Tech News - Cloud & Networking

Early this week, the Kubeflow project launched its latest version- Kubeflow 0.3, just 3 months after version 0.2 was out. This release comes with easier deployment and customization of components along with better multi-framework support. Kubeflow is the machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes. It is an open source project dedicated to making deployments of machine learning (ML) workflows on Kubernetes simple, portable and scalable. Users are provided with a easy to use ML stack anywhere that Kubernetes is already running, and this stack can self configure based on the cluster it deploys into. Features of Kubeflow 0.3 1. Declarative and Extensible Deployment Kubeflow 0.3 comes with a deployment command line script; kfctl.sh. This tool allows consistent configuration and deployment of Kubernetes resources and non-K8s resources (e.g. clusters, filesystems, etc. Minikube deployment provides a single command shell script based deployment. Users can also use MicroK8s to easily run Kubeflow on their laptop. 2. Better Inference Capabilities Version 0.3 makes it possible to do batch inference with GPUs (but non distributed) for TensorFlow using Apache Beam.  Batch and streaming data processing jobs that run on a variety of execution engines can be easily written with Apache Beam. Running TFServing in production is now easier because of the Liveness probe added and using fluentd to log request and responses to enable model retraining. It also takes advantage of the NVIDIA TensorRT Inference Server to offer more options for online prediction using both CPUs and GPUs. This Server is a containerized, production-ready AI inference server which maximizes utilization of GPU servers. It does this by running multiple models concurrently on the GPU and supports all the top AI frameworks. 3. Hyperparameter tuning Kubeflow 0.3 introduces a new K8s custom controller, StudyJob, which allows a hyperparameter search to be defined using YAML thus making it easy to use hyperparameter tuning without writing any code. 4. Miscellaneous updates The upgrade includes a release of a K8s custom controller for Chainer (docs). Cisco has created a v1alpha2 API for PyTorch that brings parity and consistency with the TFJob operator. It is easier to handle production workloads for PyTorch and TFJob because of the new features added to them. There is also support provided for gang-scheduling using Kube Arbitrator to avoid stranding resources and deadlocking in clusters under heavy load. The 0.3 Kubeflow Jupyter images ship with TF Data-Validation. TF Data-Validation is a library used to explore and validate machine learning data. You can check the examples added by the team to understand how to leverage Kubeflow. The XGBoost example indicates how to use non-DL frameworks with Kubeflow The object detection example illustrates leveraging GPUs for online and batch inference. The financial time series prediction example shows how to leverage Kubeflow for time series analysis The team has said that the next major release:  0.4, will be coming by the end of this year. They will focus on ease of use to perform common ML tasks without having to learn Kubernetes. They also plan to make it easier to track models by providing a simple API and database for tracking models. Finally, they intend to upgrade the PyTorch and TFJob operators to beta. For a complete list of updates, visit the 0.3 Change Log on GitHub. Platform9 announces a new release of Fission.io, the open source, Kubernetes-native Serverless framework Introducing Alpha Support for Volume Snapshotting in Kubernetes 1.12 ‘AWS Service Operator’ for Kubernetes now available allowing the creation of AWS resources using kubectl    

Welcome to the cloud and networking news bulletin. Every Friday you'll find the latest updates and software releases from the world of cloud. End your week with an informative dose of tech news. Cloud and networking news on the Packt Hub Couchbase Mobile 2.0 is released. Cloud and networking news from across the web The U.S. Defense Department is taking big steps towards cloud computing. The team behind The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project is looking for IaaS and PaaS solutions - with a view to using cloud as the foundation for improved artificial intelligence projects. There has been concern from some quarters that DoD were planning to commit to a 10 year contract with a single vendor. However, Pentagon spokesperson Dana White suggested otherwise, saying "multiple vendors may form a partnership to offer us a competitive solution." Huawei adds Blockchain Service platform to its cloud computing services. The Chinese telecoms giant has revealed a new Blockchain Service platform. It should allow developers and businesses to build and scale Blockchain applications on Huawei's cloud. The organization suggests there could be a number of ways the service could be used, from improving financial transparency and security, to managing digital assets. VMware reveals new releases of vSphere and vSAN. The virtualization giants claim the updates are 'elevating' the way users experience hybrid cloud. Google overhauls cloud text-to-speech engine. It's been around for a couple of years now, but the new features look like they're going to make the tool more useful for businesses. With features including 'pre-built models for improved transcription accuracy from phone calls and video' and 'automatic punctuation to improve readability of transcribed long-form audio.' Esri and Alibaba Cloud working together to bring enhanced Location Intelligence technology to Cloud Users. Oracle's customer experience cloud suite expands its offerings. FireEye and Oracle Collaborate on Cloud Transformation.

Juniper networks, one of industry leads in automated, scalable and secure networks, today announced fifth generation of it’s MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform. This series has more offerings for cutting-edge infrastructure and technology like cloud and IoT, enabling high-level network programmability. It has improved the programmability, performance and flexibility, for rapid cloud deployment by introducing a new set of software. This platform supports complex networks and service-intensive applications such as secured SD-WAN-based services and so on. Executive vice president and chief product officer at Juniper Networks, Manoj Leelanivas, said “ Cloud is eating the world, 5G is ramping up, IoT is presenting a host of new challenges, and security teams simply can’t keep up with the sheer volume of cyber attacks on today’s network. One thing service providers should not have to worry about among all this is the unknown of what lies ahead.” Few highlights of this release are as follows: Juniper Penta Silicon Penta silicon is considered the heart of the 5G platform which is next-generation 16 nm service-optimized, having a packet-forwarding engine that delivers upto 50% power efficiency over existing Junos trio chipset. Pena silicon has native support to MACsec and IPsec crypto engine that enables end to end secure connectivity at scale. In addition to this, Penta silicon also supports flexible native Ethernet (FlexE). MX 5G Control User-Plane Separation (CUPS) The 3GPP CUPS standard allows the customer to separate the evolved packet core user plane (GTP-U), and control plane (GTP-C) with standard interface to help service providers scale each independently as needed. The MX Series 5G platform is the first networking platform to support a standard-based hardware accelerated 5G user-plane in both existing and future MX routers. It enables converged services (wireless and wireline) on the same platform while also allowing integration with third-party 5G control planes. MX10008 and MX10016 Universal Chassis MX series continues to do innovations in the area of cloud, enterprise networking, and previously announced PTX and QFX Universal Chassis gains two new MX variants with today’s announcement: MX10008 and MX10016. A variety of line cards and software are available to satisfy specific networking use cases across the data center, enterprise and WAN. Refer to the official Juniper website for details on MX Series 5G. Five developer centric sessions at IoT World 2018 Cognitive IoT: How Artificial Intelligence is remoulding Industrial and Consumer IoT Windows 10 IoT Core: What you need to know  

Amazon is getting quite close to moving away from Oracle. Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services, tweeted last week regarding turning off the Oracle data warehouse and moving to RedShift. Jassy’s recent tweet seems to be a response to Oracle’s CTO, Larry Ellison’s constant taunts and punch lines. https://twitter.com/ajassy/status/1060979175098437632 The news about Amazon making its shift from Oracle stirred up in January this year. This was followed by the CNBC report this August which talked about Amazon’s plans to move from Oracle by 2020. As per the report, Amazon had already started to migrate most of its infrastructure internally to Amazon Web services. The process to move from Oracle, however, has been a bit harder than expected for Amazon. It faced an outage in one of its biggest warehouses on Prime Day (one of the Amazon’s biggest sales day in a year), last month, as reported by CNBC. The major cause of the outage was Amazon’s migration from Oracle’s database to its own technology, Aurora PostgreSQL. Moreover, Amazon and Oracle have had regular word battles in recent years over the performance of their database software and cloud tools. For instance, Larry Ellison, CTO, Oracle, slammed Amazon as he said, “Let me tell you an interesting fact: Amazon does not use [Amazon web services] to run their business. Amazon runs their entire business on top of Oracle, on top of the Oracle database. They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it’s not good enough.” Larry Ellison also slammed Amazon during Oracle OpenWorld conference last year saying, “Oracle’s services are just plain better than AWS” and how Amazon is “one of the biggest Oracle users on Planet Earth”. “Amazon's Oracle data warehouse was one of the largest (if not THE largest) in the world. RIP. We have moved on to newer, faster, more reliable, more agile, more versatile technology at more lower cost and higher scale. #AWS Redshift FTW.” tweeted Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon. Public reaction to this decision by Amazon has been largely positive with people supporting Amazon’s decision to migrate from Oracle: https://twitter.com/eonnen/status/1061082419057442816 https://twitter.com/adamuaa/status/1061094314909057024 https://twitter.com/nayar_amit/status/1061154161125773312 Oracle makes its Blockchain cloud service generally available Integrate applications with AWS services: Amazon DynamoDB & Amazon Kinesis [Tutorial] AWS Elastic Load Balancing: support added for Redirects and Fixed Responses in Application Load Balancer

In a blog post yesterday, Google announced that their public DNS will now support transport layer security (TLS). Google DNS Google’s public Domain Name Service (DNS) is the world’s largest address resolver. The service allows anyone using it to convert a human readable domain name into addresses used by browsers. Similar to search results, domains visited by DNS can also expose sensitive information. With DNS-over-TLS, users can add security to queries between devices and Google public DNS. Google DNS-over-TLS The need for security from forged websites and surveillance has grown over the years. The DNS-over-TLS protocol used contains a standard way to secure and maintain privacy of DNS traffic between users and the resolvers. Users can secure connections to Google Public DNS with TLS. It is the same technology that makes HTTPS connections secure. The DNS-over-LTS specifications are implemented according to the RFC 7766 recommendations. Doing so minimizes the overhead of using TLS, supports TLS 1.3, TCP fast open, and pipelining multiple queries over a single connection. This is deployed Google’s own infrastructure which they claim provides reliable and scalable management for the DNS-over-TLS connections. Enabling DNS-over-TLS connections DNS-over-TLS can be used by Android 9 pie users. Linux users can use the stubby resolver to communicate with the DNS-over-TLS service. You can create an issue if you are facing one. A comment from Hacker news says: “This is a DNS provided by Google, a company that earns money by analysing user data. If you want privacy, run your own DNS.” But Google has stated in their guides that they do not store any personally identifiable information long term. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service is now available as a mobile app for iOS and Andro Root Zone KSK (Key Sign Key) Rollover to resolve DNS queries was successfully completed Mozilla’s new Firefox DNS security updates spark privacy hue and cry

Linux 4.20 has shown major performance issues and the reason behind this regression was Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors (STIBP), as shared by Phoronix yesterday. This support is being reverted from the upcoming releases Linux 4.19.4 and 4.14.83 kernel points. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux kernel, was also surprised with the performance hit on Linux 4.20 as a result of STIBP introduction. He posted to the kernel mailing list that the performance impact was not communicated before the patches were merged and believes that this should not be enabled by default: “This was marked for stable, and honestly, nowhere in the discussion did I see any mention of just *how* bad the performance impact of this was.  When performance goes down by 50% on some loads, people need to start asking themselves whether it was worth it. It's apparently better to just disable SMT entirely, which is what security-conscious people do anyway.  So why do that STIBP slow-down by default when the people who *really* care already disabled SMT?  I think we should use the same logic as for L1TF: we default to something that doesn't kill performance. Warn once about it, and let the crazy people say "I'd rather take a 50% performance hit than worry about a theoretical issue”.“ The tests done by Michael Larabel also revealed that Linux 4.20 is facing significant performance issues in many workloads, more than some of the earlier Spectre and Meltdown mitigations. This has measurably affected PHP, Python, Java, and many other workloads and even the gaming performance to some extent. The STIBP support for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation was backported to the Linux 4.14 and 4.19 LTS series, which is now being reverted. You can find the reverts in Greg Kroah-Hartman’s linux-stable-rc tree:  Source: Phoronix On current Linux 4.20 Git, STIBP still remains in place and a better approach to handle performance issues is being reviewed. Michael Larabel expects that the new patch series will be ready for merging prior to the shipping of Linux 4.20, which is approximately one month’s time. To know more, check out Michael Larabel’s post on Phoronix: Linux Stable Updates Are Dropping The Performance-Pounding STIBP. Read Next Linux 4.20 kernel slower than its previous stable releases, Spectre flaw to be blamed, according to Phoronix Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta; deprecates Btrfs filesystem Soon, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) won’t support KDE

In a post yesterday, the AWS Developer team has announced that AWS Lambda support will be provided for PowerShell Core 6.0. Users can now execute PowerShell Scripts and functions in response to Lambda events. Why should Developers look forward to this upgrade? The AWS Tools for PowerShell will allow developers and administrators to manage their AWS services and resources in the PowerShell scripting environment. Users will be able to manage their AWS resources with the same PowerShell tools used to manage Windows, Linux, and MacOS environments. These tools will let them perform many of the same actions as available in the AWS SDK for .NET. What’s more is that these tools can be accessed from the command line for quick tasks. For example: controlling Amazon EC2 instances. The PowerShell scripting language composes scripts to automate AWS service management. With direct access to AWS services from PowerShell, management scripts can take advantage of everything that the AWS cloud has to offer. The AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell and AWS Tools for PowerShell Core are flexible in handling credentials including support for the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) infrastructure. To understand how the support works, it is necessary to set up the appropriate development environment as shown below. Set up the Development Environment This can be done in a few simple steps- 1. Set up the correct version of PowerShell 2. Ensure Visual Studio Code is configured for PowerShell Core 6.0. 3. PowerShell Core is built on top of .NET Core hence install .NET Core 2.1 SDK 4. Head over to the PowerShell Gallery and install AWSLambdaPSCore module The module provides users with following cmdlets to author and publish Powershell based   Lambda functions- Source: AWS Blog You can head over to the AWS blog for detailed steps on how to use the Lambda support for PowerShell. The blog gives readers a simple example on how to execute a PowerShell script that ensures that the Remote Desktop (RDP) port is not left open on any of the EC2 security groups. How to Run Code in the Cloud with AWS Lambda Amazon hits $1 trillion market value milestone yesterday, joining Apple Inc Getting started with Amazon Machine Learning workflow [Tutorial]

NeuVector, a firm that deals with container network security, yesterday, announced new capabilities to help container security teams better assess the security posture of their deployed services in production. NeuVector now delivers an intelligent assessment of the risk of east-west attacks, ingress and egress connections, and damaging vulnerability exploits. An overall risk score summarizes all available risk factors and provides advice on how to lower the threat of attack – thus improving the score. The service connection risk score shows how likely it is for attackers to move laterally (east-west) to probe containers that are not segmented by the NeuVector firewall rules. The ingress/egress risk score shows the risk of external attacks or outbound connections commonly used for data stealing or connecting to C&C (command and control) servers. In an email written to us, Gary Duan, CTO of NeuVector said, “The NeuVector container security solution spans the entire pipeline – from build to ship to run. Because of this, we are able to present an overall analysis of the risk of attack for containers during run-time. But not only can we help assess and reduce risk, we can actually take automated actions such as blocking network attacks, quarantining suspicious containers, and capturing container and network forensics.” With the RedHat OpenShift integration, individual users can review the risk scores and security posture for the containers within their assigned projects. They are able to see the impact of their improvements to security configurations and protections as they lower risk scores and remove potential vulnerabilities. Read Also: Red Hat Summit 2019 Highlights: Microsoft collaboration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8), IDC study predicts $10 trillion global revenue by end of 2019, and more! The one-click RBAC integration requires no additional coding, scripting or configuration, and adds to other OpenShift integration points for admission control, image streams, OVS networking, and service deployments. Fei Huang, CEO of NeuVector said, “We are seeing many business-critical container deployments using Red Hat OpenShift. These customers turn to NeuVector to provide complete run-time protection for in-depth defense – with the combination of container process and file system monitoring, as well as the industry’s only true layer-7 container firewall.” To know about this announcement in detail visit the official website. Red Hat releases OpenShift 4 with adaptability, Enterprise Kubernetes and more! Red Hat rebrands logo after 20 years; drops Shadowman Red Hat announces CodeReady Workspaces, the first Kubernetes-Native IDE for easy collaboration among developers

Last week, GeoServer 2.14.2 was released., GeoServer is an open source software server based on Java, for sharing geospatial data. It allows users to display their spatial information to the world. It is free and can display data on popular mapping applications such as Google Earth, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Yahoo Maps. Improvements in GeoServer 2.14.2 In GeoServer 2.14.2, WMTS Restful binding is accessible to all users and works with workspace specific services which initially used to be limited to admins. gs:DownloadEstimator now returns a true value when estimating full raster downloads at native resolution. In GeoServer 2.14.2, KML ignores sortBy parameter while querying records. The NullPointerException is thrown while using env() function with LIKE operator in CSS filters. With this release, it’s possible to modify existing GWC blobstore via UI without renaming which was not possible initially. For GetLegendGraphic, this release allows expressions in ColorMapEntry labels. In this release, OpenLayers2 preview is not automatically triggered on IE8. New MongoDB extension has been added GeoServer 2.14.2. The style editor has been improved, it now includes side by side editing Nearest match support has been added for Web Map Service (WMS) dimension handling. Major fixes Rendering issue with JAI-EXT and Input/Output TransparentColor options has been resolved. The Complex MongoDB generated properties are now handled in this release. Check out the official blog post by GeoServer for full release notes. Getting Started with GeoServer ArangoDB 3.4 releases with a native search engine, full GeoJSON support, and more Uber’s kepler.gl, an open source toolbox for GeoSpatial Analysis

Linkerd 2.0 is now generally available. Linkerd is a transparent proxy that adds service discovery, routing, failure handling, and visibility to modern software applications. Linkerd 2.0 brings two significant changes. First, Linkerd 2.0 is completely rewritten to to be faster and smaller than Linkerd 1.x. Second, Linkerd moves beyond the service mesh model to running on a single service. It also comes with a focus on minimal configuration, a modular control plane design, and UNIX-style CLI tools. Let’s understand what each of these changes mean. Smaller and Faster Linkerd has undergone a complete change to become faster and smaller than its predecessor. Linkerd 2.0’s data plane is comprised of ultralight Rust proxies which consume around 10mb of RSS and have a p99 latency of <1ms. Linkerd’s minimalist control plane (written in Go) is similarly designed for speed and low resource footprint. Service sidecar design It also adopts a modern service sidecar design from the traditional service mesh model. The traditional service mesh model has two major problems. First, they add a significant layer of complexity to the tech stack. Second they are designed to meet the needs of platform owners undermining the service owners. Linkerd 2.0’s service sidecar design offers a solution to both. It allows platform owners to build out a service mesh incrementally, one service at a time, to provide security and reliability that a full service mesh provides. More importantly, Linkerd 2.0 addresses the needs of service owners directly with its service sidecar model to its focus on diagnostics and debugging. Linkerd 2.0 at its core is a service sidecar, running on a single service without requiring cluster-wide installation. Even without having a whole Kubernetes cluster, developers can run Linkerd and get: Instant Grafana dashboards of a service’s success rates, latencies, and throughput A topology graph of incoming and outgoing dependencies A live view of requests being made to your service Improved, latency-aware load balancing Installation Installing Linkerd 2.0 on a service requires no configuration or code changes. You can try Linkerd 2.0 on a Kubernetes 1.9+ cluster in 60 seconds by running: curl https://run.linkerd.io/install | sh Also check out the full Getting Started Guide. Linkerd 2.0 is also hosted on GitHub. Google Cloud hands over Kubernetes project operations to CNCF, grants $9M in GCP credits. Kubernetes 1.11 is here! VMware Kubernetes Engine (VKE) launched to offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service.

Hybrid cloud is becoming an increasing reality for many businesses. This is something the software world is only just starting to acknowledge. However, at this year's Google Cloud Next, Google does seem to be making a play for the hybrid market. Its new Cloud Services Platform combines a number of tools, including Kubernetes and Istio, to support a hybrid cloud solution. In his speech at Google Cloud Next, Urs Holze, Senior VP of technical infrastructure, said that although cloud computing offers many advantages, it's "still missing something... a simple way to combine the cloud with your existing on-premise infrastructure or with other clouds." That's the thinking behind Cloud Services Platform, which brings together a whole host of tools to make managing a cloud potentially much easier than ever before. What's inside Google's Cloud Services Platform In a blog post Holze details what's going to be inside Cloud Services Platform: Service mesh: Availability of Istio 1.0 in open source, Managed Istio, and Apigee API Management for Istio Hybrid computing: GKE On-Prem with multi-cluster management Policy enforcement: GKE Policy Management, to take control of Kubernetes workloads Ops tooling: Stackdriver Service Monitoring Serverless computing: GKE Serverless add-on and Knative, an open source serverless framework Developer tools: Cloud Build, a fully managed CI/CD platform This diagram provides a clear illustration of how the various components of the Cloud Services Platform will fit together: [caption id="attachment_21065" align="aligncenter" width="960"] What's inside Google's Cloud Services Platform (via cloudplatform.googleblog.com)[/caption] Why Kubernetes and Istio are at the center of the Cloud Services Platform Holze explains the development of cloud in the context of containers. "The move to software containers", he says, "has helped some [businesses] in simplifying and speeding up how we package and deliver software." Kubernetes has been  an integral part of this shift. And although Holze has a vested interest when he says that "today it's by far the most popular way to run an manage containers," he's ultimately right - Kubernetes is one of the fastest growing open source projects on the planet. Read next: The key differences between Kubernetes and Docker Swarm Holze then follows on from this by introducing Istio. "Istio extends Kubernetes into these higher level services and makes service to service communications secure and reliable in a way that's very easy on developers." Istio is due to hit its first stable release in the next couple of days. So, insofar as both Istio and Kubernetes make it possible to manage and monitor containers at scale, bringing them together in a single platform makes for a compelling proposition for engineers. The advantage of being able to bring in tools like Kubernetes and Istio might make hybrid cloud solutions a much more attractive proposition for business and technology leaders - and for those already convinced, it could make life even better. According to Chen Goldberg, Google's Director of Engineering, speaking to journalists and Google Cloud Next, Cloud Services Platform "allows you to modernize wherever you are and at your own pace." Whether businesses buy into Google's vision remains to be seen - but it could well be a game-changer that threatens AWS dominance in the cloud world.  Read next: Go Cloud is Google’s bid to establish Golang as the go-to language of cloud Google Cloud Next: Fei-Fei Li reveals new AI tools for developers Dispelling the myths of hybrid cloud

Last week, Sway, the i3-compatible Wayland compositor, released its version 1.0-beta.1. The community mentions that the Sway 1.0-beta.1 is 100% compatible with the i3 X11 window manager. Sway works well the existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features. The community also maintains the wlroots project to provide a modular basis for Sway and other Wayland compositors to build upon, and have also published standards for interoperable Wayland desktops. This version includes many input and output features alongwith other features such as auto-locking, idle management, and more. New features in Sway 1.0-beta.1 Output features The Sway 1.0 beta.1 version includes a new output features where the users can get the names of the outputs for use in their config file by using swaymsg -t get_outputs. Following are some examples of how outputs can be used: To rotate display to 90 degrees, use: output DP-1 transform 90 To enable Sway’s improved HiDPI support, use: output DP-1 scale 2 To enable fractional scaling : output DP-1 scale 1.5 Users can now run sway on multiple GPUs In this version, sway picks up a primary GPU automatically. Users can also override this by specifying a list of card names at startup with WLR_DRM_DEVICES=card0:card1:... Other features include support for daisy-chained DisplayPort configurations and improved Redshift support. Users can now drag windows between outputs with the mouse. Input features Users can get a list of their identifiers with swaymsg -t get_inputs. Users can now have multiple mice with multiple cursors, and can link keyboards, mice, drawing tablets, and touchscreens to each other arbitrarily. Users can have a dvorak keyboard for normal use and a second qwerty keyboard for a paired programming session. The coworker can also focus and type into separate windows from what a user is working on. Addition of third-party panels, lockscreens, etc. This version includes a new layer-shell protocol which enables the use of more third-party software on sway. One of the main features in sway 1.0 and wlroots is to break the boundaries between Wayland compositors and encourage standard inter-operable protocols. The community has also added two new protocols for capturing user’s screen; screencopy and dmabuf-export. These new protocols are useful for screenshots and real-time screen capture, for example to live stream on Twitch. DPMS, auto-locking, and idle management The new swayidle tool adds support for DPMS, auto-locking, and idle management, which even works on other Wayland compositors. To configure it, start by running the daemon in the sway config file: exec swayidle \    timeout 300 'swaylock -c 000000' \    timeout 600 'swaymsg "output * dpms off"' \       resume 'swaymsg "output * dpms on"' \    before-sleep 'swaylock -c 000000' This code will lock user’s screen after 300 seconds of inactivity. After 600 seconds, it will turn off all of the outputs (and turn them back on when the user simply wiggles the mouse). This configuration also locks the screen before the system goes to sleep. However, none of this will happen if while watching a video on a supported media player (mpv, for example). Other features of Sway 1.0 beta.1 The additional features in the Sway 1.0 beta version include: swaylock has a config file Drag and drop is supported Rich content (like images) is synced between the Wayland and X11 clipboards The layout is updated atomically, meaning that user will never see an in-progress frame when resizing windows Primary selection is implemented and synced with X11 To know more about Sway 1.0 beta.1 in detail, see the release notes. Chrome 70 releases with support for Desktop Progressive Web Apps on Windows and Linux Announcing the early release of Travis CI on Windows Windows 10 IoT Core: What you need to know  

Yesterday, the team at Sway, the i3-compatible Wayland compositor released Sway 1.0, the first stable release of sway which is a consistent, flexible, and powerful desktop environment for Linux and FreeBSD. Sway 1.0 comes with a variety of features that improves performance and offers a better implementation of Wayland. This release is 100% compatible with i3, i3 IPC, i3-gaps and i3bar. What’s new in Sway 1.0? In this release, swayidle, a daemon for managing DPMS and idle activity has been added. This release comes with swaynag, an i3-nagbar replacement. With this release, the bindsym locked now add keybindings which work when the screen is locked. In this release, the command blocks are now generic and they work with any command. It is now possible to adjust the Window opacity with the opacity command. With this release, the border csd enables client-side decorations. Sawy 1.0 comes with atomic layout updates that help in resizing windows and adjusting the layout. With this release, the urgency hints from Xwayland are also supported. The Output damage tracking in this release will help in improving CPU performance and power usage. The performance will be improved with Hardware cursors. In this release, Wayland, x11, and headless backends are now supported for end-users. Major changes This release will now depend on wlroots 0.5. This release has dropped the dependency on asciidoc. With Sawy 1.0, the experimental Nvidia support has been removed. With this release, the swaylock is now distributed separately. Major Bugs fixes Issues related to xdg-shell have been fixed. Issues related to Xwayland have been fixed. Reloading config doesn't cause crashes anymore. Few users are excited about this news. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “Sway is absolutely incredible, it puts macOS, built by Apple's army of engineers and dump trucks of money to shame in its simplicity, stability, and efficiency.” Few others are unhappy because of the tiling window manager. Another user commented, “I really don't get the benefit of a tiling window manager. I tried one and instantly felt boxed in. There's not enough room on the screen for everything I need to have opened and flip between, which is why I use an overlapping window manager in the first place.” To know more about this news, check out the official announcement. Sway 1.0 beta.1 released with the addition of third-party panels, auto-locking, and more Alphabet’s Chronicle launches ‘Backstory’ for business network security management ‘2019 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills’ report gives an insight into the DevOps skill set required for enterprise growth  

Yesterday, Twilio announced the general availability of Flex. Since its preview announcement in March, Flex has been used by thousands of contact center agents including support and sales teams at Lyft, Scorpion, Shopify, and U-Haul. Twilio Flex is a fully-programmable contact center platform that aims to give businesses complete control over customer engagement. It is a cloud-based platform that provides infinite flexibility in your hands. What functionalities does Flex provide to enterprises? Twilio Flex enables enterprises to do the following: Answer user queries using Autopilot Flex provides a conversational AI platform called Autopilot using which businesses can build custom messaging bots, IVRs, and home assistant apps. These bots are trained with the data pulled by Autopilot using Twilio’s natural language processing engine. Companies can deploy those bots across multiple channels including voice, SMS, Chat Alexa, Slack, and Google Assistant. With these bots, enterprises can also respond to frequently asked questions and if the queries become complex the bots can then transfer the conversation to a human agent. Secure phone payment with Twilio Pay With only one line of code, you can activate the Twilio Pay service that provides businesses the tools needed to process payments over the phone. It relies on secure payment methods such as tokenization to ensure that credit card information is securely handled. Provide a true omnichannel experience Flex gives enterprises access to a number of channels out of the box including voice, SMS, email, chat, video, and Facebook Messenger, among others. Also, agents can switch from channel to channel without losing the conversation or context. Customize user interface programmatically Flex user interfaces are designed with customization in mind. Enterprises can customize the customer-facing components like click-to-call or click-to-chat. It also allows adding entirely new channels or integrating new reporting dashboards to display agent performance or customer satisfaction. Integrate any application Enterprises can integrate their third-party business-critical applications with Flex. These applications may include systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), workforce management (WFM), reporting, analytics, or data stores. Analytics and insights for better customer experience It offers real-time event stream, a supervisor desktop, and admin desktop, which gives supervisors and administrators complete visibility and control over interaction data. Using these analytics and insights they will be able to better monitor and manage an agent’s performance. To know more about Twilio Flex, check out their official announcement. Twilio acquires SendGrid, a leading Email API Platform, to bring email services to its customers Twilio WhatsApp API: A great tool to reach new businesses Building a two-way interactive chatbot with Twilio: A step-by-step guide

Yesterday, the team behind GNU Shepherd announced the release of GNU Shepherd version 0.6.0, a service manager which is written in Guile that looks after the herd of system services. It also provides a replacement for the service-managing capabilities of SysV-init (or any other init). This release has been bootstrapped with few tools including, Autoconf 2.69, Automake 1.16.1, Makeinfo 6.5, Help2man 1.47.8. What’s new in GNU Shepherd version 0.6.0? Services can now be “one-shot”. The ‘shepherd’ deletes its socket file upon termination. The bug ‘herd stop S’ is no longer an error when S is already stopped. The ‘herd’ exits with non-zero value while executing an action that fails. The ‘shepherd’ ignores reboot errors while running in a container. The translation of error messages has been fixed. This release comes with a new translation that is ta (Tamil). The list of updated translations include uk, zh_CN, fr, pt_BR, sv, da, es, ta, Most of the users are happy and excited about this release. A user commented on the HackerNews thread, “I've written previously about how much I appreciate the Guile info manual. For a document in a relatively obscure help system (other than Emacs users, who even knows about Texinfo?), it's carefully written with an eye to empowering its users. It's perhaps a bit quixotic, but you get the feeling that the GNU project really wants to deliver an OS written in Scheme all the way down, totally under the control of an enlightened end user. The Shepherd project certainly fits with that vision.” Another user commented, “I hesitate to speak for emacs users, because I'm not one really, but I suspect the info format feels really comfortable when viewed with emacs.” Few users think that Shepherd might be a replacement for systemd, a software that provides building blocks for Linux operating system. A comment reads, “Is Shepherd meant to be a replacement for systemd (et al), then?” To know more about this news, check out GNU’s official announcement. GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 releases GNU Nano 4.0 text editor releases! GNU Octave 5.1.0 releases with new changes and improvements