What’s the point: Facebook SDK, Grafana, DigitalOcean, GNU nano, Istio, OpsRamp, and Elastic

What’s the point: Facebook SDK, Grafana, DigitalOcean, GNU nano, Istio, OpsRamp, and Elastic

Facebook has released version 9.0 of its series of SDKs to let app developers integrate all sorts of platform features into their creations. Amongst the new features is a new limited data login mode to keep Facebook from using iOS login events for target advertising. The company also announced its plan to deprecate all prior SDK versions over a two year period ending on 19 January, 2023. Future versions are planned to follow an annual release cycle, with the plan to match the number of the latest Graph API version.

Next Grafana release now underway

The Grafana project has pushed a first beta for version 7.4 of its visualisation tool into the open. Teams interested in the project now have a chance to test features for visualising directed graphs, new transformations, content security policy support, and server side expressions to provide feedback before the final release.

DigitalOcean App Platform introduces GitLab integration

GitLab users wanting to deploy code on Digital Ocean’s platform as a service offering App Platform can now do so via a new integration. Next in line to get connected is BitBucket, while GitHub users were able to deploy to DOAP for a while already.

Rebecca lets nano users to suppress title bar

Version 5.5 of text editor GNU nano is now available. The release, which has been given the code name Rebecca, includes an option to suppress the title bar and just show some basic editing information at the bottom, as well as a way of changing the prompt bar’s colour. Other changes help highlight search results, and are meant to make toggles more consistent.

Istio 1.7 support ends in February

The team behind service mesh Istio has reminded users of version 1.7 of the latter’s end of life next month. This follows Istio’s practice of supporting LTS releases for three more months once a new LTS version has been made available. Since this was the case in November, support for Istio 1.7 will cease on 19 February, 2021.

OpsRamp expands portfolio to support work from home scenarios

OpsRamp, a provider for IT operations management tools, has introduced two more integrations for its software as a service platform. OpsRamp NetFlow Monitoring and OpsRamp UC Monitoring have been developed to get informed about network issues and problems in user communication systems early. Data collected by the modules are also meant to be helpful during capacity planning and incident analysis.

Elasticsearch licensing changes, part II

Elastic CEO Shay Banon has taken to his company blog again to make sure there’s no doubt about who’s to blame for the recent change in licensing. According to Banon, AWS and Amazon Elasticsearch Service “have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse. If we don’t stand up to them now, as a successful company and leader in the market, who will?” According to Banon, such “not OK” things include forking the Elasticsearch repo and providing the project as a service using the Elasticsearch trademark.

He also writes Elastic has tried “every avenue available including going through the courts” before switching the license in the hopes that this will help the company regain its focus on product building instead of being distracted by litigation. The move was met with both understanding and puzzlement in the community, but probably more than anything it again brought to light problems with the clarity of both the SSPL and Elastic’s own licence. 

To change that, the latter might therefore become simplified at some point in the future, as Banon writes in another blog entry. In the meantime, he came up with the following clarification, “Our on-prem or Elastic Cloud customers will not be impacted. The vast majority of our users will not be impacted. The folks who take our products and sell them directly as a service will be impacted, such as the Amazon Elasticsearch Service.”

Meanwhile Logz.io founder Tomer Levy voiced his own concerns about the step, which he sees as opportunistic given Elastic’s sizeable business. As a consequence, Logz.io plans to “launch a true open source distribution for Elasticsearch and Kibana, along with a few partners” in the next couple of weeks.