Tech News - Cloud & Networking

Atlassian has completely revamped it’s traditional Jira software adding a simplified user experience, new third-party integrations, and a new product roadmaps tool. Announced yesterday, in their official blog post, they mention that “They’ve rolled out an entirely new project experience for the next generation with a focus on making Jira Simply Powerful.” Sean Regan, head of growth for Software Teams at Atlassian, said: “With a more streamlined and simplified application, Atlassian hopes to appeal to a wider range of business execs involved in the software-creation process.” What’s new in the revamped Jira software? Powerful tech stack: Jira Software is transformed into a modern cloud app. It now includes an updated tech stack, permissions, and UX. Developers have more autonomy, administrators have more flexibility and advanced users have more power. “Additionally, we’ve made Jira simpler to use across the board. Now, anyone who works with development teams can collaborate more easily.” Customizable workflow: To upgrade user experience, Atlassian has introduced a new feature called build-your-own-boards. Users can customize their own workflow, issue types, and fields for the board. They don’t require administrator access or the need to jeopardize other project’s customizations. Source: Jira blog This customizable workflow was inspired by Trello, the task management app acquired by Atlassian for $425 million in 2017. “What we tried to do in this new experience is mirror the power that people know and love about Jira, with the simplicity of an experience like Trello.” said Regan. Third party integrations: The new Jira comes with almost 600 third-party integrations. These third-party applications, Atlassian said, should help appeal to a broader range of job roles that interact with developers. Integrations include Adobe, Sketch, and Invision. Other integrations include Facebook's Workplace and updated integrations for Gmail and Slack. Jira Cloud Mobile: Jira Cloud mobile helps developers access their projects from their smartphones. Developers can create, read, update, and delete issues and columns; groom their backlog and start and complete sprints; respond to comments and tag relevant stakeholders, all from their mobile. Roadmapping tool: Jira now features a brand new roadmaps tool that makes it easier for teams to see the big picture. “When you have multiple teams coordinating on multiple projects at the same time, shipping different features at different percentage releases, it’s pretty easy for nobody to know what is going on,” said Regan. “Roadmaps helps bring order to the chaos of software development.” Source: Jira blog Pricing for the Jira software varies by the number of users. It costs $10 per user per month for teams of up to 10 people; $7 per user per month for teams of between 11 and 100 users; and varying prices for teams larger than 100. The company also offers a free 7-day trial. Read more about the release on the Jira Blog. You can also have a look at their public roadmap. Atlassian acquires OpsGenie, launches Jira Ops to make the incident response more powerful. GitHub’s new integration for Jira Software Cloud aims to provide teams with a seamless project management experience. Atlassian open sources Escalator, a Kubernetes autoscaler project

Yesterday, at Uber Open Summit 2018, the company announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member with a promise to support the open source community via the Linux Foundation. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said, “Uber has been influential in the open source community for years, and we’re very excited to welcome them as a Gold member at the Linux Foundation. Uber truly understands the power of open source and community collaboration, and I am honored to witness that first hand as a part of Uber Open Summit 2018.” By being a member, Uber will support the Linux Foundation’s mission and help the community in building ecosystems that accelerate open source technology development. Uber will also work towards solving complex technical problems and further promote open source adoption globally. Zemlin said, “Their expertise will be instrumental for our projects as we continue to advance open solutions for cloud-native technologies, deep learning, data visualization and other technologies that are critical to businesses today.” Thuan Pham, Uber CTO, said, “The Linux Foundation not only provides homes to many significant open source projects but also creates an open environment for companies like Uber to work together on developing these technologies. We are honored to join the Linux Foundation to foster greater collaboration with the open source community.” To know more about this membership in detail, head over to Uber Engineering. Michelangelo PyML: Introducing Uber’s platform for rapid machine learning development Uber posted a billion dollar loss this quarter. Can Uber Eats revitalize the Uber growth story? Uber announces the 2019 Uber AI Residency

Last week, Jürgen Löb, a Debian user, discovered a bug in the linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae package of the Debian system. The version of the system affected is 4.9.144-3. The user states that he updated his Lamobo R1 board with apt update; apt upgrade. However, after the update, uboot was struck at "Starting kernel" with no further output after the same. The same issue was faced by him on Bananapi 1 board. He performed the following steps to recover his system: downgrading to a backup kernel by mounting the boot partition on the sd card. dd if=boot.scr of=boot.script bs=72 skip=1 (extract script) replaced the following command in boot.script: setenv fk_kvers '4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae' with setenv fk_kvers '4.9.0-7-armmp-lpae'  (backup kernel was available on his boot            partition) Then execute: mkimage -C none -A arm -T script -d boot.script boot.scr After performing these steps he was able to boot the system with the old kernel Version and restore the previous version (4.9.130-2) with the following command: dpkg -i linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae_4.9.130-2_armhf.deb He cross-checked the issue and said that upgrading to 4.9.144-3 again after these steps results in the above unbootable behavior. Thus concluding, that the upgrade to 4.9.144-3 is causing the said problem. Timo Sigurdsson, another Debian user stated that “I recovered both systems by replacing the contents of the directories /boot/ and /lib/modules/ with those of a recent backup (taken 3 days ago). After logging into the systems again, I downgraded the package linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae to 4.9.130-2 and rebooted again in order to make sure no other package upgrade caused the issue. Indeed, with all packages up-to-date except linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae, the systems work just fine. So, there must be a serious regression in 4.9.144-3 at least on armmp-lpae”. In response to this thread, multiple users replied with other instances of broken packages, like plain armmp (non-lpae) is broken for Armada385/Caiman and QEMU's. Vagrant Cascadian, another user added to the list that all of the armhf boards running this kernel failed to boot, including: imx6: Cubox-i4pro, Cubox-i4x4, Wandboard Quad exynos5: Odroid-XU4 exynos4: Odroid-U3 rk3328: firefly-rk3288 sunxi A20: Cubietruck The Debian team has not reverted back with any official response. You can head over to the debian bugs page for more information on this news. Google Project Zero discovers a cache invalidation bug in Linux memory management, Ubuntu and Debian remain vulnerable Remote Code Execution Flaw in APT Linux Package Manager allows man-in-the-middle attack Debian 9.7 released with fix for RCE flaw

Yesterday, Chris Keane, the General Manager of OpenSky announced that OpenSky is now acquired by the Alibaba Group. OpenSky is a network of businesses that empower modern global trade for SMBs and help people discover, buy, and share unique goods that match their individual taste. OpenSky will join Alibaba Group in two capacities: One of OpenSky’s team will become a part of Alibaba.com in North America B2B to serve US based buyers and suppliers. The other team will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alibaba Group consisting of OpenSky’s marketplace and SaaS businesses. In 2015, Alibaba Group acquired a minority ownership on OpenSky. In 2017, they collaborated with Alibaba’s B2B leadership team to solve the challenges faced by small businesses. According to Chris, both the companies share a common interest, which is to help small businesses: “It was thrilling to discover that our counterparts at Alibaba share our obsession with helping SMBs. We’ve quickly aligned on a global vision to provide access to markets and resources for businesses and entrepreneurs, opening new doors and knocking down obstacles.” In this announcement Chris also mentioned that they will be coming up with powerful concepts to serve small businesses everywhere, in the near future. To know more, read the official announcement on LinkedIn. Alibaba Cloud partners with SAP to provide a versatile, one-stop cloud computing environment Digitizing the offline: How Alibaba’s FashionAI can revive the waning retail industry Why Alibaba cloud could be the dark horse in the public cloud race

Yesterday, the team at Kubernetes released Kubernetes 1.14, a new update to the popular open-source container orchestration system. Kubernetes 1.14 comes with support for Windows nodes, kubectl plugin mechanism, Kustomize integration, and much more. https://twitter.com/spiffxp/status/1110319044249309184 What’s new in Kubernetes 1.14? Support for Windows Nodes This release comes with added support for Windows nodes as worker nodes. Kubernetes now schedules Windows containers and enables a vast ecosystem of Windows applications. With this release, enterprises with investments can easily manage their workloads and operational efficiencies across their deployments, regardless of the operating systems. Kustomize integration With this release, the declarative resource config authoring capabilities of kustomize are now available in kubectl through the -k flag. Kustomize helps the users in authoring and reusing resource config using Kubernetes native concepts. kubectl plugin mechanism This release comes with kubectl plugin mechanism that allows developers to publish their own custom kubectl subcommands in the form of standalone binaries. PID Administrators can now provide pod-to-pod PID (Process IDs) isolation by defaulting the number of PIDs per pod. Pod priority and preemption in this release enables Kubernetes scheduler to schedule important pods first and remove the less important pods to create room for more important ones. Users are generally happy and excited about this release. https://twitter.com/fabriziopandini/status/1110284805411872768 A user commented on HackerNews, “The inclusion of Kustomize[1] into kubectl is a big step forward for the K8s ecosystem as it provides a native solution for application configuration. Once you really grok the pattern of using overlays and patches, it starts to feel like a pattern that you'll want to use everywhere” To know more about this release in detail, check out Kubernetes’ official announcement. RedHat’s OperatorHub.io makes it easier for Kuberenetes developers and admins to find pre-tested ‘Operators’ for applications Microsoft open sources ‘Accessibility Insights for Web’, a chrome extension to help web developers fix their accessibility issues Microsoft open sources the Windows Calculator code on GitHub  

On Monday, Oracle Corp filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office(GAO) against Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI(Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) cloud contract. Oracle believes should not be awarded only to a single company but instead, allow for multiple winners. https://twitter.com/92newschannel/status/1027090662162944000 The U.S Defence Department unveiled the competition in July and stated that only a single winner, the one with the most rapid adoption of the cloud technology would be awarded. Deborah Hellinger, Oracle’s spokeswoman, said in a statement on Tuesday, “The technology industry is innovating around next-generation cloud at an unprecedented pace and JEDI virtually assures DoD will be locked into a legacy cloud for a decade or more. The single-award approach is contrary to the industry's multi-cloud strategy, which promotes constant competition, fosters innovation and lowers prices.” A bid protest is a challenge to the terms of a solicitation or the award of a federal contract. The GAO, which adjudicates and decides these challenges, will issue a ruling on the protest by November 14. This has been the first bid protest ever since the competition started a decade ago. Amazon.com is being seen as a top contender throughout the deal. Amazon Web Services or AWS is the only company approved by the U.S. government to handle secret and top secret data. Thus, this competition has attracted criticism from companies that fear Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud unit, will win the contract. This would choke out hopes for others (Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), Oracle (ORCL.N), IBM (IBM.N) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google) to win the government cloud computing contract. Read more about this news on The Register. Oracle makes its Blockchain cloud service generally available Google employees quit over company’s continued Artificial Intelligence ties with the Pentagon Oracle reveals issues in Object Serialization. Plans to drop it from core Java.  

Yesterday, Slack reported of an outage which started at 7:23 a.m. PDT and was fully resolved at 8:48 a.m. PDT. The Slack status page said that some people had issues in sending messages while others couldn't access their channels at all. Slack said it was fully up and running again about an hour after the issues emerged. https://twitter.com/SlackStatus/status/1155869112406437889 According to Business Insider, more than 2,000 users reported issues with Slack via Downdetector. Employees around the globe, rely on Slack to communicate, organize tasks and share information. Downdetector’s live outage map showed a concentration of reports in the United States and a few of them in Europe and Japan. Slack has not yet shared the reason which caused the disruption on its status page. Last month as well Slack had suffered an outage which was caused due to server unavailability. Users took to Twitter sending funny memes and gifs about how they really depend on Slack all the time to communicate. https://twitter.com/slabodnick/status/1155858811518930946 https://twitter.com/gbhorwood/status/1155864432527867905 https://twitter.com/envyvenus/status/1155857852625555456 https://twitter.com/nhetmalaluan/status/1155863456991436800 While on Hacker News, users were annoyed and said that such issues have become quite common. One user commented, “This is becoming so often it's embarrassing really. The way it's handled in the app is also not ideal to say the least - only indication that something is wrong is that the text you are trying to send is greyed out.” Why did Slack suffer an outage on Friday? How Verizon and a BGP Optimizer caused a major internet outage affecting Amazon, Facebook, CloudFlare among others Google Cloud went offline taking with it YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, and a number of other web services

Just days after Google announced that it was pulling out of the race to win the $10 billion JEDI contract from the Pentagon, Amazon's Jeff Bezos has stated that Amazon will continue to support Pentagon and Defense projects. But Bezos went further, criticising tech companies that don't work with the military. Speaking at Wired25 Conference, the Amazon chief said "if big tech companies are going to turn their back on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), this country is going to be in trouble... One of the jobs of senior leadership is to make the right decision, even when it’s unpopular." Bezos remains unfazed by criticism It would seem that Bezos isn't fazed by criticism that other companies have faced. Google explained its withdrawal by saying "we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles." However, it's likely that the significant internal debate about the ethical uses of AI, as well as a wave of protests against Project Maven earlier in the year were critical components in the final decision. Microsoft remains in the running for the JEDI contract, but there appears to be much more internal conflict over the issue. Anonymous Microsoft employees have, for example, published an open letter to senior management on Medium. The letter states: "What are Microsoft's AI Principles, especially regarding the violent application of powerful A.I. technology? How will workers, who build and maintain these services in the first place, know whether our work is being used to aid profiling, surveillance, or killing?" Clearly, Jeff Bezos isn't too worried about upsetting his employees. Perhaps the story says something about the difference in the corporate structure of these huge companies. While they all have high-profile management teams, its only at Amazon that the single figure of Bezos reigns supreme in the spotlight. With Blue Origin he's got his sights set on something far beyond ethical decision making - sending humans into space. Cynics might even say it's the logical extension of the implicit imperialism of his enthusiasm for Pentagon.

As promised by the Kubernetes team earlier this month, Kubernetes 1.12 now stands released! With a focus on internal improvements,  the release includes two highly-anticipated features- general availability of Kubelet TLS Bootstrap and Support for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS). This promises to provide better security, availability, resiliency, and ease of use for faster delivery of production based applications. Let’s dive into the features of Kubernetes 1.12 #1 General Availability of Kubelet TLS Bootstrap The team has made the Kubelet TLS Bootstrap generally available. This feature significantly streamlines Kubernetes’ ability to add and remove nodes to the cluster. Cluster operators are responsible for ensuring the TLS assets they manage remain up-to-date and can be rotated in the face of security events. Kubelet server certificate bootstrap and rotation (beta) will introduce a process for generating a key locally and then issuing a Certificate Signing Request to the cluster API server to get an associated certificate signed by the cluster’s root certificate authority. As certificates approach expiration, the same mechanism will be used to request an updated certificate. #2 Stable Support for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) and Cluster-Autoscaler Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) allows users to create and manage a homogenous VM pool. This pool can automatically increase or decrease based on demand or a set schedule. Users can easily manage, scale, and load balance multiple VMs to provide high availability and application resiliency which will be ideal for large-scale applications that can run as Kubernetes workloads. The stable support will allow Kubernetes to manage the scaling of containerized applications with Azure VMSS. Users will have the ability to integrate the applications with cluster-autoscaler to automatically adjust the size of the Kubernetes clusters. #3 Other additional Feature Updates Encryption at rest via KMS is now in beta. It adds multiple encryption providers, including Google Cloud KMS, Azure Key Vault, AWS KMS, and Hashicorp Vault. These providers will encrypt data as it is stored to etcd. RuntimeClass is a new cluster-scoped resource that surfaces container runtime properties to the control plane. Topology aware dynamic provisioning is now in beta. Storage resources can now understand where they live. Configurable pod process namespace sharing enables users to configure containers within a pod to share a common PID namespace by setting an option in the PodSpec. Vertical Scaling of Pods will help vary the resource limits on a pod over its lifetime. Snapshot / restore functionality for Kubernetes and CSI will provide standardized APIs design and add PV snapshot/restore support for CSI volume drivers To explore these features in depth, the team will be hosting a  5 Days of Kubernetes series next week. Users will be given a walkthrough of the following features: Day 1 - Kubelet TLS Bootstrap Day 2 - Support for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) and Cluster-Autoscaler Day 3 - Snapshots Functionality Day 4 - RuntimeClass Day 5 - Topology Resources Additionally, users can join the members of the release team on November 6th at 10 am PDT in a webinar that will cover major features in this release. You can check out the release on GitHub. Additionally, if you would like to know more about this release, head over to Kubernetes official blog. Google Cloud hands over Kubernetes project operations to CNCF, grants $9M in GCP credits VMware Kubernetes Engine (VKE) launched to offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service Nvidia GPUs offer Kubernetes for accelerated deployments of Artificial Intelligence workloads  

This week, Google Cloud Security announced a host of new services to empower customers with advanced security functionalities that are easy to deploy and use. This includes the Web Risk API, Cloud Armor, and HSM keys. #1 Web Risk API The Web Risk API has been released in the beta format to ensure the safety of users on the web. The Web Risk API includes data on more than a million unsafe URLs. Billions of URL’s are examined each day to keep this data up-to-date. Client applications can use a simple API call to check URLs against Google's lists of unsafe web resources. This list also includes social engineering sites, deceptive sites, and sites that host malware or unwanted software. #2 Cloud Armor Cloud Armor is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) defense and Web Application Firewall (WAF) service for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) based on the technologies used to protect services like Search, Gmail and YouTube. Cloud Armor is generally available, offering L3/L4 DDoS defense as well as IP Allow/Deny capabilities for applications or services behind the Cloud HTTP/S Load Balance. It also allows users to either permit or block incoming traffic based on IP addresses or ranges using allow lists and deny lists. Users can also customize their defenses and mitigate multivector attacks through Cloud Armor’s flexible rules language. #3 HSM keys to protect data in the cloud Cloud HSM is now generally available and it allows customers to protect encryption keys and perform cryptographic operations in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified HSMs. Customers do not have to worry about the operational overhead of HSM cluster management, scaling and patching. Cloud HSM service is fully integrated with Cloud Key Management Service (KMS), allowing users to create and use customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) that are generated and protected by a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware device. You can head over to Google Cloud Platform’s official blog to know more about these releases. Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS): How Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and AWS are democratizing Artificial Intelligence Google’s Cloud Robotics platform, to be launched in 2019, will combine the power of AI, robotics and the cloud Build Hadoop clusters using Google Cloud Platform [Tutorial]

Red Hat has rolled out their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 beta in their goal of becoming the cloud powerhouse. This release focuses on security and compliance, automation, and cloud deployment features. Linux security improvements As far as Linux based security is considered, some improvements made include: GnuTLS library with Hardware Security Module (HSM) support Strengthened OpenSSL for mainframes Enhancements to the nftables firewall Integration of Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to provide a safer mechanism for monitoring Linux kernel activity Hybrid cloud deployment-related changes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 has introduced a variety of cloud deployment improvements. Red Hat’s Paul Cormier considers the hybrid cloud to be the default technology choice. “Enterprises want the best answers to meet their specific needs, regardless of whether that’s through the public cloud or on bare metal in their own datacenter.” For starters, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 uses Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware modules to enable Network Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE). This provides two layers of security features for hybrid cloud operations: The network-based mechanism works in the cloud, On-premises TPM helps to keep information on disks more secure. They have also introduced Podman, a part of Red Hat's lightweight container toolkit. It adds enterprise-grade security features to containers. Podman complements Buildah and Skopeo by enabling users to run, build, and share containers using the command line interface. It can also work with CRI-O, a lightweight Kubernetes containers runtime. Management and Automation The latest beta version also adds enhancements to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Web Console including: Showing available updates on the system summary pages. Automatic configuration of single sign-on for identity management, helping to simplify this task for security administrators. An interface to control firewall services. These are just a select few updates. For a more detailed coverage, go through the release notes available on the Red Hat Blog. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 (RHEL 7.5) now generally available. What RedHat and others announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018. RedHat and others launch Istio 1.0 service mesh for microservices.

Yesterday, Tumblr announced the open sourcing of three tools developed at Tumblr itself, that will help developers integrate Kubernetes into their workflows. These tools were developed by Tumblr throughout their eleven-year journey to migrate their workflow to Kubernetes with ease. These are the 3 tools and their features as listed on the Tumblr blog: #1 k8s- sidecar injector Containerizing complex applications can be time-consuming. Sidecars come as a savior option, that allows developers to emulate older deployments with co-located services on Virtual machines or physical hosts. The k8s-sidecar injector dynamically injects sidecars, volumes, and environment data into pods as they are launched. This reduced the overhead and work involved in copy-pasting code to add sidecars to a developer's deployments and cronjobs. What’s more, the tool listens to the specific sidecar to be injected, contained within the Kubernetes API for Pod launch. This tool will be useful when containerizing legacy applications requiring a complex sidecar configuration. #2 k8s-config-projector The k8s-config projector is a command line tool that was generated out of the necessity of accessing a subset of configuration data (feature flags, lists of hosts/IPs+ports, and application settings) and a need to be informed as soon as this data changes. Config data defines how deployed services operate at Tumblr. Kubernetes ConfigMap resource enables users to provide their service with configuration data. It also allows them to update the data in running pods without redeployment of the application. To use this feature to configure Tumblr’s services and jobs in a Kubernetes-native manner, the team had to bridge the gap between their canonical configuration store (git repo of config files) to ConfigMaps. k8s-config-projector combines the git repo hosting configuration data with “projection manifest” files, that describe how to group/extract settings from the config repo and transmute them into ConfigMaps. Developers can now encode a set of configuration data that the application needs to run into a projection manifest. The blog states that ‘as the configuration data changes in the git repository, CI will run the projector, projecting and deploying new ConfigMaps containing this updated data, without needing the application to be redeployed’. #3 k8s-secret-projector Tumblr stores secure credentials (passwords, certificates, etc) in access controlled vaults. With k8s-secret-projector tool, developers will now be able to request access to subsets of credentials for a given application. This can be done now without granting the user access to the secrets as a whole. The tool ensures applications always have the appropriate secrets at runtime, while enabling automated systems including certificate refreshers, DB password rotations, etc to automatically manage and update these credentials, without the need to redeploy/restart the application. It performs the same by combining two repositories- projection manifests and credential repositories. A Continuous Integration (CI) tool like Jenkins will run the tool against any changes in the projection manifests repository. This will generate new Kubernetes Secret YAML files which will lead to the Continuous Deployment to deploy the generated and validated Secret files to any number of Kubernetes clusters. The tool will allow secrets to be deployed in Kubernetes environments by encrypting generated Secrets before they touch the disk. You can head over to Tumblr’s official blog for examples on each tool. Introducing Grafana’s ‘Loki’ (alpha), a scalable HA multi-tenant log aggregator for cloud natives; optimized for Grafana, Prometheus and Kubernetes DigitalOcean launches its Kubernetes-as-a-service at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon to ease running containerized apps Elastic launches Helm Charts (alpha) for faster deployment of Elasticsearch and Kibana to Kubernetes

Yesterday, Diane Greene, the CEO of Google Cloud, announced in a blog post that Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li will be   replaced by Dr. Andrew Moore, dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University at the end of this year. The blog further mentions that, as originally planned, Dr. Fei-Fei Li will be returning to her professorship at Stanford and in the meanwhile, she will transition to being an AI/ML Advisor for Google Cloud. The timing of the transition following the controversies surrounding Google and Pentagon Project Maven is not lost on many. Flashback on ‘Project Maven’ protest and its outcry On March 2017 it was revealed that Google Cloud, headed by Greene, signed a secret $9m contract with the United States Department of Defense called as 'Project Maven'. The project aimed to develop an AI system that could help recognize people and objects captured in military drone footage. The contract was crucial to the Google Cloud Platform gaining a key US government FedRAMP authorization. This project was expected to assist Google in finding future government work worth potentially billions of dollars. Planned for use for non-offensive purposes only,  project Maven also had the potential to expand to a $250m deal. Google provided the Department of Defense with its TensorFlow APIs to assist in object recognition, which the Pentagon believed would eventually turn its stores of video into "actionable intelligence". In September 2017, in a leaked email reviewed by The New York Times, Scott Frohman, Google’s head of defense and intelligence sales asked Dr. Li ,Google Cloud AI’s leader and Chief Scientist, for directions on the “burning question” of how to publicize this news to the masses. To which she replied back- “Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI. Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google.” As predicted by Dr. Li, the project was met with outrage by more than 3000 Google employees who believed that Google shouldn't be involved in any military work and that algorithms have no place in identifying potential targets. This caused a rift in Google’s workforce, fueled heated staff meetings and internal exchanges, and prompted some employees to resign. Many employees were "deeply concerned" that the data collected by Google integrated with military surveillance data for targeted killing. Fast forward to June 2018 where Google stated that it would not renew its contract (to expire in 2019) with the Pentagon. Dr. Li’s timeline at Google During her two year tenure, Dr. Li oversaw some remarkable work in accelerating the adoption of AI and ML by developers and Google Cloud customers. Considered as one of the most talented machine learning researchers in the world, Dr. Li has published more than 150 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences including Nature, Journal of Neuroscience, New England Journal of Medicine and many more. Dr. Li is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a large-scale effort contributing to the latest developments in computer vision and deep learning in AI. Dr. Li has been a keynote or invited speaker at many conferences. She has been in the forefront of receiving prestigious awards for innovation and technology while being an acclaimed feature in many magazines. In addition to her contributions in the world of tech, Dr Li also is a co-founder of Stanford’s renowned SAILORS outreach program for high school girls and the national non-profit AI4ALL. The controversial email from Dr.Li can lead to one thinking if the transition was made as a result of the events of 2017. However, no official statement has been released by Google or Dr. Li on why she is moving on. Head over to Google’s Blog for the official announcement of this news. Google CEO Sundar Pichai won’t be testifying to Senate on election interference Bloomberg says Google, Mastercard covertly track customers’ offline retail habits via a secret million dollar ad deal Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android Installer before patch was ready      

Earlier this week at the Adobe Summit, world’s largest conference focused on Customer Experience Management, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP announced that they’re expanding their Open Data Initiative. CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP announced the launch of the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in 2018. The core idea behind Open Data Initiative is to make it easier for the customers to move data between each others’ services. Now, the three partners are looking forward to transforming customer experiences with the help of real-time insights that will be delivered via the cloud. They have also come out with a common approach and a set of resources for customers to help customers create new connections across previously siloed data. Read Also: Women win all open board director seats in Open Source Initiative 2019 board elections “From the beginning, the ODI has been focused on enhancing interoperability between the applications and platforms of the three partners through a common data model with data stored in a customer-chosen data lake”, reads the Microsoft announcement. This unified data lake offers customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services. Also, these companies have come out with a new approach for publishing, enriching and ingesting initial data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform into a customer’s data lake. The whole approach will be activated via Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA. This, in turn, will provide a new level of AI enrichment, helping firms serve their customers better. Moreover, to further advance the development of the initiative, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP, also shared the details about their plans to summon a Partner Advisory Council. This Partner Advisory Council will comprise over a dozen firms including Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, etc. Microsoft states that these organizations believe there is a significant opportunity in the ODI to help them offer altogether new value to their customers. “We’re excited about the initiative Adobe, Microsoft and SAP have taken in this area, and we see a lot of opportunity to contribute to the development of ODI”, states Stephan Pretorius, CTO, WPP. Microsoft introduces Pyright, a static type checker for the Python language written in TypeScript Microsoft announces: Microsoft Defender ATP for Mac, a fully automated DNA data storage, and revived office assistant Clippy Microsoft brings PostgreSQL extension and SQL Notebooks functionality to Azure Data Studio

Yesterday, at the ongoing KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, RedHat announced its contribution towards etcd, an open source project and its acceptance into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Red Hat is participating in developing etcd, as a part of the enterprise Kubernetes product, Red Hat OpenShift. https://twitter.com/coreos/status/1072562301864161281 etcd is an open source, distributed, consistent key-value store for service discovery, shared configuration, and scheduler coordination. It is a core component of software that comes with safer automatic updates and it also sets up overlay networking for containers. The CoreOS team created etcd in 2013 and the Red Hat engineers maintained it by working alongside a team of professionals from across the industry. The etcd project focuses on safely storing critical data of a distributed system and demonstrating its quality. It is also the primary data store for Kubernetes. It uses the Raft consensus algorithm for replicated logs. With etcd, applications can maintain more consistent uptime and work smoothly even when the individual servers are failing. Etcd is progressing and it already has 157 releases with etcd v3.3.10 being the latest one that got released just two month ago. etcd is designed as a consistency store across environments including public cloud, hybrid cloud and bare metal. Where is etcd used? Kubernetes clusters use etcd as their primary data store. Red Hat OpenShift customers and Kubernetes users benefit from the community work on the etcd project. It is also used by communities and users like Uber, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Red Hat. etcd will be under Linux Foundation and the domains and accounts will be managed by CNCF. The community of etcd maintainers, including Red Hat, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, Amazon, etc, won’t be changed. The project will continue to focus on the communities that depend on it. Red Hat will continue extending etcd with the etcd Operator in order to bring more security and operational ease. It will enable users to easily configure and manage etcd by using a declarative configuration that creates, configures, and manages etcd clusters. Read more about this news on RedHat’s official blog. RedHat shares what to expect from next week’s first-ever DNSSEC root key rollover Google, IBM, RedHat and others launch Istio 1.0 service mesh for microservices What Google, RedHat, Oracle, and others announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018