IT bedrock Cisco plans to extend its security portfolio with a cloud-native platform which is supposed to bridge the company’s offerings with the security tooling of their customers for better collaboration between operations and IT, security, and network teams. SecureX aims to offer increased visibility across the security portfolio, providing analytics and automated workflows for threat detection and response.

The product’s orchestration and automation features are implemented through adapters, claiming a collection of over 50 to start with. SecureX is also said to deliver pre-built playbooks for a variety of use-cases which are also meant to be adaptable to custom environments and tool combinations. Those interested in the new offering will need to apply for a spot on the waiting list for now.

Chef alerts users to April end of support dates

In accordance to the company’s earlier announcements, config management tooling provider Chef has reminded its user base that “after April 30th, 2020, Chef will be ending support for Chef Infra Client 14.x, Chef InSpec 3.x, ChefDK 3.x, and Chef Workstation 0.3”. Bugfix or security updates to these versions won’t be provided after this date, since supported, warrantied, and tested distributions will require a commercial license by then.

In 2019, Chef released its Enterprise Automation stack, while also open sourcing all its products under the Apache 2 license. The change doesn’t impact users already paying for tools in the Chef portfolio. All others can choose to work with the older versions for free but will have to fix bugs or vulns themselves, or subscribe to the enterprise offering, which will continue to see updates and new features. 

HashiCorp celebrates second major Terraform AzureRM release

Five years after unleashing the AzureRM provider onto Terraform users, the tool has now hit the big 2.0. The new release is marked by the separation of the Virtual Machine and the VM Scale Set resources by type, as well as the option for users setting custom timeouts for their resources.

GitHub adds more free stuff to student package deal

Six years after launching the GitHub student developer pack meant to offer students an affordable way to gain experience with essential tools, the project now comes with 14 new offers. Amongst the new additions young devs find tools like game development platform Unity and distributed database MongoDB, although you might want to keep your excitement about those down, since they are mostly free to use for non-commercial personal projects anyway.