InfoQ Homepage News
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Amazon Opens a New Region in Bahrain – AWS Middle East
Recently, Amazon announced the opening of an AWS region in the Middle East. This new region is the first for AWS in the Middle East and located in Bahrain.
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Pulumi Crosswalk: Infrastructure as Code for AWS
Pulumi Crosswalk is an open source library of components for supporting AWS infrastructure as code. Crosswalk offers best practices around provisioning and managing AWS resources, and aims to improve the developer experience when creating applications in AWS.
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Amazon Introduces Two New Features for Polly: Neural Text-to-Speech and Newscaster Style
Recently, Amazon announced the general availability of Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology in their Polly service in AWS, which turns text into lifelike speech. Furthermore, Amazon Polly now also offers a Newscaster speaking style.
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Data Engineering in Badoo: Handling 20 Billion Events Per Day
Badoo is a dating social network that currently handles billions of events per day, explains Vladimir Kazanov, data platform engineering lead. At Skills Matter, he talked through some of the challenges of operating at this scale, and what tooling Badoo uses in order to process and report on this data.
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GitHub Launches Actions-Powered CI/CD Service, Free for Public Repos
Based on developer feedback, GitHub has just introduced its own Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) service for GitHub Actions. Currently in beta, the new service will be free for public repos and will support self-hosting.
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Huawei Firmware Analysis Reveals Security Problems
Finite State located significant security issues in Huawei firmware images, including memory corruption, hardcoded encryption keys, and unsafe functions used in place of the secure alternatives.
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Enabling Single Tenant Workloads in the Cloud, Microsoft Introduces Azure Dedicated Host
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced Azure Dedicated Hosts, a service that allows organizations to run Linux and Windows virtual machines on single-tenant physical servers. This service was introduced to address customer compliance and regulatory requirements. Organizations can also take advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefits which allows them to leverage existing software investments.
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Achieving Predictability in a Complex World
Predictability is the precursor and enabler for other important things people are looking for, like doing things faster and cheaper, argued Jose Casal at Agile Portugal 2019. He presented how to achieve predictability in three steps: focus on work in progress, reduce time to get work done, and consider how to get more done.
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Slack Shares Strategy Used to Load-Test New Encryption Service
Slack’s engineering team has revealed the load-testing strategy that has become a critical part of their continuous delivery pipeline, and suggests it promotes greater ownership by engineers. While the Slack engineers stated they had minimal load-testing experience, they built it from scratch using Go and used a methodical approach that offers a roadmap for engineers facing similar challenges.
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Improving Webapp Performance with Multi-Threading: a Study of Web Workers' Communication Overhead
Surma, Web Advocate at Google, recently published a study on the performance of postMessage, the method used by web workers to communicate. Surma concludes that while postMessage comes with some overhead, provided the payload is below a given budget, moving non-UI tasks off the main thread may result in increased overall user-perceived performance.
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Microsoft Open-Sources TensorWatch AI Debugging Tool
Microsoft Research open-sourced TensorWatch, their debugging tool for AI and deep-learning. TensorWatch supports PyTorch as well as TensorFlow eager tensors, and allows developers to interactively debug training jobs in real-time via Jupyter notebooks, or to build their own custom UIs in Python.
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Microsoft Announces General Availability of Azure Security Center for IoT
Initially introduced in March 2019, Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Security Center for IoT, which enables end-to-end threat protection and security management of IoT environments. The solution helps in identifying threats, insecure settings, and misconfigurations, allowing to mitigate before attackers can take advantage of them.
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Baidu Open-Sources ERNIE 2.0, Beats BERT in Natural Language Processing Tasks
In a recent blog post, Baidu, the Chinese search engine and e-commerce giant, announced their latest open-source, natural language understanding framework called ERNIE 2.0. They also shared recent test results including achieving state-of-the art (SOTA) results and outperforming existing frameworks, including Google’s BERT and XLNet in 16 NLP tasks in both Chinese and English.
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Go Contracts Will Enable Generic Programming
A new draft to add support for generic programming to Go is centered around the concept of contracts, which are used to constrain type parameters to types and functions. The draft also introduces type inference to simplify the use of generic types and functions by allowing developers to omit types in many cases.
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Building AR/VR Applications in the Browser
Both Augmented and Virtual reality present exciting new opportunities for web developers. We follow Doug Sillars' talk on "Building an ARt Gallery in the Browser" to find out what the state of Virtual and Augmented Reality in JavaScript is, and how developers can get involved by using A-Frame, an AR/VR JavaScript library.