Cloud App Management
GlobeNewswire | October 20, 2023
Webscale, the industry leader in Intelligent CloudOps, proudly announces its acquisition of Section.io, a trailblazer in edge-native computing. This strategic acquisition has paved the way for the launch of CloudFlow, a revolutionary Kubernetes orchestration platform with patented Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) automation at its core. This unprecedented level of smart automation allows organizations to take a zero-ops approach to enhancing operational efficiency, optimizing compute resources, and delivering ultra low-latency performance.
In today's economic landscape, where organizations face the constant challenge of balancing cloud cost optimization and surging compute demands driven by increasing user experience expectations, Webscale is pioneering a new course. CloudFlow empowers businesses, from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to enterprise organizations, to harness the full potential of AI to drive deep levels of efficiency into their distributed cloud computing strategies.
Key Features of CloudFlow:
AI-driven Adaptive Edge Engine: CloudFlow enlists patented AI/ML capabilities to ensure efficient resource allocation, dynamic scaling, and cost optimization, reducing cloud infrastructure costs while maximizing performance.
One-click Multi-cloud: CloudFlow’s Composable Edge Cloud (CEC) enables one-click multi-cloud integration, allowing users to operate seamlessly across various cloud providers, liberating them from vendor lock-in and providing unparalleled least cost routing.
Dynamic Cost Management: CloudFlow continuously monitors all environments, adjusting resource allocation and cluster size in real-time through coordination with Endpoint Controller, HPA, VPA, and HCA. This ensures judicious resource usage, resulting in cost savings without performance compromise.
Ironclad Security: The CloudFlow platform is SOC2 Type II, PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliant, ensuring the safety of your customers’ personal and financial data.
Zero-Ops Simplicity: By utilizing CloudFlow, zero-ops distributed cloud computing becomes an immediate reality, saving organizations time, effort, and resources.
A Seamless Collaboration
The acquisition of Section.io by Webscale signifies a pivotal moment in cloud-native computing, said Gary Schofield, CEO of Webscale. Our shared vision led us to create CloudFlow, a platform designed to simplify Kubernetes operations while using AI to efficiently manage workload placement and resource allocation across our clients’ networks. It's a game-changer for businesses seeking control over their margins by keeping inflated cloud infrastructure costs in check without sacrificing performance or security posture.
Gary added, "CloudFlow embodies the essence of innovation and is set to revolutionize cloud-agnostic operations for our customers across diverse sectors, including e-commerce, digital experience, ISVs, and enterprises."
Former Section.io CTO, Dan Bartholomew, has embarked on an exciting journey as Chief Product Officer within the expansive Webscale organization. In his new role, Dan is leading the Product Development organization, steering the innovation and integration roadmap of cutting-edge technology solutions from Section and Webscale. Under the united Webscale banner, we're poised to redefine the future of digital experiences, setting new standards for smart distributed computing and cloud infrastructure cost control.
CloudFlow represents a significant milestone in the cloud edge-native computing landscape. To explore how CloudFlow's AI-based technology can transform your cloud operations, visit www.webscale.com.
About Webscale
At Webscale, we understand the evolving cloud technology landscape and the challenges that organizations face in harnessing its full potential. That's why we've embarked on a mission to provide ecommerce businesses, digital experience providers, and SaaS vendors AI-rich tooling through our revolutionary CloudFlow platform, powered by the recent acquisition of Section.io. CloudFlow enables businesses to inject intelligence into their Kubernetes operations like never before and reimagine their distributed computing and cloud cost optimization strategies.
We believe that intelligence is the future of cloud computing, and CloudFlow represents our vision to empower organizations with the tools they need to thrive in the digital age. The CloudFlow platform has been designed to deeply integrate AI into multiple aspects of cloud management, from optimizing resource allocation to scaling Kubernetes architecture efficiently to meet minute-by-minute demand.
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Cloud Security
Aviatrix | October 13, 2023
Aviatrix, a leading provider of secure cloud networking solutions, unveiled the results of a comprehensive technical assessment conducted by TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, highlighting the efficacy of its revolutionary distributed cloud firewall in fortifying cloud-based cybersecurity. The report underscores the growing need for a simplified and comprehensive security architecture to safeguard applications on public cloud infrastructure as organizations increasingly leverage multiple cloud providers.
According to the evaluation, the Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall significantly reduces the complexity of securing public cloud infrastructure, streamlining crucial aspects such as threat blocking, policy definition, enforcement, and microsegmentation. This is a significant development considering the challenges posed by traditional firewalls that struggle to adapt to the dynamic nature of cloud computing.
Alex Arcilla, Senior Validation Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, reportedly remarked,
Many organizations are still working with traditional data center network firewalls that have been virtualized to work in the public cloud, and they're now finding that they're saddled with the same – if not more – challenges than they faced when deploying firewalls on premises.
[Source – Cision PR Newswire]
Aviatrix's innovative Distributed Cloud Firewall, a key offering within its Secure Cloud Networking suite, revolutionizes network security in the cloud by enabling distributed inspection and enforcement. This approach enhances security, scalability, and agility while substantially reducing costs. Notably, the distributed architecture allows for a cost reduction of over 30% while delivering a 14-fold increase in aggregate security throughput compared to conventional, centralized firewall architectures commonly adapted for cloud environments.
It was proven that the Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall can create a zero-trust security posture in multicloud environments by protecting the current perimeter, locking down environments with policy configurations based on cloud resource attributes and tags, and filtering traffic from one service to another. These features ensure comprehensive security measures for east-west service-to-service traffic within cloud environments and internet egress traffic.
Rod Stuhlmuller, the Vice President of Solutions Marketing at Aviatrix, emphasized that the introduction of Aviatrix's Distributed Cloud Firewall earlier that year had signaled the beginning of a new era for cloud network security. He further noted that customers were rapidly embracing this solution. Additionally, he highlighted that the technical analysis by Enterprise Strategy Group underscored the value that Aviatrix was providing to enterprises struggling with contemporary cloud security challenges and associated expenses.
However, the Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall, with its intricate functionalities and sophisticated network security configurations, may present a considerable obstacle for users less familiar with such intricate setups. Consequently, the successful deployment of this firewall may require the involvement of specialized experts to ensure its optimal performance. Moreover, the initial financial investment and the intricacies involved in the integration process of the Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall may create barriers for smaller organizations, potentially limiting their access to the advantages it offers.
Notwithstanding these challenges, the Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall effectively addresses the continually changing security requirements of modern cloud environments. It presents a seamless and cost-effective solution for establishing comprehensive cybersecurity measures within a cloud-based infrastructure, thereby enhancing the overall security posture and minimizing potential risks.
About Aviatrix
Aviatrix, a Santa Clara-based software development firm, caters to a global clientele of over 500 companies, providing secure cloud networking solutions that foster innovation and cost control. Its pioneering Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) Program facilitates digital transformation for businesses. Specializing in hybrid cloud networking, VPC peering, and cloud security, Aviatrix is recognized for its expertise in simplifying and streamlining networking architectures across multiple cloud service providers.
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Cloud App Management
PR Newswire | October 19, 2023
dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, today announced several new product capabilities to its dbt Cloud platform at its annual customer conference, Coalesce 2023. New dbt Cloud capabilities enable customers to adopt dbt at scale and include dbt Explorer, Cloud CLI, new partner adapters, and the next generation of the dbt Semantic Layer. dbt Labs also announced the new dbt Mesh paradigm, which equips teams to collaborate across projects to support a data mesh architecture, enabled by the new capabilities. These announcements provide organizations with a centralized data transformation platform where everyone can contribute to data in a governed manner with increased velocity, quality, consistency, and coordination.
"We first introduced dbt Cloud to help data analysts and engineers productionize dbt deployments," said Tristan Handy, CEO and founder of dbt Labs. "With today's announcements, dbt Cloud customers can create a mesh of interconnected, domain-owned, dbt codebases. The developments we've made this year are central to enabling collaboration across multiple projects, a requirement for managing dbt at scale."
Centralized, Secure, and Scalable Governance with dbt Mesh
Historically, organizations have relied solely on a central data platform and data team to deliver analytics to the entire business, resulting in bottlenecks, overworked teams, shipping delays, and low data quality. Today, dbt Labs has launched dbt Mesh, a new paradigm that makes it possible for domain teams to build and maintain their own data products, without compromising on governance or creating silos. By doing so, data products can quickly and easily build on each other. Instead of centralizing business logic in a monolithic dbt project, central data teams can make platform decisions and set global standards for governance.
The dbt Mesh paradigm allows users to:
Declare interfaces between contributors inside of dbt, with the use of model access levels, model contracts, and model versions.
Natively support dependencies across projects, which allows each domain team to own their own data products.
Democratize ownership by allowing every team to own and contribute to their own data products instead of requiring a single, monolithic dbt project for the entire organization.
Launched in public preview, the capabilities enabling dbt Mesh are currently available for no additional cost to current dbt Cloud customers.
Intuitively Navigate and Discover Data Products with dbt Explorer
dbt Labs also announced dbt Explorer, a next generation documentation and lineage visualization experience. In addition to supporting the dbt Mesh paradigm, dbt Explorer allows any organization to more easily discover and understand their dbt assets across teams and projects.
dbt Explorer makes it easier for data teams to share context, troubleshoot issues, and reuse assets across different parts of the organization – significantly reducing friction in the data development workflow, and allowing teams to better control their data platform spend at the same time.
Develop Anywhere with the Cloud CLI
The dbt Cloud platform has been enhanced to now provide data developers more flexibility in how they write dbt code. In addition to its in-browser Integrated Development Environment (IDE), dbt Cloud now offers a dedicated Command Line Interface (CLI), giving more advanced practitioners the flexibility to contribute via any terminal or IDE software of their choosing.
This gives data practitioners the best of both worlds: they can eliminate many of the hassles of local development—such as the complexities of manual configuration, authentication, and version upgrades—while enjoying the benefits of a hosted solution, all from the comfort of their preferred development environment.
With the introduction of the Cloud CLI, data teams can operate with confidence knowing that the entire organization is collaborating from a consistent platform, while each developer is free to work from wherever they are most comfortable.
Expanding the Ecosystem with Microsoft adapters
Additionally, dbt Labs is expanding the ecosystem of cloud data platforms that dbt Cloud inter-operates with, announcing upcoming adapters for Microsoft Azure Synapse and Microsoft Fabric. Existing Synapse and Fabric customers will soon be able to leverage dbt Cloud's full-service data transformation capabilities, providing mutual customers even more flexibility into how and where they develop and deliver data products. dbt Cloud support for Fabric is currently in private preview, and Synapse support will be made available before the end of 2023.
Power Consistent Metrics with the dbt Semantic Layer
dbt Labs also announced the next generation of the dbt Semantic Layer following its acquisition of Transform in February 2023. The dbt Semantic Layer now enables organizations to centrally define business metrics in dbt and then query them from a number of integrated analytics tools including Tableau, Google Sheets, Hex, and Mode. This allows organizations to ensure that critical definitions such as "revenue," "customer count," and "churn rate" are universally consistent, in every downstream application, by every user and team. The new dbt Semantic Layer is accessible to data platforms supported by dbt Cloud, namely BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, and Snowflake.
About dbt Labs
Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt Labs pioneered the practice of analytics engineering, built the primary tool in the analytics engineering toolbox, and has been fortunate enough to see a fantastic community coalesce to help push the boundaries of the analytics engineering workflow. Today there are 30,000 companies using dbt every week, 90,000 dbt Community members, and 3,600 dbt Cloud customers.
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Cloud App Management
StackPath | September 20, 2023
StackPath Edge Compute is now accessible via the Google Cloud Marketplace, allowing Google Cloud customers to expand their environment to the internet's edge. StackPath, a leading edge computing platform, has made its Edge Compute Virtual Machines and Containers available on the marketplace, with purchases counting towards users' committed Google Cloud expenditure.
StackPath offers cloud computing instances at edge points of presence within 38 major global markets, ensuring proximity to data sources and destinations. This proximity enhances application distribution options.
Tom Reyes, Chief Product Officer for StackPath, emphasized the synergy between edge and cloud computing, highlighting the cost and performance benefits of utilizing Google Cloud for latency-neutral workloads and StackPath for latency-sensitive tasks.
Dai Vu, Managing Director at Google Cloud, reportedly stated,
As a part of their digital transformation strategies, many enterprises are seeking solutions that help them optimize their workflows. With its solutions now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, StackPath is enabling companies of all types and sizes to achieve the speed, security, and efficiency they require.
[Source: PR Newswire]
Additionally, StackPath recently added support for Virtual Kubelet in StackPath Edge Compute, facilitating seamless integration of StackPath Edge Compute Containers into multi-cloud Kubernetes (K8s) clusters. K8s, born on Google Cloud, remain popular among Google Cloud users.
Key features of StackPath Edge Compute include deploying VMs with certified Linux distributions, image capture for autoscaling and rollbacks, deploying compliant container images, and rapid provisioning in StackPath Edge locations.
About StackPath
StackPath is an edge cloud platform offering cloud services in close proximity to end users compared to core cloud providers. Its edge compute solutions, including virtual machines and containers, along with edge applications such as CDN and WAF, are strategically positioned in densely populated areas. These services are connected through a secure private network fabric and managed through a single system. Clients, ranging from Fortune 50 enterprises to startups, rely on StackPath to optimize the performance, security, and efficiency of their latency-sensitive workloads and applications. Headquartered in Dallas, TX, StackPath was founded in 2015 and specializes in SECaaS, CDN, WAF, and various other cloud-related services.
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