Category: News

Automate Your Delivery Pipeline

• Different types of test automation
• The value test automation provides
• DevOps and automating your delivery pipeline
• Building a real-world framework

Agile methods have introduced a bunch of new processes to help support fast-paced operations and ensure that products meet quality standards. Continuous practices have become a staple for facilitating these needs, but they can often be dependent upon each other to function effectively. Alone, continuous integration and continuous delivery can bring essential benefits but they cannot reach their full height without continuous testing. With quality testing tools, teams can uphold continuous testing requirements and establish an environment for successful continuous integration and continuous delivery efforts.

The importance of CT

Continuous practices were implemented as a means of ensuring that a deliverable would be ready to release at any moment. However, this couldn’t happen if it wasn’t appropriately tested. Users are placing a major emphasis on whether an app is functional and meets their needs when they download it to their devices. In fact, according to research by Localytics, 23 percent of people abandon an app after just one use. Although this is a slight improvement over last year, the numbers show that 62 percent will use an app less than 11 times. User retention is the name of the game for organizations that want to be competitive, but to do this, they’ll need to step up their testing capabilities.

SwiftStack, a company that powers hybrid cloud storage for enterprises, today announced availability of its latest software release, SwiftStack 5, which will be demonstrated at the Google Cloud Next Conference 2017, March 8 through March 10 in San Francisco, at booth #A4. One notable enhancement to its Cloud Sync feature is the ability to replicate data bidirectionally between the four Google Cloud Storage offerings, as well as other cloud provider’s solutions. Two-way synchronization of data stored between on-premises and the public cloud is managed as a policy controlled by IT, so data is automatically delivered to where it can best be computed on or utilized, within private data centers or in the public cloud.

"We believe that enterprises now and  for the foreseeable future will live in a hybrid cloud world, where business value should determine where data lives, when it moves and how it behaves," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "IT creates and controls the policies for corporate data that places data on-premises and/or in the public cloud, based on the criteria that keeps their customers happy: cost, performance, security, access and availability." More about Duplessie’s view on multi-cloud data management can be found in this short video:http://learn.swiftstack.com/2017-esg-multi-cloud-data-management.html.

Teradata, a leading analytics solutions company, today announced Teradata IntelliCloud, its next generation secure managed cloud offering that provides data and analytic software as a service (SaaS). It is available with new deployment choices including Teradata IntelliFlex, the company’s flagship enterprise data warehouse platform that Teradata will deploy and manage in its own data centers, and global public cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and later, from Microsoft Azure. By leveraging the same software, training, tools and ecosystem applications in which Teradata customers have already invested for their on-premises systems, IntelliCloud ensures 100% software consistency while increasing business agility and boosting focus on data-driven analytic insights that have meaningful business outcomes.

"Demand for cloud services increases daily. In fact, by 2020, 90 percent of our customers expect to have a hybrid cloud environment – and more than 85 percent expect to buy ‘as a service’ for data warehousing," said Oliver Ratzesberger, executive vice president and chief product officer for Teradata.

According to Gartner, more and more clients are demanding that service offerings support hybrid scenarios that incorporate traditional technologies as well as new cloud technologies, and ultimately establish a hybrid IT environment. IntelliCloud was designed to support this type of modern hybrid approach with comprehensive subscription services aligned to customer priorities.

Knetik Unveils the Beta Launch of Knetik Cloud at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, CA. Based on the Knetik Platform as a Solution, the Knetik Cloud service allows game developers to leverage the Back Office and Platform Services to accelerate game development, expand user personalization and engagement, and reduce cost of operations. Providing an auto-scalable system prepared to deliver for any scale, Game Developers also gain access to a robust infrastructure environment backed by Amazon’s Web Services.

"We have had outstanding success in the past few years with our enterprise clients, including two fortune 50 using our platform. To be able to open the door in an extremely affordable way to smaller developers, is very exciting and works towards the vision of why we were acquired by Cima Group last year," said Shane Robinett, founder of Knetik and Chief Architect Digital Transformation for Cima Group.

The complexity of a piece-part approach and the absence of a utility consumption model in most private cloud initiatives has prevented many organizations from delivering mission-critical applications to their customers quickly. Many IT organizations find themselves stuck with manual processes that result in long waits experienced by end users, rising operational expenses, inconsistent infrastructure, and overall dissatisfaction by business users.

HyperCloud Block Storage Service meets the diverse needs of enterprises by providing reliable block storage to run mission-critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint. Leveraging storage volumes that provide consistent and low-latency performance, HyperCloud delivers database as a service for Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Mongo, and many others. The database services in HyperCloud deliver scalable and highly available databases supporting multi-host clustering, backup, replication, and automatic database recovery.

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Thomas Borrel.

The IT services industry is undergoing tremendous change driven by the increased use in technology. Businesses rely and depend on IT to meet customer demands, grow their businesses and deliver value. This dependency presents challenges for companies who need to keep up with IT to stay competitive or differentiate.

According to a recent survey, 68 percent of IT and business professionals are using an outside IT firm to either manage one or more of their IT functions or provide implementation, integration or other IT project work. Additionally, 50 percent of respondents indicated that they would consider using an outside IT firm in the next two years…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Clint Boulton.

The ubiquitous cloud computing craze may not be long for this world if venture capitalist Peter Levine is right. The Andreessen Horowitz general partner said that as more computing capabilities move to so-called "edge" devices, including anything from driverless cars and drones to the boundless devices that make up the internet of things (IoT), the cloud will slowly evaporate.

"A large portion of computation that gets done in the cloud today will return to the edge," said Levine at the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Network event here Tuesday. Levine said the driverless car, whose 200-plus CPUs effectively make it a "data center on wheels," is a prime example of an edge device whose computing capabilities must be self-contained…

VeloCloud Networks, Inc., the Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN company, today announced that it has closed a $35 million Series D round of funding, led by Hermes Growth Partners. Round participants included new investors Telstra Ventures and Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the strategic investment fund of the Government of Malaysia ("Khazanah"), in addition to existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Venrock, March Capital Partners, Cisco Investments, and other undisclosed strategic investors.

The funding will be used to expand business, capacity and operations as the company accelerates new SD-WAN product development, supports larger customer rollouts, and dramatically increases sales and marketing in theaters worldwide. Today’s funding brings the company’s total funding to $84 million.

"We have been following the exploding SD-WAN space very closely and recognize its potential to transform enterprise WAN," said Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, founder and partner at Hermes Growth Partners. "We decided to invest in VeloCloud because of the company’s highly differentiated solution, superb track record with customers, and exceptional management team."