InfoQ Homepage Cloud Content on InfoQ
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Amazon Announces the Availability of AWS Europe Stockholm Region
Public Cloud providers are opening more regions every year. Before the end of 2018, Amazon announced the availability of another new region. This new region is the fifth region in Europe; the official name is Europe (Stockholm), and the API name is eu-north-1.
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Microsoft Announces General Availability of Static Websites on Azure Storage
Microsoft has announced the general availability of static websites on Azure Storage, which provides the ability to serve content from HTML, CSS and JavaScript files hosted on Azure Storage. Static websites contain web pages with fixed content, while still allowing to leverage client-side code like JavaScript to create a rich user experience.
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DigitalOcean Launches Managed Kubernetes Service
Cloud provider DigitalOcean recently opened up access to their new Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering. This fully-managed service is now available in every DigitalOcean region.
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Microsoft Previews Neural Network Text-To-Speech Capabilities
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a public preview of their neural network-powered text-to-speech capability, which is part of their Azure Cognitive Services offering. Within this release, the service makes computer generated voices indistinguishable from actual recordings. This technology has applications in chatbots, virtual assistants and converting digital text into audio books.
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Building Scalable and Reliable IoT Apps with MQTT and HiveMQ 4
HiveMQ is an MQTT-based messaging platform designed to power IoT applications. Recently released HiveMQ 4 adds support for MQTT 5, improves its extension system, and integrates better with Docker and Kubernetes, and AWS EC2. InfoQ has spoken with Dominik Obermaier, CTO of dc-square GmbH, maker of HiveMQ.
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Microsoft Announces New Features and Integrations for Azure Pipelines
At the recent Connect() event, Microsoft announced several new features and integrations with Azure Pipelines. The new features and integrations include an Azure Pipelines extension for Visual Studio Code, management of GitHub Releases, support for IoT projects, and ServiceNow integration.
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Amazon Announces an AWS Well-Architected Tool to Review Workloads Against Best Practices
At the recent AWS re:Invent 2018 event, Amazon announced a new Well Architected tool - a self-service tool that helps customers review AWS workloads at any time without the need for an AWS Architect. Moreover, this new tool uses the AWS Well-Architect Framework launched back in 2015.
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AWS Lambda Layers and Runtime API: beyond Officially Supported Runtimes
AWS re:Invent 2018 had numerous announcements of new features and services, including Lambda Layers, to centrally manage code and data shared across functions, and the Lambda Runtime API, expanding Lambda beyond JavaScript to any programming language.
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Microsoft Announces Azure Kubernetes Service Updates
Microsoft has announced multiple updates to Azure Kubernetes Service, their managed Kubernetes offering. The announcements include features around AKS virtual nodes, GPU support for Azure Container Instances, and the donation of the Virtual Kubelet project to the Cloud Native Compute Foundation.
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Microsoft Introduces New API Management Consumption Tier for Serverless Architectures
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a new Azure API Management Consumption tier. This tier allows for micro-based billing and aligns to serverless architecture principles including automated scaling, built-in high availability, per action billing and no infrastructure to provision or manage.
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Amazon Announces Managed Streaming for Kafka in Public Preview
At the recent AWS re:Invent 2018 event, Amazon announced a new fully managed service that makes it easy for customers to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. This new service is called Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka, Amazon MSK for short, and is now in public preview.
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Amazon Introduces Intelligent-Tiering for S3 Storage to Automatically Optimize Costs
Amazon introduces a new S3 Storage tier called Intelligent-Tiering which optimizes storage costs by automatically selecting the most cost-effective storage tier based on usage patterns. This new tier can help reduce costs for customers infrequently accessing their data in S3.
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Amazon Announces New Integrations for AWS Step Functions
Amazon has announced new integrations with their compute, database, messaging, analytics, and machine learning services for AWS Step Functions, allowing to leverage these as steps in the state machine workflows. With AWS Step Functions, an abstracted way is provided to connect and coordinate activities, taking advantage of a highly scalable runtime.
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Alexa Soon to Offer "Newscaster" Voice: Applying Generative Neural Networks for Text-to-Speech
Amazon recently announced the development of a customized Alexa voice, suitable for reading the news. In earlier implementations, text to speech functionality was achieved by concatenating small snippets of audio to produce the full sentence outcome. In the article we will discuss how Alexa can achieve a newscaster voice and how it can be expanded to several other types of voices in the future..
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Amazon Introduces Managed Blockchain and Quantum Ledger Database
Amazon has announced a new managed service for creating and managing blockchain networks. The Hyperledger Fabric project is currently supported and support for Ethereum is coming soon. Amazon has also introduced a complementary blockchain service called Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) which provides a managed ledger database to store immutable transaction logs.