Exciting times at Appsecute at the moment as the team begins to unveil its new vision for the company. When the company first started (and, for anyone not aware of the fact, I’m an investor and board member) our vision was to provide a single place to manage all the different PaaS applications that an organization uses. In building the Appsecute solution, founder Mark Cox and Tyler Power kept coming upon similar situations – that many of the systems they were relying on sat outside PaaS. This realization made them think about the problem they were trying to solve and, after talking with DevOps practitioners all around the world, they soon realized that the real potential of Appsecute was to become the single pane of glass to the cloud in general – to become the place where DevOps practitioners go on a daily basis to stay on top of the various systems they use.

I’ve known about this project for a couple of months now, but was only really made aware of the value of this approach when I attended DevOpsCon in Israel recently. There I took part in many discussions, but the overarching theme was one of building a team culture that encouraged a holistic vie on an application lifecycle – development, deployment and continuing operations.The new Appsecute social stream delivers a tool which really helps to build that culture.

So how does this social stream work? With the integrations that the team have already built, Appsecute has insight into many different tools. It knows, for example, that your system includes some repositories on GitHub, it knows you’re using CircleCi for continuous integration, it knows the production version of your app is running on Cloud Foundry or Heroku and it knows you’re using Zendesk for support. Appsecute argues that it knows about everything that a DevOps practitioner might care about.

The stream is in real time and, of course, shows the events occuring in the services a developer might use but, more importantly, encourages collaboration around those event. An event can be anything, examples that Appsecute include someone pushing code to GitHub, a build failing, tests failing, an application going offline, a support request coming in, a daily summary of the metrics you care about etc. In terms of the collaboration aspects, anyone can write comments against any event – think of it like Facebook for DevOps without the annoying game requests.

But the great thing about the new Appsecute is that it’s a platform – the product has an open API that allows anyone to plug a new system into the social stream. So anyone using a particular service (or indeed, the service vendor themselves) can create a custom connector that can be written and published on Appsecute – allowing anyone else to use the connector. Appsecute will be hosting any connectors that the community writes and open sources.

For now, Appsecute is launching with some connectors they’ve written themselves – GitHub, Zendesk, CircleCi, Cloud Foundry, AppFog and Heroku. But the team plans to keep rolling out addition connectors over time. The product is currently in private beta – anyone wishing to give it a whirl should email Tyler Power, CTO – tyler@appsecute.com

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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