There's a lot of product announcements every week -- and sooner or later, something gets announced that you'll want to know. Every Friday, we'll connect some of these newsy little dots and draw a picture as to what's going on with tech vendors and industry trends.
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8 DevOps Tools That Smoothed Our Migration from AWS to GCP: Tamr
Software company Tamr listed the third party tools they used to move from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud, showing that there are solutions available for companies to manage and migrate between cloud platforms. These type of tools are even more valuable when you are using a hybrid mix of cloud platforms for your organization and need the ability to seamlessly manage those resources through the same third party software/tools.
Deploy a Cloud Video Editing Environment on the AWS Cloud with New Quick Start
If you work with a lot of video and need cloud-based video editing then this new feature on AWS might just be what you are looking for as a service.
This new Quick Start from AWS has been built in conjunction with Teradici, a company that provides PC-over-IP (PCoIP) capabilities, so that you can edit videos on a remote work station without having to transfer large amounts of data to and from your local workstation and the cloud.
This template sets up your new editing environment using AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, an RD Gateway, and AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory. The entire deployment and activation process takes approximately 30 minutes from start to finish.
Microsoft TechSpark Expands to Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming
TechSpark was first announced by Microsoft last fall and is a program to generate jobs in communities in the United States.
This week Microsoft announced that four new locales will be added to the existing Fargo, North Dakota and Northeast Wisconsin regions that were previously announced:
- El Paso, Texas
- Southern Virginia
- North Central Basin of Washington around Quincy
- Cheyenne, Wyoming
TechSpare uses a five pronged approach to learning more about these areas of the country and how technology can be used to bring more opportunity to the residents of these locations. The five areas TechSpark focuses on are:
- Digital Transformation
- Digital Skills and Computer Science Education
- Career Pathways
- Rural Broadband
- Support for Nonprofits
By bringing attention to these areas in these typically remote areas of our country, residents will get an opportunity to gain access to the digital tools that many of us take for granted each day.
Android Security 2017 Year in Review
Android is the most popular mobile platform in the world, but the platform suffers from a lot of fragmentation, in part because many handset models are abandoned by the manufacturers and never updated to the latest major versions of Android, nor do they get routine security updates that are released each month.
However, Google still wants to put services and tools in place to help protect these handsets from malicious downloads that show up in the Google Play Store. This past week they released their annual security report about the platform and how their efforts are paying off.
In this report, they share details about how they are using machine learning to review more than 50 billion apps to identify harmful apps and then using that data to protect the handset from these harmful downloads.
Amazon ECS Supports Container Health Checks and Task Health Management
You can now use Amazon's Elastic Container Service (ECS) to perform health checks on your Docker containers. This update eliminates the need to use load balancing, as was previously required to get container health status and for restarting unhealthy instances.
The HEALTHCHECK command can be used with defined parameters so that each container can be monitored and given a health status based on the overall health of its essentials containers. Access to the health status of your containers is available through the ECS Console or programmatically using the ECS API.
What is Windows Machine Learning and How to Get Started
Microsoft announced several initiatives around the next feature update to Windows 10 that will allow developers to add even more capabilities to their apps.
The ability to use pre-trained machine-learning models will be made available on users' machines so they can use the computing power of the CPU and GPU to perform deep learning and other calculations. This means faster results without having to send data to and from the cloud for processing.
This video from the #ifdev WINDOWS team shows just how straightforward it is to use these models.
