ArsTechnica: Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
Ashish Kurmi (left) and Varun Sharma, co-founders of StepSecurity. (StepSecurity Photo)
StepSecurity, a Seattle-area startup aiming to help developers secure their projects, raised a $3 million seed round led by Runtime Ventures.
Founded in 2022 by former Microsoft engineers and cybersecurity veterans Ashish Kurmi and Varun Sharma, StepSecurity focuses on CI/CD, an industry term known as continuous integration and continuous delivery that describes the process of automating the development and deployment of applications.
StepSecurity specifically targets developers using GitHub Actions and plans to expand to support other similar tools, such as GitLab CI, Harness, and Azure DevOps.
The startup has paying customers across industries including crypto, healthcare, and cybersecurity.
Kurmi and Sharma point to high-profile security breaches such as the SolarWinds and Codecov hacks that originated in CI/CD.
“The glaring lack of security in CI/CD pipelines that these incidents highlighted compelled us to start StepSecurity,” they wrote in a blog post. “We looked around, spoke with peers, and realized there was no solution to prevent such CI/CD attacks. So, a couple of years back, we started building our product in the open and offered it for free to help secure CI/CD pipelines for open-source developers. Little did we know that it would be the beginning of something special.”
Sharma previously spent nearly 15 years at Microsoft, most recently as a principal security software engineering manager. Kurmi spent almost eight years at Microsoft before joining Uber and Plaid as a security engineer.
Other investors in the seed round include Inner Loop Capital, SaaS Ventures, DeVC, and angel investors in leadership roles at companies such as Coinbase and Zscaler.
The team catches up with Priyanka Khare to learn about recent advancements in Azure Advisor and how customers can use Advisor to help ensure their workloads are more stable.
We are excited to release Bing Ads SDK 13.0.20 for Java and .NET, which includes performance improvements such as lower service call latency and reduced network traffic. This allows you to make service calls faster and at a lower cost.
Improvement from previous SDK version
For example, when we run the following test to query ad groups by campaign Id for 1000 ad groups, the previous SDK version 13.0.19.1 has an average call duration of 284 ms:
When running the same code with the new SDK version 13.0.20, the average call duration is reduced to 67 ms.This is a 75% improvement from the previous version.
v13.0.19.1
# Duration (ms)
0 425
1 326
2 304
3 262
4 264
5 253
6 270
7 257
8 245
9 240
Avg. 284 ms
v13.0.20
# Duration (ms)
0 79
1 73
2 66
3 62
4 63
5 70
6 65
7 69
8 61
9 64
Avg. 67 ms
Reduced response size
We have also reduced the response size. For the example above, it is reduced from 784 KB to 8.4 KB, which is a 99% improvement.
You can expect similar improvements for other API method calls as well, especially ones that operate on many entities or return large amounts of data.
New REST API
These improvements are made possible by internally switching the SDK from the existing XML-based SOAP API to a new JSON-based REST API. This SDK release switches Campaign Management, Bulk, and Reporting services to the new API, and other services will be switched in future releases.
Upgrading to the new SDK
Given the significant internal changes we had to make to achieve these improvements, we recommend that you test and monitor your application when upgrading to this version to make sure your application is compatible with the implementation changes and dependencies introduced in this release.
We have also provided an easy way to switch Bing Ads SDK back to the old implementation in case any issues arise when using the new implementation. For more details on that and other information regarding the upgrade process, please see:
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