SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Traefik Labs, creator of the open source Traefik Proxy, today announced the general availability, available on October 26 during KubeCon, of its new cloud service that enables networking best practices in minutes and helps eliminate the complexity of managing Kubernetes and Docker networking at scale.

Cloud native emerged in 2015, the same year Traefik Proxy was open sourced. With more than 3 billion downloads and 40,000 GitHub stars, Traefik Proxy has grown alongside the cloud native ecosystem. Traefik Proxy revolutionizes cloud native networking for containerized applications by providing dynamic application-aware traffic management and deep integration with all the major container orchestrators.

Today, as the cloud native ecosystem is becoming more mature and adoption continues to accelerate, organizations still face pressing challenges coming from the multiplication of clusters and the need to extend traffic management up to the edge, to users, and third parties. Traefik Hub, a unified cloud native networking platform, redefines the publication and security of containers to the edge, at scale.

Traefik Hub fills a gap in the industry for both small standalone teams and large distributed organizations, said Darren Shepherd, chief architect and co-founder of Acorn Labs, and former chief technology officer of Rancher.

Announced as a beta in June and already with over 6,000 users, Traefik Hub is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that integrates with Traefik and Nginx and instantly provides a gateway to services running on any Kubernetes or Docker environment. With the Traefik Hub platform, customers are able to:

In today's cloud native world, applications are more distributed than ever before, with services running across increasingly heterogeneous environments and a complex technical stack, said Emile Vauge, CEO and founder of Traefik Labs. That complexity demands a new generation of cloud native networking solutions with greater operational agility with full GitOps readiness.

To learn more about Traefik Hub, visit Traefik Labs at KubeCon, booth S13, or go to https://traefik.io/traefik-hub. The Pro plan promotional launch price is available at $109 per month.

About Traefik Labs

Traefik Labs develops the worlds most popular cloud-native application networking stack. Traefiks modern approach to networking helps developers and operations teams of all sizes build, deploy and run modern microservices applications quickly and easily across data centers, on-premises servers and public clouds from the origin to the edge. Used by the worlds largest enterprises, Traefik Proxy is one of Docker Hubs top 10 projects, with over 3 billion downloads. Founded in 2016, Traefik Labs is backed by investors including Balderton Capital, Elaia, 360 Capital Partner, and Kima Ventures. For more information, visit traefik.io and follow @traefik on Twitter.

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Traefik Announces General Availability of Traefik Hub, First-of-its-Kind Cloud Native Networking Platform - Business Wire

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that TransUnion has expanded its global automation capabilities with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to accelerate feature development for customers and migrate to the cloud at scale and velocity. Ansible Automation Platform helps TransUnion consolidate disparate tooling and increase the speed of delivery of new products and services to its customers.

TransUnion is a global information and insights company that makes trust possible in the modern economy by providing a comprehensive picture of each person so they can be reliably and safely represented in the marketplace. TransUnion is a leading presence in more than 30 countries across five continents where they provide solutions that help create economic opportunity, great experiences and personal empowerment for hundreds of millions of people. TransUnion has been using Red Hat solutions to modernize its IT infrastructure and improve IT performance and costs for several years.

Like many customers, TransUnion is expanding its use of Ansible Automation Platform to address growing demands for automation, including cloud migration and provisioning of on premises and cloud infrastructure. Ansible Automation Platform integrates with platforms that theyre already using, like AWS, so developers can automate right away with the skills they already have. Ansible Automation Platform provides a repeatable way to provision and deploy both middleware and applications right to servers in AWS, with an automation framework that provides a level of governance and compliance, but still enables teams to provision infrastructure in AWS and deploy applications.

Red Hats expert consultants also worked with TransUnion to facilitate a broader culture of automation by integrating communities of practice, tools and processes and breaking down the silos that frequently exist when extending automation across an organization. IT teams now spend less time on repetitive work and more time on their core responsibilities, and no longer need specialized experts to fully realize the value of automation.

Prior to implementing Ansible Automation Platform organization-wide, developer teams in various regions were building bespoke pipelines for automation, using templates that were sparse and duplicated across its ecosystem. With the help of Red Hat Consulting, TransUnion streamlined their underlying automation framework to consolidate tooling and create key template playbooks that are reusable, so teams have a repository of automation content that can be configured in other technical scenarios. As a result, TransUnion shortened its migration pipeline development from months to minutes, reducing the cost of feature development and speeding up the delivery to customers.

TransUnion plans to continue expanding its use of Ansible Automation Platform to further consolidate and simplify its modules and frameworks in the cloud.

Supporting QuotesThomas Anderson, vice president, Ansible, Red HatOur customers are operating in increasingly complex IT environments, spanning on-premises datacenters to public and private clouds, that rely on automation to effectively scale. With the organization-wide extension of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, TransUnion can accelerate workloads and migrate to the cloud quicker, allowing them to spend more time innovating and delivering new products to their customers.

Vishal Patel, director, GTP, TransUnionAs we expand our automation use in our technology and across the organization, achieving organizational alignment and interoperability is top priority for TransUnion. Red Hat has helped us establish a community based framework for a more collaborative culture, with easily shareable and reusable templates that make automation accessible for various IT teams and lower the barrier to automation. Now, developers are freed up to advance broader strategic and organizational goals.

Ryan Searles, vice president, Global Technology, TransUnionImplementing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to expand our cloud initiatives enables us to scale and standardize application deployments quickly and efficiently, with consolidated tooling and an underlying foundation for future projects. Now, we can focus on innovation in the cloud, without having to worry about how were going to get there.

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Connect with Red Hat

About Red Hat, Inc.Red Hat is the worlds leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

Forward-Looking StatementsExcept for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on the companys current assumptions regarding future business and financial performance. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statement in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat logo and Ansible, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.

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TransUnion Accelerates Cloud-Native Innovation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform - Business Wire

When the pandemic changed work as we know it, IT spending fundamentally changed as well. As organizations continue balancing their remote and in-person workforce, it is up to IT leaders to rethink their companys approach to infrastructure and spending.

Cloud investments grew significantly in 2020 due to the new reality of virtual connections, and many experts believe cloud spending will only continue to grow going forward via such markets as the best cloud storage (opens in new tab) and best cloud hosting (opens in new tab). At the same time, the remote workforce highlighted many enterprises lack of secure, remote security systems, and networks.

Now more than ever, IT teams need to focus on creating IT budgets that take into account the need for new essential initiatives.

Cloud investments have risen steadily over the last decade. Prior to the pandemic, 2020 was already a milestone year for the cloud, as the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index market cap crossed $1 trillion (opens in new tab) that February, and aggregate SaaS and IaaS revenue both topped $100 billion.

When remote work accelerated in 2020, cloud investments kept growing as more workers than ever collaborate and access private data and information virtually. As shelter-in-place and quarantining have led to a new remote work normal, cloud software services had a record 2020 - Zoom's stock was up 293 percent over the summer, and AWS and Microsoft Azure had strong summer outings.

The pandemic accelerated what was widely understood: most companies are realizing that its essential to update operations and technology to best equip the modern workforce. As companies manage and distribute private data across networks, its important to invest in a cloud service that will distribute data safely and effectively.

Having the ability to access the cloud - and your data - from anywhere should be reason enough, but having cloud services that will securely store and distribute your information is essential in todays remote world. But how much cloud investment is too much investment?

The corporate shift to the cloud because of remote work also accelerated the amount companies spent on cloud infrastructure services. In 2019, businesses spent an estimated $96.4bn on cloud infrastructure services, surpassing their in-house data center hardware and software spending for the first time.

IT leaders believe that companies spent the equivalent of around $15 billion extra a week on technology during the first few months of remote work to enable safe and secure home working. To avoid bill shock, I recommend companies and financial departments take the time to understand their contracts with cloud service providers - they may not look the same as they did last year.

I recommend talking to your cloud provider about ways to contain costs, but also preparing budgets for cloud investments in the new year.

When most companies moved to remote work in March, it became clear that many did not have a robust security plan to protect their data. Malicious activity has seen a massive spike, with hackers across the world breaking into stressed IT systems that were not built to withstand so many network log-ins.

While the pandemic is heightening the need for shared cloud environments, migration to the cloud can also increase risk. As such, cloud migration introduces the need for vulnerability assessments and management.

According to Trustwave, cloud services have become the third-most targeted environment by cybercriminals (opens in new tab), accounting for 20 percent of investigated incidents in 2019, up from seven percent in 2018. Cyber resilience is thus top of mind for enterprises as they bring this technology, which is susceptible to attack, into the fold.

It's important for businesses to implement proper cloud security to prevent a potential organizational breach. Unfortunately, the pandemic served as a wake-up call for many IT teams who learned - the hard way - that a remote security strategy is prudent. Now, security has become many CIOs top priority. In fact, in a survey conducted by Information Week, 47 percent of IT leaders said that security and privacy is the most important technology investment (opens in new tab) for their teams in 2021 and beyond.

One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to prioritize security is to keep your IT teams educated, well-prepared, and focused. Help them by adding yearly or biannual training sessions - sharing threat knowledge and providing tips and tricks for how to thwart potential attacks.

Doubling down on security also entails incorporating privacy impact assessments in your organizational structure, using Computer Information Systems (CIS) hardening guidelines for your servers and infrastructure, and bringing in tools that help your organization think smarter, not harder, about security.

Its also important to invest in VPNs, VDI solutions, and privileged user jump hosts. As employees work from at-home WiFi networks, it has become key to ensure they are actively connected to a corporate VPN when accessing the cloud to eliminate any risk from potentially unsecured systems.

Remember that most employees did not set up their at-home WiFi networks with the knowledge that they would be utilizing it for more than personal usage. While the networks are secure, they are certainly not set up to host, protect, and secure the organizations data. This is why the best VPN services (opens in new tab) for corporations are essential, and recommended to every IT team looking to secure their organizations data assets.

With security and cloud taking precedent, its important for IT teams to re-evaluate the long term plans they may have previously set for the coming years. While every companys individual priorities will be different, organizations should take a firm look at their upcoming IT budget to ensure efficient and secure remote work takes precedence over other activities that may be less pressing.

While it may be difficult for IT teams to only focus budget on secure remote work, organizations need to make sure to move as many non-essential initiatives as possible to 2022 or beyond. They can wait but secure systems cannot.

While the pandemic has certainly been unprecedented, its created a new IT reality around flexibility and resilience. Being flexible amidst future disruption is critically important and will make sure that data, assets and personal information is not able to be compromised.

No one can predict what this year or beyond will look like, but with an updated IT budget and investments in place, organizations will be ready for any challenge or crisis that comes up.

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The new essentials: IT budgets - TechRadar

At the 2022 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit on Tuesday, Meta introduced its second-generation GPU-powered datacenter hardware for machine learning and inference a system called Grand Teton.

"We're excited to announce Grand Teton, our next-generation platform for AI at scale that we'll contribute to the OCP community," said Alexis Bjrlin, VP of engineering at Meta, in a note to The Register. "As with other technologies, weve been diligently bringing AI platforms to the OCP community for many years and look forward to continued partnership."

Tuned for fast processing of large scale AI workloads in datacenters, Grand Teton boasts numerous improvements over its predecessor Zion, such as 4x the host-to-GPU bandwidth, 2x the compute and data network bandwidth, and a 2x better power envelope.

Meta's Grand Teton all-in-one box

Where the Zion-EX platform consisted of multiple connected subsystems, Grand Teton unifies those components in a single hardware chassis.

According to Bjrlin, Zion consists of a CPU head node, a switch sync system, and GPU system, all linked via external cabling. Grand Teton is a single box with integrated power, compute, and fabric interfaces, resulting in better performance, signal integrity, and thermal performance. The design supposedly makes datacenter integration easier and enhances reliability.

Grand Teton has been engineered to better handle memory-bandwidth-bound workloads like deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs), which can require a zetaflop of compute power just to train. It's also optimized for compute-bound workloads like content understanding.

In the hope that someone wants to view its datacenter blueprints using the VR goggles it sells, Meta has created a website to host 3D models of its hardware designs, metainfrahardware.com. The biz is focused on pushing Metaverse, a galaxy of interconnected virtual-reality worlds, accessible using VR headsets.

OCP was founded in 2011 by Facebook, which reorganized last year under a parent company without scandal baggage called Meta. OCP aims to allow large consumers of computing power to share hardware designs for datacenter servers and related equipment optimized for enterprise and hyperscale work. OCP essentially allowed Facebook, Google, and others in the cloud to specify exactly the boxes they wanted, and have contract manufacturers turn them out on demand, rather than have server vendors dictate the designs. The project has since widened its community.

That means OCP is a collection of open specifications, best practices, and other things that people can follow or tap into if they want to build out interoperable gear or take inspiration from the cloud giants. The contributed designs are useful or interesting in seeing where the big players are headed in terms of their datacenter needs, and what design decisions are being taken to achieve the scale they want.

OCP's market impact has been fairly modest: companies spent more than $16 billion on OCP kit in 2020 and that figure is projected to reach $46 billion by 2025. The total datacenter infrastructure market is expected to be about $230 billion in 2025.

Meta is also talking up Open Rack v3 (ORV3), the latest iteration of its common rack and power architecture, which aims to make deploying and servicing rack-mounted IT gear easier. ORV3 features a power shelf that can be installed anywhere in the rack.

"Multiple shelves can be installed on a single busbar to support 30kW racks, while 48VDC output will support higher power transmission needs in the future," said Bjrlin in a blog post due to go live today. "It also features an improved battery backup unit, upping the capacity to four minutes, compared with the previous model's 90 seconds, and with a power capacity of 15kW per shelf."

ORV3 has been designed to accommodate assorted liquid cooling strategies, such as air-assisted liquid cooling and facility water cooling.

"The power trend increases we're seeing, and the need for liquid cooling advances, are forcing us to think differently about all elements of our platform, rack and power, and data center design," explained Bjrlin.

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Meta shares latest hardware you can't wear it on your face, so don't panic - The Register

As an SME it is always important to recognise where your data is coming from. And, as companies grow, there is an exponential growth of data from various sources.

As part of their keynote at the upcoming SME Growth Summit, taking place as part of Digital Manufacturing Week, Rimsha Tariq, Continuous Improvement & Digital Transformation Technician, and Peter Lai, Continuous Improvement & 4IR Manager, NGF Europe (NGFE), will discuss digital transformation in manufacturing from the point of view of SMEs and the importance of cloud technology, IoT and Big Data. We caught up with them for a sneak preview.

PL: The premise will be on how NGF Europe, which is part of the NSG Pilkington Group, has gone from having zero smart digital technology infrastructure to having real-time dashboarding that has ultimately helped us improve production, operational efficiency and reduce energy consumption and waste.

RT: Well also go into how an SME with a small team and limited resources, can still really home in on becoming a smarter factory.

RT: Cloud computing refers to the access of data or information located in a virtual space, as opposed to the use of local servers or computers. IoT is hardware thats been made smart. There are five key components that make an IoT device:

Big data then refers to larger more complex datasets; the concept that allows access to databases in real-time. Put simply, IoT is the source of the data. Big Data is the analytic platform of the data, and cloud computing is the location for storage, scale and speed of access.

Theres money to be saved in not having to buy physical servers and becoming more efficient purely by looking at the data you already have. And again, it really helps bring a focus on sustainability via waste reduction. The relationship between cloud computing, IoT and Big Data creates a unique opportunity for businesses to become proactive by working smarter, not harder.

PL: A lack of workable infrastructure. At NGFE, we had bits and pieces of data coming from a variety of different sources, whether that was an SQL server within our corporate network, Excel data, or more importantly, industrial networks that included PLC data, etc.

How you go about linking that all together is a big problem. Usually, businesses are looking for short-term solutions, and how a problem is going to get fixed now. When we were setting up a factory many years ago with SCADA, we had SCADA, SAP and QA systems, all in different places, which made everything much more difficult from an infrastructure perspective. Therefore, its key to take a step back and look at the bigger picture and end goal. Then, work backwards from there. Set your KPIs and then see how youre going to go about achieving them.

PL: Its all too easy for too much data to be collected. First and foremost, theres no value in collecting data which youre not going to use. Crucially, whats changed is that the cost of data is much cheaper, so its easier for data to be stored, and this is being driven by cloud computing.

For example, we are currently in proof-of-concept for a service, which is available in AWS cloud, which is using AI and ML to analyse huge amounts of data, looking for statistically significant changes.

So, its easy to get bogged down with the sheer volume of data thats available, and its too much for someone to look at physically. But when youve got a service doing the same thing, then that task is one that manufacturers can let go. So, the solution is using intelligent services to look at huge amounts of data and pinpoint when there is statistically significant differences.

RT: For us, it was about understanding what was relevant to the business; cutting down the noise and focusing on what really matters. Not everything can be fixed with a sensor, and not all data is useful. Building dashboards and putting the architecture in place takes time; hence why we take our proof-of-concept approach where we can carry out experiments on a small scale, and play around and test as much as we can.

If it gives us something tangible, only then will we implement it on a larger scale. As an example, weve got digital projects in place for the next couple of years that we want to roll out across different areas of the business. We put CAPEX in place for only small projects.

Whether something is going to give tangible results is an important point for SMEs to remember. That was a hurdle for us to start with because we were just excited about having sensors across our site. So, it was important for us to focus on what is of real value.

PL: Theres lots of different technologies out there but whats important is whether it actually adds to the business. Theres a lot of hype surrounding digitalisation, Industry 4.0 and IoT, but what is it thats going to deliver value? Once that can be seen to be having an impact, then a business can start to map what else might be required.

PL: The future for SMEs is about how they can become proactive, rather than reactive as a production site; making stepped improvements through the use of technology. And the technology is now cheap enough to allow access to even some of the smallest companies.

RT: IoT, cloud and Big Data is a key part of digital transformation, and SMEs need to make it part of their journey too. They shouldnt be scared of larger companies with big budgets. Something else that well cover at the SME Growth Summit is that we have a very small budget, and an extremely small team. So, although its a journey that can be daunting to start with, its not as scary once you have taken the first step.

Tickets for SME Growth Summit on 16-17 November at Exhibition Centre Liverpool are still available. Why not join us for two days of engaging with your peers to build stronger manufacturing businesses, with three key streams: People, Platform and Processes.

*Tickets are for manufacturers only.

Rimsha Tariq joined NGF Europe two years ago, and as the companys first Continuous Improvement & Digital Transformation Technician, she has played a vital role in their journey to becoming a smarter digital factory. As well as being a certified Cloud Practitioner, she has a background in mathematics, finance, and management. Utilising her vast array of skills, Rimsha architects data and cloud solutions to make production more efficient. She believes that cloud, IoT and Big Data are the future of manufacturing.

Peter Lai started working at NGF Europe over 27 years ago and has held numerous roles over that time ranging from operator to production manager. These perspectives have given him the key insights into the data NGF needs to utilise as a business. As the Continuous Improvement & 4IR Manager, he combines practices from his lean six sigma certification and Level 7 Executive Business Management training to drive the production forward. He believes that digitalisation is key.

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How SMEs can get to grips with digital transformation - The Manufacturer