What’s the point: Kata Containers, CloudEvents, Gitea, Bison

What’s the point: Kata Containers, CloudEvents, Gitea, Bison

Kata Containers is now available in v1.5. The update lets users work with AWS’ Firecracker hypervisor, IBM Z-series, and simplifies how the project integrates with the container runtime containerd. Kata Containers is an open source project hosted by the OpenStack Foundation.

Its goal is a standard implementation of lightweight virtual machines “that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs”. The project hit its first major release in May 2018 is backed by companies such as Intel, Dell EMC, Red Hat, ARM, and Canonical.

CloudEvents

Work on CloudEvents as a specification for describing event data in common formats continues, and just introduced a breaking change: contenttype has been renamed datacontenttype, to clarify that the property isn’t about the encoding of the CloudEvent but this of the data property and reduce confusion moving forward.

The standardisation effort is driven by the Serverless Working Group that is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and should tackle issues such as the portability of event data. It is however still in its early stages, with 0.2 being the most current version of the specification.

Gitea

Self-hosted Git service Gitea was released in v1.7 and includes amongst other new features a user action heatmap similar to the one that can be found on GitHub. It also comes with review summaries at the bottom of pull requests, approval limitations to branch protections, and a way to list all open tasks for a milestone. Other than that the developers got rid of some security issues, so an update seems sensible.

Gitea is a MIT-licensed fork of the Gogs project, which is written in Go and can therefor run anywhere the language can compile for. With low minimum requirements it offers an interesting choice for resource-limited hardware.  

GNU Bison

The team behind the general-purpose parser generator GNU Bison just celebrated the third minor release of the 3.x series, which finally offers official support and documentation for the %nterm feature. Bison 3.3 lets users annotate rules with the number of expected conflicts,  C++ parsers make use of noexcept/constexpr and include genuine symbol constructors.