Today on Product Saturday: Datadog unveils a new uptime monitoring service with a cheeky title, Platform Engineering introduces its take on infrastructure-as-code tools, and the quote of the week.
Today: Factory's co-founder and CEO explains why using AI to automate developers' least-favorite tasks could have a huge impact, AWS sheds more light on the root causes of Monday's outage, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: Monday's big AWS outage illustrates yet again why us-east-1 is the biggest problem in cloud computing, further evidence that bitcoin mining is so very 2019 these days, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Today on Product Saturday: Datadog unveils a new uptime monitoring service with a cheeky title, Platform Engineering introduces its take on infrastructure-as-code tools, and the quote of the week.
Welcome to Runtime! Today on Product Saturday: Datadog unveils a new uptime monitoring service with a cheeky title, Platform Engineering introduces its take on infrastructure-as-code tools, and the quote of the week.
(Please forward this email to a friend or colleague! And if it was forwarded to you, sign up here to get Runtime each week.)
Not much, what's up with you?: The classic updog joke takes a decent amount of setup to pull off, but you don't usually see it baked into the product roadmap. After an X user wondered earlier this year why Datadog had an uptime monitoring service that wasn't called Updog, this week the company launched exactly that.
Updog.ai is "a free public-facing web page from Datadog that shows the live health status of 30+ popular SaaS providers (such as OpenAI, Zoom, and GitHub) and 13 AWS services," the company said in a blog post. It's not a production-grade monitoring tool, but it's useful and fun, and for the love of God, my fellow members of the media: Please use this, not DownDetector, when writing your outage stories.
Where's the money?: Companies need to understand how much revenue they think will come in over a future period of time for dozens of reasons, and a lot of business decisions are only as good as the accuracy of those predictions. Gong makes software that helps analyze sales pipeline data in hopes of nailing those projections, and this week it introduced some new features within its Gong AI Operating System that get agents in on the action.
AI Data Extractor is an agent that "captures customizable, high-value deal and account details from customer interactions, such as decision-maker, next step date, competitor, and use case, and then automatically populates CRM fields," the company said in a blog post. Gong predicts big things for its own revenue over the next 12 months, and sits just outside a CRM market that is scrambling to make itself over with AI.
IaC for you and me: Tools that let companies provision infrastructure programmatically — as opposed to manually — have a rich history, dating back a decade ago to the Chef/Puppet era and carried through to the modern day by HashiCorp's Terraform and its open-source rival, OpenTofu. This week Platform Engineering Labs entered the ring, launching formae, a new infrastructure-as-code tool designed for multicloud deployments.
"Unlike tools that rely on brittle state files and endless manual babysitting, formae automatically discovers and codifies an organization's entire environment, whatever its origin, into a single, unified source of truth," the company said in a press release. Unlike OpenTofu, formae was released under the Functional Source License, which allows developers free access to the code as long as they don't create anything that competes with Platform Engineering Labs' business model and converts to a traditional. permissive open-source license after two years.
Snakebite kit: Chainguard's libraries of safe, vetted code packages are well known with the JavaScript community, and this week it formally released a set of packages for AI developers, who as you might have heard are having a moment right now. Chainguard Libraries for Python is now generally available, covering the most popular programming language of the AI boom.
The new set of libraries "fix high and critical Python CVEs by identifying upstream patches, running full tests to ensure nothing breaks, and shipping secure updates – complete with VEX advisories – so customers stay protected without any disruption," the company said in a blog post. The security of the AI software supply chain hasn't been as big of a problem yet as it has in other corners of enterprise tech, but that won't last forever.
Gimme the keys: After Valkey was released last year in response to a new licensing strategy at Redis, the company has come full circle with its open-source strategy but the project continues on under the auspices of The Linux Foundation. This week Valkey rolled out its second major release since the debut of the open-source key-value data store.
Valkey 9.0 "introduces expiration dates for hash fields, atomic slot migration, and multiple databases in cluster mode, which fortify Valkey’s use at scale," The Linux Foundation said in a press release. A cluster running the project can now support over 1 billion requests per second, which is a lot.
The biggest question in enterprise tech as we close out the last quarter of the year is whether anybody is seeing results from their investments in generative AI technology. A new report from Kyndryl basically says, kinda: "While 54% of organizations reported seeing positive returns on AI investments – an increase of 12 points from 2024 – 62% still haven’t advanced their AI projects beyond the pilot stage."
"You go to an enterprise and you automate all of the coding, there's still going to be so much work that developers do, it's just going to be the least-fun work. So they're not going to want to adopt whatever tool it is anyway." — Factory co-founder and CEO Matan Grinberg, on his startup's strategy to provide tools for automating developer busywork alongside AI coding assistants.
Microsoft interrupted happy hours around the world Friday with an emergency out-of-band patch for a remote code execution vulnerability in Windows Server Update Services, which was assessed as "critical," according to The Register.
AWS had a chance to strike a deep partnership with Anthropic during its early days only to balk in part because it has "historically been reluctant to pay for access to technology that it believed could be readily developed in-house," according to an in-depth report from Bloomberg, and that hesitation allowed Google Cloud to gain a foothold.
Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!
Today: Factory's co-founder and CEO explains why using AI to automate developers' least-favorite tasks could have a huge impact, AWS sheds more light on the root causes of Monday's outage, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: Monday's big AWS outage illustrates yet again why us-east-1 is the biggest problem in cloud computing, further evidence that bitcoin mining is so very 2019 these days, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Today on Product Saturday: Anthropic may have found a way to deliver on the promise of agents, Oracle puts up a lakehouse, and the quote of the week.
Today: F5's disclosure that hackers had "long term" access to its systems is just the latest sign that the federal government is focused on the wrong problems, Salesforce does damage control on behalf of its CEO, and the latest enterprise moves.
