New Programmable Infrastructure capabilities provide customisation automation and integration in software-defined and highly virtualised environments; New 'Splash' online community enables building, learning and collaboration  Riverbed Technology, the application performance company announced the availability of new product capabilities, developer tools and a supporting community that allow IT professionals to customise and adapt their IT infrastructure to meet the demands of their business and improve theexperience of their users. As developers and IT managers use this programmable infrastructure they create a performance platform that is highly flexible and in line with the needs of modern virtualised and software-defined IT architectures. Riverbed's broad set of application performance solutions allows organisations to increase productivity and efficiency through performance acceleration and management.  The new programmable infrastructure capabilities extend the rich reporting and management interfaces available in Riverbed solutions and allow IT operators to create custom rules and views attuned to their organisation's needs. By doing so, organisations can solve challenges with better visibility and control through a custom IT portal, automated provisioning and management within a software-defined data center, and intelligent closed-loop performance remediation.

"We encounter customers all the time whose needs are specific to their business and their infrastructure," said Eric Wolford, president of Riverbed Products Group.  "Today, we are giving customers the ability to uniquely accelerate their business in a way that has never before been possible." Core to these capabilities are new developer tools, called FlyScript, that enable integration and automation within the Riverbed performance platform, as well as with third-party tools and customers' proprietary software. In addition, Riverbed invites developers, programmers and operators to join Riverbed Splash, an online community where customers can learn more about using FlyScript to get better performance, control, and scale for their applications.  Riverbed Splash also features best practices regarding configuring, deploying, and managing Riverbed products. In an effort to create a more dynamic and responsive IT environment, organisations are increasingly deploying new virtualisation technologies and software-defined architectures. To extract the full value of these flexible environments, IT is also exploring how to customise and program these environments to best serve the unique needs of their business," said Bob Laliberte at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Riverbed's FlyScript developer tool kit enables IT to quickly create programmable infrastructures without requiring extensive training or experience, and accelerates the time to deploy a customised solution."

FlyScript: Customise, integrate and automate
The introduction of FlyScript developer tools builds on the scripting and customisation capabilities of Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager, which allows organisations to build custom functionality or implement traffic management policies that are unique to an application. Adding to these capabilities, FlyScript developer tools now offer that programmability within the broader development and operations lifecycle. As part of FlyScript developer tools, Riverbed introduced REST APIs for the Riverbed performance platform solutions, including Cascade Shark, Cascade Profiler, and Stingray Traffic Manager.  These REST APIs give developers a supported way to access raw data and manage the configuration of Riverbed solutions in an industry standard web service design model. To simplify the coding process for casual coders and application programmers, Riverbed introduced the Python Software Development Kit (SDK), built on top of fully documented and supported REST APIs to develop custom modules and applications.  With FlyScript developer tools, operators can simplify and accelerate the execution of repetitive tasks with scripts that can be copied, pasted, and modified as needed to automate a wide range of functions, including configuration, deployment and monitoring, and testing for performance challenges. FlyScript also allows operators and third-party systems integrators to pull data from multiple sources, as well as push configuration settings to multiple targets.  This level of automation eliminates the need for IT organisations to rely on a number of different technologies to deliver IT services to end users and support business-critical objectives. "Being able to provide customers with the visibility they need to monitor their application performance is a differentiated service offering," said Mark Terrill, principal consultant at O2 Networks, a Riverbed partner. "As our customers adopt our cloud services and require management consoles, we can use Riverbed FlyScript developer tools to expose the right level of data and configuration options to the end user while maintaining the level of control we require to ensure service levels."

Splash: Customers can dive into the online community

As Riverbed customers and partners seek to take advantage of FlyScript and programmability, the Splash Community will serve as a resource environment to learn, collaborate and share. This community will enable customers to not only engage with their peers through forums and technical blogs, but also interact with the Riverbed developers and support team.  Riverbed will provide educational resources within Splash, including programming skills and best practices for all audiences, no matter their level of expertise. Developers looking to create scripts, modules, custom widgets and UI integrations that meet the specific requirements of their IT infrastructure can begin with the library found in Splash.