Welcome to the Executive Report from TFiR. Here are some of the major stories, articles and videos from January 28, 2020.

Featured Stories
1) SIOS AppKeeper Now Available On AWS
AppKeeper ensures availability of applications and systems running in AWS EC2 environments. It continuously monitors specific services within the operating system and within the application and identify when there are issues. If something goes wrong, AppKeeper takes corrective action, depending on the configuration, to remedy the problem. “What we found is that about 85% of failure scenarios that customers experience are being addressed with AppKeeper,” said Michael Bilancieri, SVP Products and Marketing of SIOS Technology.
Source: TFiR

2) Building Zero Trust Authentication For Multi-Cloud Application Services
One of the fundamental challenges organizations have about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments is how to easily establish secure communication across different clouds and environments. Cloud providers have their own identity and access management solutions, such as AWS IAM, to manage what access an instance should and should not have. But as soon as the applications or services need to communicate from AWS to GCP or from AWS to their on-prem infrastructure, it becomes a challenge because it’s AWS-specific and not interoperable. This is the problem Scytale, a is trying to address with Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE). Both of these open-source projects originated at Scytale but now are part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). These projects have grown in popularity within the cloud native community and have seen contributions from organizations such as Amazon, Bloomberg, Google, Pinterest, Square , Uber and more.
Source: TFiR

3) Bid goodbye to AWS Downtime worries
Our video interview with Michael Bilancieri, SVP Products and Marketing of SIOS Technology in which he discusses the problems SIOS AppKeeper is solving for AWS customers. SIOS AppKeeper is another gem from SIOS that ensures availability to applications and systems running in AWS EC2 environments. AppKeeper continuously monitors specific services within the operating system and within the application for any application and identify when there are issues.
Source: YouTube

4) Intel Now Part Of CHIPS Alliance
Intel has joined CHIPS Alliance, the consortium advancing common and open hardware for interfaces, processors and systems. To foster broad adoption, Intel said it is contributing the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) to CHIPS Alliance.
Source: TFIR

Newsbytes:
5) Cisco Announces Kubernetes-As-A-Service Platform
At the Cisco Live! event in Barcelona, Cisco joined the Kubernetes club by announcing its Kubernetes-as-a-service platform dubbed, Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform. Built on HyperFlex, it’s a fully curated container platform that’s 100% upstream Kubernetes-compliant, comes without a V-Tax. “The HyperFlex Application Platform (HX-AP) is designed to take the hard work out of K8’s and make it as easy as deploying an appliance,” said Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President and General Manager IoT at Cisco. HyperFlex Application Platform offers Kubernetes components along with lifecycle management of the operating system, libraries, packages and patches users need for K8’s. Cisco’s platform also manage the security updates and check for consistency between all components every time users deploy or upgrade a cluster. Cisco is leveraging its AppDynamic and Intersight by integrating them with the Kubernetes platform to supports real-time monitoring and optimization of the complete application to infrastructure stack. Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform is expected to be available in the second quarter.
Source: Cisco

Notable:
6) Microsoft has open sourced a machine learning library called, Diverse Counterfactual Explanations (DiCE) which implements Microsoft’s framework for generating counterfactual explanations. Source: Microsoft,
Source: Microsoft