One year ago, on the first anniversary of the Machine Identity Management Development Fund, I asked Kevin Bocek, Venafi VP of Ecosystem and Threat Intelligence, this question: “What do you see happening with the Fund over the coming year?”
His answer: “Only upwards and to the right, of course. I think we're going to see an increasing focus on DevOps. The majority will be open-source projects. We're going to see themes around quantum continue to play a big part of the conversation. The Fund's going to be just more and more international. I can tell you that interest is growing fastest in Europe and Asia. The Development Fund will be more and more global.”
The Development Fund has come a long way since our First Year Report Card. Despite the disruption that the Covid pandemic has brought to our business lives, technology and innovation continues its trajectory—upwards and to the right. And with more and more machines resulting from accelerated digital transformation, the need to manage machine identities is more critical than ever.
Venafi is extremely pleased that the Machine Identity Management Fund, as it closes out Q4 of 2020, continues to attract the smartest minds from around the world. The Development Fund has launched new programs for independent open-source developers. And the Development Fund continues to add developers globally including multiple developers from Israel and Australia in 2020. Plus, as predicted, the Fund has maintained a strong focus on DevOps and open source.
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The result is more innovation and capabilities to protect more machine identities for Venafi customers. In 2020 the ecosystem has grown from GitLab to Atlassian Jira and beyond. And out of the Development Fund, the Jetstack team join Venafi through acquisition in May 2020.
In the fourth quarter of 2020 alone, the Machine Identity Management Development Fund has directly sponsored two new developers, one returning developer and three new Indie Devs. These experts in their field are creating integrations that accelerate the delivery of comprehensive protection for machine identities across microservices, DevOps, multi-cloud environments and more.
The newest developers to receive sponsorship from the Development Fund include:
Developers
Akeyless
[akeyless.io] Vault Platform for secrets management and zero-trust access is a unified SaaS solution built to protect workload identities as well as secure access to production resources across hybrid cloud and legacy environments. DevOps, engineering, and IT teams are moving fast to deploy workloads with an increasing number of environments. Within this process, secrets, credentials, and keys must be centrally managed and secured while seamlessly enabling zero-trust application access. Akeyless will be integrated with cert-manager, Venafi Trust Protection Platform, and Venafi DevOpsACCELERATE, giving Akeyless users the ability to automate public certificates via Venafi as well as internal certificates. Akeyless is based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Fullstaq
Fullstaq are specialists in the field of Open Source, DevOps, Cloud Native and high-traffic web hosting. GitLab CI/CD has become the developer’s favorite choice for implementing a software development pipeline in Cloud Native environments. Even when using a code signing solution, development teams have still been dependent on custom scripts to integrate their pipelines, which can lead to bugs and hassle. This second project from Fullstaq seeks to make Venafi CodeSign Protect a closely integrated service in the Cloud Native market with containers to enable DevOps to go fast with GitLab CI/CD and furthermore transform them to solid DevSecOps teams. Fullstaq is based in the Netherlands.
Sidechain
Sidechain are experts in securing their clients’ Digital Transformation. Microsoft Azure DevOps is now one of the most popular CI/CD platforms enabling developers to move from enterprise Windows build processes to those built in the cloud for cloud-native deployments. To date, Azure DevOps teams have not had an easy and fast way to sign code consistently and with the approval and visibility of security teams. To address this challenge, Sidechain will make Venafi CodeSign Protect a closely integrated service in Microsoft Azure DevOps pipelines with an Azure DevOps Sign Task and Signing Agent for Venafi CodeSign Protect. Sidechain is based in Portland, Oregon.
Indie Devs
Billy Moon
The number of Venafi third-party developer integrations has grown exponentially. While the Venafi Marketplace provides a searchable inventory of integrations, developers have largely been left to explore and experiment on their own. This project solves that challenge by providing Venafi customers a fully automated and sandboxed developer playground environment for open-source integrations and applications for Venafi Trust Protection Platform and Venafi DevOpsACCELERATE. Moon is based in the United Kingdom.
Haresh Singh Kainth, PhD
Kubernetes is considered the de-facto operating system for orchestrating containers in the cloud. However, there are few controls for interservice communication, and the ability to identify bad actors is an impossible task for humans. Dr. Kainth’s Indie Dev project is building a behavior-based continuous authorization service. The project controls mesh behavior across services running within the environment for real-time authorization. Dr. Kainth is based in the United Kingdom.
Hongli Lai
VCert is the easiest and fastest way for developers to get started with machine identity management. It was built first for Go with features added later for Java, Python and Ruby. Java is the most common enterprise language used by the Global 5000, where it’s used to develop integrations with popular DevOps applications, including Jira and Jenkins. Lai’s Indie Dev project is extending VCert to include many of the popular features needed by developers that have been available only in VCert Go. Lai is based in the Netherlands.
With $12.5M dedicated to sponsorships to promote innovation and invention, the Development Fund continues to build the ecosystem of the future for Venafi customers today. In effect, the Fund is future-proofing every customers’ machine identity management program. What will 2021 bring? One thing sure is the Development Fund adding more and more new developers each month, bringing new solutions for DevOps, cloud, IoT, microservices, distributed applications, quantum and more into the Venafi ecosystem. And with Thomas Bravo joining forces with Venafi, the Development Fund is set to innovate in entirely new ways to grow the Venafi Ecosystem to help more customers.
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