Riverbed Technology announced the availability of new product capabilities, developer tools and a supporting community that allow IT professionals to customize and adapt their IT infrastructure to meet the demands of their business and improve the experience of their users.

As developers and IT managers use this programmable infrastructure they create a performance platform that is highly flexible and inline with the needs of modern virtualized and software-defined IT architectures.

Riverbed's broad set of application performance solutions allows organizations 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 organization's needs. By doing so, organizations 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, organizations are increasingly deploying new virtualization technologies and software-defined architectures. To extract the full value of these flexible environments, IT is also exploring how to customize 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 customized solution."

The introduction of FlyScript developer tools builds on the scripting and customization capabilities of Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager, which allows organizations 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 organizations to rely on a number of different technologies to deliver IT services to end users and support business-critical objectives.

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.