Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I don’t know about you, but April traveled at the speed of light. A blink and it happened. Our teams have been working at the same speed throughout one of our favorite months of the year. With an incredible amount of updates, we’ve made our product even more transparent and easier to use. It’s not just our world-class documentation that enables you, it’s also the in-product visualizations and enablement that help guide you without you even realizing it.

We’re excited to announce Calico v3.19.0! This release includes a number of cool new features as well as bug fixes. Thank you to each one of the contributors to this release! For detailed release notes, please go here. Here are some highlights from the release…

We are proud to announce that CircleCI has acquired Vamp, the first cloud-native release orchestration platform. This paves the way for CircleCI customers to have first-class release orchestration and continuous validation, all natively within the CircleCI platform.

Today we announced our Series F round of $100M led by Greenspring Associates, with Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold, Scale, Owl Rock, and Next Equity Partners. Thank you to our customers, community, partners, investors, and team. This latest investment allows us to invest as well; in our product, our community, and in our people. We build for the builders of the digital age: developers.

The HAProxy Data Plane API 2.3 expands its service discovery mechanisms and introduces native support for discovering AWS EC2 instances and auto-scaling groups. It also adds a new configuration file that supports HCL and YAML, an Inotify configuration watcher, and Syslog support. HAProxy Data Plane API version 2.3 is now available and you will find it in the 2.3 version of the Alpine Docker image.

I’m excited to announce that ServiceNow has signed an agreement to acquire next-generation observability leader Lightstep. Combining Lightstep’s innovative observability capabilities with ServiceNow’s unmatched Now Platform will help customers better manage software complexity, reliability, and performance while enabling the enterprise workflows that deliver great experiences.

AWS announced AWS Lambda Extensions back in October 2020 and I wrote extensively about it at the time – what it is, how it works, and why you should care. In short, Lambda Extensions allow operational tools to integrate with your Lambda functions and run either in-process alongside your code or in a separate process. To better understand the problems they solve and their use cases, please read my previous article.

In April, we brought you the ability to dashboard any data with the new SquaredUp Dashboard Server product – for free. Then at SquaredUp Live, we announced the launch of Dashboard Server Enterprise for enterprise organizations who have got to grips with their dashboarding and now want to scale up. You can purchase unlimited named users and get endless data connections plus new, enterprise integrations that let you dashboard just about anything.

Mergers and acquisitions are going on all over the market at the moment … and de-mergers as well, actually. Typically in a merger or acquisition, there’s some knowledge that it’s going to happen in advance. But until the Heads of Terms have been signed and there’s a Transition Service Agreement in place, people don’t really get moving with the activity needed to support the move, particularly on the technology side.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the launch of CloudWatch Metric Streams. Cloudwatch Streams can stream metrics from a number of different AWS resources using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to target destinations. The new service is different from the current architecture. Instead of polling, metrics are delivered via an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose stream. This is a highly scalable and far more efficient way to retrieve AWS service metrics.