FossBytes

JFrog Ltd has announced it will be expanding its presence in the AsiaPacific (APAC) region, specifically in the People’s Republic of China. The expansion, which complements JFrog’s already strong presence and offices in India and Japan, enables the company to accelerate its services and engagements with customers and local partners in the region as their demand increases for JFrog’s end-to-end DevOps solution.

The growth of JFrog’s local business operations in China will span local technical DevOps support, and sales and marketing teams will provide frontline support for the growing list of Chinese enterprises looking to automate their software delivery life cycle. Tali Notman, chief revenue officer at JFrog, said, “We see impressive growth and maturity in the Chinese market and we are excited to expand our presence to better serve the community. With some of China’s leading companies increasingly adopting DevOps and DevSecOps, our growing footprint and strong partnership in the region puts us in a better position to serve our customers’ growing needs, and further support our thousands of global customers that have development teams in APAC and can now benefit from more trusted experts and local resources next to them.”

IDC predicts that by 2025, up to a quarter of A-500 companies in APAC will become software producers to digitally transform and maintain their A-500 status. And by 2023, 60 per cent of Asian 1000 companies will shift security to earlier in the development process, so that security engages with DevOps teams to review application architecture and release plans early on.

JFrog Artifactory is a universal package manager and container registry solution, and JFrog Xray is a continuous security solution for open source vulnerabilities and licence compliance. They are both part of the JFrog DevOps Platform and are used by more than 100 enterprises in China.

Julia helps to speed up developments in AI, medicine and robotics

Handling the huge amounts of data for vaccine development requires advanced tools. ‘Julia’, a relatively new software language, has surged in popularity due to this. It delivers comparable speed and functionality to programming in C while also allowing scientific and numerical computing. Spectrum Instrumentation has created a software development kit (SDK) for programming its full range of over 200 different digitisers, generators and digital I/O products using Julia.

An important feature of Julia is that it has been specifically designed for high-performance applications that require fast processing of data, like machine

Aserto has announced the launch of its authorisation-as-a-service company, making it easy for developers to build enterpriseready SaaS applications. It has received US$ 5.1 million in seed financing led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from Heavybit Industries as well as angel investors Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake; Mathias Biilmann Christensen, co-founder/CEO of Netlify; and Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub. This round of funding will be used to accelerate product development and broaden access to its private beta.

Developer APIs are now commonplace from SendGrid for email delivery, Twilio for text messaging, Stripe for payments, and Auth0 for authentication.

Each pioneered the trend to use a developer API for important functionality that isn’t their core competency. Authorisation is next. Aserto co-founders Omri Gazitt and Gert Drapers possess over six decades of experience at Microsoft, HP Cloud, Puppet, and Hulu building databases, directories, developer tools, cloud platforms, open source IaaS and PaaS projects, and running billion-dollar businesses.

James Lindenbaum, co-founder of Heroku and Heavybit, said, “A policy-centric authorisation solution for developers is a glaring hole in the market, and there is no team on the planet better equipped to build it to enterprise grade. Heavybit investing in Aserto was a no-brainer.”

Anypoint Platform, technology partners help customers achieve greater speed, agility, and efficiency by creating reusable building blocks, including connectors, APIs, and templates, that can accelerate the pace of innovation, said the company.

PostHog raises US$ 15 million in fresh funding

PostHog has announced that it has raised US$ 15 million in a fresh round of funding and has introduced major new free features for users of data warehouses. The company’s series B funding was led by existing investor Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, with participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures), and takes PostHog’s total funding to over US$ 27 million, despite the company only recently turning one-year old. As part of the round, Ali Rowghani, managing partner at YC Continuity, and former COO at Twitter and CFO at Pixar, will join the PostHog board.

PostHog will use the funding to focus on another major input, with the best people in the world joining the team. This will accelerate improvements to self-hosted deployment at scale, data warehouse integration and tutorials, user experience, marketing, and customer success.

James Hawkins, co-founder and CEO, said,“To-date, product analytics for those using data warehouses has been painful — developers are between a rock and a hard place. They can either code their own data export libraries and their own SQL, or they’d have to send user data to a third party and incur massive data transfer charges. Companies want to leverage their data more than ever before, data warehouses are getting cheaper and simpler, and we can support their adoption as they become mainstream. PostHog means data analysts no longer need to lose hours producing simple product usage visualisations.”

The company said that PostHog’s mission is to increase the number of successful products in the world. Its open source platform lets developers track product usage, understand the impact of new features on user behaviour, and integrate product and user data with data warehouses – all without sending any data to a third party.

CloudLinux makes open source UChecker available for free

CloudLinux has announced that it is making open source software UChecker available for free. This software scans Linux servers for vulnerable libraries that are outdated and being used by other applications. It provides detailed actionable information regarding which application is using which vulnerable library and needs to be updated, which helps improve the security awareness patching process.

Jim Jackson, president and chief revenue officer, CloudLinux, said, “Patch management is a challenging area of security and IT operations because so many different systems require patching, plus they have to be tested before being deployed. Also, some patches require reconfigurations and reboots of servers that are difficult to take offline for very long. Time is critical because hackers look to exploit vulnerabilities, so it’s always a race for IT teams to apply security patches.”

UChecker detects and reports those shared libraries that are not up-to-date, both on disk and in memory. Short for ‘username checker’, it can be integrated with tools like Nagios or other monitoring and management tools to alert about systems running outdated libraries. UChecker works with all modern Linux distributions under the GNU General Public License.

DataStax expands in Asia-Pacific with new Singapore headquarters

DataStax has announced it has expanded its footprint in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market with the opening of a new office in Singapore. It said that establishing regional headquarters in Singapore marks a major global expansion for DataStax, and comes fresh off from the funding from Goldman Sachs. The expansion reinforces DataStax’s commitment to APAC, and enables the company to meet the growing global demand for its marquee offering Astra, an open data stack for modern data apps built on Apache Cassandra.

Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO at DataStax, said, “We see an impressive opportunity for growth in APAC. We are excited to expand our presence in APAC to help the growing number of enterprises adopting an open data stack to accelerate their digital transformation.”

According to a ResearchandMarkets.com report titled ‘Global Cloud Database and DBaaS Market (2020 to 2025)’, Asia-Pacific is expected to have the highest growth rate over the forecast period.

Red Hat announces general availability of its migration toolkit for virtualisation

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualisation to help organisations accelerate open hybrid cloud strategies by making it easier to migrate existing workloads to modern infrastructure in a streamlined, wholesale manner. By bringing mission-critical applications based on virtual machines (VMs) to Red Hat OpenShift, IT organisations can experience a smoother, more scalable modernisation experience while mitigating potential risks and downtime.

IT organisations are tasked with addressing existing systems and workloads, many of which may run on infrastructure or resources that aren’t compatible with the realities of modern computing. Modernising these deployments can be time consuming, costly and overwhelming for developers, IT operations teams and business users without the necessary tools. To help organisations break down application barriers between traditional and cloud-native workloads, Red Hat announced OpenShift Virtualization in 2020. With OpenShift Virtualization, Red

Hat brought traditional application stacks forward into a layer of open innovation, enabling customers to truly transform at their own speed.

The company added, “Red Hat is working with customers and partners to modernise and migrate projects to help enable cloud-native capabilities through migration toolkits that come with OpenShift. These offerings now include the migration toolkit for virtualisation by Red Hat, which helps migrate VMs at scale to Red Hat OpenShift. This gives organisations the ability to more easily access workloads running on virtual machines, while developing new cloud-native applications. Migrations are performed in a few simple steps, first by providing source and destination credentials, then mapping the source and destination infrastructure and creating a choreographed plan and, finally, executing the migration effort.”