InfoWorld

Our ability to augment technology with artificial intelligence and machine learning does not seem to have limits. We now have AI-powered analytics, smart Internet of Things, AI at the edge, and of course AIops tools. At their essence, AIops tools do smart automations. These include self-healing, proactive maintenance, even working with security and governance systems to coordinate actions, such as identifying a performance issue as a breach. We need to consider discovery as well, or the capab...

Although not due to arrive until March 2021, Java Development Kit (JDK) 16 has begun to take shape, with proposed features including concurrent thread-stack processing for garbage collection, support for C++ 14 language features, and an “elastic metaspace” capability to more quickly return unused class metadata memory to the OS. JDK 16 will be the reference implementation of the version of standard Java set to follow JDK 15 , which arrived September 15. The six-month release cadence for stand...

The Apple-developed Swift programming language is now available on Windows, after a significant porting effort that has taken more than a year. Windows support has reached a stage where early adopters can now use Swift to build experiences for Windows, the project reports. Downloadable images of the Swift 5.3 toolchain for Windows 10 were introduced September 22. The porting effort set about to ensure that the full ecosystem is available on Windows: the compiler, the standard library, and the...

Agile development teams aim to develop innovative capabilities, while devops teams strive to release code to production more frequently. But the buck often stops with the IT service desk and customer support teams who must respond to application incidents, issues, and requests. Release too frequently with defects, performance bottlenecks, or security issues, and end-users may inundate service and support teams with incidents. Even when devops teams deploy reliable changes, they still have a r...

Developers forced to work remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic have proved to be so productive they may never return to the office, according to a study by analyst firm Accelerated Strategies released this week. The study was commissioned by CloudBees, a provider of CI/CD software and cloud services. The forced shift to remote work has required organizations to act quickly, doing business through online meetings, cloud applications, and digital collaboration tools, the report notes. Infrastr...

The Snowflake IPO was a big deal, and not merely because of the company’s enormous valuation . In 2013 Cloudera co-founder Mike Olson confidently (and accurately) declared “a stunning and irreversible trend in enterprise infrastructure.” That trend? “No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last 10 years in closed-source, proprietary form.” Snowflake, a cloud-based enterprise data platform, may spell the end of that run. Sure, we had Splunk, but Spunk squeaked thr...

Spam filtering, face recognition, recommendation engines — when you have a large data set on which you’d like to perform predictive analysis or pattern recognition, machine learning is the way to go. The proliferation of free open source software has made machine learning easier to implement both on single machines and at scale, and in most popular programming languages. These open source tools include libraries for the likes of Python, R, C++, Java, Scala, Clojure, JavaScript, and Go. Apache...

As information and processing needs have grown, pain points such as performance and resiliency have necessitated new solutions. Databases need to maintain ACID compliance and consistency, provide high availability and high performance, and handle massive workloads without becoming a drain on resources. Sharding has offered a solution, but for many companies sharding has reached its limits, due to its complexity and resource requirements. A better solution is distributed SQL . In a distributed...

TypeScript 4.1, a planned upgrade to Microsoft’s popular open source language that adds types to JavaScript , is now available as a beta release, featuring template literal types and a multitude of other improvements. The template literal type has the same syntax as template literal strings in JavaScript except it is used in type positions. When used with concrete literal types, a new string literal type is produced by concatenating the contents. To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft Teams’ growth has exploded as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced more and more companies to shift to home working and virtual meetings. With more than 5 billion daily meeting minutes, Teams relies heavily on Azure’s global network of fiber-connected hyperscale data centers and its growing number of metroscale edge sites. It’s a powerful set of technologies, with support for text, voice, and video communications, all wrapped up in apps that run on the Web, on PCs, and on mobile devices...

A few things have changed since the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The Global 2000, as well as governments, now understand that traditional data centers are more vulnerable to natural disasters (such as pandemics) than once thought. Indeed, the use of cloud computing means that there are no physical data centers and servers to protect, and that we don’t rely on humans for physical operations as much as we did in the past. Putting the obvious aside for now, let’s look at the future of cloud ...

Vue 3.0, a major upgrade to the popular JavaScript framework for building web UIs, is now available as a production release, after nearly two years in development. Highlights include better performance and smaller bundle sizes. Unveiled September 18, Vue 3.0 improves performance over Vue 2 in terms of render speed, update speed, memory usage, and bundle size. According to the project, initial render is up to 55 percent faster, updates up to 133 percent faster, and memory usage up to 54 percen...

The GitHub CLI command line tool has reached 1.0 release status. The tool is intended to help developers reduce context switching by allowing them to run their GitHub workflow from the terminal, from issues through releases. Introduced September 17 after a beta period dating back to February, GitHub CLI calls the GitHub API to script actions and set a custom alias for any command. GitHub CLI is available for repos hosted on GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise Server 2.20 or higher. Access to Ent...

In the Forrester/InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Awards competition, we look for the most dramatic stories of EA’s strategic leadership and concrete business impact. The winners of the 2020 Forrester/InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Awards show the value of a close relationship with the business, a solid vision for enabling digital transformation, and effective governance practices — not to mention the need for a high-priority response to a global pandemic! In alphabetical order, the winne...

Microsoft introduced support for named and optional parameters in C# 4.0. While a named parameter is used to specify an argument based on the name of the argument and not the position, an optional parameter can be used to omit one or more parameters in the method signature. The parameters of a method can be either required or optional depending on whether or not you need to pass a value to these parameters when the method is called. It should be noted that named and optional parameters can be...