InfoQ Homepage News
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Google Announces the General Availability of A2 Virtual Machines
Recently, Google announced A2 Virtual Machines (VMs)' general availability based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs in Compute Engine. According to the company, the A2 VMs will allow customers to run their NVIDIA CUDA-enabled machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) scale-out and scale-up workloads efficiently at a lower cost.
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Google Bolsters Cloud Spanner with Point-in-Time Recovery
Google recently released a point-in-time-recovery feature for its Cloud Spanner database that aims to help protect against accidental data loss and corruption. The new point-in-time recovery (PITR) features seek to provide users more granular control over data recovery processes.
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GitHub Scales Its Rate Limiter Using Redis
Yesterday GitHub engineer Robert Mosolgo posted a detailed account of how GitHub scaled the GitHub API with a sharded, replicated rate limiter in Redis. GitHub migrated from an older Memcached-based rate limiter to a Redis-based one. According to Mosolgo, the new implementation has improved reliability, fixed issues for clients, and reduced GitHub's support load.
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Alibaba Announces 10 Billion Parameter Multi-Modal AI M6
Alibaba has created an AI model called Multi-Modality to Multi-Modality Multitask Mega-transformer (M6). The model contains 10 billion parameters and is pretrained on a dataset consisting of 1.9TB of images and 292GB of Chinese-language text. M6 can be fine-tuned for several downstream tasks, including text-guided image generation, visual question answering, and image-text matching.
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Java News Roundup - Week of March 29th, 2021
This week’s Java roundup features news on: the proposed JDK 17 proposed release schedule; Confluent providing early access to KIP-500, an internal metadata store for Apache Kafka that will ultimately remove its dependency on Apache ZooKeeper; Red Hat and AWS announcing the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS; and point releases for Quarkus, Micronaut and Spring Data.
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JetBrains Releases Projector, a Technology to Remotely Run Swing Applications
JetBrains recently released the first major iteration of Projector, a technology that allows developers to run and operate Swing GUI applications remotely. Resource-hungry applications like Android Studio may run on a powerful server while developers need only a web browser on a thin client.
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Two Hidden Instructions Discovered in Intel CPUs Enable Microcode Modification
Security researchers Mark Ermolov, Dmitry Sklyarov, and Maxim Goryachy discovered two undocumented x86 instructions that can be used to modify the CPU microcode. The instructions can only be executed when the CPU runs in debug mode, which makes them not easily exploitable, though.
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Supreme Court Rules Google's Use of Java API Was Fair Use
The Supreme Court in the United States of America has ruled that Google's use of the Java API was fair use, and that the objections raised by Oracle are rejected. InfoQ looks back at the history and what this means for the future of APIs.
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Google Pushes for Better Android App Quality
Google launched a new quality section on its Android developer site and updated the Core App Quality checklist. These moves continue Google’s push for better app quality, such as improved privacy and battery life and increased gesture navigation. Google promises quarterly revisions of this checklist and other checklists, and more tooling.
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.NET News Roundup - Week of March 29th, 2021
The last week of March was pretty intense in the .NET community, with the release of Project Reunion 0.5, Dapr 1.1, and more. InfoQ examined these and a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of March 29th, 2021.
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Consul-Terraform-Sync Enables Automating of Common Networking Tasks
HashiCorp has moved Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS) into full general availability. CTS allows for the definition of tasks as Terraform modules that can be run as services are added or removed from Consul. CTS is part of a solution called Network Infrastructure Automation (NIA) which focuses on automating day two network tasks such as updating load balancer pools or firewall policies.
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Cloudflare Announces New Web Application Firewall
Cloudflare has recently introduced a new Web Application Firewall. The latest engine is written in Rust, provides better performances and integrates with other Cloudflare products.
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Ki is a New, More Flexible Kotlin Interactive Shell
Ki is a new interactive shell for Kotlin that aims to make it easier for developers to do quick experiments with the language and to take advantage of REPL-driven development.
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Git 2.31 Release: Maintenance Moved to Background
Git 2.31 sees the light at almost three months after the previous official version. It brings the option of running git maintenance in background and also the addition of reverse index files. You can conclude that its main focus is a more efficient tool with increased usability.
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Crystal Language That Aims at C Performance with Ruby Syntax Releases 1.0
Crystal, a new object-oriented, compiled systems programming language that aims to blend the conciseness and friendliness of Ruby with the efficiency of C, recently released its first major version. Crystal 1.0 has a syntax close to Ruby’s and features statically inferred types, C bindings, and macros. Crystal may attract developers with a Ruby/Rails, Elixir/Phoenix background.