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
Business Wire | September 29, 2023
CoreStack, a global multi-cloud governance provider, today announced the release of CoreStack Assessments, a product that simplifies and streamlines multi-cloud assessments for managed services providers and their enterprise customers. CoreStack Assessments equips MSPs and SIs to run multi-cloud assessments at scale against cloud-native Well-Architected Frameworks as well as custom frameworks, enabling them to quickly and easily identify and resolve issues across security and compliance, cost, and operations.
As organizations progress their cloud transformation, it’s imperative that they continue to operate in an optimized and well-architected manner, said Cyril Belikoff, GM of Azure and Industry GTM at Microsoft. CoreStack Assessments hits the mark by empowering single and multi-cloud customers with a comprehensive evaluation of architectural alignment with industry best practices.
“We are thrilled to introduce CoreStack Assessments to our partners – and to simplify delivery of cloud assessments,” said Saba Arumugam, CoreStack’s Chief Technology Officer. “Armed with these powerful assessment capabilities, our partners will be able to capitalize more quickly on the opportunities that matter and help their customers realize the full potential of their cloud investments. This solution provides our partners a robust, flexible, and streamlined assessment experience so they can help customers embrace cloud best practices in the most efficient way possible.”
Purpose-built for partners, CoreStack Assessments provides out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Azure, AWS, and GCP frameworks. Partners can also import existing custom frameworks, create custom assessment frameworks based on hyperscaler frameworks, or create new frameworks from scratch. With multi-level hierarchy and identity isolation, a clear and centralized workflow, and highly automated issue detection and recommendations, CoreStack Assessments provides MSPs new levels of assessment flexibility and scalability. The solution also provides powerful collaboration, evidence tracking, and reporting features.
“For Cloudelligent, CoreStack Assessments has been a game changer,” said Dwayne Lyle, Chief Revenue Officer at Cloudelligent. “It has reduced the internal costs to deliver a Well-Architected Review and automated many of our manual activities, accelerating delivery of these assessments by 50% and helping us ensure our customers are always well-architected. Ultimately it has improved the customer experience and differentiated us from other AWS Well-Architected Partners who deliver reviews in a more traditional way.”
CoreStack Assessments is offered alongside CoreStack NextGen Cloud Governance, a powerful set of solutions that leverage AI to provide continuous and autonomous governance for FinOps, SecOps, and CloudOps through one unified dashboard. CoreStack NextGen Cloud Governance is designed to help customers leverage best-of-breed cloud platforms with the least friction possible, boosting top-line revenues and bottom-line efficiencies whether they’re running AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, OCI, or a combination of cloud providers.
CoreStack was recently named one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., ranking 835th on the Inc. 5000 List for 2023. CoreStack's inclusion on this prestigious list underscores its striking growth and transformative influence within the cloud industry. CoreStack comes in 120th in the Software category and is the 10th best performing company in the Seattle area and 12th in Washington State. CoreStack has also been recognized by Frost & Sullivan, Forrester, Gartner, S&P Global, and IDC as an innovator and leader in cloud management.
About CoreStack
CoreStack provides a NextGen Cloud Governance platform that empowers enterprises to predictably increase top-line revenues, improve bottom-line efficiencies, and gain a competitive edge through AI-powered real-time cloud governance on autopilot. CoreStack's FinOps, SecOps, and CloudOps solutions embrace, enhance, and extend native-cloud capabilities, enabling reporting, recommendation, and remediation and providing single pane-of-glass governance across multi-cloud. Through executive dashboards for comprehensive real-time insights, CoreStack delivers transformative value such as 40% increase in operational efficiencies, 50% decrease in cloud costs, and 100% security assurance and compliance. CoreStack helps 750+ global enterprises govern $2+ billion in annual cloud consumption, and $300 million in cloud cost savings. Frost & Sullivan, Forrester, Gartner, S&P Global, and IDC have recognized CoreStack as an innovator and leader in cloud management. CoreStack is backed by strategic advisors, including the ex-CEO of Wipro and ex-CIO of Microsoft. The company is a Microsoft Azure (Legacy) Gold Partner, Amazon AWS Technology Partner with Cloud Operations Competency, Oracle Cloud Build Partner, and Google Cloud Build Partner. To learn more, visit www.corestack.io
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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 Deployment Models
LightEdge | October 12, 2023
LightEdge, a prominent cloud and colocation provider, introduces its robust cloud offering, LightEdge Cloud. This cloud solution blends the flexibility of public clouds with private cloud-grade security, incorporating robust connectivity options and compliance expertise for heavily regulated industries. It comes with a 100% uptime guarantee and round-the-clock performance monitoring by a dedicated team of cloud engineers. LightEdge Cloud offers a secure and customizable enterprise cloud experience, emphasizing co-management and transparency.
Jim Masterson, the CEO of LightEdge, emphasized that the LightEdge Cloud provides support for any enterprise workload with a scalable, transparent, and, most importantly, highly secure solution.
Key features of LightEdge Cloud:
Managed by experienced data center and cloud engineers for proactive performance maintenance.
Transparent pricing with no hidden costs, including data egress fees and per-IP charges.
Compatibility with various enterprise workloads, such as VMware-based, IBM-based, and container-based workloads
Integration with VMware Cloud Director for enhanced transparency and management
Enhanced security features include microsegmentation, a virtual firewall, DDoS protection, and load balancing.
Supported by LightEdge's secure, redundant network developed over 25 years.
Dale Dawson, the VP of Product at LightEdge, emphasized that the LightEdge Cloud offers identical advantages to any public cloud but at a more cost-effective and transparent price point, with a complete team of cloud experts prepared to intervene when necessary.
LightEdge Cloud provides a secure platform for enterprise workloads, supported by cloud infrastructure and management solutions from VMware and Dell Technologies. Co-management may limit independence, and competition with established cloud providers may pose challenges. Performance and scalability should be evaluated against larger platforms.
LightEdge Cloud offers robust security, 100% uptime, transparent pricing, and compatibility with various enterprise workloads, making it attractive for regulated industries. Proactive maintenance, integration with VMware Cloud Director, and a secure network boost reliability.
About LightEdge
LightEdge, founded in 1996, is a trusted provider of secure cloud and colocation services, with a strong emphasis on security, observability, and compliance. Serving over 1,300 clients, the company offers tailored public cloud solutions and simplifies multi-cloud environments. With a focus on reducing complexity and enhancing security, LightEdge allows clients to allocate resources to innovation over maintenance.
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