial arrangements like go-to-market, services, research and development, and intellectual property agreements.

Amidst this news, VMware and AWS unveil new VMware Cloud on AWS features. Specifically, the two unveil i3en.metal, a new bare-metal instance type for VMware Cloud on AWS clusters that is designed for data-intensive workloads that require high random I/O access. The two also announced that the new 2-host cluster capability for VMware Cloud on AWS is available with Amazon’s EC2 i3.metal instance type. Other news includes VMware Cloud on AWS support for AWS Partition Placement Groups, VMware Site Recovery enhancements, new VMware operations product capabilities and more.

DevOps News

• Atlassian updates its popular Confluence and Trello tools to help distributed teams work together even more easily. For example, newly added insights at the top of Confluence pages will show total page views and read time while bulk archiving allows teams to quickly clear out old data. Trello users will see a new team table view for better tracking of multiple boards in one place.
• Portshift introduces the K8SHIELD Framework, and what it calls context-aware security policy enablement. The new features help DevOps and security teams protect against Kubernetes
• Microsoft introduces the preview of Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions. Touted as helping operators more effectively monitor SAP on Azure, the new monitoring solution offers simplified monitoring, troubleshooting, and customization.
• Our DevOps consulting team enjoyed this article from GitLab on fuzz testing and GitLab’s recent acquisitions in the space.
• Codefresh releases Codefresh Runner, a native Kubernetes application that allows operators to run pipelines on their Kubernetes cluster, including private clusters behind a company firewall. According to a company press release, “Customer deploy, ments confirm that moving from traditional self-managed CI/CD to the Kubernetes-native Codefresh Runner results in considerable savings, typically 85% of overall maintenance costs that can run hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.”
• SmartBear reveals new DevOps features in its SwaggerHub platform, including a command line interface and Git integration enhancements.

AWS News 

• Amazon announces CDK Pipelines is now in preview. The construct library for the AWS Cloud Development Kit helps operators set up continuous delivery pipelines in AWS CodePipeline. The library helps dev teams create and share pipelines-as-code patterns to deploy apps.
• AWS Managed Services account users can now use AWS Service Catalog.
• AWS allows operators to fine-tune their security controls with the added ability to define VPC Endpoint policies with AWS KMS.

Flux7 News

• Lock-in has been a perennial IT concern, so it only makes sense that IT would voice this same worry when it comes to cloud computing. As a result, enterprises are naturally very aware that being dependent on a single cloud vendor could present significant cost, legal, and/or technical issues if they choose to change platforms down the road. However, the benefits of cloud standardization can significantly outweigh the potential downsides of cloud lock-in. Read how in our latest blog, Don’t Fear Cloud Lock-In: The Benefits of Standardization.
• Four Recommendations to Boost Test AutomationIn this article Elysia Lock shares several approaches to boost the amount of automated testing you’re doing, and how to focus where it counts most.

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.