Break point: Selenium, Ray, TriggerMesh, Ambassador, and Falco

Break point: Selenium, Ray, TriggerMesh, Ambassador, and Falco

Browser automation tool Selenium has reached its fourth major release this week. Popular amongst web site testers, the update introduces relative locators to specify where on the page an element can be found using natural language. It also adds ways to handle “basic” and “digest” authentication and network interception, and includes a rebuilt Selenium Grid that promises to be more secure and easier to manage.

Ray 1.7 sees Workflows and RaySGD moving into alpha

Ray, an open-source framework for building distributed applications from the machine learning space, recently hit version 1.7. The update is quite comprehensive, but features highlights such as major enhancements to the C++ API, which can be used to build distributed systems in C++. It also sees version 2 of the distributed deep learning library RaySGD moving into alpha — complete with JSON and Tensorboard callbacks, fault tolerance, and checkpointing support. 

Work on application flow component Ray Workflows progressed far enough to justify alpha status as well, while Ray Client was modified to allow multiple client connections from one driver and the forwarding of ray.init() arguments to a remote server.

TriggerMesh open sources Cloud Native Integration Platform

It’s KubeCon week, so naturally cloud-native news is especially prevalent. Amongst the more noteworthy announcements was TriggerMesh’s open-sourcing of its Cloud Native Integration Platform, a set of APIs and tooling to build event-driven applications. The project has been licensed under the Apache License v2 and comes with a catalogue of event sources that is meant to “provide […] the capability of Google EventArc and AWS EventBridge combined and on-premises”. 

TriggerMesh co-founder Sebastien Gosguen explained the move with his deep-rooted belief that the open-source development and distribution model is the best way to deliver enterprise cloud software. The project is meant to be completely open-source, though TriggerMesh plans to offer commercial support, hosting services, and third-party integrations for non-open-source projects to stay solvent.

Ambassador Cloud gets Developer Edition

The team behind the Ambassador Cloud used this week’s heightened interest levels to release the Developer Edition of its product into general availability. According to Ambassador Labs CEO Richard Li, this means that individual developers or small teams now get to set up a “‘developer control plane’ to code, ship, and run apps using Kubernetes”. Stand-out feature of the new edition seems to be a UI including a visualisation of complex Kubernetes environments, suggestions for important actions, and helpers to automate tasks. Pricing is said to start at $30 per month (prepaid annually).

Falco starts plugins early access

Cloud-native runtime security project Falco started the early access phase of its upcoming plugin feature this week. Plugins are described as shared libraries to extend Falco’s functionality and are expected to be ready for general use in early 2022. Interested users who also happen to work with AWS Cloudtrail can take the newly available Cloudtrail plugin for a spin, or check the developer’s guide to get started implementing their own ones.