The software giant has added a new Azure Cognitive Services category called “Decision”.

“Decision”

According to an InfoWorld report, the new Decision category provides user-specific recommendations for better decision-making.

Azures Cognitive Service is a collection of APIs to intelligent algorithms that developers can use to perform image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, anomaly detection, and other intelligent tasks.

Under the new banner are other new services such as Personaliser, which uses reinforcement learning to provide users with specific recommendations to help them make quicker and more efficient decisions.

Azure search

Azure Search will also obtain new AI capabilities, via a cognitive search capability that uses Cognitive Services algorithms to extract insights from structured and unstructured content.

Microsoft will also be previewing a new storage capability that will allow developers to store AI insights gained from cognitive search.

Here’s a list of other additional developments relating to the new AI capabilities on Azure:

• New MLOPs improvements with Azure DevOps integration to help developers better reproduce, audit, and automate the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle.
• Automated ML advancements and UI to develop high-quality models.
• Visual machine learning interface provides no-code model creation and deployment drag-and-drop capabilities.
• Hardware-accelerated models for low-latency inferencing on FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays).
• Additional support for the ONNX Runtime on the NVidia TensorRT and Intel nGraph for high-speed inferencing on NVidia and Intel chipsets.

The post Microsoft launches new Azure AI and machine learning services appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The firm said in an email sent to customers over the weekend, which was eventually shared online, that it had discovered unauthorised access on its Docker database last Thursday (April. 25^th).  In the message, Docker said the database reportedly contained a “subset of non-financial user data.”

Sensitive data

“During a brief period of unauthorised access to a Docker Hub database, sensitive data from approximately 190,000 accounts may have been exposed (less than 5% of Hub users),” said Kent lamb, the director of Docker Support.

“Data includes usernames and hashed passwords for a small percentage of these users, as well as Github and Bitbucket tokens for Docker autobuilds.”

It remains unclear how the breach occurred or how long the hackers had access to the company’s database.

Docker Hub is a repository for users to find free Docker images on the Docker container application. Its container technology allows developers to build, package, and deploy applications.

While the Docker Hub contains a variety of different container images, the company claims that none of its Official Images were compromised during the attack.

“We have additional security measures in place for our Official Images including GPG signatures on git commits as well as Notary signing to ensure the integrity of each image,” the company said.

Docker said “no action is required” for regular Dock Hub users.

Password reset

“A password reset link has been sent to any users who potentially had their password hash exposed,” said Docker.

However, for DevOps teams which that use GitHub and Bitbucket to automatically build code at periodic interval, containers images are often deployed automatically to Docker Hub as part of the whole process.

“Users who have autobuilds who have had their GitHub or Bitbucket repositories unlinked will need to relink those repositories,” said Docker.

Docker said it is still investigating the incident and will share more information about the attack, when available.

The post Docker Hub breach exposes 190k acccounts appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

As smart cars and other devices continue to be developed, tested, and sold by companies, more automotive and hardware manufacturers are beginning to compete more diligently at a software level.

CloudBees claims to help these businesses create more time for experimentation and innovation by accelerating building times and shortening functional, performance and security testing cycles.

CloudBees Accelerator

The firm cited its CloudBees Accelerator platform as an example that can help create more time for experimentation and iteration.

After using the company’s acceleration platform, around 25 CloudBees customers managed to save more than three million developer hours from 459.331 build jobs worldwide in March alone – totaling more than 20 million developer hours saved in the last 10 months.

Those 20 million hours represent 500,000 40-hour weeks or 9,615 years that developer in these businesses were able to devote to new innovation, the company said.

“For car technology organisations, getting new software off the assembly line and onto the road faster matters, but a more rapid innovation cycle is not possible with lengthy builds and testing cycles,” said Anders Wallgren, vice president of technology strategy at CloudBees. “CloudBees is an engine to help these development and engineering teams create safer car technology, faster, by accelerating builds and optimizing tests, thus creating more time to iterate and experiment.”

“It’s an exciting time to be part of the Automotive Grade Linux community as the ecosystem continues to strengthen and grow,” said Dan Cauchy, executive director of Automotive Grade Linux at the Linux Foundation. “We are excited to welcome CloudBees as a new member, and we look forward to leveraging their expertise in continuous delivery and application release automation.”

The post CloudBees joins AGL to help car manufacturers build software appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

According to Getronics, HeleCloud is one of the fastest growing start-ups in the UK.

Together, the pair will focus primarily on European customers in the retail, tourism and transport, financial services and healthcare sectors.

With HeleClouds technical knowledge and experience with AWS, both firms will create solutions designed for each vertical sector. Offerings include Technology Consulting, Managed Services, and Technology Training.

Technology offering will be delivered from the new Cloud Centre of Excellence, which is organised to seven areas of competence, including – cloud roadmap and migration, cloud security, compliance and governance, business continuity and disaster recovery. Services for data analysis, infrastructure, and technical design are also among the services offered.

Microsoft Azure

In addition to offering the AWS services, the company remains a partner of Microsoft Azure, serving customers committed to Microsoft technologies or intent on establishing a multi-vendor presence.

Getronics also provides private and hybrid and cloud solution its own private cloud platforms in 19 data centres in Europe.

The post Getronics and HeleCloud partner to deliver AWS appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The company said in a press release last Friday (April.26th) that the AWS DevOps Competency program recognises SAIC’s commitment to helping customers automate cloud infrastructure management functions and simplify continuous integration and delivery processes.

DevOps teams help transform software development life cycles to deliver secure application lifecycles to deliver secure applications, instill collaborative software and IT teams, and automate continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines using AWS and AWS developer tools.

“We are excited to achieve AWS DevOps Competency status, which recognises our continued commitment to helping our clients adopt cloud technologies and DevOps practices with a combination of our process know-how and AWS reliable services,” said Coby Holloway, SAIC vice president of Enterprise IT.

“We help our customers achieve their digital transformation goals by providing some of the best cloud technology solutions using AWS cloud services.”

SAIC, a member of the AWS Public Sector Partner program, is an authorised and government reseller and has previously secured AWS Government Competency status.

The post SAIC secures AWS DevOps Competency appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

SAP declared that cloud revenue exceeded €1.5 billion (£1.2bn) for the first time in a quarter, with cloud and software orders up by 17% compared to Q1 in 2018.

Cloud revenue grew 45% year-over-year, while total revenue at the company increased by 16%.

“SAP’s results are another illustration that we are a rarity in the enterprise applications software industry,” said Bill McDermott, CEO at SAP, in the firm’s report.

“We have a strong core business, the fastest growing cloud at scale in enterprise software and impressive non-IFRS operating profit growth. We are focused on leading a best-run SAP so we can drive significant margin expansion in the quarters ahead.”

The company said that it is now a market leader in experience management due to its acquisition of Qualtrics in 2018.

“I am extremely pleased that we delivered rapid growth in the cloud and a rock-solid core,” said Luka Mucic, CFO at SAP.

“Non-IFRS operating profit growth saw the biggest improvement in more than three years, with both cloud gross margin and operating margin beating our expectations. This gives us the confidence to further extend our commitment to mid-term margin improvements and stronger shareholder returns as announced today.”

The post SAP’s cloud revenue increases by 45% in Q1 2019 appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Screener allows enterprises to test their UI across several different browsers, devices, and operating systems to automatically detect and identify any visual mistakes for easier integration into the DevOps workflow.

Sauce Labs

With the acquisition, Sauce Labs can integrate visual testing into the functional testing workflow, enabling users to deploy both visual and functional testing without sacrificing the convenience and simplicity of working with a single vendor.

It also allows developers to test individual UI components to get the fast feedback in the beginning stages of the development lifecycle.

For most organisations with a large online presence, the visual accuracy of their application has a significant impact on how customers interact with their business. With solution for both end-to-end visual testing as well as front-end visual component testing, screener allows user to:

– Build and run their own visual tests.

– Automate test flows in minutes

– Use DOM snapshots to identify the differences in an app by looking at both visual and programmatic data

– Ignore areas based on element identification

– Store baselines and seamlessly manage entire test lifecycle in the cloud

Sauce Headless

At the same time, the company also announced that it has released Sauce Headless, an offering that provides cloud-based headless browser testing on containers to facilitate fast and affordable early pipeline testing.

It leverages Chrome and Fox browsers on Linux in a container-based infrastructure so development can detect any issues early and keep the pipeline moving by testing on every commit.

The post Sauce Labs acquires Screener and releases Sauce Headless appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

According to a press release, the company plans to use the new round to help improve its R&D efforts, as well as grow its engineering, sales, and customer success teams.

Harness

Harness uses advanced machine learning and AI to automate software deployments, analyse and examine their quality, and initiate automatic rollbacks when any errors have been discovered.

The company was co-founded by CEO Jyoti Bansal and former AppDynamics founder and Rishi Singh, a former DevOps platform architect at Apple.

“We were not actively seeking new investment at this point, but our strong market traction created heavy investor interest in Harness, resulting in a fast-moving and heavily oversubscribed Series B round,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO, and co-founder of Harness.

“We are thrilled to partner with world-leading investment and technology firms — IVP, GV, and ServiceNow — as we continue to build Harness into the next major software platform company.”

Since its launch in October 2017, Harness has helped a number of high-profile businesses, including McAfee, Home Depot, SoulCycle, Bank of Santander, NCR and Beachbody.

Software delivery

“Harness represents a tremendous opportunity to create the next multi-billion dollar company. The team has a powerful vision to redefine the software delivery process using automation and machine learning, and the company’s market momentum is significantly beyond what we typically see in companies at this stage,” said Steve Harrick, General Partner at IVP.

“We were fortunate to be investors in Jyoti Bansal’s previous company AppDynamics, and believe that Jyoti and the all-star team assembled at Harness have the ability to revolutionize software delivery within the enterprise.”

The post Harness raises £46m in Series B funding for its continuous delivery platform appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

According to a TechCrunch report, the terms of the deal were not disclosed, but cloudBees has raised a total of $113.2m (£87.4m), while Electric Cloud raised $64.4m (£49.6m) from the likes of Rembrandt Venture Partners, US Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and Next47.

CloudBees said it plans to integrate Electric Cloud’s application into its offerings, with all of Electric Cloud’s employees set to join the company.

CI/CD solutions

“As of today, we provide customers with best-of-breed CI/CD software from a single vendor, establishing CloudBees as a continuous delivery powerhouse,” said Sacha Labourey, CloudBees CEO and co-founder in a statement.

“By combining the strength of CloudBees, Electric Cloud, Jenkins, and Jenkins X, CloudBees offers the best CI/CD solution for any application, from classic to Kubernetes, on-premise to cloud, self-managed to self-service.”

Electric Cloud offers its users a number of tools for automation their release pipelines and managing the application lifecycle afterward.

Electric Cloud chief executive Carmine Napolitano said the combination would give customers “the best foundation for releasing the app at any speed the business demands”.

Acquisition

The company announced the acquisition at its developer conference, at which CloudBees chief product officer, Christina Noren, said that customers are becoming more sophisticated with their DevOps platforms, but are beginning to run into new problems now they’ve reached this point.

“What we’re seeing is that these customers have disconnected and fragmented islands of information,” she was quoted as saying in the TechCrunch report. “There’s the view that each development team has […] and there’s not a common language, there’s not a common data model, and there’s not an end-to-end process that unites from left to right, top to bottom.” This kind of integrated system is what CloudBees is building toward (and that competitors like GitLab would argue they already offer). Today’s announcement marks the first step into this direction toward building a full software delivery management platform, though others are likely to follow.

The announcement comes after CloudBees acquired CI/CD tool maker CodeShip last year.

The post CloudBees buys Electric Cloud to create continuous delivery ‘powerhouse’ appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The new financing will be used to help build the company, particularly the engineering, sales, and marketing teams and initiatives.

According to the release, Curtail is changing the way IT is implemented for government agencies, financial institutions, service providers and enterprise organisations that are developing and releasing new software and services for DevOps and cloud environments.

Regrade

Curtail network traffic analysis solution tool, Regrade, which allows consumers to release software updates with high-quality, enables software and DevOps teams to:

• “Verify the quality of software upgrades and patches by using real production traffic.”
• “Prevent costly rollback and cumbersome staging.”
• “Regression test in development, quality assurance and production using breakthrough network traffic comparison analysis.”
• “compare open source alternatives to achieve best application performance and security.”
• “Quickly report on software and web services differences including content, metadata, and application behaviour and performance.”

ReCover

Curtail’s continuous security tool, ReCover, will also be used to help teams to mitigate zero-day exploits and prevent server infrastructures from being accessed without the proper authority.

Recover will also isolate compromised servers without the risk of downtime and “negate false positive by switching traffic over to clean systems, eliminating the blocking legitimate traffic.”

“Traditional tools to find bugs in code are outdated in today’s rapid DevOps cycle times. While flaws in software can also be exploited by attacks, it’s most often the risk of unplanned downtime that causes the bigger risk for DevOps teams. It costs four to five times as much to fix a software bug after release, rather than during the design process,” said Frank Huerta, CEO of Curtail.

“System downtime is the enemy of every business. Despite the risks of unplanned downtime, many organizations that develop software and services often push them live without knowing how the software will perform against production traffic, said Chris Kane, partner of Tarus Capital.

“The industry needs new software testing methods to keep up with rapid DevOps cycles. Curtail’s approach is a game changer – helping customers to develop stronger applications and to eliminate the risks of software update differences and defects that impact quality as well as application security,” he added.

The post Curtail raises £2.4m in series seed funding appeared first on DevOps Online North America.