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“Traditional tools to find bugs in code are outdated in today’s rapid DevOps cycle times.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.

These tenants are frequently applied to things like code delivery and security, but a company that fails to apply those tenants to cost control is destined to have a runaway cloud bill (or at least have a series of upcoming meetings with the CFO).

Here are some of those tenants, and how they apply to cost control:

1. Collaborative culture

By tearing down silos and sharing ideas and services, cost control can be a normal part of DevOps cloud practice instead of a forced decree that no one wants to take part in. Writing a script that is more generally applicable, or finding a tool that others can be invited to will cause others to save money and join in.

You may also get ideas from others that you never thought of, without having to waste time or replicate work.

2. Leadership

One common excuse for wasted cloud spend is, “well, that other group has cloud waste too!” By aggressively targeting and eliminating cloud waste, you can set the tone for cost control within your team, which will spread throughout the rest of the organisation.

This also helps to get everyone thinking about the business, even if it doesn’t seem like wasting a few bucks here or there really matters (hint: it does).

3. Design for DevOps

Having cost control as a central priority within your team means that you end up building it into your processes and software as you go. Attempting to control costs after-the-fact can be tough and can cause rewrites or roll-back instead of pressing forward.

Also, tacked-on cost control is often less effective and saves less money than starting with it.

4. Continuous integration

Integrating ideas and code from multiple teams with multiple codebases and processes can be daunting, which is why continually integrating as new commits happen is such a big step forward.

Along the same lines, continually controlling costs during the integration phase means you can optimise your cloud spend by sharing resources, slimming down those resources, and shutting down resources until they are needed by the integration.

5. Continuous monitoring

Monitoring and reporting, like cost control, are often haphazardly tacked on to a software project instead of being a core component. For a lot of organisations, this means that costs aren’t actively being monitored and reported, which is what causes yelling from the finance team when that cloud bill comes.

By making everyone aware of how costs are trending and noting when huge spikes occur, you can keep those bills in check and help save yourself from those dreaded finance meetings.

6. Continuous testing

Continuous testing of software helps find bugs quickly and while developers are still working on those systems. Cost control during the testing phase can take multiple forms, including controlling the costs of those test servers, or doing continuous testing of the cost models and cost reduction strategies.

New scripts and tools that are being used for cost control can also be tested during this phase.

7. Continuous security

Cloud cost control can contribute to better security practices. For example, shutting down virtual machines when they aren’t in use decreases the number of entry points for would-be hackers, and helps mitigate various attack strategies.

Reducing your total number of virtual machines also makes it easier for your security teams to harden and monitor the machines that exist.

8. Elastic infrastructure

Auto-scaling resources are usually implemented by making services scale up automatically, while the ‘scaling down’ part is an afterthought. It can be admittedly tricky to drain existing users and processes from under-utilised resources but having lots of systems with low load is the leading cause of cloud waste.

Additionally, having different scale patterns based on time of day, day of the week, and business need can be implemented, but requires thought and effort into this type of cost control.

9. Continuous delivery / deployment

Deploying your completed code to production can be exciting and terrifying at the same time. One factor that you need to consider is the size and cost of those production resources. Cost savings for those resources is usually different from the dev/test/QA resources, as they typically need to be on 24/7 and can’t have high latency or long spin-up times.

However, there are some cost control measures, like pre-paying for instances or having accurate usage patterns for your elastic environments, that should be considered by your production teams.

Full cloud DevOps cost control

As you can see, there are a lot of paths to lowering your cloud bill by using some common cloud DevOps tenants. By working these ideas into your teams and weaving them throughout your processes, you can save money and lead others to do the same. Controlling these costs can lead to less headaches, more time, and more money for future projects, which is what we’re all aiming to achieve with DevOps.

Chris Parlette is director of cloud solutions at ParkMyCloud

The post How cloud DevOps best practices apply to cost control appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Jamie Cool, the Director of Project Management at Microsoft Azure and author of the post said that Azure DevOps Server 2019 is the on-premises version of Azure DevOps, and it will include a range of new features for customers to use.

Microsoft Azure DevOps additional features

Azure DevOps Server 2019 includes the following features: Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Artifacts, Azure Boards, and Azure Test Plans.

The new 2019 server will provide the “codebase” of Azure DevOps, and will come with a new interface that “makes it easier than ever to see how your deployment is going,” he said.

Each of DevOps services is open and extensible, and all applications work the same on all devices, regardless of what operating system users are using.

However, some users may need to use Azure DevOps in the location they’re in, either because they require an isolated instance of Azure DevOps, or because they want to run Azure in an area where an Azure DevOps is not available.

Microsoft Azure DevOps allows users to install on-premises

The all-new addition of Azure SQL will allow businesses and users to deploy their application to Azure, on premises, or on the cloud, and take advantage of Azure SQL features.

Later in his blog post, Jamie states: “With this release, Azure DevOps now provides best in class hybrid-cloud development collaboration capabilities allowing customers to install on-premises, self-host in the cloud, or use the globally available Microsoft hosted service to take advantage of automatic updates and automatic scaling.”

“You can also mix and match agents self-hosted on-premises and in any cloud on Windows, Mac, or Linux. You can easily deploy to IaaS or PaaS in Azure as well as on-premises infrastructure,” Jamie added.

Microsoft didn’t mention an official release date for the new Azure DevOps Server 2019, but said that the RC includes a “go-live licensing making it suitable for production use today.”

The post Microsoft Azure DevOps on-premises version launched appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The cloud, and the flexibility it provides, is now established as a necessity for nearly every business; from the backroom start-up to the very largest blue chip corporate.

Cloud computing has helped organisations significantly streamline and improve processes in many areas, with low (or no) maintenance costs, better security and the ability to gather, store and share information quickly.

So, with cloud adoption now not an ‘if’ but a ‘when and a how’ for most, businesses are turning their attention to where cloud services can make most impact. And for many, quality testing is an area where the cloud can provide significant benefits.

Indeed, cloud- based testing has become a viable and popular addition to on-premise solutions, often replacing on-premise test strategies entirely.

I believe the move to the cloud in this area is inevitable, providing competitive advantage those who do it well and threatening to leave behind those that don’t.

More than 90% of our customers have either moved wholly to the cloud, are in the process of doing so, or have some cloud testing capabilities.

Simply put, the immense (and growing) popularity of cloud-enabled performance testing is based on the fact that it helps to overcome the limitations of a test strategy that relies entirely on on-premise performance testing.

But, of course, there’s lots to consider when embracing a cloud strategy; what are the benefits of cloud computing in the testing sphere and how can QA specialists prepare for cloud-based testing?

What the cloud can do that on-prem can’t

Faster results is perhaps the most obvious reason to move testing to the cloud. Cloud-based software tests run faster than those that are hosted on local hardware for a couple of key reasons.

The first, and perhaps the most significant, is that a cloud-based test grid enables you to run as many tests in parallel as you want.

Simply put, when you don’t have to wait for one test to complete before you have infrastructure available to run the next one, you get much faster results.

The ability to execute more tests in the cloud comes because the capacity of the cloud infrastructure is virtually unlimited.

If you have a particularly resource-hungry test to run, you won’t have to sacrifice completing other tests at the same time – if it runs in the cloud.

And in a hyper-competitive digital landscape, where it’s vital to bring high quality products and services to market more quickly than the competition – but while still ensuring quality – we all know that fast results make the difference.

For us, cloud services in testing go hand-in-hand with test automation. Already a watchword of development and testing, automation helps developers find any problems much earlier in the development cycle, speeds up the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) exponentially and improves quality at every stage.

Cloud-based testing enables teams to manage the pace and demands that come with test automation: it allows teams to perform tests on multiple versions, on multiple devices, and in multiple use case scenarios – supporting the need for optimum test coverage, without having to set up or maintain infrastructure.

In contrast, using an on-premise scenario presents many limitations – and the most fundamental factors, like WiFi availability, have the potential to significantly impact the quality and velocity of testing.

Testing across multiple versions is hard on-prem. Once you’ve upgraded the operating systems of the devices you’re testing on, there’s no going back to a previous version.

Another challenge is testing across multiple carriers. On-prem you’re tied to your cellular network provider and being able to quickly test for, and develop for, new devices as soon as they hit the market is difficult.

If you’re using on-prem testing, your ability to perform tests on real devices as opposed to using simulators on a local grid will almost always be limited, as most organisations can’t afford to purchase and maintain hundreds of different devices for hosting tests, let alone procure the latest and greatest on an ongoing basis.

In addition, when you own your own devices lab, when a new version of a testing framework debuts or you need to add tests for a new type of device or operating system, configuring a local test grid to support the change will require a significant investment of time.

You may also need to acquire new hardware to support these changes.

Conversely, with a cloud test grid, updates happen automatically, new devices are added as they appear on the market, and cloud test vendors handle software updates for you.

Cloud based testing benefits for all

So, if it’s such a no brainer, then why isn’t all testing performed in the cloud? The answer is that it will be!

It is an inevitable next step in testing. Agile methodologies and DevOps simply can’t succeed without the support of cloud services.

The cloud is the only way to enable disparate teams, in disparate locations, work seamlessly on the same projects – helping them to automate and analyse test results daily, or even more frequently.

But, whilst cloud based testing is likely to be ubiquitous soon, the truth is that we’re not quite there yet – and some, albeit unfounded, concerns remain. For example, we know that ‘the cloud’ as a concept often generates security fears.

But, the perception that data is less secure in the cloud dissipating as even the biggest enterprises are relocating business critical functions to the cloud.

Today, many cloud vendors offer the most stringent security measures – more so than any on-prem method.

Some are concerned that they will have to change processes, but this is a concern which can be mitigated by using the right provider.

Perfecto support all standard automation services – Appium, Selenium etc., meaning that there is no interruption or change in service when you adopt the cloud; and that all of your assets, scripts and processes remain unaltered.

And, without any changes, your tests will be executed faster with more coverage – with all the results stored automatically in a cloud-based analytic tool.

For me, the crucial tenet of success, and how to overcome any lingering misconceptions, is rooted in choosing the right technology vendor.

There’s a lot of choice in the market, so this means working with trusted partners, evaluating providers and tools against your objectives, and perhaps even looking at hybrid options to fit your needs.

And importantly, this must be an ongoing process, where you are able to evaluate and re-evaluate systems and providers, to ensure that they’re always able to take advantage of new developments.

I’d encourage companies to ask vendors tricky questions around uptime, security, speed and scalability. For example, are they able to provision for new devices and for new operating systems in the cloud as soon as they’re available (on the same day as release)?

For major releases like the iPhone X this is important – enabling firms to deliver applications and services which have been properly tested, quickly.

The starting point to success

So, by now I hope that I’ve made the case for migrating your testing to the cloud. But I know that every organisation has different goals, and the methods they use to achieve those goals differ from firm to firm.

And so, which cloud services you need, and when you need them, is down to you.

However, I believe that there are there are five essentials to consider when adopting a cloud-based testing strategy.

The foundations of success are:

• Scale. The solution should be able to scale rapidly as business needs evolve
• Availability. An online solution must be available 24/7 and guarantees about uptime and disaster recovery / system continuity must be made
• Quality. Can your cloud provider ensure that your test quality goals are met, and are any lingering security fears addressed?
• Speed. Cloud testing is much quicker than on-prem. Look to leverage this speed in your testing strategy
• Cost. The cloud naturally has cost savings – but remember, the cheapest solution isn’t always the best or most comprehensive.

And of course, it’s also crucial to look at the underlying tools that you have to work with in your cloud-based testing environment.

For example, if you don’t have the right analytics tools to gather information about your executions and to optimise results, then you simply won’t be able to make the most of the automation process.

Analytics can help pinpoint the highest-risk areas of your product, app or service for regression testing and validate your initial assumptions and concerns.

It can help you spot issues and fix them quickly – and can even help you prioritise the devices or browsers most used by your customers.

So, in testing, just like in every other aspect of commercial industry, cloud computing is big business.

And whilst goals of traditional and cloud-based testing are similar, the cloud approach is significantly better. It’s more scalable, it’s faster, it’s more adaptable and it’s more cost effective.

And whilst local on-premise software testing may make sense if your testing needs are very small or temporary, cloud testing offers a number of clear advantages for organisations that have serious tests to run on a recurring basis as part of continuous delivery pipelines.

You could get the job done with a local test grid, but tests will take longer to complete, they will be harder to interpret, analyse and troubleshoot, and your test coverage will not be as large or as comprehensive as with cloud-based solutions.

There are, of course, some companies that have yet to embrace cloud. These late adopters may be companies in highly regulated industries such as healthcare or government services, or very small organisations with limited testing needs.

And so, for us, while some concerns may remain, we believe that any late adopters should take advantage of the lessons learned by early adopters, harnessing advice from those pioneers experienced on their journey.

And then, simply put, everyone is a potential winner – from the companies that can bring better quality applications and services to market more quickly, to the consumer who buys and uses them.

Uzi Eilon, CTO America at Perfecto

The post Cloud based testing: benefits, challenges and tips for success appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

As part of a specialist DevOps and cloud consultancy that helps organisations to use public cloud securely and professionally throughout their cloud journey, I’ve seen the importance of working closely with companies to define their public cloud strategy and governance model, build secure core-infrastructure, enable DevOps teams and migrate data centres.

With this in mind, the crucial mission at hand is to help organisations accelerate their time-to-value from the cloud, by designing, building, and optimising their infrastructures in the public cloud.

As part of a team of DevOps fanatics, a core part of my work is to help organisations leverage the cloud to increase the speed and success of digital transformation.

Whether an organisation is already using the cloud or planning to use the cloud in the future, the most important reason behind any cloud products is to help new, or existing, enterprises create the foundations for business innovation on which they can then build.

Cloud and DevOps are certainly a growing area and companies are increasingly realising the need to release more faster and safely turn to the cloud because of its agility to help them do that.

Although embracing the cloud is the first step, it’s important to also know how to utilise its speed to ensure that you gain all the advantages it comes with – hence the need for companies to also adopt DevOps as well.

DevOps eliminates a lot of manual tasks that developers continuously undertake and helps give a boost to the development teams. It enables them to interact with harmony and reduces the blame game of ‘it was working on my machine’.

Just like any other major tech game-changers like IoT, machine learning, blockchain, and big data, DevOps is also considered a game disruptor.

DevOps enables teams to evolve and learn collaboratively, ensuring they deploy often and automatically, with rapid release cycles making things faster, which in turn gives the company a competitive edge in the market.

Integrating different teams is at the heart of DevOps and is the first hurdle and currently the biggest challenge. The move to DevOps can also seem scary to the majority of team members and key stakeholders, but I strongly believe the discomfort of change is better than staying behind the competition and not being innovative.

Most companies aren’t big enough, or doing things complicated enough, to justify having a specialised, in-house team of DevOps engineers. They do it because everyone is doing it or believe that is what is going to set them apart, and that is often a costly mistake.

I’ve learned over the years that no DevOps or cloud adoption story is the same and each project must be approached based on its individual requirements, timescale and budget, through a lens of expertise and experience gathered over these years.

It is important to help clients move to the cloud in a way that satisfies their information security, compliance, auditing and regulatory requirements. Based on that, I believe that creating a lightweight adoption and assessment framework to help deliver successful digital transformation faster and more accurately to clients is key.

Cloud Foundation

This is a core element and provides an automated cloud infrastructure and migration service, based on AltoStack’s own and industry-best practices. This provides a secure, automated ‘cloud landing zone’ which forms the foundation for a customer’s cloud platform.

After choosing a public cloud, a team can then help them implement the technology as well as set up the related processes.

One question I often hear from organisations is: ‘how do you approach the transformation and deal with all the moving parts involved?’ Well, enabling cloud in your company can be a difficult task and AltoStack’s cloud enablement team can help a company answer the crucial questions, using cloud workshops and consulting, culminating in a clear, step-by-step roadmap for their organisation.

Cloud Migration

It’s every organisation’s priority for any transition to not disrupt day-to-day operations and to ensure the continuity of business during a migration process, therefore, it is extremely important to help companies reduce the costs and risks of migration.

AltoStack achieve this with proven processes, specialised tools and many years of migration experience. Cloud migration is usually an eight-step process that has core dependencies around good governance and core infrastructure solutions, which lay the foundations required to progress a large-scale migration.

Managed CloudOps

With a company’s critical production systems running on the cloud, it is vital to provide specifically tailored operations, monitoring and support. AltoStack manages these operations in their entirety so that enterprises have more time to add value to their business operations.

Managed DevOps

It is vital to work in partnership with a business to enable, build and ratify any DevOps transformation strategy and ensure that it is aligned to their business’s objectives and priorities.

By focusing on the essential elements of a successful DevOps transformation, AltoStack develops a strategic business plan around DevOps practices and approaches to accelerate technology delivery at scale. Automation of orchestration, provisioning and management of cloud environments – to accelerate time-to-value and increase efficiencies – are all core to this delivery.

A consolidated group of experts

Comprised of a group of experts that have spent thousands of hours building and supporting complex cloud infrastructure and having taken all the knowledge and experience gained from migrating organisations to the cloud – and helping organisations successfully adopt DevOps at scale – AltoStack have distilled their offering into proven frameworks that are tailored according to each client’s needs.

Increasing numbers of companies are now realising they do not need an in-house operations team to support infrastructure that isn’t theirs, and that what they need is a reliable partner to handle all their operational and infrastructure needs – so their developers can focus on building great products they can be proud of!

As well as saving companies, on average, over £100,000 per partnership, we at AltoStack believe that quite simply it boils down to this – stop wasting resources building an in-house team to manage something you don’t own – your infrastructure is not yours!

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure own it. What you own is your product, so why not focus on that and let the experts take care of everything else?

Mohammed Abubakar, Founder, AltoStack

Mohammed is a DevOps & Site Reliability Engineer with a passion for automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery. He works with software development groups in an Agile environment utilising cutting edge technology such as Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Kubernetes, Jenkins and Vagrant to ensure they have all the facilities to get the job done and make their life easier. He has worked for such companies as Deloitte and McKinsey & Company.

The post Time to get your head in the cloud! appeared first on DevOps Online North America.