Dec
02
2020
--

Fylamynt raises $6.5M for its cloud workflow automation platform

Fylamynt, a new service that helps businesses automate their cloud workflows, today announced both the official launch of its platform as well as a $6.5 million seed round. The funding round was led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund. Mango Capital and Point72 Ventures also participated.

At first glance, the idea behind Fylamynt may sound familiar. Workflow automation has become a pretty competitive space, after all, and the service helps developers connect their various cloud tools to create repeatable workflows. We’re not talking about your standard IFTTT- or Zapier -like integrations between SaaS products, though. The focus of Fylamynt is squarely on building infrastructure workflows. While that may sound familiar, too, with tools like Ansible and Terraform automating a lot of that already, Fylamynt sits on top of those and integrates with them.

Image Credits: Fylamynt

“Some time ago, we used to do Bash and scripting — and then [ … ] came Chef and Puppet in 2006, 2007. SaltStack, as well. Then Terraform and Ansible,” Fylamynt co-founder and CEO Pradeep Padala told me. “They have all done an extremely good job of making it easier to simplify infrastructure operations so you don’t have to write low-level code. You can write a slightly higher-level language. We are not replacing that. What we are doing is connecting that code.”

So if you have a Terraform template, an Ansible playbook and maybe a Python script, you can now use Fylamynt to connect those. In the end, Fylamynt becomes the orchestration engine to run all of your infrastructure code — and then allows you to connect all of that to the likes of DataDog, Splunk, PagerDuty Slack and ServiceNow.

Image Credits: Fylamynt

The service currently connects to Terraform, Ansible, Datadog, Jira, Slack, Instance, CloudWatch, CloudFormation and your Kubernetes clusters. The company notes that some of the standard use cases for its service are automated remediation, governance and compliance, as well as cost and performance management.

The company is already working with a number of design partners, including Snowflake.

Fylamynt CEO Padala has quite a bit of experience in the infrastructure space. He co-founded ContainerX, an early container-management platform, which later sold to Cisco. Before starting ContainerX, he was at VMWare and DOCOMO Labs. His co-founders, VP of Engineering Xiaoyun Zhu and CTO David Lee, also have deep expertise in building out cloud infrastructure and operating it.

“If you look at any company — any company building a product — let’s say a SaaS product, and they want to run their operations, infrastructure operations very efficiently,” Padala said. “But there are always challenges. You need a lot of people, it takes time. So what is the bottleneck? If you ask that question and dig deeper, you’ll find that there is one bottleneck for automation: that’s code. Someone has to write code to automate. Everything revolves around that.”

Fylamynt aims to take the effort out of that by allowing developers to either write Python and JSON to automate their workflows (think “infrastructure as code” but for workflows) or to use Fylamynt’s visual no-code drag-and-drop tool. As Padala noted, this gives developers a lot of flexibility in how they want to use the service. If you never want to see the Fylamynt UI, you can go about your merry coding ways, but chances are the UI will allow you to get everything done as well.

One area the team is currently focusing on — and will use the new funding for — is building out its analytics capabilities that can help developers debug their workflows. The service already provides log and audit trails, but the plan is to expand its AI capabilities to also recommend the right workflows based on the alerts you are getting.

“The eventual goal is to help people automate any service and connect any code. That’s the holy grail. And AI is an enabler in that,” Padala said.

Gradient Ventures partner Muzzammil “MZ” Zaveri echoed this. “Fylamynt is at the intersection of applied AI and workflow automation,” he said. “We’re excited to support the Fylamynt team in this uniquely positioned product with a deep bench of integrations and a nonprescriptive builder approach. The vision of automating every part of a cloud workflow is just the beginning.”

The team, which now includes about 20 employees, plans to use the new round of funding, which closed in September, to focus on its R&D, build out its product and expand its go-to-market team. On the product side, that specifically means building more connectors.

The company offers both a free plan as well as enterprise pricing and its platform is now generally available.

Sep
08
2020
--

Progress snags software automation platform Chef for $220M

Progress, a Boston-area developer tool company, boosted its offerings in a big way today when it announced it was acquiring software automation platform Chef for $220 million.

Chef, which went 100% open source last year, had annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $70 million from the commercial side of the house. Needless to say, Progress CEO Yogesh Gupta was happy to bring the company into the fold and gain not only that revenue, but a set of highly skilled employees, a strong developer community and an impressive customer list.

Gupta said that Chef fits with his company’s acquisition philosophy. “This acquisition perfectly aligns with our growth strategy and meets the requirements that we’ve previously laid out: a strong recurring revenue model, technology that complements our business, a loyal customer base and the ability to leverage our operating model and infrastructure to run the business more efficiently,” he said in a statement.

Chef CEO Barry Crist offered a typical argument for an acquired company; that Progress offered a better path to future growth, while sending a message to the open-source community and customers that Progress would be a good steward of the startup’s vision.

“For Chef, this acquisition is our next chapter, and Progress will help enhance our growth potential, support our Open Source vision, and provide broader opportunities for our customers, partners, employees and community,” Crist said in a statement.

Chef’s customer list is certainly impressive, and includes tech industry stalwarts like Facebook, IBM and SAP, as well as non-tech companies like Nordstrom, Alaska Airlines and Capital One.

The company was founded in 2008 and had raised $105 million, according to Crunchbase data. It hadn’t raised any funds since 2015, when it raised a $40 million Series E led by DFJ Growth. Other investors along the way included Battery Ventures, Ignition Partners and Scale Venture Partners.

The transaction is expected to close next month, pending normal regulatory approvals.

Sep
23
2019
--

Chef CEO does an about face, says company will not renew ICE contract

After stating clearly on Friday that he would honor a $95,000 contract with ICE, CEO Barry Crist must have had a change of heart over the weekend. In a blog post this morning he wrote that the company would not be renewing the contract with ICE after all.

“After deep introspection and dialog within Chef, we will not renew our current contracts with ICE and CBP when they expire over the next year. Chef will fulfill our full obligations under the current contracts,” Crist wrote in the blog post.

He also backed off the seemingly firm position he took on Friday on the matter when he told TechCrunch, “It’s something that we spent a lot of time on, and I want to represent that there are portions of [our company] that do not agree with this, but I as a leader of the company, along with the executive team, made a decision that we would honor the contracts and those relationships that were formed and work with them over time,” he said.

Today, he acknowledged that intense feelings inside the company against the contract led to his decision. The contract began in 2015 under the Obama administration and was aimed at modernizing programming approaches at DHS, but over time as ICE family separation and deportation polices have come under fire, there were calls internally (and later externally) to end the contract. “Policies such as family separation and detention did not yet exist [when we started this contract]. While I and others privately opposed this and various other related policies, we did not take a position despite the recommendation of many of our employees. I apologize for this,” he wrote.

Crist also indicated that the company would be donating the revenue from the contracts to organizations that work with people who have been affected by these policies. It’s a similar approach that Salesforce took when 618 of its employees protested a contract the company has with the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). In response to the protests, Salesforce pledged $1 million to organizations helping affected families.

After a tweet last week exposed the contract, the protests began on social media, and culminated in programmer Seth Vargo removing pieces of open-source code from the repository in protest of the contract in response. The company sounded firmly committed to fulfilling this contract in spite of the calls for action internally and externally, and the widespread backlash it was facing both inside and outside the company.

Vargo told TechCrunch in an interview that he saw this issue in moral terms, “Contrary to Chef’s CEO’s publicly posted response, I do think it is the responsibility of businesses to evaluate how and for what purposes their software is being used, and to follow their moral compass,” he said. Apparently Crist has come around to this point of view. Vargo chose not to comment on the latest development.

Sep
23
2019
--

Programmer who took down open-source pieces over Chef ICE contract responds

On Friday afternoon Chef CEO Barry Crist and CTO Corey Scobie sat down with TechCrunch to defend their contract with ICE after a firestorm on social media called for them to cut ties with the controversial agency. On Sunday, programmer Seth Vargo, the man who removed his open-source components, which contributed to a partial shutdown of Chef’s commercial business for a time last week, responded.

While the Chef executives stated that the company was in fact the owner, Vargo made it clear he owned those pieces and he had every right to remove them from the repository. “Chef (the company) was including a third-party software package that I owned. It was on my personal repository on GitHub and personal namespace on RubyGems,” he said. He believes that gave him the right to remove them.

Chef CTO Corey Scobie did not agree. “Part of the challenge was that [Vargo] actually didn’t have authorization to remove those assets. And the assets were not his to begin with. They were actually created under a time when that particular individual [Vargo] was an employee of Chef. And so therefore, the assets were Chef’s assets, and not his assets to remove,” he said.

Vargo says that simply isn’t true and Chef misunderstands the licensing terms. “No OSI license or employment agreement requires me to continue to maintain code of my personal account(s). They are conflating code ownership (which they can argue they have) over code stewardship,” Vargo told TechCrunch.

As further proof, Vargo added that he has even included detailed instructions in his will on how to deal with the code he owns when he dies. “I want to make it absolutely clear that I didn’t “hack” into Chef or perform any kind of privilege escalation. The code lived in my personal accounts. Had I died on Thursday, the exact same thing would have happened. My will requests all my social media and code accounts be deleted. If I had deleted my GitHub account, the same thing would have happened,” he explained.

Vargo said that Chef actually was in violation of the open-source license when they restored those open-source pieces without putting his name on it. “Chef actually violated the Apache license by removing my name, which they later restored in response to public pressure,” he said.

Scobie admitted that the company did forget to include Vargo’s name on the code, but added it back as soon as they heard about the problem. “In our haste to restore one of the objects, we inadvertently removed a piece of metadata that identified him as the author. We didn’t do that knowingly. It was absolutely a mistake in the process of trying to restore customers and our global customer base service. And as soon as we were notified of it, we reverted that change on this specific object in question,” he said.

Vargo says, as for why he took down the open-source components, he was taking a moral stand against the contract, which dates back to the Obama administration. He also explained that he attempted to contact Chef via multiple channels before taking action. “First, I didn’t know about the history of the contract. I found out via a tweet from @shanley and subsequently verified via the USA spending website. I sent a letter and asked Chef publicly via Twitter to respond multiple times, and I was met with silence. I wanted to know how and why code in my personal repositories was being used with ICE. After no reply for 72 hours, I decided to take action,” he said.

Since then, Chef’s CEO Barry Crist has made it clear he was honoring the contract, which Vargo felt further justified his actions. “Contrary to Chef’s CEO’s publicly posted response, I do think it is the responsibility of businesses to evaluate how and for what purposes their software is being used, and to follow their moral compass,” he said.

Vargo has a long career helping build development tools and contributing to open source. He currently works for Google Cloud. Previous positions include HashiCorp and Chef.

Sep
20
2019
--

Chef CEO says he’ll continue to work with ICE in spite of protests

Yesterday, software development tool maker Chef found itself in the middle of a firestorm after a Tweet called them out for doing business with DHS/ICE. Eventually it led to an influential open source developer removing a couple of key pieces of software from the project, bringing down some parts of Chef’s commercial business.

Chef intends to fulfill its contract with ICE, in spite of calls to cancel it. In a blog post published this morning, Chef CEO Barry Crist defended the decision. “I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business.”

He stood by the company’s decision this afternoon in an interview with TechCrunch, while acknowledging that it was a difficult and emotional decision for everyone involved. “For some portion of the community, and some portion of our company, this is a super, super-charged lightning rod, and this has been very difficult. It’s something that we spent a lot of time on, and I want to represent that there are portions of [our company] that do not agree with this, but I as a leader of the company, along with the executive team, made a decision that we would honor the contracts and those relationships that were formed and work with them over time,” he said.

He added, “I think our challenge as as leadership right now is how do we collectively navigate through through times like this, and through emotionally-charged issues like the ICE contract.”

The deal with ICE, which is a $95,000 a year contract for software development tools, dates back to the Obama administration when the then DHS CIO wanted to move the department towards more modern agile/DevOps development workflows, according Christ.

He said for people who might think it’s a purely economic decision, the money represents a fraction of the company’s more than $50 million annual revenue (according to Crunchbase data), but he says it’s about a long-term business arrangement with the government that transcends individual administration policies. “It’s not about the $100,000, it’s about decisions we’ve made to engage the government. And I appreciate that not everyone in our world feels the same way or would make that same decision, but that’s the decision that that we made as a leadership team,”Crist said.

Shortly after word of Chef’s ICE contract appeared on Twitter, according to a report in The Register, former Chef employee Seth Vargo removed a couple of key pieces of open source software from the repository, telling The Register that “software engineers have to operate by some kind of moral compass.” This move brought down part of Chef’s commercial software and it took them 24 hours to get those services fully restored, according to Chef CTO Corey Scobie.

Crist says he wants to be clear that his decision does not mean he supports current ICE policies. “I certainly don’t want to be viewed as I’m taking a strong stand in support of ICE. What we’re taking a strong stand on is our consistency with working with our customers, and again, our work with DHS  started in the previous administration on things that we feel very good about,” he said.

Apr
02
2019
--

Chef goes 100% open source

Chef, the popular automation service, today announced that it is open-sourcing all of its software under the Apache 2 license. Until now, Chef used an open core model with a number of proprietary products that complemented its open-source tools. Most of these proprietary tools focused on enterprise users and their security and deployment needs. Now, all of these tools, which represent somewhere between a third and a half of Chef’s total code base, are open source, too.

“We’re moving away from our open core model,” Chef SVP of products and engineering Corey Scobie told me. “We’re now moving to exclusively open-source software development.”

He added that this also includes open product development. Going forward, the company plans to share far more details about its roadmap, feature backlogs and other product development details. All of Chef’s commercial offerings will also be built from the same open-source code that everybody now has access to.

Scobie noted there are a number of reasons why the company is doing this. He believes, for example, that the best way to build software is to collaborate in public with those who are actually using it.

“With that philosophy in mind, it was really easy to justify how we’d take the remainder of the software that we produce and make it open source,” Scobie said. “We believe that that’s the best way to build software that works for people — real people in the real world.”

Another reason, Scobie said, is that it was becoming increasingly difficult for Chef to explain which parts of the software were open source and which were not. “We wanted to make that conversation easier, to be perfectly honest.”

Chef’s decision comes during a bit of a tumultuous time in the open-source world. A number of companies like Redis, MongoDB and Elastic have recently moved to licenses that explicitly disallow the commercial use of their open-source products by large cloud vendors like AWS unless they also buy a commercial license.

But here is Chef, open-sourcing everything. Chef co-founder and board member Adam Jacob doesn’t think that’s a problem. “In the open core model, you’re saying that the value is in this proprietary sliver. The part you pay me for is this sliver of its value. And I think that’s incorrect,” he said. “I think, in fact, the value was always in the totality of the product.”

Jacob also argues that those companies that are moving to these new, more restrictive licenses, are only hurting themselves. “It turns out that the product was what mattered in the first place,” he said. “They continue to produce great enterprise software for their customers and their customers continue to be happy and continue to buy it, which is what they always would’ve done.” He also noted that he doesn’t think AWS will ever be better at running Elasticsearch than Elastic or, for that matter, at running Chef better than Chef.

It’s worth noting that Chef also today announced the launch of its Enterprise Automation Stack, which brings together under a unified umbrella all of Chef’s tools (Chef Automate, Infra, InSpec, Habitat and Workstation).

“Chef is fully committed to enabling organizations to eliminate friction across the lifecycle of all of their applications, ensuring that, whether they build their solutions from our open-source code or license our commercial distribution, they can benefit from collaboration as code,” said Chef CEO Barry Crist. “Chef Enterprise Automation Stack lets teams establish and maintain a consistent path to production for any application, in order to increase velocity and improve efficiency, so deployment and updates of mission-critical software become easier, move faster and work flawlessly.”

Sep
25
2018
--

Chef launches deeper integration with Microsoft Azure

DevOps automation service Chef today announced a number of new integrations with Microsoft Azure. The news, which was announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, focuses on helping enterprises bring their legacy applications to Azure and ranges from the public preview of Chef Automate Managed Service for Azure to the integration of Chef’s InSpec compliance product with Microsoft’s cloud platform.

With Chef Automate as a managed service on Azure, which provides ops teams with a single tool for managing and monitoring their compliance and infrastructure configurations, developers can now easily deploy and manage Chef Automate and the Chef Server from the Azure Portal. It’s a fully managed service and the company promises that businesses can get started with using it in as little as thirty minutes (though I’d take those numbers with a grain of salt).

When those configurations need to change, Chef users on Azure can also now use the Chef Workstation with Azure Cloud Shell, Azure’s command line interface. Workstation is one of Chef’s newest products and focuses on making ad-hoc configuration changes, no matter whether the node is managed by Chef or not.

And to remain in compliance, Chef is also launching an integration of its InSpec security and compliance tools with Azure. InSpec works hand in hand with Microsoft’s new Azure Policy Guest Configuration (who comes up with these names?) and allows users to automatically audit all of their applications on Azure.

“Chef gives companies the tools they need to confidently migrate to Microsoft Azure so users don’t just move their problems when migrating to the cloud, but have an understanding of the state of their assets before the migration occurs,” said Corey Scobie, the senior vice president of products and engineering at Chef, in today’s announcement. “Being able to detect and correct configuration and security issues to ensure success after migrations gives our customers the power to migrate at the right pace for their organization.”

more Microsoft Ignite 2018 coverage

Oct
28
2016
--

Blog Series: MySQL Configuration Management

MySQL Configuration Management

MySQL Configuration ManagementMySQL configuration management remains a hot topic, as I’ve noticed on numerous occasions during my conversations with customers.

I thought it might be a good idea to start a blog series that goes deeper in detail into some of the different options, and what modules potentially might be used for managing your MySQL database infrastructure.

Configuration management has been around since way before the beginning of my professional career. I, myself, originally began working on integrating an infrastructure with my colleagues using Puppet.

Why is configuration management important?
  • ReproducibilityIt’s giving us the ability to provision any environment in an automated way, and feel sure that the new environment will contain the same configuration.
  • Fast restorationThanks to reproducibility, you can quickly provision machines in case of disasters. This makes sure you can focus on restoring your actual data instead of worrying about the deployment and configuration of your machines.
  • Integral part of continuous deploymentContinuous deployment is a terminology everyone loves: being able to deploy changes rapidly and automatically after automated regression testing requires a configuration management solution.
  • Compliance and securitySolutions like Puppet and Chef maintain and enforce configuration parameters on your infrastructure. This can sound bothersome at first, but it’s essential for maintaining a well-configured environment.
  • Documented environmentAlthough reading someone’s puppet code can potentially harm you beyond insanity, it provides you with the real truth about your infrastructure.
  • Efficiency and manageabilityConfiguration management can automate repetitive tasks (for example, user grants, database creation, configuration variables), as well as security updates, service restarts, etc. These can potentially bring you less work and faster rollouts.
Which players are active in this field?

The most popular open source solutions are Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and CFengine (among others). In this series, we will go deeper in the first three of them.

Let’s first start by giving you a quick, high-level introduction.

Puppet

Puppet is a language used to describe the desired state of an environment. The Puppet client reads the catalog of the expected state from the server and enforces these changes on the client. The system works based on a client/server principle.

Puppet has as default four essential components:

  • Puppet Server: A Java virtual machine offering Puppet’s core services.
  • Puppet Agent: A client library that requests configuration catalog info from the puppet-server.
  • Hiera: A key-value lookup database, which can store and modify values for specific hosts.
  • Facter: An application that keeps an inventory of the local node variables.

How can you integrate puppet in your MySQL infrastructure?

This will allow you and your team to create users, databases, install and configure MySQL

Probably my old “code from hell” module is still somewhere out there.

Chef

Chef also consists of a declarative language (like Puppet) based on Ruby which will allow you to write cookbooks for potential integrable technologies. Chef is also based on a server/client solution. The client being chef nodes, the server managing the cookbooks, catalogs and recipes.

In short, Chef consists of:

  • Chef server: Manages the multiple cookbooks and the catalog
  • Chef clients (nodes): The actual system requesting the catalog information from the chef server.
  • Workstations: This is a system that is configured to run Chef command-line tools that synchronize with a Chef-repository or the Chef server. You could also describe this as a Chef development and tooling environment.

How can you integrate Chef in your MySQL infrastructure:

Ansible

Ansible originated with something different in mind. System engineers typically chose to use their own management scripts. This can be troublesome and hard to maintain. Why wouldn’t you use something easy and automated and standardized? Ansible fills in these gaps, and simplifies management of Ansible targets.

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes (by SSH default) and pushes out Ansible modules to them. These modules represent the desired state of the node, and will be used to execute commands to attain the desired state.

This procedure is different to Puppet and Chef, which are essentially preferably client/server solutions.

Some pre-made modules for MySQL are:

Conclusion and Next Steps

Choose your poison (or magical medicine, you pick the wording), every solution has its perks.

Keep in mind that in some situations running a complicated Puppet or Chef infrastructure could be overkill. At this moment, a solution like Ansible might be a quick and easily integrable answer for you.

The next blog post will go over the Puppet Forge MySQL module, so stay tuned!

Nov
03
2015
--

Chef Announces Key Acquisition And New Compliance Automation Tool

code over a keyboard Chef has been helping companies configure, manage and automate their software and infrastructure for some time. Today it made several announcements to bring that same level of automation to compliance. For starters, the company announced that it has acquired VulcanoSec, a German compliance and security firm. Chef actually acquired the company last summer, but is making the purchase official… Read More

Apr
01
2015
--

Chef Launches Chef Delivery DevOps Workflow Service For The Enterprise

lego-chef Chef is mostly known as an IT automation service, but the company is branching out into continuous and unified delivery today with the launch of Chef Delivery. This new service provides enterprise devops teams with a new workflow for managing the continuous delivery of their infrastructure and run-time environments (including containers), as well as applications. Read More

Powered by WordPress | Theme: Aeros 2.0 by TheBuckmaker.com