What’s the point: DC/OS, OpenAI API, OpenNebula, and DataStax Vector

What’s the point: DC/OS, OpenAI API, OpenNebula, and DataStax Vector

So much news, so little time – here’s a quick round-up of recent small but important updates in the worlds of containerisation, DevOps and machine learning, to make sure you’re not missing anything vital.

OpenAI releases “text in, text out” interface

AI research and deployment company OpenAI continues on its quest to make some money, presenting those interested in making machine learning part of their product with an API for text-related tasks. According to the announcement post, the interface will “return a text completion, attempting to match the pattern you gave it” and also offer ways to provide training datasets to improve performance for special use-cases. 

Typical scenarios in which to use the API include text summarisation, automated content generation, or sentiment analysis. Users looking to profit from OpenAI’s experience can now apply to get free beta-testing access. The final pricing model isn’t set yet, but should be worked out in about two months to help the company “cover costs”. To keep those low, the company apparently also relies on investor Microsoft, since the API website sports a “powered by Microsoft Azure” label.

DC/OS pushes out first minor release of the 2.x series

D2iQ, the company formerly known as Mesosphere, recently presented the 2.1 update to its distributed operating system DC/OS, featuring improvements in virtual networking and, as it’s mostly aimed at enterprise customers, security.

Since the 2.0 release last October, D2iQ has been busy adding ways to set limits to the amount of CPUs or memory used by container orchestration platform Marathon, and fitting in an alternative to DC/OS Overlay for virtual networking, which provides network policy setting amongst other things. The new version also comes with the capability to allow jobs based on the Metronome framework to join container networks, and the option to add a custom non-CA certificate the Admin Router can use for external clients that seek to connect to a cluster.

Before updating, a quick look at the release notes is advised, since some adjustments in Marathon could lead to old setups not properly working anymore. Other breaking changes include a new format for admin router access logs, and the removal of a couple of packages.

OpenStack competitor OpenNebula lets off Firework

OpenNebula 5.12, code name “Firework”, is now ready to be downloaded. The cloud management platform now permits direct execution of Docker Hub images, integrates with AWS’ virtualization project for serverless computing Firecracker, and includes a new monitoring subsystem. The latter is supposedly able to scale better and have less problems with hypervisors at edge locations, which is something that seems to become more and more important. A full list of improvements, including better security features, can be found on the project’s blog

DataStax starts AIOps beta for Cassandra users

Distributed database-provider DataStax has taken a step towards process automation, by announcing the private beta of Vector. The new service is meant to help operators of Apache Cassandra clusters become aware of misconfigurations and similar issues quicker. It does so by “proactively monitor[ing]” the health of a cluster, serving up recommendations which are continuously updated, and providing better visualisations, amongst other things.