SYS-CON Events announced today that Addteq will exhibit at SYS-CON’s DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Addteq specializes in creating innovative solutions to solve business processes through the use of DevOps automation. Addteq was founded on the firm belief that automation is essential for successful software releases. Addteq’s products and services are centered around the fundamental approach of understanding the proper balance between knowing when to integrate software and when to automate software. For software teams looking for build and release management services, Addteq is a one-stop shop for all of their development needs.

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Cloud storage provider Box has announced it is cash flow positive for the first time after posting what it calls an ‘incredible’ fourth quarter – yet shares fell in the immediate aftermath of the results.

The company described the 2017 fiscal year as a ‘milestone’, hitting a record $109.9 million (£x) in quarterly revenue which represented a 29% from this time last year, with $398.6m, an increase of 26%, being the whole year’s total.

“Q4 was an incredible quarter for Box, closing out a record year of financial performance,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie, according to Seeking Alpha. “We’re excited to enter fiscal 2018 in a strong position.”

In its previous quarter’s analysis, as this publication reported back in December, the company said it was still on track to become cash flow positive. Levie told analysts that some of the firm’s customers have 600 million objects stored in the Box platform, revealing the depth of usage at the highest level.

Highlights for Box in the most recent quarter include expanded integrations with Microsoft and IBM, the launch of the new Box Notes web and desktop apps, as well as customer wins in the form of Volkswagen Goup of America, Discovery Communications, John Muir Health, and Spotify.

The IBM aspect was again noted in the analyst call, with Levie noting that while the alliance was currently going well, “you will see more success from the partnership this year than even last year.” The partnership with IBM has been cited as key to securing some of Box’s larger enterprise deals; Levie alluded to it here, while dissecting Q217 results back in September noting that IBM played a role in eight six figure deals closed in that quarter.

“Over the coming year, you will see us build amazing products that power how people work together. Our vision of cloud content management fits a major customer need and our product innovation will further drive enterprise adoption of Box,” Levie added. “We will also advance our global go-to-market efforts to extend our reach to enterprises all around the world.”

Shares in Box fell 8.1% after the company posted its guidance on Thursday. You can find out more here.

Cloud storage provider Box has announced it is cash flow positive for the first time after posting what it calls an ‘incredible’ fourth quarter – yet shares fell in the immediate aftermath of the results.

The company described the 2017 fiscal year as a ‘milestone’, hitting a record $109.9 million (£x) in quarterly revenue which represented a 29% from this time last year, with $398.6m, an increase of 26%, being the whole year’s total.

“Q4 was an incredible quarter for Box, closing out a record year of financial performance,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie, according to Seeking Alpha. “We’re excited to enter fiscal 2018 in a strong position.”

In its previous quarter’s analysis, as this publication reported back in December, the company said it was still on track to become cash flow positive. Levie told analysts that some of the firm’s customers have 600 million objects stored in the Box platform, revealing the depth of usage at the highest level.

Highlights for Box in the most recent quarter include expanded integrations with Microsoft and IBM, the launch of the new Box Notes web and desktop apps, as well as customer wins in the form of Volkswagen Goup of America, Discovery Communications, John Muir Health, and Spotify.

The IBM aspect was again noted in the analyst call, with Levie noting that while the alliance was currently going well, “you will see more success from the partnership this year than even last year.” The partnership with IBM has been cited as key to securing some of Box’s larger enterprise deals; Levie alluded to it here, while dissecting Q217 results back in September noting that IBM played a role in eight six figure deals closed in that quarter.

“Over the coming year, you will see us build amazing products that power how people work together. Our vision of cloud content management fits a major customer need and our product innovation will further drive enterprise adoption of Box,” Levie added. “We will also advance our global go-to-market efforts to extend our reach to enterprises all around the world.”

Shares in Box fell 8.1% after the company posted its guidance on Thursday. You can find out more here.

Building a cross-cloud operational model can be a daunting task. Per-cloud silos are not the answer, but neither is a fully generic abstraction plane that strips out capabilities unique to a particular provider. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Wolf, VP & Chief Technology Officer, Global Field & Industry at VMware, will discuss how successful organizations approach cloud operations and management, with insights into where operations should be centralized and when it’s best to decentralize.

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Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS)’ S3 (simple storage service) suffered an extended period of service disruption knocking a multitude of sites and businesses offline – and the fault was all down to good old fashioned human error, according to the company.

According to a note published to customers, the fault occurred during a debugging session. “At 9:37AM PST, an authorised S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process,” the note reads. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”

As a result, this greater-than-expected removal prompted a full restart for US-EAST-1 region, which also meant that other AWS services, such as new instance launches of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Lambda, were also affected.

The resulting casualty list was vast, including Quora, Slack, and Medium. Some users reported that their Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled services, such as connected lightbulbs and thermostats, had gone blank because they were connected to the Amazon backend, while AWS itself could not change its status dashboard, meaning green lights were erroneously blinking away while the chaos unfolded.

AWS, as one would expect in such a situation, said it would make several changes to ensure the issue does not happen again. The first step, which has already been carried out, was to change its capacity tool to create a slower process, as well as adding safeguards to prevent capacity being removed when it goes past the minimum required level. The company has also said it will change the admin console of its status dashboard to run across multiple regions and have less of a dependence on S3, adding that while the AWS Twitter feed tried to keep users updated, it understood the dashboard provided ‘important visibility’ to customers.

So what happens from here? Naturally, the resultant conversation and best practice was to not put ‘all your eggs in one cloud’, as Chuck Dubuque, VP of product and solution marketing at Tintri put it. “This is a wakeup call for those hosted on AWS and other providers to take a deeper look at how their infrastructure is set up and emphasises the need for redundancy,” said Shawn Moore, CTO at Solodev. “If nothing else, the S3 outages will cause some businesses to reconsider a diversified environment – that includes enterprise cloud – to reduce their risks,” Dubuque added.

“We want to apologise for the impact this event caused for our customers,” AWS added. “While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses.

“We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.”

You can read the full statement here.

Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS)’ S3 (simple storage service) suffered an extended period of service disruption knocking a multitude of sites and businesses offline – and the fault was all down to good old fashioned human error, according to the company.

According to a note published to customers, the fault occurred during a debugging session. “At 9:37AM PST, an authorised S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process,” the note reads. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”

As a result, this greater-than-expected removal prompted a full restart for US-EAST-1 region, which also meant that other AWS services, such as new instance launches of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Lambda, were also affected.

The resulting casualty list was vast, including Quora, Slack, and Medium. Some users reported that their Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled services, such as connected lightbulbs and thermostats, had gone blank because they were connected to the Amazon backend, while AWS itself could not change its status dashboard, meaning green lights were erroneously blinking away while the chaos unfolded.

AWS, as one would expect in such a situation, said it would make several changes to ensure the issue does not happen again. The first step, which has already been carried out, was to change its capacity tool to create a slower process, as well as adding safeguards to prevent capacity being removed when it goes past the minimum required level. The company has also said it will change the admin console of its status dashboard to run across multiple regions and have less of a dependence on S3, adding that while the AWS Twitter feed tried to keep users updated, it understood the dashboard provided ‘important visibility’ to customers.

So what happens from here? Naturally, the resultant conversation and best practice was to not put ‘all your eggs in one cloud’, as Chuck Dubuque, VP of product and solution marketing at Tintri put it. “This is a wakeup call for those hosted on AWS and other providers to take a deeper look at how their infrastructure is set up and emphasises the need for redundancy,” said Shawn Moore, CTO at Solodev. “If nothing else, the S3 outages will cause some businesses to reconsider a diversified environment – that includes enterprise cloud – to reduce their risks,” Dubuque added.

“We want to apologise for the impact this event caused for our customers,” AWS added. “While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses.

“We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.”

You can read the full statement here.

The modern software development landscape consists of best practices and tools that allow teams to deliver software in a near-continuous manner. By adopting a culture of automation, measurement and sharing, the time to ship code has been greatly reduced, allowing for shorter release cycles and quicker feedback from customers and users. Still, with all of these tools and methods, how can teams stay on top of what is taking place across their infrastructure and codebase? Hopping between services and command line interfaces creates context-switching that slows productivity, efficiency, and may lead to early burnout.

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ChatOps is an emerging topic that has led to the wide availability of integrations between group chat and various other tools/platforms. Currently, HipChat is an extremely powerful collaboration platform due to the various ChatOps integrations that are available. However, DevOps automation can involve orchestration and complex workflows. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Himanshu Chhetri, CTO at Addteq, will cover practical examples and use cases such as self-provisioning infrastructure/applications, self-remediation workflows, integrating monitoring and complimenting integrations between Atlassian tools and other top tools in the industry.

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