Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced that the National Football League (NFL) has selected AWS’s machine learning and data analytics services to boost the accuracy, speed, and insights provided by its Next Gen Stats platform, the NFL’s player-tracking system. In choosing AWS to power Next Gen Stats, the NFL aims to develop new ways of visualizing the action on the field, uncovering deeper insights into the action on the field, and expanding the fan experience by offering a broader range of advanced statistics. In addition, AWS will become an Official Technology Provider of the NFL.

Through the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in player equipment and the football, Next Gen Stats captures a variety of real-time location, speed, and acceleration data. The data is analyzed on AWS and used to contextualize movement on the field for fans to see on NFL Media properties, game broadcasts, third-party digital platforms, and in-venue displays. The data is also leveraged by NFL clubs post game as part of their football operations on a weekly basis. The system creates a variety of unique player and team stats for every game such as a receiver’s ability to get open and an offensive line’s ability to protect the quarterback. By leveraging AWS’s broad range of cloud-based machine learning capabilities, the NFL is looking to take its game-day stats to the next level so that fans and NFL Clubs can benefit from deeper insights.

Nokia’s software-defined network (SDN) venture, Nuage Networks, has been chosen by Fujitsu to expand its Cloud Service Fujitsu Enterprise Cloud Service K5. The world’s largest OpenStack cloud service, K5 provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) using both virtual machine (VM) and bare metal services, with the latter managed by OpenStack Ironic, in a global commercial first. The powerful combination of OpenStack and the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) provides Fujitsu and its enterprise customers with massively scalable and highly available virtual networks.

The Nuage Networks next-generation overlay SDN solution will help Fujitsu expand its deployment of its K5 cloud-based services beyond its current data centers in Japan, Europe and North America, to new centers in Singapore and Australia. Starting with the data center in Japan, Cloud Service K5 will enable Fujitsu’s enterprise customers to accelerate their digital transformation by moving their existing server infrastructure into K5 data centers. This allows them to quickly migrate to a cloud-native architecture running on OpenStack Ironic and the Nuage Networks VSP. In addition to ‘on-demand’ delivery of services, it will assure them greater security, manageability and availability of the cloud, as well as full support for non-cloud-native applications running on fully integrated bare metal services.

"We’ve teamed with AWS to add our unique value to Amazon GuardDuty findings, maintaining a dynamic asset model of the customer’s environment and providing prescriptive guidance on how to remediate Amazon GuardDuty findings and adhere to security best practices on AWS."

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.