CIQ Secures VC Funding, Forms New Leadership Team

CIQ, the company behind CentOS alternative Rocky Linux, focuses on enterprise tool suite.

CIQ, the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux (https://rockylinux.org/), has formed a new leadership team with extensive experience building and running Linux-based infrastructure at scale.

This move follows recent venture capital funding (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/software-infrastructure-leader-ciq-closes-26-million-series-a-led-by-two-bear-capital-301544663.html) secured in May "with the goal of building a suite of enterprise workflow orchestration and hybrid cloud solutions." These tools, according to the announcement (https://ciq.co/linux-and-open-source-veterans-sign-on-to-form-ciq-leadership-team/), are designed to leverage the capabilities of Rocky Linux, an alternative to CentOS.

"The next generation of software infrastructure that we're building at CIQ will help enterprises and organizations tackle data-intensive workflows--from big data analytics, to HPC for modeling and simulation, to training sophisticated machine learning models," said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ.

Learn DevSecOps Basics Through Free Training Course

Introduction to DevSecOps for Managers (https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-devsecops-for-managers) is a free online training course from the Linux Foundation, which is now available on the edX platform.

According to the website, the course focuses on providing managers and leaders with an overview of the history, terminology, processes, and tools used to implement a DevSecOps approach within any organization.

The self-paced course "covers topics such as value stream management, platform as product, and engineering organization improvement, all driving towards defining Continuous Delivery and explaining why it is so foundational for any organization. The course also focuses on culture, metrics, cybersecurity, and agile contracting," the website states.

GitLab Survey Reflects Shifting Roles in DevSecOps

DevOps roles continue to shift with devs taking on operations jobs, and operations professionals focusing more on cloud management, according to the recent GitLab 2022 Global DevSecOps Survey (https://about.gitlab.com/developer-survey/#security).

The survey asked Ops pros about their primary responsibilities, with the following results:

• Fifty-four percent manage hardware infrastructure "all or most of the time," and 32 percent manage hardware infrastructure "sometimes."
• Fifty-two percent manage cloud services "all or most of the time," and 31 percent manage cloud services "sometimes."

A majority of respondents also reported spending between one quarter to half of their time managing audit and compliance responsibilities; however, nearly 25 percent of Ops pros said they spend "between half and three-quarters of their time dealing with audit and compliance." Other tasks include toolchain maintenance, automation, and DevOps coaching.

Other findings indicate that:

• Seventy percent of DevOps teams surveyed release code continuously, once a day, or every few days, which is up 11 percent from 2021.
• Sixty-eight percent of teams said software development lifecycle was either completely or mostly automated, up 13 percent from last year.
• Forty-seven percent of teams have full test automation, which is nearly double the number reported in 2021.