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Granulate announces $12M Series A to optimize infrastructure performance
As companies increasingly look to find ways to cut costs, Granulate, an early-stage Israeli startup, has come up with a clever way to optimize infrastructure usage. Today it was rewarded with a tidy $12 million Series A investment.
Insight Partners led the round with participation from TLV Partners and Hetz Ventures. Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners, will be joining the Granulate board under the terms of the agreement. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $15.6 million, according to the company.
The startup claims it can cut infrastructure costs, whether on-prem or in the cloud, from between 20% and 80%. This is not insignificant if they can pull this off, especially in the economic maelstrom in which we find ourselves.
Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO at Granulate, says the company achieved the efficiency through a lot of studying about how Linux virtual machines work. Over six months of experimentation, they simply moved the bottleneck around until they learned how to take advantage of the way the Linux kernel operates to gain massive efficiencies.
It turns out that Linux has been optimized for resource fairness, but Granulate’s founders wanted to flip this idea on its head and look for repetitiveness, concentrating on one function instead of fair allocation across many functions, some of which might not really need access at any given moment.
“When it comes to production systems, you have a lot of repetitiveness in the machine, and you basically want it to do one thing really well,” he said.
He points out that it doesn’t even have to be a VM. It could also be a container or a pod in Kubernetes. The important thing to remember is that you no longer care about the interactivity and fairness inherent in Linux; instead, you want that the machine to be optimized for certain things.
“You let us know what your utility function for that production system is, then our agents. basically optimize all the decision making for that utility function. That means that you don’t even have to do any code changes to gain the benefit,” Ezra explained.
What’s more, the solution uses machine learning to help understand how the different utility functions work to provide greater optimization to improve performance even more over time.
Insight’s Jaffe certainly recognized the potential of such a solution, especially right now.
“The need to have high-performance digital experiences and lower infrastructure costs has never been more important, and Granulate has a highly differentiated offering powered by machine learning that’s not dependent on configuration management or cloud resource purchasing solutions,” Jaffe said in a statement.
Ezra understands that a product like his could be particularly helpful at the moment. “We’re in a unique position. Our offering right now helps organizations survive the downturn by saving costs without firing people,” he said.
The company was founded in 2018 and currently has 20 employees. They plan to double that by the end of 2020.
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Paul Cormier takes over as Red Hat CEO, as Jim Whitehurst moves to IBM
When Ginni Rometty indicated that she was stepping down as IBM CEO at the end of January, the company announced that Arvind Krishna would be taking over, while Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst would become president. To fill his role, Red Hat announced today that long-time executive Paul Cormier has been named president and CEO.
Cormier would seem to be a logical choice to run Red Hat, having been with the company since 2001. He joined as its VP of engineering and has seen the company grow from a small startup to a multi-billion dollar company.
Cormier spoke about the historical arc he has witnessed in his years at Red Hat. “Looking back to when I joined, we were in a different position and facing different issues, but the spirit was the same. We were on a mission to convince the world that open source was real, safe and enterprise-grade,” Cormier said in an email to employees about his promotion.
Former CEO Whitehurst certainly sees this as a sensible transition. “After working with him closely for more than a decade, I can confidently say that Paul was the natural choice to lead Red Hat. Having been the driving force behind Red Hat’s product strategy for nearly two decades, he’s been intimately involved in setting the company’s direction and uniquely understands how to help customers and partners make the most out of their cloud strategy,” he said in a statement.
In a Q&A with Cormier on the company website, he talked about the kind of changes he expects to see under his leadership in the next five years of the company. “There’s a term that we use today, ‘applications run the business.’ In five years, I see it becoming the case for the majority of enterprises. And with that, the infrastructure underpinning these applications will be even more critical. Management and security are paramount — and this isn’t just one environment. It’s bare metal and hypervisors to public and private clouds. It’s Linux, VMs, containers, microservices and more,” he said.
When IBM bought Red Hat in 2018 for $34 billion, there was widespread speculation that Whitehurst would eventually take over in an executive position there. Now that that has happened, Cormier will step into run Red Hat.
While Red Hat is under the IBM umbrella, it continues to operate as a separate company with its own executive structure, but that vision that Cormier outlined is in line with how it will fit within the IBM family as it tries to make its mark on the shifting cloud and enterprise open source markets.
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AWS launches Bottlerocket, a Linux-based OS for container hosting
AWS has launched its own open-source operating system for running containers on both virtual machines and bare metal hosts. Bottlerocket, as the new OS is called, is basically a stripped-down Linux distribution that’s akin to projects like CoreOS’s now-defunct Container Linux and Google’s container-optimized OS. The OS is currently in its developer preview phase, but you can test it as an Amazon Machine Image for EC2 (and by extension, under Amazon EKS, too).
As AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr notes in his announcement, Bottlerocket supports Docker images and images that conform to the Open Container Initiative image format, which means it’ll basically run all Linux-based containers you can throw at it.
One feature that makes Bottlerocket stand out is that it does away with a package-based update system. Instead, it uses an image-based model that, as Barr notes, “allows for a rapid & complete rollback if necessary.” The idea here is that this makes updates easier. At the core of this update process is “The Update Framework,” an open-source project hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
AWS says it will provide three years of support (after General Availability) for its own builds of Bottlerocket. As of now, the project is very much focused on AWS, of course, but the code is available on GitHub and chances are we will see others expand on AWS’ work.
The company is launching the project in cooperation with a number of partners, including Alcide, Armory, CrowdStrike, Datadog, New Relic, Sysdig, Tigera, Trend Micro and Waveworks.
“Container-optimized operating systems will give dev teams the additional speed and efficiency to run higher throughput workloads with better security and uptime,” said Michael Gerstenhaber, director of Product Management at Datadog.” We are excited to work with AWS on Bottlerocket, so that as customers take advantage of the increased scale they can continue to monitor these ephemeral environments with confidence.”
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Cartesiam helps developers bring AI to microcontrollers
Cartesiam, a startup that aims to bring machine learning to edge devices powered by microcontrollers, has launched a new tool for developers who want an easier way to build services for these devices. The new NanoEdge AI Studio is the first IDE specifically designed for enabling machine learning and inferencing on Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers, which power billions of devices already.
As Cartesiam GM Marc Dupaquier, who co-founded the company in 2016, told me, the company works very closely with Arm, given that both have a vested interest in having developers create new features for these devices. He noted that while the first wave of IoT was all about sending data to the cloud, that has now shifted and most companies now want to limit the amount of data they send out and do a lot more on the device itself. And that’s pretty much one of the founding theses of Cartesiam. “It’s just absurd to send all this data — which, by the way, also exposes the device from a security standpoint,” he said. “What if we could do it much closer to the device itself?”
The company first bet on Intel’s short-lived Curie SoC platform. That obviously didn’t work out all that well, given that Intel axed support for Curie in 2017. Since then, Cartesiam has focused on the Cortex-M platform, which worked out for the better, given how ubiquitous it has become. Since we’re talking about low-powered microcontrollers, though, it’s worth noting that we’re not talking about face recognition or natural language understanding here. Instead, using machine learning on these devices is more about making objects a little bit smarter and, especially in an industrial use case, detecting abnormalities or figuring out when it’s time to do preventive maintenance.
Today, Cartesiam already works with many large corporations that build Cortex-M-based devices. The NanoEdge Studio makes this development work far easier, though. “Developing a smart object must be simple, rapid and affordable — and today, it is not, so we are trying to change it,” said Dupaquier. But the company isn’t trying to pitch its product to data scientists, he stressed. “Our target is not the data scientists. We are actually not smart enough for that. But we are unbelievably smart for the embedded designer. We will resolve 99% of their problems.” He argues that Cartesiam reduced time to market by a factor of 20 to 50, “because you can get your solution running in days, not in multiple years.”
One nifty feature of the NanoEdge Studio is that it automatically tries to find the best algorithm for a given combination of sensors and use cases and the libraries it generates are extremely small and use somewhere between 4K to 16K of RAM.
NanoEdge Studio for both Windows and Linux is now generally available. Pricing starts at €690/month for a single user or €2,490/month for teams.
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Databricks makes bringing data into its ‘lakehouse’ easier
Databricks today announced the launch of its new Data Ingestion Network of partners and the launch of its Databricks Ingest service. The idea here is to make it easier for businesses to combine the best of data warehouses and data lakes into a single platform — a concept Databricks likes to call “lakehouse.”
At the core of the company’s lakehouse is Delta Lake, Databricks’ Linux Foundation-managed open-source project that brings a new storage layer to data lakes that helps users manage the lifecycle of their data and ensures data quality through schema enforcement, log records and more. Databricks users can now work with the first five partners in the Ingestion Network — Fivetran, Qlik, Infoworks, StreamSets, Syncsort — to automatically load their data into Delta Lake. To ingest data from these partners, Databricks customers don’t have to set up any triggers or schedules — instead, data automatically flows into Delta Lake.
“Until now, companies have been forced to split up their data into traditional structured data and big data, and use them separately for BI and ML use cases. This results in siloed data in data lakes and data warehouses, slow processing and partial results that are too delayed or too incomplete to be effectively utilized,” says Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “This is one of the many drivers behind the shift to a Lakehouse paradigm, which aspires to combine the reliability of data warehouses with the scale of data lakes to support every kind of use case. In order for this architecture to work well, it needs to be easy for every type of data to be pulled in. Databricks Ingest is an important step in making that possible.”
Databricks VP of Product Marketing Bharath Gowda also tells me that this will make it easier for businesses to perform analytics on their most recent data and hence be more responsive when new information comes in. He also noted that users will be able to better leverage their structured and unstructured data for building better machine learning models, as well as to perform more traditional analytics on all of their data instead of just a small slice that’s available in their data warehouse.
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Canonical’s Anbox Cloud puts Android in the cloud
Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, today announced the launch of Anbox Cloud, a new platform that allows enterprises to run Android in the cloud.
On Anbox Cloud, Android becomes the guest operating system that runs containerized applications. This opens up a range of use cases, ranging from bespoke enterprise apps to cloud gaming solutions.
The result is similar to what Google does with Android apps on Chrome OS, though the implementation is quite different and is based on the LXD container manager, as well as a number of Canonical projects like Juju and MAAS for provisioning the containers and automating the deployment. “LXD containers are lightweight, resulting in at least twice the container density compared to Android emulation in virtual machines – depending on streaming quality and/or workload complexity,” the company points out in its announcements.
Anbox itself, it’s worth noting, is an open-source project that came out of Canonical and the wider Ubuntu ecosystem. Launched by Canonical engineer Simon Fels in 2017, Anbox runs the full Android system in a container, which in turn allows you to run Android application on any Linux-based platform.
What’s the point of all of this? Canonical argues that it allows enterprises to offload mobile workloads to the cloud and then stream those applications to their employees’ mobile devices. But Canonical is also betting on 5G to enable more use cases, less because of the available bandwidth but more because of the low latencies it enables.
“Driven by emerging 5G networks and edge computing, millions of users will benefit from access to ultra-rich, on-demand Android applications on a platform of their choice,” said Stephan Fabel, director of Product at Canonical, in today’s announcement. “Enterprises are now empowered to deliver high performance, high density computing to any device remotely, with reduced power consumption and in an economical manner.”
Outside of the enterprise, one of the use cases that Canonical seems to be focusing on is gaming and game streaming. A server in the cloud is generally more powerful than a smartphone, after all, though that gap is closing.
Canonical also cites app testing as another use case, given that the platform would allow developers to test apps on thousands of Android devices in parallel. Most developers, though, prefer to test their apps in real — not emulated — devices, given the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem.
Anbox Cloud can run in the public cloud, though Canonical is specifically partnering with edge computing specialist Packet to host it on the edge or on-premise. Silicon partners for the project are Ampere and Intel .
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Microsoft announces public preview of Microsoft Teams for Linux
Today, Microsoft announced a public preview of Microsoft Teams for Linux, the first Office 365 tool that’s available for the open-source operating system.
The hope is that by making it available for preview, the company can get feedback from the community and improve it before it becomes generally available. “Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions,” the company wrote in the blog post announcing the release.
The goal here ultimately is to help get Teams into the hands of more customers by expanding the platforms it runs on. “Most of our customers have devices running on a variety of different platforms such as Windows 10, Linux and others. We are committed to supporting mixed environments across our cloud and productivity offerings, and with this announcement, we are pleased to extend the Teams experience to Linux users,” the company wrote in the blog post.
This announcement is significant for a couple of reasons. For starters, Microsoft has had a complicated history with Linux and open source, although in recent years, under Satya Nadella, it has embraced open source. This shows that Microsoft is willing to put its tools wherever customers need them, regardless of the platform or operating system.
Secondly, as it marks the first Office 365 app on Linux, if there is positive feedback, it could open the door for more apps on the platform down the road.
The announcement also comes against the backdrop of the company’s ongoing battles with Slack for enterprise collaboration platform users. In July, Microsoft announced 13 million daily active users on Teams. Meanwhile, Slack has 12 million DAUs. It’s worth noting that Slack has been available on Linux for almost two years.
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The 7 most important announcements from Microsoft Ignite
It’s Microsoft Ignite this week, the company’s premier event for IT professionals and decision-makers. But it’s not just about new tools for role-based access. Ignite is also very much a forward-looking conference that keeps the changing role of IT in mind. And while there isn’t a lot of consumer news at the event, the company does tend to make a few announcements for developers, as well.
This year’s Ignite was especially news-heavy. Ahead of the event, the company provided journalists and analysts with an 87-page document that lists all of the news items. If I counted correctly, there were about 175 separate announcements. Here are the top seven you really need to know about.
Azure Arc: you can now use Azure to manage resources anywhere, including on AWS and Google Cloud
What was announced: Microsoft was among the first of the big cloud vendors to bet big on hybrid deployments. With Arc, the company is taking this a step further. It will let enterprises use Azure to manage their resources across clouds — including those of competitors like AWS and Google Cloud. It’ll work for Windows and Linux Servers, as well as Kubernetes clusters, and also allows users to take some limited Azure data services with them to these platforms.
Why it matters: With Azure Stack, Microsoft already allowed businesses to bring many of Azure’s capabilities into their own data centers. But because it’s basically a local version of Azure, it only worked on a limited set of hardware. Arc doesn’t bring all of the Azure Services, but it gives enterprises a single platform to manage all of their resources across the large clouds and their own data centers. Virtually every major enterprise uses multiple clouds. Managing those environments is hard. So if that’s the case, Microsoft is essentially saying, let’s give them a tool to do so — and keep them in the Azure ecosystem. In many ways, that’s similar to Google’s Anthos, yet with an obvious Microsoft flavor, less reliance on Kubernetes and without the managed services piece.
Microsoft launches Project Cortex, a knowledge network for your company
What was announced: Project Cortex creates a knowledge network for your company. It uses machine learning to analyze all of the documents and contracts in your various repositories — including those of third-party partners — and then surfaces them in Microsoft apps like Outlook, Teams and its Office apps when appropriate. It’s the company’s first new commercial service since the launch of Teams.
Why it matters: Enterprises these days generate tons of documents and data, but it’s often spread across numerous repositories and is hard to find. With this new knowledge network, the company aims to surface this information proactively, but it also looks at who the people are who work on them and tries to help you find the subject matter experts when you’re working on a document about a given subject, for example.
Microsoft launched Endpoint Manager to modernize device management
What was announced: Microsoft is combining its ConfigMgr and Intune services that allow enterprises to manage the PCs, laptops, phones and tablets they issue to their employees under the Endpoint Manager brand. With that, it’s also launching a number of tools and recommendations to help companies modernize their deployment strategies. ConfigMgr users will now also get a license to Intune to allow them to move to cloud-based management.
Why it matters: In this world of BYOD, where every employee uses multiple devices, as well as constant attacks against employee machines, effectively managing these devices has become challenging for most IT departments. They often use a mix of different tools (ConfigMgr for PCs, for example, and Intune for cloud-based management of phones). Now, they can get a single view of their deployments with the Endpoint Manager, which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described as one of the most important announcements of the event, and ConfigMgr users will get an easy path to move to cloud-based device management thanks to the Intune license they now have access to.
Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser gets new privacy features, will be generally available January 15
What was announced: Microsoft’s Chromium-based version of Edge will be generally available on January 15. The release candidate is available now. That’s the culmination of a lot of work from the Edge team, and, with today’s release, the company is also adding a number of new privacy features to Edge that, in combination with Bing, offers some capabilities that some of Microsoft’s rivals can’t yet match, thanks to its newly enhanced InPrivate browsing mode.
Why it matters: Browsers are interesting again. After years of focusing on speed, the new focus is now privacy, and that’s giving Microsoft a chance to gain users back from Chrome (though maybe not Firefox). At Ignite, Microsoft also stressed that Edge’s business users will get to benefit from a deep integration with its updated Bing engine, which can now surface business documents, too.
You can now try Microsoft’s web-based version of Visual Studio
What was announced: At Build earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would soon launch a web-based version of its Visual Studio development environment, based on the work it did on the free Visual Studio Code editor. This experience, with deep integrations into the Microsoft-owned GitHub, is now live in a preview.
Why it matters: Microsoft has long said that it wants to meet developers where they are. While Visual Studio Online isn’t likely to replace the desktop-based IDE for most developers, it’s an easy way for them to make quick changes to code that lives in GitHub, for example, without having to set up their IDE locally. As long as they have a browser, developers will be able to get their work done.
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Microsoft launches Power Virtual Agents, its no-code bot builder
What was announced: Power Virtual Agents is Microsoft’s new no-code/low-code tool for building chatbots. It leverages a lot of Azure’s machine learning smarts to let you create a chatbot with the help of a visual interface. In case you outgrow that and want to get to the actual code, you can always do so, too.
Why it matters: Chatbots aren’t exactly at the top of the hype cycle, but they do have lots of legitimate uses. Microsoft argues that a lot of early efforts were hampered by the fact that the developers were far removed from the user. With a visual too, though, anybody can come in and build a chatbot — and a lot of those builders will have a far better understanding of what their users are looking for than a developer who is far removed from that business group.
Cortana wants to be your personal executive assistant and read your emails to you, too
What was announced: Cortana lives — and it now also has a male voice. But more importantly, Microsoft launched a few new focused Cortana-based experiences that show how the company is focusing on its voice assistant as a tool for productivity. In Outlook on iOS (with Android coming later), Cortana can now read you a summary of what’s in your inbox — and you can have a chat with it to flag emails, delete them or dictate answers. Cortana can now also send you a daily summary of your calendar appointments, important emails that need answers and suggest focus time for you to get actual work done that’s not email.
Why it matters: In this world of competing assistants, Microsoft is very much betting on productivity. Cortana didn’t work out as a consumer product, but the company believes there is a large (and lucrative) niche for an assistant that helps you get work done. Because Microsoft doesn’t have a lot of consumer data, but does have lots of data about your work, that’s probably a smart move.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – APRIL 02: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella walks in front of the new Cortana logo as he delivers a keynote address during the 2014 Microsoft Build developer conference on April 2, 2014 in San Francisco, California (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Bonus: Microsoft agrees with you and thinks meetings are broken — and often it’s the broken meeting room that makes meetings even harder. To battle this, the company today launched Managed Meeting Rooms, which for $50 per room/month lets you delegate to Microsoft the monitoring and management of the technical infrastructure of your meeting rooms.
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Microsoft Teams gets Yammer integration, secure private channels and more
You’re forgiven if you thought Yammer — Microsoft’s proto-Slack, not quite real-time chat application — was dead. It’s actually still alive (and well) — and still serves a purpose as a slower-moving social network-like channel for company and team-wide announcements. Today, Microsoft announced that, among other updates, it will offer a Yammer integration in Teams, its Slack competitor. Yammer in Teams will live in the left-hand sidebar.
With this, Microsoft’s two main enterprise communications platforms are finally growing together and will give users the option to use Teams for fast-moving chats and Yammer as their enterprise social network in the same way Facebook messenger and its news feed complement each other.
Oh, and Yammer itself has been redesigned, too, using Microsoft’s Fluent Design System across all platforms. And Microsoft is also building it into Outlook, too, to let you respond to messages right from your inbox. This new Yammer will roll out as a private preview in December.
With this update, Teams is getting a number of other new features, too. These include secure private channels, multi-window chats and meetings, pinned channels and task integration with Microsoft To Do and Planner (because having one to-do app is never enough). Microsoft is also making a number of enhancements to Teams Rooms, with upcoming support for Cisco WebEx and Zoom meetings, the Teams Phone System, which is getting emergency calling, and the IT management features that help admins keep Teams secure.
A Teams client for Linux is also in the works and will be available in public preview later this year.
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Databricks brings its Delta Lake project to the Linux Foundation
Databricks, the big data analytics service founded by the original developers of Apache Spark, today announced that it is bringing its Delta Lake open-source project for building data lakes to the Linux Foundation under an open governance model. The company announced the launch of Delta Lake earlier this year, and, even though it’s still a relatively new project, it has already been adopted by many organizations and has found backing from companies like Intel, Alibaba and Booz Allen Hamilton.
“In 2013, we had a small project where we added SQL to Spark at Databricks […] and donated it to the Apache Foundation,” Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi told me. “Over the years, slowly people have changed how they actually leverage Spark and only in the last year or so it really started to dawn upon us that there’s a new pattern that’s emerging and Spark is being used in a completely different way than maybe we had planned initially.”
This pattern, he said, is that companies are taking all of their data and putting it into data lakes and then doing a couple of things with this data, machine learning and data science being the obvious ones. But they are also doing things that are more traditionally associated with data warehouses, like business intelligence and reporting. The term Ghodsi uses for this kind of usage is “Lake House.” More and more, Databricks is seeing that Spark is being used for this purpose and not just to replace Hadoop and doing ETL (extract, transform, load). “This kind of Lake House patterns we’ve seen emerge more and more and we wanted to double down on it.”
Spark 3.0, which is launching today soon, enables more of these use cases and speeds them up significantly, in addition to the launch of a new feature that enables you to add a pluggable data catalog to Spark.
Delta Lake, Ghodsi said, is essentially the data layer of the Lake House pattern. It brings support for ACID transactions to data lakes, scalable metadata handling and data versioning, for example. All the data is stored in the Apache Parquet format and users can enforce schemas (and change them with relative ease if necessary).
It’s interesting to see Databricks choose the Linux Foundation for this project, given that its roots are in the Apache Foundation. “We’re super excited to partner with them,” Ghodsi said about why the company chose the Linux Foundation. “They run the biggest projects on the planet, including the Linux project but also a lot of cloud projects. The cloud-native stuff is all in the Linux Foundation.”
“Bringing Delta Lake under the neutral home of the Linux Foundation will help the open-source community dependent on the project develop the technology addressing how big data is stored and processed, both on-prem and in the cloud,” said Michael Dolan, VP of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation. “The Linux Foundation helps open-source communities leverage an open governance model to enable broad industry contribution and consensus building, which will improve the state of the art for data storage and reliability.”
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