SOASTA Now Available Via Azure, VSTS Marketplaces

Performance analytics company SOASTA has expanded its Microsoft (News - Alert) support with the availability of CloudTest on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and the Visual Studio Team Services Marketplace. The collaboration extends SOASTA’s leadership in performance testing to Microsoft’s solutions for Microsoft Azure customers migrating to the cloud and for continuous delivery. Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, said: “CloudTest, with Microsoft Azure, delivers peak customer load to web and mobile channels just as real customers would – from the outside in. Unlike traditional performance testing done in a lab, CloudTest delivers full-scale dress rehearsals of peak events, allowing all stakeholders to observe performance at scale in real time, identify problems and resolve them before putting revenue and reputation at risk.”

Professional Services Enable Rapid Prototyping

WaveMaker now offers professional services for rapid mobile app development. At the core of RAD is rapid prototyping, which allows developers to create real looking apps in a matter of days, and without slowing the full development lifecycle.

GigaSpaces (News - Alert) Offers Cloudify Online Training

Cloudify cloud orchestration sponsor GigaSpaces has launched an online training program for cloud architects and application developers interested in learning more about the TOSCA templating language. TOSCA stands for Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications from OASIS. The course covers the fundamentals of TOSCA orchestration and how it is implemented in the Cloudify project. It contains eight modules, four theoretical and four hands-on labs.

Red Hat Makes GA New OpenStack Solutions

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 and Red Hat Cloud Suite are now available. Both are OpenStack solutions designed to help enterprises move toward a complete, integrated hybrid cloud stack. Platform 8 now includes infrastructure and workload management.

Micron Unleashes Accelerated Solutions

Micron Technology (News - Alert) Inc. has introduced a set of solutions for open source and software-defined data centers. The first suite of Micron Accelerated Solutions were designed and developed in close collaboration with Nexenta, Supermicro, and VMware. Micron also recently opened the Micron Storage Solutions Center; this Austin, Texas, facility serves as hub for Micron storage innovation and is the engineering home for Micron Accelerated Solutions.

Hortonworks Offers Updates

At the recent Hortonworks Summit Europe the company released an Extended Services Release including Apache Ranger for security, Apaches Atlas for data governance, Cloudbreak for expanded support for cloud resources, and the latest for Apache Ambari.

The company says it also is helping to accelerate the Apache Metron security incident event management project to combat cyber security threats. The company also announced a couple new partnerships. One, with Syncsort, will create a solution to integrate legacy ETL flows in Connected Data Platforms. The other, an extension of its existing relationship with Pivotal, will have that company standardize on Pivotal HDP to support subscription software that is identical to the Hortonworks Data Platform.

SYSTRAN Introduces Cloud-Based API

Customer experience experts, marketers, online gaming developers, and social media companies now have another tool at their disposal thanks to the introduction of a new application programming interface from SYSTRAN Software. SYSTRAN.io is a new cloud-based API that enables organizations to more easily develop multilingual applications. This 50-language toolkit allows for anonymization, data extraction and restructuring, dictionary management, real-time text-to-text translation, and voice-to-text recognition and transcription. And it enables those who use the applications built with it to learn through language analytics, do sentiment analysis on user-generated content, and understand and react to data in multiple languages.

IDC (News - Alert): Open Source Xamarin is Game Changer

In a recent commentary Al Hilwa, program director of software development research at IDC, talked about how Microsoft changed the application development software tooling world about 20 years ago with the introduction of Visual Basic. And he said the software giant is doing that again today with cross-platform mobile development by open sourcing Xamarin, software from a company of the same name that it bought in March. Then, he said, Microsoft connected its IoT services to its new Azure Functions offering. “It was expected that Microsoft would announce something similar to AWS Lambda, Google (News - Alert) Cloud Functions and IBM OpenWhisk,” he said. “These are new app models that make it easy for developers to write event-driven apps. The idea of processing such events as a transitory workload has become more widespread with the arrival of container technology like Docker, allowing the fast launch of a container with a preprovisioned execution environment to perform a short-lived computation. The technology makes it simple for developers, without the provisioning of servers or machine images, to deploy algorithms for processing intermittently arriving data. All a developer has to do is supply the code fragment according to a documented app model to handle the input and produce the output. The technology provides a form of abstracted PaaS but deals with short bursts of processing instead of long running computing sessions.”

Dato Delivers Validation Tools

Dato has come out with new tools to give scientists, developers, and users confidence in machine learning models and predictions. These tools exist within GraphLab Create and Dato Predictive Services. "At Capital One, we exhaustively work on model robustness and validation,” said Brendan Herger, Capital One Data Innovation Lab Data Scientist. "We are excited to see Dato working on this new initiative." Free 30-day trials are available on the Dato website. Pricing starts at $399.