Introducing new Eficode ROOT services

At the moment these are in extended support and not yet included as part of the reference architecture, but we are working to develop them into more stable packages. Here’s an update on the progress we’ve made. 

Eficode ROOT Insights

Eficode’s product portfolio now contains Eficode ROOT Insights and it is beautiful! You can read more on its own product blog here. 

First adopters are already running this and we are starting to roll it out to many other excited customers. 

Eficode 5G DevOps offering

Eficode’s 5G DevOps offering runs on top of Eficode ROOT and is built with Eficode ROOT in mind. If you're going towards 5G we highly recommend you discuss this option with our experts.

Our approach to the multi-vendor Telco DevOps challenge forms a single pipeline in the shape of a flower. It consists of multiple SW suppliers (vendors) continuously deploying SW to the Telco Operator’s network. The goal is to have the vendors integrate into the operator’s vendor agnostic DevOps pipeline.

The agnostic pipeline helps to harmonize and optimize automated deployment, configuration, and acceptance workflows, enabling fast time to market and easy onboarding of new suppliers.

With Eficode ROOT we can provide vendor agnostic automation for Telecom SW orchestration which is compliant with ETSI NFV MANO and puts you in the center of the action.

Eficode ROOT Team Management extensions

We worked on releasing Eficode ROOT Team management (RTM) in 2019. Now, in 2020, we’ve realised that our customers need more protocols and capabilities to the existing service. We started by adding new features to the platform to integrate Eficode RTM with our customer systems. This means we want to support OAuth and SAML 2.0 for authentication and two factor authentication options. We also want to access these new technologies safely from the public internet. Check out Keycloak and Oauth proxy:

Keycloak

This is a slightly unusual mixture in terms of our tooling and setup, but a more unified authentication experience to our Azure Directory/Single sign-on solutions has been in development for a while. Additionally, we have been planning on how to increase security by adding two factor authentication options for enterprise and public sector customers without bringing all the identity provider complications, or comparables in between. We have successfully prepared Keycloak as our middleman solution to provide two factor authentication for users with more traditional systems that might not allow direct integrations, or to customers/tools with advanced needs. This also enables the same Eficode ROOT Team Management accounts across cloud tools. 

There will be more info to come from us, but in the meantime you can read about Keycloak here.

Additional security with Oauth2 proxy

For this you will need the following flowchart as additional information:

Oauth Proxy is a tool that allows us to build safe public internet access to your internal services. It is a feature designed for customers who need high security. The idea behind Oauth Proxy is that we do authentication in a separate service before pushing the user to service itself, meaning that any possible attack vectors to said tool or service are blocked by an additional service. It means, for example, that Atlassian mobile tools would not be able to connect to the service from insecure public internet. Currently we support authentication with Azure AD, Keycloak, Google auth and Gitlab from the supported tool list, and we are working on adding more features as we proceed with development. 

Read more on Oauth Proxy here.

Gitlab

You might have noticed that we recently rolled out our Gitlab support. We have supported Gitlab for a while and are working on making it one of the staples in our environments. Gitlab is a Distributed Version Control system with optional issues and continuous integration features. You can read more about it here.

Graylog

Eficode has been running Elasticsearch Logstash Kibana (ELK) and ELASTIC stacks for a long time, but we’ve decided to start supporting Graylog too. It pretty much uses the same Elasticsearch under the hood, but it provides its own log-centric way of processing incoming messages and it replaces Kibana with its own UI. We are happy to announce that we have packaged this, it’s ready for production, and will withstand the load expected by our customers. 

You can look into Graylog more here or contact us for demo. 

Hashicorp Vault

We have been working on adding more security to our customer pipelines by taking a close look at different secret managers. Hashicorp Vault has been gaining quite a lot of traction lately so we have been preparing it for our customers. It is now in early preview and we are eagerly awaiting feedback from the early adopters on its usefulness. 

Read more here.

GoCD

One of our colleagues has been pushing GoCD for a long time and we decided to help him out and add an official “supported” tag for the tool. We have now made this available for our customers too. GoCD is a continuous integration/continuous delivery tool that can be used to create pipelines as YAML. 

You can look into GoCD here or contact us for a demo. 

Bamboo

Bamboo is a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform from Atlassian. 

It has been supported by us for a long time, but during the last short while we have improved its upgrade cycles and moved it from the consulting side to our service offerings. This means all upgrades to it are included in the service and we will have a section for it in our service description very soon. 

We are continually working on improving the experience of Bamboo in our services.

You can read more from here.

Github Enterprise

Github is probably known to everyone reading this, but Github Enterprise might not be familiar to all of you. We have been maintaining Github enterprise for the last 6 years and over the last 6 months we have been working on packaging, testing and prepping the backups for larger distribution. We also support Github cloud usage in our environments.

You can read more about Github enterprise here.

Prometheus

Prometheus is one of the leading monitoring tools for Kubernetes clusters and microservices. We have been working on improving our service by offering more monitoring options and Prometheus felt like a natural choice to add to the toolset. The tool itself is quite bareboned by default, so you should connect it with Grafana for meaningful graphs and views. 

Read more on Prometheus here. 

Snyk

We are working with Snyk to improve our DevSecOps offering by bringing their cloud and on-premise options to our customers. We’re looking to integrate Snyk into existing DevOps pipelines for customers who feel Snyk works better for them than comparable products. 

Read more here.

AWS and Azure support

We have been working with our customers to increase our AWS and Azure support. You might have already experienced our scalable agents or environment automation. If you haven’t, you can now purchase Eficode ROOT from the cloud and experience them first hand. We are working on widening this space in the coming months, so stay tuned!

Atlassian cloud monthly billing

In January we started to offer Atlassian cloud licenses with monthly billing in addition to the yearly billing option. Eficode has become a one stop shop for all of your Atlassian licenses, rolled into a single monthly bill. 

What about Jfrog Artifactory 7?

We are looking into it and we'll get back to you about it after summer. It is quite a large upgrade, so be ready for big changes. We anticipate big differences from its current state, but we are working on releasing it in stable condition in the autumn.

Reminder of 2019 releases

In 2019 we released Sonatype Nexus, Sonatype Nexus IQ, Jfrog Xray, Eficode ROOT Team Management, Atlassian Opsgenie and Jira Align.

You can read more here about last year’s accomplishments:Eficode wins the global

• Atlassian Partner of the Year award in DevOps
• Scaling agility with Atlassian Jira Align
• Eficode wins Sonatype EMEA Partner Award 2020

And that’s a wrap. Have we missed anything? Are there other tools we should be adding to the Eficode ROOT stack? Let us know! In the meantime we’d like to wish you all a very nice summer holiday.