Is summer a silly season for dev news? No chance! To keep you up to date with the latest developments in the world of containers and application infrastructure, here’s a quick look at what has happened outside of our headlines in the past few days.
Lua updates garbage collection in 5.4 release
Version 5.4 of programming language Lua is now available to download. Amongst other things, the current release introduces a new generational mode for garbage collection (always good to keep interruptions to a minimum), to-be-closed variables, and new semantics for the integer for loop to the language. A warning system and debug information about function arguments and returns are also part of the update, making bugs in Lua code easier to catch and mitigate.
AWS introduces new tool to get Java and .NET devs into its cloud
Developers of Java and .NET applications with trouble getting their creations containerised can now try their luck with brand new AWS App2Container. The just announced command line tool supposedly “discovers applications running on a server, identifies their dependencies, and generates relevant artifacts”. Relevant in this case means to Amazon application files and folders, Dockerfiles, container images in Amazon Elastic Container Registry, ECS Task definitions, Kubernetes deployment YAML, CloudFormation and AWS Codepipeline templates, making it clear that the tool is mainly about getting more apps onto AWS.
To get started, IAM permissions have to be set to allow the tool to interact with other services. Other than that AWS CLI, Docker, and Powershell 5.0+ for ASP.NET applications have to be installed. App2Container itself is free, though – as usual – usage of other AWS services has to be paid.
OpsRamp summer release provides multi-cloud insight
IT operation management platform OpsRamp has received its summer update and now includes additional automation capabilities as well as synthetic and multi-cloud monitoring. While the term sounds a bit weird, synthetic monitoring is simply supposed to simulate how a user would interact with an application to make sure everything works as expected and give devs a chance to catch (and resolve) performance issues early on.
News in the automation category meanwhile include a central spot to define and manage rules for parsing events and triggering alerts, as well as integrations for AppDynamics, Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager, Sumo Logic, and Sysdig. To answer the growing demand in explainable AI, OpsRamps now also comes with visualisations to explain how a used machine learning algorithm works and help users decide which stage of the process to target with event management policies.
Diamanti polishes app platform for more distributed scenarios
Distributed Application Platform Diamanti Spektra has hit its third major release and has opened the platform for multi-cluster/multi-platform management. In its first iteration the new capability will allow provisioning and administration of Kubernetes clusters across Azure, data centers, or edge locations, with more cloud providers to follow.
Other than that admins now get a way of organising tenants and projects across managed clusters, including functions to customise visibility and reserve resources, and users get an interface to deploy and migrate to other managed clusters and configure disaster recovery measures.
Ch-ch-changes in the NoSQL space
Couchbase’s database as a service product Couchbase Cloud has left the beta stage behind and is now available via AWS. The fully managed product builds on Couchbase Server and is mainly meant to help teams control costs and offer a reliable, highly available way to manage Couchbase clusters from one interface.
Meanwhile competitor Redis had to say goodbye to maintainer Salvatore Sanfilippo, which left the project in a bit of a pickle when it comes to governance. Project leads Yossi Gottlieb and Oran Arga are supposed to carry on the Redis torch, though the change will supposedly see a switch to a more “community-driven” structure.
The project says it will adopt a “light governance” model which comes in the form of a core team taking care of roadmapping, documentation, and release planning. How this will be more community-driven however remains to be seen, since the initial core trio is completely made up of Redis Labs employees.