Confluent, provider of the streaming platform based on Apache Kafka, today announced that Confluent Cloud is generally available and ready for enterprise production workloads with a 99.95 percent service level agreement (SLA). Built by the original creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud operationalizes the Confluent team’s expertise from managing some of the largest streaming environments in production today. The fully managed service helps companies deploy their Customer 360, fleet management, fraud detection, and other real-time, large-scale initiatives.  

Confluent Platform includes Confluent Cloud, Confluent Enterprise and Confluent Open Source, to create a more complete distribution of Apache Kafka intended for large-scale production across a variety of environments. It improves Apache Kafka by expanding its integration capabilities, adding tools to optimize and manage Kafka clusters, and ensuring the streams are secure. With Confluent Cloud, enterprises and developers have the option to build and run applications in the cloud, knowing that the team who created Kafka are maintaining and managing the Kafka clusters.

Key Confluent Cloud features:

AHEAD, a leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions, announced today the release of its new managed service, CoPilot, which will monitor and optimize public cloud environments. The company officially unveiled CoPilot at AWS re:Invent 2017, as AWS will be the initial focus of the service (AHEAD is exhibiting at Booth #2122).

While there is incredible momentum around public cloud adoption, enterprises often find that the combination of enthusiasm and lack of qualified staff lead to unintended negative consequences. These include spikes in billings from new resources being deployed across their businesses and configuration missteps that can leave companies exposed to potential data breaches.

The CoPilot service delivers reports, dashboards, alerts and benchmarks, and integrates them with guidance from AHEAD cloud experts to provide actionable insights in three areas:

Aporeto today announced the launch of the first Zero Trust Security solution for the enterprise based on finely-tuned application identity, context and intent. The solution continuously monitors and protects applications, by replacing network security based approaches with a radically simple identity and authorization system.

Aporeto’s security is decoupled from the infrastructure and network; the solution transparently binds to applications to provide them with identity and protect them according to their context and operations intent using end-to-end cryptographic techniques. This approach is underpinned by the "zero trust" principle that assumes that any part of the infrastructure can be compromised at any given time. In contrast, the common approaches of security products are to provide static, infrastructure-dependent protection that must constantly be reconfigured to address application needs.

Enterprise Cloud Data Management leader, Informatica, is using Aporeto as the company continues to deliver and grow its portfolio of data management solutions as cloud services.

Traditional web application security technology, such as web application firewalls (WAF), cannot effectively secure and scale with the complexity today’s modern-day applications. Built by practitioners, for practitioners, Signal Sciences WPP is the only solution in the application security market that works across any language, any cloud and any physical infrastructure. This means security, operations and DevOps teams can now ensure they have broad coverage against real threats and attack scenarios and easily scale web protection across all applications on AWS, or other infrastructures.

Fugue, Inc., the company automating infrastructure and policy-as-code to deliver fast, secure and scalable cloud operations, announced it will be showcasing its new capabilities for preventing costly cloud misconfiguration errors at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, November 27-December 1, hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The newest Fugue innovation enhances an enterprise’s ability to move faster in the cloud while addressing mission-critical risks by automating compliance policy validation and enforcement-without incurring a costly forklift of existing cloud infrastructure operations. Enterprises currently operating on AWS can immediately take advantage of these powerful new capabilities to automate and assure cloud governance. Those migrating their existing workloads to Fugue will get:

Avi Networks, the leader in next-generation elastic application delivery services, today announced that the Avi Vantage Platform is natively available to customers of VMware Cloud on AWS. Launched today with immediate availability, Avi for VMware Cloud on AWS brings together VMware’s enterprise-class software-defined data center (SDDC) software and dedicated, elastic, bare-metal infrastructure from AWS to give organizations a consistent operating model and application mobility for private and public cloud. Avi Vantage delivers one-click load balancer provisioning, simplified troubleshooting, consistent multi-cloud architecture, and cost savings of more than 50 percent to customers of VMware Cloud on AWS.

New Relic, Inc., provider of real-time insights for software-driven businesses, announced new product capabilities, customer enablement, and best practice guidance for organizations leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) through their cloud journey. Many of the most advanced and disruptive businesses running on AWS drive their cloud optimization and resource investments using New Relic, including Dunkin’ Donuts, Morningstar, Scripps Networks, Telstra, Cloud Technology Partners, Relus Cloud, and Slalom. The company’s latest updates support the speed, agility, and confidence for these teams, and help enable businesses adopting AWS.

Newly Introduced Instrumentation for AWS

Understanding the context of application health, performance, and constant changes across diverse environments requires deeper analytics than isolated performance metrics. New Relic’s platform unifies real-time metrics from all the components of the application, including those provided by Amazon CloudWatch. To further this support, New Relic Infrastructure has announced expanded instrumentation for AWS, totaling 31 services, with new support for AWS Personal Health Dashboards, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), Amazon Aurora, Auto Scaling, and AWS CloudTrail. Additionally, to get a more focused view, customers can now filter their data sources by tags for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). New Relic Infrastructure combines AWS service performance with application and customer experience data, enabling teams to understand how the configuration and deployment of AWS services impacts the rest of their technology stack.

Today at AWS re:Invent 2017, VMware, Inc., and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced VMware Cloud on AWS is expanding availability from the U.S. West (Oregon) region to also include the AWS U.S. East (N. Virginia) region, and includes additional VMware capabilities and support for more AWS services, making it even easier for customers to move, run, and protect mission-critical applications at scale. For more information about VMware Cloud on AWS, visit: http://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws.

"The momentum for VMware Cloud on AWS is growing rapidly, and VMware and AWS are delivering major new capabilities after only three months of availability while enhancing our strategic relationship with new integrations across our platforms," said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware. "Customers of VMware Cloud on AWS will be able to migrate application portfolios to the cloud even more rapidly with Hybrid Cloud Extension and AWS Direct Connect, while maintaining the optimal levels of performance, scale, and availability required for mission-critical apps."