Cloud infrastructure automation is becoming an increasingly hot space. HashiCorp, a vendor based in San Francisco, has secured $40 million (£30.2m) to support its growing customer base and boost investment in its engineering and go-to-market initiatives.

The funding round was led by GGV Capital and Redpoint, with contributions from Mayfield and True Ventures. Scott Raney, partner at Redpoint, said his company believed HashiCorp was a “key component for making cloud adoption work” in the enterprise.

The company offers four primary products, alongside an array of open source offerings: Terraform, which focuses on infrastructure provision; Vault, for securing apps and infrastructure; Consul, for configuring applications across infrastructure; and Nomad for running any application on any infrastructure.

Among its customers are Adobe, Barclays and Comcast, with the company also having partnerships with many of the largest cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Total download numbers for its open source products stand at 22 million, the company says, with 150 updates released across its enterprise and open source suite.

“Broad usage of our products by operations, security, and development professionals has meant that HashiCorp products play an increasingly critical role for many large enterprises as they adopt cloud,” said Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp in a statement. “Our products provide consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure, so we are uniquely positioned to help enterprises address the realities of multi-cloud.

“Our commercial customer base has grown significantly over the past 18 months and this funding will allow us to invest aggressively across the breadth of our organisation and with a particular emphasis on customer support and success,” added McJannet.

You can find out more about HashiCorp here.

Gemini is Yahoo’s native and search advertising platform. To ensure the quality of a complex distributed system that spans multiple products and components and across various desktop websites and mobile app and web experiences – both Yahoo owned and operated and third-party syndication (supply), with complex interaction with more than a billion users and numerous advertisers globally (demand) – it becomes imperative to automate a set of end-to-end tests 24×7 to detect bugs and regression.
In their session at 21st Cloud Expo, Jenny Hung, E2E Engineer Manager at Yahoo Gemini, Haoran Zhao, Software Engineer at Oath Gemini, and Lin Zhang, Software Engineer at Oath (Yahoo), will describe the technical challenges and the principles we followed to build a reliable and scalable test automation infrastructure across desktops, mobile apps, and mobile web platforms on the cloud. We also share some best practices for advanced automated testing of web and mobile applications.

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In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Guy Fighel, Co-Founder and CTO at SignifAI, will dissect a few real-world examples where not knowing what you don’t know led to massive outages and service disruptions. He’ll explore how despite the fact that modern DevOps teams have multiple monitoring tools, hundreds of metrics instrumented and are capturing billions of data points… downtime still happens.
How about instead of implementing more monitoring, we bring forward a future where DevOps teams can augment their existing tooling with AI and machine learning to draw richer correlations across events, metrics and logs to surface insights about threats to uptime that aren’t even being monitored. Or put another way, how DevOps teams can get closer to a state of “known knowns!”

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Enterprises have taken advantage of IoT to achieve important revenue and cost advantages. What is less apparent is how incumbent enterprises operating at scale have, following success with IoT, built analytic, operations management and software development capabilities – ranging from autonomous vehicles to manageable robotics installations. They have embraced these capabilities as if they were Silicon Valley startups.
As a result, many firms employ new business models that place enormous importance on software-based innovations. They require not only skilled occupations, such as data analysts and DevOps professionals, with more technical skills, but also middle-level employees with more software and computing acumen. Both large and small firms operate differently.

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In their session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Michael Berman, VP Engineering at TidalScale, and Ivo Jimenez, Engineer at TidalScale, will describe how automating tests in TidalScale is easy thanks to WaveRunner. They will show how they use WaveRunner, Jenkins, and Docker to have agile delivery of TidalScale. Michael Berman is VP Engineering at TidalScale. TidalScale is developing a scale up compute and resource architecture for customers to perform big data exploration and real time analytics.

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As hybrid cloud becomes the de-facto standard mode of operation for most enterprises, new challenges arise on how to efficiently and economically share data across environments.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Dr. Allon Cohen, VP of Product at Elastifile, will explore new techniques and best practices that help enterprise IT benefit from the advantages of hybrid cloud environments by enabling data availability for both legacy enterprise and cloud-native mission critical applications. By reviewing common hybrid cloud usage scenarios and their active and inactive data challenges, we will answer the common question on many IT managers’ minds: “Do I really need to re-architect everything when adopting cloud?”

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Google and Cisco have teamed up on a hybrid cloud partnership in something of a first for the networking giant.

The partnership will enable Cisco’s customers to deploy applications and services across both on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform.

Alongside this, the increasing importance of open source was cited in the joint offering, with developers being able to leverage managed Kubernetes, as well as Istio, to secure, manage and monitor microservices.

Writing in a blog post, Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco’s cloud platform and solutions group, outlined the reasons behind the move. “One of the things that makes hybrid hard is that while cloud generally abstracts underlying hardware and resources, these abstractions are different in various clouds,” he wrote. “It’s actually a good thing – enabling the rapid innovation and expansion of cloud platform capabilities that we’ve seen over the last several years – but those differences can become a real hindrance for enterprises implementing hybrid cloud.

“It’s with these challenges in mind that engineering teams from Cisco and Google Cloud started working together on a new solution,” Compton added. “The result is a solution that will deliver cloud agility and scale, coupled with enterprise-class security and support.”

Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google Cloud, wrote similarly. “This partnership to enhance existing on-premises infrastructure and extend it to the cloud addresses tough operational problems that enterprises have traditionally struggled to solve,” Boden wrote. “It also takes advantage of Cisco’s best of breed capabilities, including the ability to extend Cisco’s network and security policies and configurations and monitor application behaviour across hybrid cloud environments.”

Google’s cloud push under Diane Greene – who said earlier this year the company was able to catch up to Amazon Web Services (AWS) within five years – has been concerted. In July, CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts amidst the company’s ‘impressive’ cloud assets, the number of its big cloud deals – worth more than $500,000 – had tripled year over year. Among its most recent customer wins was marketing automation software provider Marketo, who went all-in on Google’s cloud in August as part of a wider six year alliance.

The companies said the solution will be available to a ‘limited number’ of customers during the first part of 2018, with general availability being rolled out later in the year.

The cloud market may be a truly global one with the leading vendors being US-based – but in China, for the time being, the local market holds firm.

According to the latest figures from Synergy Research, the Chinese cloud and data centre market, comprising cloud services, colocation, content delivery networks (CDN), and data centre hardware and software, continues to be dominated by local providers.

In the services markets, Chinese operators total more than 80% of revenues, while for data centre hardware and software the figure is nearer to 50%. In cloud services, Alibaba, China Telecom and Tencent lead, while Huawei, Inspur and Lenovo are on top for data centre hardware and software. Annual revenues for these markets in aggregate are now at more than $15 billion per year, growing at over 16% annually.

“The difference between China and all other countries is striking,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research. “The markets for cloud services and for data centre infrastructure are truly global in nature and in all regions they are dominated by US-headquartered companies, but China stands out as the one huge exception.

“Going forward, it is difficult to see US companies making too much headway in China, but there is no doubt that some of the Chinese companies will have an increasing impact in countries beyond China,” added Dinsdale.

This is not to say that the leading global cloud providers do not have presence in China. Amazon Web Services launched its Beijing region in 2013, which now has two EC2 availability zones, while Microsoft has China North and China East regions.

On the other side of the coin, Alibaba’s recent Computing Conference, in Hangzhou, shed some light on its ambitions. As Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, told attendees, the company aimed to move from its recent milestone of one million cloud customers to 10 million. The company’s marquee customers as revealed in the conference were impressive, albeit all Asia-based.

According to the most recent analysis of Asia Pacific nations by the Asia Cloud Computing Association (pdf), China was ranked 13th out of 14 countries ahead only of Vietnam, scoring poorly on international connectivity, data centre risk, and freedom of information.