The team behind Red Hat’s IT automation tool Ansible is on track for the 2.10 release on September 22nd, and has just finished work on the base component for the upcoming version. Ansible 2.10 is the first to have the Ansible engine, which is made up of some core programs (ansible-galaxy, ansible-test, etc), a subset of modules and plugins, and some documentation, in a separate ansible-base repository. 

The rest of the plugins and modules have been pushed into a variety of collections, a format for bundling Ansible artifacts. Collections are independently developed and updated, with some sought out ones becoming bundled with ansible-base for the final Ansible package. To make sure moved components won’t break setups, Ansible 2.10 comes with appropriate routing data.

Datadog unleashes additional capabilities on monitoring aficionados

At Datadog’s yearly user conference last week, the monitoring company introduced some additions to its portfolio that are well worth a look. One of the most sought after enhancements seems to be the Datadog mobile app for iOS and Android devices. The application is meant to provide on-call workers with dashboard and alert access. It also allows users to check the new Incidents UI, which grants a central overview of the state of all incidents. Other enhancements to the Datadog platform include investigation dashboards and threat intelligence for Security Monitoring, and compliance monitoring.

AWS pushes quantum computing service into general availability

A good eight month after introducing devs interested in quantum computing to its Braket service, AWS has decided it’s time to make it generally available. The product aims to support researchers by providing them with a development environment “to explore and build quantum algorithms, test them on quantum circuit simulators, and run them on different quantum hardware technologies”. Amazon Braket comes packed with pre-built quantum computing algorithms, though implementing some from scratch is promised to be an option as well, and simulators for testing and troubleshooting different approaches.

Mirantis continues container shopping spree with Lens acquisition

Mirantis, recent home of Docker Enterprise, has continued on its cloud native acquisition journey by buying Kubernetes integrated development environment Lens from its authors. Lens is a MIT-licensed project which was launched in March 2020 and is supposed to run on MacOS, Windows, and Linux. It was originally developed by Kontena, whose team also became part of Mirantis earlier this year. In its announcement, Mirantis promised to keep Lens “free and open source” and invest in the future development of the tool.

Mozilla layoffs supposedly won’t affect Rust development

Lovers of programming language Rust might have started to worry given the string of Mozilla layoffs announced last week. The language team therefore took to Twitter to assure users that Rust “isn’t in existential danger”, ensuring to share more information on the topic in the coming weeks.

DeepMind team open sources JAX helpers

Developers working with just-in-time compiler JAX in their machine learning projects can now add two more helpers to their open-source toolbelt. Optax and Chex both stem from Google’s DeepMind team and are meant to support users in properly using JAX, which funnily enough is also a Google research project. 

Chex includes utils to instrument, test, and debug JAX code in order to make it more reliable. Meanwhile Optax was dreamt up to provide “simple, well-tested, efficient implementations” of gradient processing and optimisation approaches. Both projects can be found on GitHub, where the project’s are protected under a Apache-2.0 License.