The Apache Mesos project narrowly avoided being retired this week, when members of the Apache community voted to move the code to the Apache Attic, where code goes when it has effectively reached end of life. However, renewed interest from community members in maintaining the project meant that the decision was reversed a few days later.

Apache Mesos is an open-source orchestration platform that began as a project at the University of California, Berkeley. It is a cluster manager designed to allow fine-grained resource sharing across the entire data centre, but has been somewhat marginalised by the meteoric rise of Kubernetes for managing containers.

Okta opens up authentication for all

Okta has launched a new Starter Developer Edition of its identity and access management suite, aimed at helping developers embed authentication, authorisation and user management functions into their applications right from the start. This version provides developers with access to Okta’s customer identity and access management (CIAM) products at no cost for up to 15,000 monthly active users.

Okta said it has also enhanced the platform to make developer onboarding a smoother experience, with richer documentation and sample applications, plus a redesigned Admin Console. New CI/CD capabilities have also been implemented to address identity across the full application development lifecycle. More details can be found on its blog.

CLion 2021.1 released into the wild

JetBrains continues to push out the releases with CLion 2021.1, an update of its cross-platform IDE for C and C++.  This version provides an overhaul for code analysis, allowing it to catch more potential issues and guideline inconsistencies, according to the firm.

In addition to enhancements to the debugging experience for C and C++, CLion 2021.1 introduces updated Rust and Swift support and important changes from the IntelliJ Platform. For those building a Qt-based project in CLion, this release integrates Clazy, a Qt-specific code analyser into CLion’s Clangd-based engine, putting Clazy checks and fixes right in the editor.

Apple adds flexibility to Swift data structures

The Swift language has gained Swift Collections, a new open-source package focused on extending the range of data structures available to Swift developers beyond the Array, Set and Dictionary structures offered by the Swift Standard Library.

Among those included in Swift Collections are OrderedSet, described as a hybrid of an Array and a Set, OrderedDictionary as an alternative to Dictionary when the order of elements is important, while Deque works like an Array, but supports operations to insert and pop elements at both ends. More details are available on the Swift blog.

Microsoft Visual Studio and .Net 6 updates

Microsoft has announced Visual Studio administrator updates coming this month. The firm says it will start publishing administrator updates to Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2019 via Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and the Microsoft Update Catalog during April.

Also announced was the release of .NET 6 Preview 3, with this release dedicated almost entirely to low-level performance features, according to Microsoft. The official release of .NET 6 is slated for November 2021, and this version will be supported for three years as a Long Term Support (LTS) release.