InfoWorld

As cloud computing , containerization , devops , and microservice architectures have established themselves as the building blocks for modern application development, the need for a simple way to manage those resources for internal software developer teams has become more and more important. To read this article in full, please click here

Try asking IT for data on the development, test, production, and disaster recovery environments in the data center and public clouds like AWS or Azure. It’s a straightforward question, yet answering it accurately and without going through a time-consuming audit is difficult for many IT operations departments. Service configuration management is a core ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) management practice , and the CMDB (configuration management database) is the data warehou...

Deno 1.8, released on March 2, offers preliminary support for an API to bring enhanced machine learning to the secure JavaScript/TypeScript runtime . Experimental backing for the WebGPU API , for performing operations such as rendering and computation on a GPU, provides a path toward out-of-the-box GPU accelerated machine learning in Deno, release notes said. The WebGPU API gives developers a low-level, high-performance cross-architecture mechanism to program GPU hardware from JavaScript. It ...

With its Power Fx language introduced this week, Microsoft is making a play in the low-code development realm. Announced on March 2, the general purpose language is based on the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and spreadsheet-like formulas, sharing Excel syntax and functions. With Power Px, Microsoft is attempting to provide citizen developers with an approachable way to express logic. Power Fx already is in use across Microsoft’s Power Platform . Documentation on the language can be found on Git...

Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions. In C and C++, it’s the switch/case construction; in Rust, it’s called “ pattern matching .” The traditional ways to do this in Python aren’t elegant. One is to write an if/elif/else chain of expressions. The other is to store values to match as keys in a dictionary, then use the values to take an ...

Modern digital transformation is data-intensive, and presents three issues that conflict with each other in various ways. First, large amounts of data need to be ingested in real time, and the latest data needs to be available across geographically distributed systems for enterprises to make the most accurate real-time decisions to delight their customers. To date, the majority of companies have simply duplicated and moved large amounts of data to keep up, essentially covering the business ne...

Running a server farm in the cloud at full capacity 24/7 can be awfully expensive. What if you could turn off most of the capacity when it isn’t needed? Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, what if you could bring up your servers on-demand when they are needed, and only provide enough capacity to handle the load? Enter serverless computing . Serverless computing is an execution model for the cloud in which a cloud provider dynamically allocates—and then charges the user for—only the co...

Microsoft has introduced Mesh, a collaboration platform offering mixed-reality capabilities on the Azure cloud. Microsoft Mesh enables persons in different locations to share collaborative holographic experiences on many kinds of devices. Over time, users will be able to use holoportation to project themselves as their lifelike, photorealistic selves, Microsoft said. Designers or engineers who work with 3D physical models could appear as themselves in a shared virtual space to collaborate on ...

While enterprises believe open source software provides benefits including higher quality software and innovations, they also perceive barriers to adoption including levels of support and compatibility, according to a Red Hat report assessing enterprise open source usage. Curiously, security shows up as both a positive and negative in the report, with open source seen as offering better security but the security of the code seen as a barrier. Released on March 2, the 2021 State of Enterprise ...

At the heart of Azure is a set of foundational services. They’re the technologies Microsoft uses to build its platform, giving it the tools to deliver reliable, scalable applications, and they’re the first to be deployed in any new Azure data center or region. Many of them never get to leave the background, but those that do are powerful, cloud-native, distributed-computing tools that can help you build and run massive applications that can run at global scale across regions, scaling to milli...

You probably don’t realize it, but you’re a direct beneficiary of OpenStreetMap. You may not be one of those who has contributed the 100 million edits to the community-driven mapping project, but if you’re a customer of Apple, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, or countless other organizations , you depend upon OpenStreetMap every day. For example, I mostly interact with OpenStreetMap when using Strava, which builds on Mapbox’s OpenStreetMap-driven data. Back in 2014 I asked if OpenStreetMap could becom...

I’ve built distributed applications for years. Put in simplistic terms, you break down an application and data into parts that run on the platforms that will provide the best performance and reliability. Back in the day, we deployed applications on smaller hardware platforms, such as x86-based servers. We needed distribution. By using distributed processing, we could scale to greater processing loads and set up active/active failover systems where one system could instantly back up the other ...

Spiffy and convenient as Python is, most everyone who uses the language knows it’s comparatively creaky—orders of magnitude slower than C , Java , or JavaScript for CPU-intensive work. But several projects refuse to ditch all that’s good about Python and instead have decided to boost its performance from the inside out. To read this article in full, please click here

C++ is a general-purpose systems programming language that is now more than 40 years old, having been designed in 1979 . Far from losing steam, C++ still ranks near the top of multiple programming language popularity indexes . Smoothing the path to C++ usage is broad support for the language among the makers of IDEs, editors, compilers, test frameworks, code quality, and other tools. Software developers also have at their disposal many excellent libraries to assist with building C++ applicati...

Anonymous functions were introduced in the C# programming language long ago. Although anonymous functions have many benefits, they are not cheap. Avoiding unnecessary allocations matters, and this is why static anonymous functions were introduced in C# 9. In C# 9 lambda or anonymous methods can have a static modifier. This article talks about static anonymous functions and why they are useful, using code examples to illustrate the concepts. To work with the code examples provided in this arti...