Flux7 Blog

In this week’s DevOps news, VMware Carbon Black issues its semiannual Global Incident Response Threat Report. In it, the firm warns readers that COVID-19 has brought a surge in cyberattacks that security teams are struggling to keep up with — 53% of survey respondents reported increases in cyberattacks related to COVID-19. Top endpoint security issues to be addressed include remote access inefficiencies, VPN vulnerabilities, and staff shortages. Looking forward, cloud jacking was identified by 42% of respondents as “very likely” to become more common in the next 12 months.

Reinforcing how COVID-19 has changed the cybersecurity landscape, AT&T Cybersecurity released results of its research in which it found that 70% of large businesses believe remote work makes them more vulnerable to cyberattacks. In response, 47% of businesses say they expect to grow their digital transformation of business processes and cloud implementation in 2021; 40% plan to adopt new automation and robotic tools; and 48% of businesses with more than 5,000 employees expect to change technology partners.

DevOps News

• TriggerMesh integrates with Amazon EventBridge, enabling operators to connect existing on-premises applications or non-AWS SaaS offerings with AWS cloud infrastructure.
  
• Harness acquires Drone.io, pairing its Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform with Drone’s self-service Continuous Integration solution to create self-service CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native applications. In the process, Harness joins the open source software community.
• Sumo Logic introduces the Continuous Intelligence Platform for AWS Observability. According to a blog announcement, the solution, “uses telemetry generated by AWS services to accelerate issue resolution, automatically determine the root cause of failures, and help customers optimize usage of AWS services to improve uptime and performance.”
• GitHub releases two new features to manage and secure self-hosted runners: Enterprise self-hosted runners and self-hosted runner groups. GitHub also ships a series of features to improve workflows. Specifically, to empower users to run workflows on fork pull requests, GitHub introduces three new settings at the enterprise, organization, and repository level for private repositories.
• Appvia launches Kore Cost, to help operators compare costs from AWS, Azure and GCP. It also provides ongoing visibility of actual costs as they occur.
• Microsoft introduces Open Service Mesh, an extensible service mesh that runs on Kubernetes. The open source project helps users manage, secure, and observe service-to-service communication in microservice environments.
• Microsoft makes Azure Advisor Quick Fix available. The new feature allows users to remediate recommendations across resources in just a few clicks.
• Cherwell Software and Resolve Systems join forces to offer workflow automation and auto-discovery and dependency mapping.

AWS News 

• AWS announces GA of AWS Wavelengthin Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area. According to a blog announcement, Wavelength is built on Verizon’s 5G Network and “embeds AWS compute and storage services at the edge of communications service providers’ 5G networks while providing seamless access to cloud services running in an AWS Region.” AWS created the new service with use cases like connected cars, smart cities, and IoT in mind.
• EC2 Image Builder users can now develop and troubleshoot AMIs locally, on their laptops or development and test servers.
• AWS Fargate adds the ability to view and manage limits using Service Quotas, consolidating default values and account specific applied values for On-Demand and Spot resource count quotas in one place. AWS Fargate also adds support for Amazon CloudWatch Usage Metrics.
• Amazon EMR expands to offer up to fifteen EC2 instance types to diversify spot requests for cloud cost optimization. In related news, AWS announces that applications on Elastic Beanstalk can now use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances in both single instance and load balanced environments.

Flux7 News

• NTT DATA announces Deploy Containers for AWS. When beginning the containerization process, teams must answer dozens of questions — many of which have ramifications down the road — making those decisions all that more important. Unfamiliar with the terrain, teams often find themselves in analysis paralysis as they look to educate themselves and avoid making poor design choices. Enter our new reference architecture that helps shortcut the process, shrinking weeks from the containerization process.
• In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes an important business cycle called the doom loop, a negative cycle created by reaction without understanding. The doom loop illustrates the importance of the OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop as a model for responding to shifting market situations with intelligent agility. Read how apply smart agility in our latest blog insights: Smart or Stupid Agility: Which are you?
• DevOps engineer Nikhil Araga shares his Lessons from the DevOps Front Lines, sharing  his takeaways about working as part of an Agile team and specific technologies.

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.