InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Facebook Builds an Efficient Neural Network Model over a Billion Words
Using Neural Networks for sequence prediction is a well-known Computer Science problem with a vast array of applications in speech recognition, machine translation, language modeling and other fields. FB AI Research scientists designed adaptive softmax, an approximation algorithm tailored for GPUs which can be used to efficiently train neural networks over vocabularies of a billion words & beyond.
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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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Facebook's Comparison of Apache Giraph and Spark GraphX for Graph Data Processing
A Facebook team has recently published a comparison of the performance of their existing Giraph-based graph processing system with the newer GraphX which is part of the popular Spark framework. Their conclusion is that GraphX is neither sufficiently scalable or performant to support their graph processing workloads.
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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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Latest Java 9 Schedule Appears to Be at Risk from the Outset
After approving the feature extension process, Oracle has confirmed July 2017 as release date for Java 9. Similar to a previous estimation by InfoQ, the new schedule involves a longer wait time for feature extension and impacted testing phases which may impose a risk. Early, informal testing might be in place to compensate.
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Julien Le Dem on the Future of Column-Oriented Data Processing with Apache Arrow
Julien Le Dem, the PMC chair of the Apache Arrow project, presented on Data Eng Conf NY on the future of column-oriented data processing. Apache Arrow is an open-source standard for columnar in-memory execution. InfoQ interviewed Le Dem to find out the differences between Arrow and Parquet.
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Authentication Strategies in Microservices Systems
Software security is a complex problem, and is becoming even more complex using Microservices where each service has to deal with security, David Borsos explained at the recent Microservices Conference in London, during his presentation evaluating four end-user authentication options within a microservice based systems.
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Amazon Adds Finer Granularity of Control to Their Voice Recognition API
Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service API, the NLP (natural language processing) API that powers Amazon Echo, has a new update that allows for developers to use Alexa to turn any device into a “smart” device through the use of the API’s voice recognition features.
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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 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.
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Sharing Experiences from a Microservices Journey
In our continued effort to showcase lessons learned by microservices practitioners, we look at an article Piotr Gankiewicz has recently written with his own tips and tricks. These include references to CQRS, asynchronous architectures, service discovery and how choosing the right database for each service is important.
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Amazon Announces AWS Shield for DDoS Protection
At the recent re:Invent 2016 event, Amazon announced a new service called AWS Shield, which provides customers with protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This announcement comes just over a month after Amazon was impacted by a DDoS attack on a DNS provider that Amazon used, Dynamic Network Services (Dyn).
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Technologies for the Future of Software Engineering
The Cloud, infrastructure as code, federated architectures with APIs, and anti-fragile systems: these are technologies for developing software systems that are rapidly coming into focus, claimed Mary Poppendieck. Systems are moving towards the cloud, and APIs are replacing central shared databases and enable the internet of things. We need to develop anti-fragile systems which embrace failure.
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Git 2.11 Improves SHA-1 Name Handling, Performance and More
Git 2.11 improves SHA-1 name handling, performance and more
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RxJava 2.0 Released with Support for Reactive Streams Specification
The RxJava team announced their 2.0 release after an 18 month development cycle. The project's "What's Different in 2.0" is a good guide for those developers familiar with RxJava 1.x. This release brings an important milestone. RxJava is a sub-project of ReactiveX, which is "a combination of the best ideas from the Observer pattern, the Iterator pattern, and functional programming".