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Google Introduces Cloud-Based Encryption Key Management Service
Google has announced a new service for its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that allows to create, use, rotate, and destroy symmetric encryption keys. Although the new Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) is integrated with Google's Cloud Identity Access Management and Cloud Audit Logging, keys managed using KMS can be also used independently.
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Google Release Zipkin Integration with Stackdriver Trace for Tracing Distributed Applications
Google Cloud Platform has released an open source Zipkin server that allows Zipkin-compatible clients to send traces to Google’s own Stackdriver Trace distributed tracing service for analysis. This Zipkin/Stackdriver Trace integration is aimed at developers whose applications and services are written in a language or framework that Stackdriver Trace doesn’t officially support.
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Amazon Introduces Rekognition for Image Analysis
At the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon launched Rekognition, a managed service for Image Recognition and Analysis, powered by Deep Learning. The capabilities that Rekognition provides include Object and Scene detection, Facial Analysis, Face Comparison and Facial Recognition. The service attempts to extract meaning from visual content for the 1.2 Trillion pictures captured annually.
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AWS Step Functions: Coordinating Distributed Applications and Microservices Using Visual Workflows
Amazon Web Services have launched AWS Step Functions, a service that enables the coordination of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. The AWS Step Functions console allows the JSON specification of a state machine to be defined that execute 'steps' within an application, e.g., by calling out to an AWS Lambda function or containerised application running on AWS ECS.
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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Gains FIFO Queues
Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS) recently gained FIFO (first-in, first-out) queues, which are designed to "guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the order that they are sent, and without duplicates". AWS rolled out this new queue type in the US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon) regions and "plans to make it available in many others in early 2017".
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Microsoft Launches Cloud Bot-as-a-Service Platform
This past November, Microsoft launched, what it is calling, the Industry’s First Cloud Bot-as-a-Service platform. The Azure Bot Service is powered by the Microsoft Bot Framework and has a serverless compute back-end built on Azure Functions. Using the Bot service allows developers to build conversational applications that plug into many popular chat applications.
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GitLab 8.15 Introduces Auto Deploy and Web Terminal
The latest GitLab version, 8.15, provides new CD/CI features aimed to automate deployments on a variety of platforms and to make it easier to reach your staging or production deployments through a command line interface.
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AWS Expands Cloud to Canada, United Kingdom
Just days after the end of re:Invent, AWS shared news of further geographic expansion. Amazon added locations in Montréal and London, representing the 15th and 16th regions of the AWS cloud.
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Amazon Preview FPGA Enabled EC2 Instances
Amongst the flurry of announcements at re:invent 2016 was the launch of a developer preview for a new F1 instance type. The F1 comes with one to eight high end Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to provide programmable hardware. The FPGAs are likely to be used for risk management, simulation, search and machine learning applications.
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Azure Functions Reach General Availability
Microsoft recently announced an addition to its Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering called Azure Functions. Initially launched as a preview service in March 2016, Azure Functions provide developers with an event-driven serverless compute platform that allow organizations to pay for only what they consume.
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Building Conversational and Text Interfaces Using Amazon Lex
At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon introduced a preview of their deep learning technology called Amazon Lex which can be used to build conversational interfaces using voice and text. Amazon Lex is powered on the same deep learning technology as Alexa, which is used in the portable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled Amazon Echo speaker.
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AWS re:Invent Recap
At their annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS unleashed a flurry of announcements about upcoming cloud services. Amazon outlined over two dozen new capabilities coming to the public cloud, including directly querying data in S3 object storage, building code as part of deployment pipelines, provisioning cheap virtual private servers, and moving data in bulk, ETL-style.
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Amazon Launches Lightsail Virtual Private Servers
Amazon has launched Lightsail, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) service to compete with companies like Digital Ocean, Linode and the multitude of Low End Box providers. The service bundles a basic Linux virtual machine with SSD storage and a bandwidth allowance. Pricing starts at $5/month with tiers by RAM allocation. Each larger configuration comes with more storage and bandwidth.
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Amazon Releases 'AWS X-Ray' Distributed Tracing Service in Preview
At the AWS re:Invent 2016 conference, held in Las Vegas, USA, a distributed tracing service named AWS X-Ray was released in preview within all 12 public AWS Regions. In a similar fashion to Google’s Dapper, Twitter’s Zipkin and the OpenTracing API, AWS X-Ray helps developers analyse and debug distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architectural style.
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Amazon Introduces AWS Batch Preview
At the recent AWS Re:Invent event, Amazon announced a new preview service, called AWS Batch. AWS Batch allows organizations to optimize their scheduling and workload execution across a cloud-based landscape. Amazon has built this service in response to many AWS customers building their own batch platforms using EC2 instances, containers and CloudWatch.