Progress acquires Chef for $220m to add more automation and open source to its sauce

Application development firm Progress is to acquire DevOps and automation software provider Chef in a $220 million (£168.6m) cash deal.

The acquisition of Chef, which has more than $70m in annual recurring revenue, will 'bolster Progress' core offerings', as well as aligning with its 'growth strategy through accretive acquisitions… [adding] both scale and cash flow', Progress said.

The company added that the combination of Chef's 'vibrant' developer community, as well...

By | 8 September 2020 | Developers

Misconfigurations remain alarmingly common in cloud storage services, says Accurics

Misconfigured cloud storage services are common in the vast majority of cloud deployments, with the issue expected to exacerbate, according to new analysis.

The finding comes from security provider Accurics, whose latest State of DevSecOps Report found that misconfigurations were found in 93% of cloud deployments analysed, with the majority having at least one network exposure where a security group was left wide open.

Most worrying is that many emerging...

By | 6 August 2020 | Containers

Is Kubernetes the key to unlocking the benefits of containerisation?

Any CIO or CTO worth their salt is aware of containers, so it’s not surprising to see Gartner reporting that three-quarters of businesses want to have containerised applications by 2022. What is surprising, however, is that the same study says at present just 30% are using them – indicating businesses remain cautious about adoption.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that they are unsure about how they would manage and maintain a whole host of containers at the...

By | 23 July 2020 | Containers

Lessons learned: Engineering productivity best practice during Covid-19

Case study The world became a different place during Covid-19 and how we work, communicate and collaborate has been redefined - possibly forever. Our company has a distributed team across the US and India for development and operations. When “shelter in place” hit the entire world, we were not sure how we would be able to execute our projects, customer commitments, and day-to-day operations. Most of our engineers rarely worked from home and in India. Some even left their homes to be...

By | 15 July 2020 | Best Practice

Using agile development practices to improve team performance: A guide

As the world braves a global pandemic, organisations are continuously adapting to working remotely. While teams are working hard to stay productive during these difficult times, there is still a learning curve to acclimate to the current remote setup – a setup which now involves sharing workspaces with spouses, roommates and even rambunctious kids.

From my experience as a software developer all the way through my current role as a CTO, I’ve encountered a variety of work styles...

By | 10 July 2020 | Best Practice

Accelerating the DevOps process during Covid-19: How CFOs and CISOs can work together

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about a new normal. Remote working and videoconferencing has never been more popular; and as a direct consequence, the cloud has never been more popular either. 

Yet a note of caution needs to be applied to those looking at full-speed migration. Jeremy Snyder of DivvyCloud told this publication in April that 'people are really good at creating stuff, but not at cleaning up after themselves', while writing last month Margaret Rogers, VP at...

By | 8 June 2020 | CIO

CircleCI raises $100m in series E funding to move CI/CD further mainstream

Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) software provider CircleCI has raised $100 million (£80.6m) in series E funding - as its lead investor notes how CI/CD is 'expanding to all companies.'

The round, which was led by IVP with participation from Sapphire Ventures, brings the company's total funding to $215m, and adds to the $56m raised in series D back in July.

"CircleCI is an especially attractive investment given the depth and complexity of the product...

By | 14 April 2020 | Developers

How AI is bringing a new dimension to software testing

Software testing teams analyse and correct thousands of code on a daily basis to ensure the final product is free of errors. However, the on-demand customer expects software to be comprehensive in functionality and delivered with precision and speed. Current software testing procedures are not scalable to meet these needs, nor are they cost- or time-efficient in the digital economy.

As products become...

By | 24 March 2020 | Applications

Realising the impact of unsecured container deployments: A guide

A recently published report by StackRox on the state of containers and Kubernetes security has revealed the statistics related to security concerns in data centres with containerised workloads. 94% of respondents out of 540 IT and security professionals who participated in the survey had experienced security incidents in the last 12 months. Misconfigurations and human errors were the primary issues which came out of the survey.

By | 20 March 2020 | Containers

Gartner’s cloud AI developer services Magic Quadrant sees AWS edge out Microsoft and Google

The hyperscalers continue to lead where others fear to tread – or at least those without the cavernous pockets of the biggest cloud players, at least. Gartner has gazed into its crystal ball and ranked the main vendors for cloud AI developer services, and it’s a 1-2-3 for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google.

In its latest Magic Quadrant, Gartner defines ‘cloud AI developer...

By | 6 March 2020 | Amazon