This week in DevOps shows an ongoing expansion of opportunities for DevOps teams, IT teams, and developers to leverage open source and vendor-specific API models. Configuration and automation remains the big draw for DevOps needs, but virtual containers (via Docker and others) are becoming more visible.

Chef Software, Inc. continues to release expanded abilities permitting greater automation of testing, deployment, and configuration and has even added capabilities for virtual containers with Docker integration. Docker, Inc. continues to innovate around virtual containers by providing a model that allows DevOps teams to image applications and application environments for rapid deployment.

Cisco Systems, Inc. is opening up much of its ecosystem to developers with the DevNet online community containing resources for APIs, SDKs and documentation about Cisco products and tools to increase developer attention for its products and services.

This and more below in this DevOps Weekly.

Chef expands abilities around automation

The web-scale IT automation provider Chef Software, Inc. last week announced new enterprise product features that expand the Chef platform, powering speed, scale and consistency for enterprise companies to speed of DevOps operation and automation.

First in the list is the general availability of a new analytics platform, which provides visibility into activity on the Chef server for audits and compliance. The company recently gained some big data expertise by buying a startup called Tower 3. With analytics platform, Chef users now have access to an action log, which documents activity in the environment, such as cookbook usage, roles and infrastructure changes, presented in a single dashboard.

Chef has also started providing commercial support for test-driven infrastructure across the entire stack. Called Test-Driven Infrastructure, The first version of the Chef Development Kit (Chef DK) was released with a full set of open source tools to cover the entire test and development workflow.

Docker virtual containers leading the way

Docker, Inc. develops and delivers Docker containers. A product designed to ease deployment of applications across a variety of data centers, devices or clouds has already garnered tremendous interest and support for its container solution.

For Docker in specific, Chef has released the Knife Plug-in enabling users to launch, configure and manage Docker containers. Chef Docker Container brings container management into the company’s overall IT automation framework DevOps teams can look to Chef Container for full support surrounding Linux container configuration at deployment.

Last week also saw another major development surrounding Docker’s purchase of the UK startup Orchard Laboratories. Orchard brings a Docker orchestration tool called Fig particularly useful to developers because it allows easy composition and management of multi-container Docker applications.

Cisco starts DevOps journey with DevNet

Its long history has roots in network hardware, but Cisco Systems, Inc. has been reaching out to software developers to drive new stimulus into the company. The network company has set an ambitious goal for the future as it aims to attract one million developers by 2020, a figure still far from the 80,000 that the company has achieved today.

To that end, Cisco launched DevNet last week, an online community and resource center for software developers, in hopes of spurring creation of new applications around its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and the Internet of Things. DevNet is part of a strategy to develop products that can run on Cisco networks. DevNet acts as a one-stop-shop for developer tools and resources, including Cisco APIs, software development kits (SDKs) and ready-to-use code examples.

The Cisco DevNet portal contains over 100 fully documented APIs from Cisco. The portal will also be used to develop the Inter Cisco Cloud platform and Cisco end-user platforms, such as collaboration solutions, Internet of Things and Cisco’s Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) solutions.

AppDynamics raises fund for Application Intelligence Platform

Application intelligence leader AppDynamics, Inc. raised $120 million in funding to enhance its Application Intelligence Platform for the IT Operations and Business Analytics markets.

The Intelligence Platform provides developers insight into the current and historical health of applications with visualization, dashboards and opens up opportunities to detect and fix bottlenecks, as well as identify the root cause of faults.

Contributing authors: Saroj Kar and Kyt Dotson