Microsoft has confirmed the acquisition of Cloudyn, a cloud management platform provider and cloud cost optimization tool. The company hopes this acquisition will help its Azure customers better manage and optimize their work in the cloud.  

As customers grow their cloud usage across many projects, it can be challenging to gain visibility and understand costs for existing projects, to optimize those investments and to project future usage. It is critical that customers have access to enterprise-grade management capabilities for detailed visibility into their Azure consumption, cost and performance in order to stay within budget and ensure business success,” Jerry Winter, director of program management for Azure security and operations management at Microsoft, wrote in a post.

Cloudyn will provide tools to govern cloud adoption as well as automated monitoring, analytics and cost allocation capabilities.

Ford announces new robotics and AI research team
Ford announced the creation of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Research team as part of the company’s Research and Advanced Engineering department. The company believes robotics and artificial intelligence is going to have a huge impact in the way we get around, even in the next five to 10 years, and they want to make sure they are keeping up with the ever-changing world of advanced engineering.

The team will focus on new sensor technology, machine learning, mobile development, drones, and other aerial robotics solutions. According to Ford’s head of research and CTO Ken Washington, the company is able to dedicate more resources to artificial intelligence and robotics thanks to a partnership with Argo AI. Fore recently partnered with Argo AI to help lead the development of its virtual driver system, according to Washington.

More information is available here.

Red Hat Cloud Suite’s latest version
Red Hat Cloud Suite’s latest version is now available with new features, including enterprise-grade Kubernetes. Kubernetes, the open-source project for container technology, just released version 1.7 this week.

Red Hat Cloud Suite adds new features besides the Kubernetes support, including Red Hat CloudForms with Ansible automation, composable OpenStack services for clouds built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and it comes with flexible virtualization capabilities.

“Red Hat Cloud Suite provides the technologies to drive this transformation while retaining existing IT investments, from the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to leading-edge open source virtualization with Red Hat Virtualization, all delivered as a unified, ready-to-deploy solution to fit nearly every enterprise IT infrastructure need,” said Lars Herrmann, general manager of integrated solutions at Red Hat.

TestPlant launches enhanced eggPlant solution
TestPlant added new automation and workflow enhancements to its performance testing product, eggPlant. The solution, along with its new enhancements, lets testing teams quickly customize prebuilt workflows and automate testing for performance.

New capabilities include: Intelligent auto creation, performance test builder, Studio GUI enhancements, and support for Visual Studio 2017.

“At TestPlant we are committed to bringing intelligent automation to testing,” said Antony Edwards, CTO of TestPlant. “eggPlant Performance levels the playing field so that all test teams can immediately transform how they approach performance testing and realize much-needed productivity gains.”