What’s the point: Qt, Ruby, GitLab pricing, Databricks, TabNet, Icinga, and Ambassador

What’s the point: Qt, Ruby, GitLab pricing, Databricks, TabNet, Icinga, and Ambassador

Ruby creator promises major release for Christmas

Ruby creator Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto has informed the community around his programming language that the core team decided to make the jump to version 3.0 this year. After mulling over a major release for a couple of years, Matz confirmed in a recent presentation that, “unless something very bad happens”, Ruby 3.0 will become available on December 25, as is tradition in this project. According to him, the language “needs to move forward” which he hopes to achieve with a variety of enhancements in speed, concurrency, and correctness.

Another major release planned for December is Qt 6.0, which just went through a feature freeze for that purpose, which means development of the C++ library is on track to hit the end of year target.

GitLab.com cuts free tier CI/CD minutes

Repository management service and GitHub competitor GitLab.com has spoken of its plans to change the CI/CD offer for free tier users starting on 1 October, 2020. Instead of the current 2000 CI/CD minutes available at this subscription level, devs on the free tier will have to make do with 400 minutes from next month on. According to the company, “98.5% of free users” are below that usage line anyway, so reducing the offer shouldn’t hurt too much, but could help GitLab “to maintain our commitment to offer a free GitLab.com tier”.

Databricks adds terminal to unleash shell-user power

Data analytics tool provider Databricks has added a preview of a web terminal to its platform, meaning to simplify everyday tasks such as library installation, system file editing, and package management. The fully interactive shell is especially aimed at power users, who previously had to resort to workarounds such as using Databricks Notebooks to work their command-line skills.

Apart from that, the company’s Unified Data Analytics Platform for AWS got an upgrade. In this iteration it lets users add their own IP access lists, offers multiple workspaces per account, and features IAM credential passthrough for easy access to other AWS services.

Google fits AI offering with more interpretable approach to deep learning

Google Cloud AI Platform has learned a new algorithm called TabNet. Depending on the task, the deep tabular data learning architecture it entails is meant to perform better than other neural network and decision tree variants on tabular datasets. It’s sequential approach supposedly also helps with interpretability, making it especially useful in finance and insurance applications.

Icinga for Windows team looks into usability for 1.2 release

Monitoring tool Icinga for Windows has reached version 1.2, mainly featuring a trio of PowerShell plugins to compare local machine time with a time server, check the current state of scheduled tasks, and check disk health. The team behind the project has also been busy improving workflows in Windows Terminal, exception handling (mainly through clearer error messages), and performance counter usage

Ambassador API Gateway goes for multi-domain scenarios

The Ambassador API Gateway and Edge Stack are now available in version 1.7. The release allows admins to independently configure domain-level security policies, proxy kubectl exec through the gateway, and configure rate-limit headers. It also adds some new metrics to monitor the project’s control plane and has been upgraded to use Envoy 1.15 under the hood, which should fix some tracing issues amongst other things.