Version 5 of Apple’s Swift language used for iOS and MacOS application development will arrive in late 2018 with ABI (application binary interface) stability in the standard Swift library a primary focus—delaying a feature originally intended for the upcoming Swift 4 release.Locking down the ABI iin Swift 5 will mean any future compiler versions can produce binaries that conform to the stable ABI. “Once an ABI is stable, it tends to persist for the rest of the platform’s lifetime due to ever-increasing mutual dependencies,” according to Apple documentation.[ Download InfoWorld’s essential guide to microservices and learn how to create modern web and mobile applications that scale. | Cut to the key news and issues in cutting-edge enterprise technology with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ]This stability only affects invariants of externally visible public interfaces and symbols. Internal conventions, symbols, and layouts can keep changing without … [Read more...]

Microsoft’s Visual Studio leads the way in desktop IDE (integrated development environment) popularity, with Eclipse close behind, according to PYPL’s August index of IDE popularity. Android Studio was a distant third.Visual Studio takes a 22.4 percent share in this month’s index. Eclipse follows with a 20.38 percent share. Much further back was Android Studio, with a 9.87 percent share. “It’s surprising how a couple of IDEs have about half the popularity,” PYPL’s Pierre Carbonelle said.[ Also on InfoWorld: 6 best JavaScript IDEs and 10 best JavaScript editors. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's App Dev Report newsletter. ]The index is based on an analysis of how often IDEs are searched on in Google, similar to PYPL’s monthly language popularity index. The more searches for an IDE, the more popular it is presumed to be. The 10 most popular IDEs for August: Visual Studio, 22.4 percent Eclipse, 20.38 Android … [Read more...]

With the newest Docker Enterprise Edition, you can now have Docker clusters composed of nodes running different operating systems.Three of the key OSes supported by Docker—Windows, Linux, and IBM System Z—can run applications side by side in the same cluster, all orchestrated by a common mechanism.[ What is Docker? Linux containers explained. | Go deeper with InfoWorld’s beginner’s guide to Docker. ]Clustering apps across multiple OSes in Docker requires that you build per-OS images for each app. But those apps, when running on both Windows and Linux, can be linked to run in concert via Docker’s overlay networking.New APIs also allow cluster configuration to be automated.Docker Enterprise Edition also introduces secure multi-tenancy. Containers have long spurred concerns about how well-isolated they are from each other, because they operate through a shared operating system kernel. To address such concerns, Docker now offers ways to create … [Read more...]

Today, we launched the new Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform that will fuel the next generation of personalized medicine, product development, energy exploration, weather modeling, and numerous other high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Across virtually all industries, HPC systems give engineers and researchers the tools they need to drive innovation and discovery to solve the big challenges — problems that may have seemed all but unsolvable on yesterday’s systems. The use of HPC to gain actionable insights is fundamental.This march forward to tackle ever-larger problems involves harnessing ever-larger data sets and creates the need for new generations of HPC systems. Today’s HPC users need systems with innovative technologies in compute, memory, fabric, storage, and optimized software that provides balanced, scalable performance and breaks system bottlenecks to unleash the next generation of innovation.That’s the idea behind the new Intel Xeon … [Read more...]

Whenever someone asks me to explain devops, I always start with the same story. It isn’t the usual story about time and money. It’s about people.I used to work on two web applications at a large healthcare organization. Technically speaking, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between them: back-end services, a couple supporting Windows microservices, same data center. Pretty standard.But on deployment Thursdays, the two couldn’t have been more different.[ Discover the power of Bash on Windows. | The power of PowerShell: PowerShell intro for Windows Server admins • PowerShell intro for Exchange admins • Essential PowerShell scripts for security admins • All about PowerShell providers and modules. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's App Dev Report newsletter. ]One side of the house had invested heavily in automation. They had everything under source control. The entire deployment process was planned, scripted and logged. … [Read more...]

Team Synapse is Josh Cohen, Jacob Hoffman, Jordan Hank, and John Morgan, four Stanford computer science majors with a shared interest in using computer science for the social good. Are you interested in contributing? You'll find the Synapse repo on GitHub.  At Synapse, we’ve been developing a “low data” app designed to crowdsource, verify, and redistribute information in the aftermath of a disaster. While our particular use case presented special challenges, like minimizing the size of requests and the number of round trips required to fetch new information, many of our goals were the same as for any large-scale mobile web application.Along with a scalable, cloud-based back end, we wanted a stack that would allow us to be device agnostic, to plug in information from many different sources, to handle large amounts of data, and to manage requests as simply and efficiently as possible. To meet these goals, we used React Native for the client, Flask for the API, and … [Read more...]

In the current environment of increasingly aggressive malicious actors looking to infiltrate systems for monetary gain, protecting customer data remains at the top of every major corporation’s priority list. As software companies, we are stewards of that data and must ensure our processes and technology are designed correctly to maintain their trust and comply with the regulations set forth in the countries in which we operate—you can never do enough security.Data privacy rules in the U.S. differ from those in the EU. In the US, we have a patchwork of legislation to protect customer data and ensure privacy, including the United States Privacy Act, Safe Harbor Act and HIPAA, which most American CIOs are aware of. The EU, on the contrary, has recently approved centralized, formal rules to apply across its member countries, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which go into effect on May 25, 2018.With the GDPR, companies must notify authorities and customers of data … [Read more...]

Google is offering an open source, hardware-accelerated library for machine learning that runs in a browser. The library is currently supported only in the desktop version of Google Chrome, but the project is working to support more devices. The Deeplearn.js library enables training of neural networks within a browser, requiring no software installation or back end. “A client-side ML library can be a platform for interactive explanations, for rapid prototyping and visualization, and even for offline computation,” Google researchers said. “And if nothing else, the browser is one of the world’s most popular programming platforms.”[ Learn how to write apps that take full advantage of machine learning: Data in, intelligence out: Machine learning pipelines demystified • Google’s machine-learning cloud pipeline explained • R and Python drive SQL Server 2017 into machine learning. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with … [Read more...]

Data scientists are in high demand, and this skills shortage looks to continue for the next few years. According to a study by IBM, by 2020 the number of annual job openings for all data savvy professionals in the United States will increase from 364,000 openings to 2,720,000. Furthermore, according to the study, the annual demand for the fast-growing new roles of data scientist, data developers, and data engineers will reach nearly 700,000 openings by 2020.Many companies find themselves searching for qualified candidates that can meet the business’s technical demands. However, just because a person technically fits the criteria, it does not necessarily mean they will make a strong team member. Human Resource directors should watch out for other traits in data scientists as well.Though hiring data scientists can take time—it takes 53 days on average to fill an analytics manager position in professional services—it is worth finding a good fit. Here are five … [Read more...]

FlickrBy Paul Miller, Vice President of Marketing, HPE Software-defined and Cloud GroupThere have been six thrilling seasons of Game of Thrones, and now, after what feels like the longest wait, season seven is finally here. Throughout the show and especially in this season, we’ve seen many families forging alliances, albeit shaky alliances at best, to meet common goals and increase their power.What does this vastly popular franchise about skems, politics, ice zombies, and dragons have to do with modern IT infrastructure? Despite modern IT being filled with all-in-one products that can improve different factors of the datacenter on their own, it is also beneficial for these solutions to be used simultaneously in the right deployment for the benefit of the datacenter.Historically, IT has leveraged multiple, separate products in one datacenter. But with the rise of huge challenges like Big Data and the pressure of the modern, faster-paced world, those separate products aren’t … [Read more...]

Vacations are over, school is about to start, and people are starting to think about what to do in the four months until the end of the year. In IT, that means driving success in the cloud.Many IT manages have been incentivized with impending deadlines for shutting down enterprise data centers, migrating applications, and converting data from the enterprise to the cloud data conversion projects. It’s all a bit overwhelming. But there are two things you must do before 2017 is over.[ What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know now. | Also: InfoWorld’s David Linthicum explains what exactly is edge computing. ]1. Think security—yes, againWhen considering the public cloud, security should be systemic to everything you do. This includes when encryption, key management, and the use of identities. However, most enterprises moving to cloud have no real definition of their security strategy, not to mention policies or the selection of enabling technology.All is not … [Read more...]

Microsoft’s .Net development platform has been around a long time now as the heart of the company’s development tool and platform strategy. Having begun life as a Windows-only tool that brought new languages and methodologies to the platform, it’s grown to become a cross-platform environment that supports everything from wearables to walls and on into the cloud..Net has long had cross-platform ambitions, starting with the release of the educational Rotor runtime and tools back in 2002 under a noncommercial shared-source license, and continuing with its sadly undelivered plans for the cross-platform WP/E, the .Net runtime that became Silverlight.[ All it needed was tooling, APIs, libraries, and docs: Microsoft .Net Core is finally ready for prime time. | .Net Framework or .Net Core? Learn when to use which. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's App Dev Report newsletter. ]Xamarin’s Mono offered an open source .Net for Linux built to ECMA … [Read more...]

Amazon Web Services has joined the “Anyone-but-AWS” club, pledging its support to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to better align with the Kubernetes crowd. It’s not as if the cloud giant had much of a choice: As much as AWS wanted to ignore Kubernetes into obsolescence, the gravitational pull around Kubernetes is simply too strong. Although most people view the CNCF announcement as a big endorsement for Kubernetes, AWS has been far cagier, offering precious little information on what it plans to do.The big question is just how far Amazon will go to support the open source project voted most likely to “take down AWS,” as WS02 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana‏ said. Here is what AWS must do: Build a Kubernetes service.[ Are you ready for the container invasion? Learn how to get started with Kubernetes. | Keep up with the latest developments in cloud computing with InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing newsletter. ]Rumors have been swirling that AWS intends … [Read more...]

Vacations are over, school is about to start, and people are starting to think about what to do in the four months until the end of the year. In IT, that means driving success in the cloud.Many IT manages have been incentivized with impending deadlines for shutting down enterprise data centers, migrating applications, and converting data from the enterprise to the cloud data conversion projects. It’s all a bit overwhelming. But there are two things you must do before 2017 is over.[ What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know now. | Also: InfoWorld’s David Linthicum explains what exactly is edge computing. ]1. Think security—yes, againWhen considering the public cloud, security should be systemic to everything you do. This includes when encryption, key management, and the use of identities. However, most enterprises moving to cloud have no real definition of their security strategy, not to mention policies or the selection of enabling technology.All is not … [Read more...]

In a previous post, I described devops as an investment in team happiness. It can mean actually looking forward to deployments, rather than fearing the Thursday Night of Dread.In particular, I’ve found three specific devops practices that go the farthest in boosting team morale:Fast feedbackDevelopers feel most engaged when they know they’re building something that works and adds value. You achieve this by creating a tight feedback loop, using test-driven development. Before you write a line of code, you define the criteria for success and create an automated test suite to verify you’ve hit your goal.[ Are you ready for the container invasion? Learn how to get started with Kubernetes. | Keep up with the latest developments in cloud computing with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing newsletter. ]You have to commit—really commit—to automation and telemetry. People sometimes claim they’re doing test-driven development when they’re actually relying on … [Read more...]

AWS launched Amazon Macie today, a service that leverages machine learning to help customers prevent inadvertent exposure of sensitive data and unauthorized access to data in Amazon S3. The company said Amazon Macie will support additional AWS storage services later this year. Inside the company’s S3 (Simple Cloud Storage Service) platform, Amazon Macie will use natural language processing to discover and classify sensitive data, looking at factors such as personally identifiable information, private keys, and credit card information. The Macie service will also continuously monitor data access for unusual activity. Anomalies will trigger alerts to a customer’s security team, Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at AWS, said.[ What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know now. | Also: InfoWorld’s David Linthicum explains what exactly is edge computing. ]Macie will help users understand other risks associated with data as well, providing … [Read more...]

AWS launched Amazon Macie today, a service that leverages machine learning to help customers prevent inadvertent exposure of sensitive data and unauthorized access to data in Amazon S3. The company said Amazon Macie will support additional AWS storage services later this year. Inside the company’s S3 (Simple Cloud Storage Service) platform, Amazon Macie will use natural language processing to discover and classify sensitive data, looking at factors such as personally identifiable information, private keys, and credit card information. The Macie service will also continuously monitor data access for unusual activity. Anomalies will trigger alerts to a customer’s security team, Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at AWS, said.[ What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know now. | Also: InfoWorld’s David Linthicum explains what exactly is edge computing. ]Macie will help users understand other risks associated with data as well, providing … [Read more...]

“Silos build the wall in people’s minds and tie the knots in their hearts,” writes Pearl Zhu in IT Innovation: Reinvent IT for the Digital Age.Nutanix and other technology vendors popularized the concept of hyperconvergence—combining compute and storage in the same box—in an attempt to do away with silos in virtualization environments.For virtualization workloads, hyperconvergence is also extending into backup. By 2020, 30 percent of organizations will have replaced traditional backup applications with storage- or hyperconverged integrated systems for the majority of backup workloads, according to a 2017 Gartner study.[ 4 top disaster recovery packages compared. | Backup and recovery tools: Users identify the good, bad, and ugly. ]The technology of hyperconvergence isn’t as important as its value—horizontal scaling even as data continues to grow in the enterprise.Much in the same way hyperconvergence has transformed storage for virtual … [Read more...]

Microsoft’s .Net Core 2.0, an upgrade to the company’s open source, cross-platform implementation of .Net, is becoming available today. The new release includes improvements intended to make .Net Core easier to use. It also conforms to the .Net Standard 2.0 specification designed to facilitate code sharing among .Net Framework, .Net Core, and Xamarin.The .Net Core framework can be used to build web applications and services that run on Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Ease of use improvements in .Net Core 2.0 include making the dotnet restore command (used to install project dependencies and other tasks) implicit for commands like run, build, and publish that require it.[ All it needed was tooling, APIs, libraries, and docs: Microsoft .Net Core is finally ready for prime time. | .Net Framework or .Net Core? Learn when to use which. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ]Version 2.0 also introduces an opt-in mode … [Read more...]

There is a great deal of interest from those with traditional IT skills—such as enterprise architects, developers, and networking engineers—to steer themselves into a cloud computing career that will not only provide job protection, but pay better as well.However, the path to cloud computing riches is not that clear for most.[ What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know now. | Download the public cloud megaguide PDF: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Joyent compared. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ]The good news: There is a path for many IT pros into the cloud. This article shows you how to map a path to those jobs from your current state if you are an enterprise architect, database admin, application developer, system admin, test-and-acceptance engineer, or networking engineer.Enterprise architect: the path to the cloudAs an example, the role of an enterprise architect is pretty general in terms of technology and … [Read more...]