Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Virtualization
businesswire | July 19, 2023
Spectro Cloud announces new Palette VerteX Edition and new Spectro Cloud Government practice to meet the growing need for powerful management and security for Kubernetes (K8s) in the public sector.
Kubernetes adoption is growing across the public sector, from federal and defense to state and local government. Public sector organizations are looking to K8s and the open-source, cloud-native ecosystem around it to help drive IT agility in pursuit of their mission. But IT and platform engineering teams are often held back from embracing their choice of K8s by limited resources and restrictions around security and compliance frameworks.
To get the most from Kubernetes, they need the flexibility and simplicity to manage the full lifecycle of multiple Kubernetes distributions deployed in diverse environments, from cloud to edge, including air-gapped locations. And they need this without sacrificing security.
Today Spectro Cloud announces a new edition of its award-winning Palette Kubernetes management platform to meet the needs of these government and public sector organizations, and other industries where security and compliance are paramount.
“We developed Palette VerteX with extensive input from government agencies and customers, along with our public sector team’s decades of experience in delivering secure IT to government,” said Dave Cope, CRO of Spectro Cloud. “Palette VerteX builds on the firm foundation of our Palette enterprise platform to address the specific security requirements of public sector environments, including both military and civilian agencies.”
Palette: trusted K8s management from data center to edge
The award-winning Palette platform is already enabling thousands of platform engineers and DevOps professionals to deploy and manage their full-stack Kubernetes clusters in production, at scale.
They have the power to choose all the components of their clusters and manage clusters consistently across edge, bare metal, data center and cloud. Palette’s deep automation of day 2 activities like patching and monitoring helps stretched teams focus on innovation and removes roadblocks to scale, whatever their mission.
Palette already provides a unique combination of power and simplicity that has attracted enterprise customers in demanding and regulated industries, such as T-Mobile and GE HealthCare, which deal with sensitive data and mission-critical infrastructure at scale.
From the start, Palette was engineered with robust security features including security scans, powerful RBAC, auditing and logging, and tamperproof edge device images. The Palette management platform can be deployed on-premises and even in air-gapped environments.
New VerteX edition adds security capabilities
Now the new Palette VerteX edition extends Palette’s security features further.
VerteX supports the environments and technology platforms essential to government workloads, including deploying Kubernetes clusters in AWS GovCloud, and supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu LTS and Ubuntu Pro as the managed OS layer. Support for Azure Government Cloud is coming later this year.
Furthermore, Spectro Cloud announces that Palette VerteX brings full FIPS 140-2 cryptographic features to both the Palette platform and the Kubernetes clusters it deploys and manages, whether in traditional compute environments or at the edge. FIPS 140-2 is a key security baseline for many public and private sector organizations.
"Palette VerteX is designed from the ground up with security in mind that permeates every aspect it touches, giving government IT, platform engineering, and security teams the confidence they need to deploy and manage any Kubernetes environment at scale,” said Matthew Appler, CEO, Corsec Security, Inc.
Mission-ready support you can rely on
Spectro Cloud is a US-headquartered company, with engineers located across the country, from California to Florida. Many are veterans or have spent their careers supporting defense and government IT organizations. As such Spectro Cloud is proud to offer a premium support tier, delivered exclusively by highly qualified US citizens on US soil, for agencies and departments that need it.
The non-disruptive answer to budget shortfalls
Together, the new features in the VerteX edition make Palette a compelling alternative to incumbent K8s management tooling, especially with its competitive and transparent usage-based pricing model. Palette presents a clear solution for organizations struggling with team resources and budgets. A recent study by analysts ESG found that Palette could cut operating hours and costs for a typical multi-cluster deployment by 90%.
But adopting Palette doesn’t mean ‘rip and replace’ for customers already tied into multi-year agreements with other vendors. One of Palette’s greatest differentiators is its broad support for different Kubernetes distributions and environments, including its ability to monitor and manage clusters built on Rancher RKE2 and Red Hat OpenShift.
Government organizations can leverage their existing investments while charting a course for modern Kubernetes, with openness as a core design principle in Palette VerteX.
“The Palette VerteX announcement comes at a pivotal time in the public sector where managing Kubernetes across organizations using multiple cluster types, across multiple cloud and on-prem environments is very much a challenging reality,” said Josh Slattery, Vice President of Technology Sales at Vertosoft, the leading technology distributor focused on the public sector. “It’s great to see Spectro Cloud launch a truly mission-ready Kubernetes management solution for government straight out of the gate, and we are excited to see the impact it will have on our public sector customers.”
Today’s announcement is the first step on Spectro Cloud’s government roadmap. Furthermore, Spectro Cloud is already working to make Palette the first multi-environment SaaS Kubernetes management platform to become FedRAMP Moderate certified.
“Palette was built to be secure and mission-ready from the start, and over the past year we’ve seen a lot of interest from public sector organizations of all kinds,” said Kyle Goodwin, VP of Public Sector at Spectro Cloud. “Today, with the announcement of these important enhancements, Palette VerteX provides a genuine best-in-class experience for demanding agencies and departments looking to simplify, secure and scale their Kubernetes infrastructure. Our message to government is this: Spectro Cloud is here, and we’re ready to accelerate your mission.”
About Spectro Cloud
Spectro Cloud uniquely enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes in production, at scale. Its Palette enterprise Kubernetes management platform gives platform engineering and DevOps teams effortless control of the full Kubernetes lifecycle even across multiple clouds, data centers, bare metal and edge environments. Ops teams are empowered to support their developers with curated Kubernetes stacks and tools based on their specific needs, with granular governance and enterprise-grade security.
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Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Hypervisors
prnewswire | July 20, 2023
RISC Zero, developer of leading general purpose zero-knowledge (ZK) virtual machine technology, has raised a $40 million Series A. The round was led by Blockchain Capital and joined by seed round lead Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from other notable investors including Galaxy Digital, IOSG, RockawayX, Maven 11, Fenbushi Capital, Delphi Digital, Aglaé Ventures, IOBC, Tribute Labs' Zero Dao, Figment Capital, and Alchemy Ventures.
RISC Zero's mission is to equip developers and infrastructure providers with novel cryptographic tools to power the next generation of trustless, scalable, and decentralized computation; both on and off-chain — allowing them to build solutions that defy common assumptions about the capabilities of blockchains and other federated and cooperative computing systems. Our innovative system enables users to confidently take control of their digital world by ensuring computational integrity and producing indisputable receipts of accurate program execution.
"Imagine a world where data privacy, security, and trust are no longer concerns, where software supply chains are transparent and verifiable, and where a new generation of applications can harness the power of zero-knowledge computing to solve some of the most pressing challenges of the digital age. This is the promise of zero-knowledge computing and the reason we are investing in RISC Zero" - Bart Stephens, Founder and Managing Partner at Blockchain Capital
RISC Zero's ZK Virtual Machine (zkVM) enables developers to build ZK-powered applications with the convenience of conventional programming languages such as Rust and C++. Utilizing advanced features such as continuations, RISC Zero's zkVM can run programs of arbitrary complexity and scope while utilizing off-the-shelf computing platforms — a first in the blockchain industry.
"We're honored to be supported by all of our incredible capital partners and the visionary leaders and teams that have signed on to help us build this revolution in computing capability. We're excited to play our part in building a more open and trusted foundation for the future of the internet." - Brian Retford, CEO & Co-founder
This funding round will enable RISC Zero to bring its Bonsai computing platform to market, supporting rapid application development and deployment in both cloud and decentralized environments. With Bonsai, developers can focus on writing their application instead of worrying about the complexities of proof orchestration and server infrastructure.
AboutRISC Zero
The RISC Zero platform will drive the coming decentralized computing revolution. We are bringing general purpose computing to the zero-knowledge ecosystem – enabling users to trust programs run anywhere, while allowing developers to use the tools they already know and love. Public key cryptography ushered in the modern internet era by fundamentally altering digital trust dynamics. Similarly, zero-knowledge computing will radically alter the way we interact digitally and enable entirely new classes of applications.
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Cloud, Containers, Virtualized Environments
PR Newswire | June 29, 2023
StackPath, the industry-leading edge computing platform, today announced support for using Virtual Kubelet (VK), an open-source Kubernetes (K8s) technology, with StackPath Edge Compute Containers. With VK support, developers and operators can seamlessly integrate StackPath Containers (SP// Containers) into multi-cloud K8s clusters and manage them as part of their worker node deployment using standard K8s APIs/management consoles.
"Virtual Kubelet support delivers on all three of our core product values: speed, decentralization, and simplification," said Tom Reyes, Chief Product Officer for StackPath. "Nearly all internet-centric applications are distributed, latency-sensitive, and meant for multi- or hybrid-cloud deployment. Virtual Kubelet, paired with our edge compute, is the perfect solution. VK lets clusters span clouds without additional management overhead. StackPath gives those clusters more geographic diversity and higher proximity to data sources and destinations. We couldn't be happier to join the VK community as an official infrastructure provider."
Sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Virtual Kubelet is a revolutionary open-source technology transforming how companies approach Kubernetes clusters. Installed on a K8s cluster's control node, VK enables the control node to integrate and communicate with compute resources in other networks and platforms. The K8s cluster's administrator can centrally manage the entire cluster, regardless of where and how many other resources have been integrated.
No other VK provider offers complete compute containers with the physical proximity to end-users and on-premises networks as StackPath. Data can reach or be delivered from StackPath Edge Compute instances up to 300% faster than similar instances in hyperscale cloud data centers, providing exceptional speed and responsiveness for businesses' B2C, B2B, and even internal workloads.
"If you already use K8s and want to go to the edge, no need to rip and replace; just skip right to a better-performing application. Or if you held off leveraging K8s because you couldn't afford the latency or complexity, wait no more.," said Mr. Reyes. "The cloud is complicated enough with too much room for runaway costs and inadequate performance. StackPath and VK have the perfect combination of easy-to-use and familiarity. Keep using your same Kubernetes API server and API calls. We'll keep care of the infrastructure."
About StackPath
StackPath is a cloud platform built at the internet's edge, providing infrastructure and services physically closer to the source or destination of data than hyperscale cloud service providers. StackPath Edge Compute (including virtual machines and containers), Edge Delivery (including CDN and serverless scripting), and Edge Security (including WAF and L3-L4, L7 DDoS Protection) solutions run in edge locations strategically deployed in high-density markets and united by a secure global network and a single management system. Customers ranging from Fortune 50 enterprises to one-person startups trust StackPath to give their latency-sensitive workloads and real-time applications the speed, security, and efficiency they require.
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Virtual Desktop Tools, Cloud
Globenewswire | July 04, 2023
Anjuna Security Inc., a confidential computing software company, today announced that its flagship product, the Anjuna Confidential Computing Platform, now supports Microsoft Azure confidential virtual machines (VMs) powered by AMD EPYC™ processors with Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) security features. This added functionality represents a significant advancement in Anjuna’s support for Azure confidential computing (ACC) solutions and increases flexibility of choice for Microsoft customers.
“As a leader in off-chain computation, where trust and security are non-negotiable, we are very excited by Anjuna’s expanded support for the latest AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing technology on Microsoft Azure that provides powerful isolation, risk reduction, and simplicity for sensitive data and code, taking confidential computing ease of use, trust, and simplicity to next level,” said Mitch Gildenberg, Switchboard CTO.
Azure confidential VMs, powered by AMD SEV-SNP, provide a robust platform to securely migrate and run enterprise applications to the cloud with data-in-use protection. While running in confidential VMs, applications can be isolated from other VMs, the hypervisor, and cloud infrastructure operators. Additionally, Anjuna's solution provides further isolation and safeguards for threats originating from the guest OS, misconfigurations, and other applications running in the same VM and the VM administrator. With more organizations processing more sensitive data in the cloud for generative AI, financial systems, and high-value transactions processing, however, security must extend to cover all these additional threats.
Anjuna Confidential Computing Platform enhances Azure confidential VMs, strengthening data protection and improving operational efficiency at scale. Anjuna automates the end-to-end deployment process and further protects applications in hardened Anjuna Confidential Containers that cannot be accessed by the other applications or the VM administrator. Moreover, Anjuna seamlessly and without code changes integrates attestation-aware key management capabilities via the Anjuna Policy Manager, ensuring that secrets are exclusively distributed to trusted applications.
“At Anjuna, we believe Confidential Computing should be ubiquitous, easy to use, and above all, secure without trade-offs. For too long, enterprises have had to choose between ease of use and security. In today’s digital economy, this is no longer acceptable,” said Ayal Yogev, CEO and co-founder of Anjuna Security. “Microsoft Azure is a leading innovator in confidential computing and we are excited to be among the first Confidential Computing software providers to support both their Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP powered infrastructure. We are committed to keep working closely with Microsoft to unlock the full potential of Azure Confidential Computing services.”
“We are committed to making Microsoft Azure a trusted cloud platform offering a broad portfolio of Confidential Computing solutions to customers,” said Vikas Bhatia, Head of Product, Azure confidential computing at Microsoft. “The combination of Azure confidential VMs powered by AMD SEV-SNP and the Anjuna Confidential Computing Platform unlocks value to customers, ensuring high levels of data protection and privacy with streamlined operations and ease of use.”
About Anjuna Security
Anjuna allows applications to run in any cloud with complete data security and privacy. Anjuna isolates workloads in a protected environment that intrinsically secures data in every state. Anjuna empowers enterprises to directly control application-level trust policies, ensuring that only trusted code can access sensitive data. Anjuna works with enterprises around the globe in industries such as financial services, government, and blockchain. To learn more about Anjuna’s platform and impact, visit Anjuna.io.
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