Tech News

Microsoft Offers Preview of Azure File Sync and PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell

At the Ignite Conference, Microsoft made two big announcements: public previews for Azure File Sync and PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell.

The PowerShell experience adds an Azure drive (Azure:) to discover and navigate all Azure resources, like filesystem navigation. Azure drive also provides contextual capabilities, such as resource group scoping for Azure PowerShell cmdlets when within the context of a resource group path in the Azure drive.

It also enables interactions with virtual machines (VMs) using PowerShell remoting to enable management of guest VMs. PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell is available as a public preview to showcase these new capabilities.

With Azure File Sync, users can now keep Azure File shares in sync with their on-premises Window Servers. Files are tiered between the on-premises file server and Azure Files. As a result, users can have only the newest and most recently accessed files locally, without sacrificing the ability to see and access the entire namespace through seamless cloud recall. Azure File Sync is available immediately as a preview.

Google Releases Machine Learning Library

The Google PAIR (People + AI Research) initiative has released an open source, WebGL-accelerated JavaScript library for machine learning. The deeplearn.js library requires no installation or back end and runs entirely in the browser.

According to the blog post by Google engineers Nikhil Thorat and Daniel Smikov, "While web machine learning libraries have existed for years, … they have been limited to the speed of JavaScript, or have been restricted to inference rather than training (e.g., TensorFire). By contrast, deeplearn.js offers a significant speedup by exploiting WebGL to perform computations on the GPU, along with the ability to do full backpropagation." The library lets you train a convolution neural network to recognize photos and handwritten digits "all in the browser without writing a single line of code."

The deeplearn.js home page includes links to demos showing deeplearn.js at work on real-world machine learning tasks, such as classifying photos.

VMware Brings Its Cloud to AWS

At the VMware World Conference, VMware announced the arrival of VMware cloud to AWS. VMware will be selling and supporting the service as an on-demand, elastically scalable cloud service. This announcement is the culmination of the strategic partnership that the two companies forged last October.

"VMware and AWS are empowering enterprise IT and operations teams to add value to their businesses through the combination of VMware enterprise capabilities and the breadth and depth of capabilities and scale of the AWS Cloud, providing them a platform for any application," said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware.

This service is initially available in the US West (Oregon) region through VMware and members of the VMware Partner Network.

The VMware Cloud on AWS supports custom-sized VMs to run any OS that is supported by VMware by using single-tenant, bare-metal AWS infrastructure.

"Each SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center) consists of 4 to 16 instances, each with 36 cores, 512GB of memory, and 15.2TB of NVMe storage. Clusters currently run in a single AWS Availability Zone (AZ) with support in the works for clusters that span AZs. You can spin up an entire VMware SDDC in a couple of hours and scale host capacity up and down in minutes," said AWS in a blog post.

The company also added that VMware Cloud on AWS runs directly on the physical hardware to avoid nested virtualization, while still taking advantage of a host of network and hardware features designed to support our security-first design model.

The entire stack of AWS compute, storage, database, analytics, mobile, and IoT services can be accessed directly from applications.

Microsoft is Building a Programming Language for Quantum Computers

At the Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced that later this year it will release a new quantum computing programming language that is very tightly integrated with Visual Studio. The language is designed to work on both a quantum simulator and a quantum computer.

Microsoft has been working on quantum computers for decades. The company hired Michael Freedman some 20 years ago to continue his work on topology. Microsoft's quantum computing work is based on the work Freedman has done over years. Eventually Microsoft has started to see some results of the work it has been doing for ages.

Krysta Svore, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, said that a programming language that can run in a simulated environment will help people understand how to harness quantum power for different types of problems.

One big difference between the work Microsoft is doing on quantum computing and the rest of the industry is that the company doesn't want to build a quantum computer for display in labs. Microsoft wants to deliver a full-fledged topological quantum computing system.

According to Allison Linn, senior writer, editor, and multimedia storyteller at Microsoft, it's a system that includes everything from hardware capable of consistently running calculations that require tens of thousands of logical qubits to a complete software stack that can program and control the quantum computer.

FDA Recalls Nearly Half a Million Pacemakers Over Security Concerns

The Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning calling for a voluntary recall of more than 465,000 pacemakers implanted in patients.

In a review, the FDA found potential vulnerabilities in Abbott's (formerly St. Jude Medical's) RF-enabled implantable cardiac pacemakers. Affected devices include Accent, Anthem, Accent MRI, Accent ST, Assurity, and Allure.

If the vulnerabilities were exploited, an attacker could gain access to a patient's device and then hurt the patient by either depleting the battery or triggering fatal pacing.

What's the fix? A firmware update patches these vulnerabilities; however, considering the nature of the device, you can't update it at home. The FDA said that the update requires an in-person patient visit with a health care provider.

The good news is that they don't have to operate on the patient to take out the device. The patch will take place wirelessly in about three minutes.

"During this time, the device will operate in backup mode (pacing at 67 beats per minute), and essential, life-sustaining features will remain available. At the completion of the update, the device will return to its pre-update settings," the FDA said in its advisory.

The firmware update was made available on August 29, 2017. All Pacemakers manufactured after this date will have the patch preloaded in the device and will not need the update.

If you, your friends, or family members have a pacemaker implant, please check the advisory to stay safe.

Microsoft Brings Azure App Service to Linux

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure App Service on Linux and Web App for Containers. The service allows developers to build, deploy, and scale applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Azure Web Apps were initially announced in 2015, without support for Linux.

"With this, we now offer built-in image support for ASP.NET Core, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby on Linux, as well as provide developers an option to bring their own Docker formatted container images supporting Java, Python, Go, and more," said Nir Mashkowski, partner director of Program Management, Azure App Service.

All developers need to do is select the stack that apps need and the application environment will be set up automatically. Microsoft will handle the maintenance for you, including Linux OS patching and load balancing.

The service comes with built-in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities and scalability. Developers can easily integrate with GitHub, Docker Hub, or Azure Container Registry and then achieve continuous deployment with Jenkins, VSTS, or Maven.

Deployment slots enable developers to deploy to targeted environments and easily move from staging to production. You can easily schedule tests and, if something doesn't work as expected, roll back to previous working versions with zero downtime. Developers can easily scale their applications, either on demand or automatically.

If developers want more control over the application, they can SSH into the application and get complete remote access.

In addition to Web Apps for Linux, developers can use the service to deploy containerized applications to production very quickly.

"Simply push your container image to Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry, or your private registry, and Web App for Containers will deploy your containerized application and provision required infrastructure," said Mashkowski.

OpenStack Pike Is Released

The OpenStack Foundation has announced the 16th version of OpenStack, code-named Pike. The foundation recently moved the fully open source private cloud platform to a six month release cycle.

In an interview, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, told us that OpenStack is experiencing wide adoption and unique use cases all around the globe. The software now powers 60 public cloud availability zones and more than a thousand private clouds running across more than five million physical cores.

Bryce also added that this release reflects the improvements that the community wanted in the software, especially a modular approach that enables users to use a mix of open source technologies with OpenStack.

The foundation said in a press release that OpenStack's modular architecture also allows you to pick the functionality you need – whether that's bare metal or block storage provisioning – to plug in to your infrastructure stack. This composability – which makes possible use cases like edge computing and network functions virtualization (NFV) – is a marked distinction from proprietary on-premises offerings, or even earlier versions of OpenStack.

The release is available for free from the OpenStack Pike page.

The OpenStack community will be meeting in Sydney, Australia, in November for the OpenStack Summit to see the release in action through demos. Attendees from more than 50 countries will gather to hear speakers from American Airlines, China Railway, Saudi Telecom, Commonwealth Bank, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Sprint, Adobe Marketing Cloud, and Tencent talk about multicloud strategies, cost savings, and increasing agility with OpenStack. An ADMIN/Linux Pro Magazine news editor will be on-site to cover the event for readers.