InfoQ Homepage News
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Google and Retail Leaders Launch Universal Commerce Protocol to Power Next‑Generation AI Shopping
Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard enabling AI-driven shopping agents to complete tasks end-to-end from product discovery to checkout and post-purchase management. Co-developed with Shopify, Target, and others. UCP aims to standardize commerce capabilities, support multiple payment providers, and expand globally. Shaping the next generation of agentic commerce.
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Microsoft Releases Azure Functions Support for Model Context Protocol Servers
Microsoft has launched its Model Context Protocol (MCP) for Azure Functions, ensuring secure, standardized workflows for AI agents. With built-in OBO authentication and streamable HTTP transport, it addresses key security concerns. Now supporting multiple languages and self-hosting, MCP empowers developers to deploy with ease while safeguarding sensitive data.
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GitLab 18.8 Marks General Availability of the Duo Agent Platform
GitLab 18.8 brings a number of new features, including GitLab Duo Planner Agent, GitLab Duo Security Analyst Agent, auto-dismiss irrelevant vulnerabilities, and more. With this release, the GitLab Duo Agent Platform, enabling organizations to orchestrate AI agents, reaches general availability.
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Microsoft Open Sources XAML Studio, Reviving a Longstanding Prototyping Tool
Microsoft has officially open-sourced XAML Studio, a lightweight rapid prototyping tool for XAML-based UI development, under the .NET Foundation. The tool, originally released through the Microsoft Store as part of the Microsoft Garage initiative, now welcomes community contributions and collaboration via its GitHub repository.
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Pinterest's Moka: How Kubernetes Is Rewriting the Rules of Big Data Processing
Digital pinboard provider Pinterest has published an article explaining its blueprint for the future of large-scale data processing with its new platform Moka. The company is moving core workloads from ageing Hadoop infrastructure to a Kubernetes-based system on Amazon EKS, with Apache Spark as the main engine and support for other frameworks on the way.
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Docker’s Cagent Brings Deterministic Testing to AI Agents
Docker is positioning its Cagent runtime as a way to bring deterministic testing back to AI agents, addressing a growing problem for teams building production agentic systems.
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Java News Roundup: WildFly 39, Open Liberty, Spring Framework, JobRunr, Gradle, Micrometer
This week's Java roundup for January 12th, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA release of WildFly 39; point releases of JobRunr and Gradle; maintenance releases of Spring Framework and Micronaut; milestone releases of Micrometer Metrics and Micrometer Tracing; and a beta release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.1.
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Human‑Centred AI for SRE: Multi‑Agent Incident Response without Losing Control
A growing body of recent research and industry commentary suggests that a shift in how organisations approach site reliability engineering is underway. Rather than handing the pager to a machine, teams are designing multi-agent AI systems that work alongside on-call engineers, narrowing the search space and automating the tedious steps while leaving judgment calls to humans.
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Hugging Face Releases FineTranslations, a Trillion-Token Multilingual Parallel Text Dataset
Hugging Face has released FineTranslations, a large-scale multilingual dataset containing more than 1 trillion tokens of parallel text across English and 500+ languages. The dataset was created by translating non-English content from the FineWeb2 corpus into English using Gemma3 27B, with the full data generation pipeline designed to be reproducible and publicly documented.
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Android Studio Otter Boosts Agent Workflows and Adds LLM Flexibility
The latest Android Studio Otter feature drop introduces several new features that make it easier for developers to integrate AI-powered tools in their workflows, including the ability to set which LLM to use, enhanced agent mode through device interaction, support for natural language testing, and more.
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Cloudflare Automates Salt Configuration Management Debugging, Reducing Release Delays
Cloudflare recently shared how it manages its huge global fleet with SaltStack (Salt). They discussed the engineering tasks needed for the "grain of sand" problem. This concern is about finding one configuration error among millions of state applications. Cloudflare’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team redesigned their configuration observability.
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Pulumi Adds Native Support for Terraform and HCL
Pulumi now natively supports Terraform and HCL, enabling direct HCL execution and state management within Pulumi Cloud. Currently in private beta with a Q1 2026 release, the update aids migration from legacy tools. A new financial "escape hatch" offers credits for existing HashiCorp contracts, targeting teams affected by recent licensing shifts.
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Cloudflare Introduces Aggregations in R2 SQL for Data Analytics
Cloudflare recently announced support for aggregations in R2 SQL, a new feature that lets developers run SQL queries on data stored in R2. This enhancement expands R2 SQL beyond basic filtering and makes it more useful for analytical workloads without requiring separate data warehouse tools.
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ArkType Introduces ArkRegex with Type Safe Regular Expressions
Introducing ArkRegex: a revolutionary drop-in for JavaScript's RegExp that ensures type safety in regular expressions without runtime overhead. Seamlessly integrate with native features like capture groups and receive robust type inference, revolutionizing TypeScript development and eliminating runtime failures. Simplify regex with confidence—experience ArkRegex today!
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350PB, Millions of Events, One System: Inside Uber’s Cross-Region Data Lake and Disaster Recovery
Uber’s HiveSync is a sharded, cross-region batch replication system keeping Hive/HDFS data consistent across multiple regions. Handling 5M daily Hive events and 8PB of data replication, it uses event-driven jobs, hybrid RPC and DistCp strategies, DAG-based orchestration, and dynamic sharding, enabling disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, and 99.99% cross-region data accuracy.