theCUBE At HP Discover With David Vellante & Jeff Frick

DevOps and continuous delivery of services and applications is changing the way that businesses and enterprise address critical IT operations. Focused on customized innovation, HP announced the general availability of the SDN App Store to develop and sell their SDN-enabled applications. Puppet Labs unveiled a new DevOps automation platform whereas JumpCloud announced JumpCloud Directory as a Service (DaaS), a new replacement for Active Directory.

This and more in this week DevOps round up.

New DevOps tools for automation challenges

Puppet Labs last week unveiled new DevOps automation management and reporting capabilities taking into account the ever increasing role of cloud and virtualization in the enterprise as well as a notable increase in scale.

The new DevOps feature set is designed to allow developers and users to innovate quickly around core features with purpose-built applications that focus on solving IT automation challenges. In addition, the management and reporting update adds a better hands-on role when issuing and engineering automation for deployment with a profiler and metrics service.

The management and monitoring provider JumpCloud announced JumpCloud Directory as a Service (DaaS), a new offering that the company projects as an alternative to existing on-premise directory services like the Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

According to the company, the DaaS service allows organizations to replace or enhance AD and LDAP capabilities by moving to the cloud. The service can authenticate, authorize, and manage users, devices, and applications. It acts as a single-user store for an organization or can extend existing AD and LDAP user stores to the cloud. This is good for developers as the service brings IT teams the simplicity, ubiquity, and security of user and device management, all from the cloud.

Users of Heroku’s popular cloud-based development platform got a treat when the company redesigned the dashboard with an array of new capabilities. The new dashboard called Heroku DX is described as better aligned with the workflow of developers and engineering teams and underscores an increased focus on DevOps at Heroku. The dashboard enables developers working in a team to see what their peers are doing at any given time and lend a hand to a colleague who may need help with a particular aspect of their assignment.

In addition to just visualizing that data for developers, the service also feeds it into an analytical engine that churns out recommendations on how to improve service levels and overall efficiency.

Software marketplace in the cloud

Last week, HP announced the general availability of the new software-defined networking (SDN) App Store to encourage a new wave of networking innovation centered on SDN and open standards. The HP SDN App Store is part of an open SDN ecosystem in which HP also offers the HP SDN Developer Kit. The kit gives developers the essential tools to create, test and validate SDN apps.

The HP SDN App Store provides not just APIs for developers, but an end-to-end model of solutions, support, services and sales tools to provide a fully integrated experience. Integrated with the HP Virtual Application Networks (VAN) SDN controller, the store is the central building block for developing SDN apps, providing centralized control and automation in a software-defined network.

Finally, the mobile app-dev specialists Xamarin announced the launch of its new web-based “Xamarin Test Cloud”, which lets developers test out apps and programs on over 1,000 devices. Xamarin Test Cloud runs alongside Calabash, an automation framework that was built by startup LessPainfu.

Xamarin says with the Xamarin Test Cloud, developers will be able to practically anything they might do when they’re using an actual, physical device. Developers will be able to create their own test scripts using Xamarin’s powerful framework, run them locally on devices or emulators, and then run the same tests on literally thousands of devices at the push of a button.