What’s the point: Red Hat Marketplace, JDK version control, and Visual Studio Codespaces

What’s the point: Red Hat Marketplace, JDK version control, and Visual Studio Codespaces

After keeping its business under its hat for a couple of months, the IBM acquisition and venerable open source software purveyor has now made its open cloud marketplace, Red Hat Marketplace, generally available. The service is operated by parent company Big Blue and is supposed to offer “one curated repository” of tools and services for hybrid cloud computing. 

In Red Hat’s case, the latter is another way of saying OpenShift, since the service really provides a variety of charged software certified to run on the company’s container application platform. At the time of writing, the Marketplace contains 62 products from categories ranging from security and monitoring, to logging, tracing, and machine learning.

Organisations who are interested in a more bespoke offer can choose to set up a private marketplace with Red Hat Marketplace Select. Those can then be made to only include pre-approved services, giving admins a way of creating a sort of self-service portal for development teams with options to track usage and spending across cloud environments. 

JDK transition to Git progressed

Developers looking to help move the OpenJDK forward, no longer need to learn about version control system Mercurial to participate in the project. The transition of the Java implementation’s jdk/jdk and jdk/sandbox repositories to Git, GitHub, and Skara was completed last weekend, with a getting started guide available for those who need help to get going again. 

Users working with the JDK Updates project need to be aware that the associated repositories still use Mercurial, so a quick glance at the Wiki might be helpful. To make things not too complicated, the Skara CLI tooling is promised to be backward compatible with Mercurial, and help is meant to be available via the skara-dev mailing list or IRC.

Say goodbye to your Visual Studio Codespaces

Microsoft is ending its Visual Studio Codespaces experiment and looks to consolidate the in-browser IDE formerly known as Visual Studio Online with GitHub Codespaces. VS Codespaces will be retired in February 2021, though current users still can create new plans and codespaces until 20 November. 

Self-hosting, which some organisations saw as a major selling point of VSC, isn’t in the cards for GitHub Codespaces, and neither is a way to migrate codespaces set up with the VS flavour to GitHub, meaning that they have to be recreated from scratch. However, GitHub Codespaces is still in limited public beta, which means VSC users might have to wait a while until they are added to the club and are really able to access the alternative offering anyway. 

The move to axe the Visual Studio product is the result of confusion amongst users, who found the “distinct experiences” tricky to handle. Since GitHub also belongs to the Microsoft family, the merger will help save resources that potentially could be used to address customer woes quicker.

Speaking of Visual Studio…

Visual Studio Code has gotten a new extension: in-memory data store Azure Cache for Redis is now available as a preview. The addition can be found in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace or via the extension tab and is useful to view, test, and debug caches.