As central banks worldwide embark on a crusade against inflation, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the state of the global economy and where prices (and costs) will go from here. Engineering organizations are facing increased operating expenses (OpEx) on multiple fronts. Cloud costs are growing across all major providers, with Azure and Microsoft Cloud raising prices 15% year-over-year (YoY) in 2023. And that’s not to mention if your technical estate is running on VMware, which reportedly has raised prices between 600% and 1000% since the Broadcom acquisition. These increases compound ..read more

Martin Odersky, creator of the Scala programming language has posted a masterful proposal for developers to pursue the concept of “Lean Scala”. Lean Scala is a coding style that aims to make Scala code simple, understandable, concise, and expressive, Odersky wrote. “Scala is a strong statically typed high-level general-purpose programming language that supports both object-oriented programming and functional programming,” Wikipedia says. “Designed to be concise, many of Scala’s design decisions are intended to address criticisms of Java.” And Scala source code can be compiled into Java byteco ..read more

There’s a real pain so many engineering organizations are feeling right now: On the operational side, engineers are trying to frantically manage the infrastructure, and in the meantime, the application developers who are consuming the infrastructure are increasingly being asked to understand more about the infrastructure and are therefore facing cognitive overload. The end result? Low velocity. The reason for this pain is complexity: first, the emergence of Kubernetes as the de facto operating system for the cloud, which requires in-depth technical knowledge that most developers simply do not ..read more

SEATTLE — A Linux Foundation project to map the world with open data has launched a beta of its service this week, bringing enterprises and startups an open source alternative to commercial services such as Google Maps. The project announced the new availability at the Linux Open Source Summit North America, being held this week in Seattle. “Mapping has become this incredibly hard thing to do well. There’s so much data you have to do worldwide coverage,” said Marc Prioleau, executive director of LF’s Overture Maps Foundation, in an interview with TNS. Unless you have a Google-proportione ..read more

As software supply chain attacks , security challenges remain at the forefront of modern software development. Of all the cyber threats addressed in application security, zero-day vulnerabilities exemplify some of the most serious issues. These critical security vulnerabilities are so named because bad actors exploit them before developers become aware, leaving no time — “zero days” — for a patch or update to fix the issue. Their discovery and the subsequent race to fix them before widespread exploitation requires constant vigilance and innovation in safeguarding against unforeseen threa ..read more

In the constantly changing world of cloud computing, businesses are on the hunt for ways to enhance efficiency and reduce expenses. At Intel Granulate, we frequently engage in discussions about cloud cost optimization, a term that’s gaining momentum but often leaves many wondering about its practical implications for their operations. Cloud cost optimization isn’t just about cutting expenses; it’s about achieving a balance where you’re investing smartly in cloud resources without sacrificing performance. Here are the questions we most frequently encounter, along with insights that could trans ..read more

A Python Set is a collection data type that is iterable, mutable, and cannot be duplicated. This data type can come in very handy. Say, for example, you need to store information for employee IDs. You certainly don’t want those IDs to be duplicated within the application, as that could lead to issues. For example, you have the following employee IDs: 001 002 003 004 … You might attach specific information to each of those IDs, such as names, emails, phone numbers, birthdays, etc. Should the IDs get duplicated, the cross-pollination of data could lead to confusion or an application that does ..read more

I live in West London, not San Francisco, so I never expected to enjoy any Artificial Intelligence firsts. But the first Amazon Fresh opened in Ealing in 2021. When I visited late one night, it was largely devoid of customers. There were quite a few staff stacking shelves and milling around, but none at the checkout; because of course, there were no checkouts. You had to confirm you were an Amazon customer via an app when you came in, but after that, you were tracked and your shopping was automatically registered to your Amazon account, and you could “just walk out”. The story at the time was ..read more

SEATTLE — SPDX, the open standard for “System” Bill of Materials, takes a major step forward. For years, we needed a standard way for companies to standardize their license and component information (metadata) in software bills of material (SBOM) to ease the discovery and labeling of open source components in their products. The answer to that problem is Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX), aka the International Standards Organization (ISO) standard: ISO/IEC 5962:2021. Now, at Open Source Summit North America in Seattle, the latest version, SPDX 3.0, has made its appearance. “It’d been ..read more

AMSTERDAM — Improving the developer experience is at the heart of Grafana 11’s release. Among the standout features described during GrafanaCON 2024 here, Grafana Labs’ annual user’s conference, is the Explore Metrics. With it, a major pain point has been removed — you’re now able to form queries and even look at problems in Prometheus specifically without having to write or learn Prometheus query language PromQL. The user can find and select a metric name and immediately see the appropriate visualization, whether your metric is a gauge, counter or histogram, Grafana Labs said. The user ..read more