November 2023 Summaries

In January, Tines expanded its app-building capabilities by evolving its pages feature into a more robust tool for collaboration and communication, leading to the introduction of page collections. This new feature allows users to compile multiple apps into a single view, thereby creating a unified entry point for teams. To use page collections, users can create or add pages to a collection directly from the storyboard, which then appears in the collections section of the menu. Tines employs these collections to consolidate various resource hubs, manage their library, and streamline internal app usage for managing feature trials. Although page collections enhance accessibility and efficiency, they are designated as an enterprise feature, requiring customer success manager approval for access.

Amid increasing workloads and burnout, cybersecurity professionals continue to prioritize attendance at key industry conferences, as revealed by the 2023 Voice of the SOC report, which found that 81% of surveyed practitioners had attended at least one event in the past two years. These conferences, including AWS re:Inforce, Black Hat, AWS re:Invent, InfoSec, DefCon, BSides, and RSA Conference, offer critical benefits such as insights into emerging trends and threats, networking opportunities, and exposure to the latest security tools and expert opinions. The report highlights the value these events provide in helping security teams focus on priorities for the coming quarter, with particular emphasis on the significance of continued learning and peer engagement in a rapidly evolving field. Additionally, newer events like ElasticON, SecureWorld, and Fal.Con are gaining traction, further expanding the landscape of valuable cybersecurity gatherings.

Tines, an automation platform, achieves scalable performance by employing a model where actions and events operate in isolation, allowing for seamless parallel execution without interference. The architecture is designed to fan out instructions to a horizontally scalable set of workers, executing tasks concurrently, which can be dynamically expanded according to demand, reaching up to 15,000 workers. Key to maintaining scalability is the elimination of bottlenecks, such as optimizing the system to update timestamps efficiently without causing database contention. The company experiences rapid growth, with action runs increasing by 50% every two months and introducing new features at a rate of 12 per month in 2023. A recent load test demonstrated Tines' capability to handle over 4,000 action runs per second, generating 10,000 downstream events per second. This scalability is supported by standard industry practices and continuous refinements to the system's design and strategies.