NEW YORK — Nov. 16, 2016 — On Wednesday, during its annual Connect(); developer event, Microsoft Corp. unveiled a series of products and partnerships that strengthen the company’s Azure cloud platform for building intelligent, cross-platform apps and services. Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie detailed significant steps Microsoft is taking to empower the ecosystem by giving developers greater choice in the tools they use — including joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum Member to better collaborate with the open source community, welcoming Google to the independent. NET Foundation, and working with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to enable. NET developers to build apps for more than 50 million Samsung devices worldwide.
Guthrie also demonstrated a preview of Visual Studio for Mac, which enables developers to write cloud, mobile and macOS apps on Apple’s Mac operating system using the popular development environment; a preview of the next version of the company’s flagship SQL Server database with support for Linux, Linux-based Docker containers and Windows-based environments; and a preview of Azure App Service on Linux with support for containers.
“We want to help developers achieve more and capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud-first and mobile-first experiences using the tools and platforms of their choice,” Guthrie said. “By collaborating with the community to provide open, flexible and intelligent tools and cloud services, we’re helping every developer deliver unprecedented levels of innovation.”
Collaborating with the community
As part of its effort to work more closely with the open source community, Microsoft on Wednesday announced it has joined the Linux Foundation as a Platinum Member. Microsoft’s membership in the Linux Foundation will benefit customers through increased collaboration and innovation among a diverse ecosystem.
“By becoming a Linux Foundation Platinum member, Microsoft is better able to collaborate with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “Microsoft has been a key contributor to many projects, and we see the company intensifying its involvement and commitment to open development.”
Microsoft has become an active member of the open source community in part through the popularity of its open source and cross-platform application framework. NET Core. Wednesday’s addition of Google to the. NET Foundation’s Technical Steering Group further reinforces the vibrancy of the. NET developer community as well as Google’s commitment to fostering an open platform that supports businesses and developers who have standardized on. NET.
Other industry leaders are also betting on. NET Core for their own commercial products. On Wednesday Samsung is releasing a preview of its Visual Studio Tools for Tizen. Developers can use the tools to build. NET apps for the Tizen operating system that runs on millions of Samsung TVs, wearables, mobile devices and many IoT devices around the world.
Tools for any developer on any platform
Microsoft highlighted several announcements Wednesday aimed at helping developers use the tools of their choice to create Android, iOS and Windows apps powered by Linux or Windows Server, including the following:
Enabling better apps through the intelligent cloud
Today’s most impactful apps are using data to delight users and drive business outcomes. Microsoft today unveiled unique capabilities and services that make it easier for more developers to turn massive amounts of data into deeply personal, intelligent and predictive applications.
Improving the end-to-end developer experience
Microsoft’s solutions evolve with changing developer needs. Through the Visual Studio family, SQL Server, Windows, Office and Azure, Microsoft is working to provide the most complete platform for application innovation, spanning mobile and cloud.
“Microsoft is transforming the nature of its appeal to developers by broadening its supported platforms,” said Al Hilwa, research director for Software Development research at IDC. “The new partnerships and commitments allow Microsoft to meet developers where they are and multiply its reach and impact with mobile and cloud developers as well as become established in emerging areas such as IoT, data science and cognitive computing.”
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
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Google infrastructure is designed to ensure that information is secure throughout its entire lifecycle. Security within Google infrastructure encompasses several layers and concerns the deployment of services, the storage of data, inter-process and external communications, up to operational concerns.
Physical Layer
At the physical layer, security is ensured by:
Service deployment
At the service level, Google does not assume any trust between services running on the same infrastructure. This has a number of important consequences for service identification, authorization, and data privacy and integrity, including the following:
Data storage
Google uses encryption both at the application and the drive level. Indeed, before being stored to disk, data is encrypted using a central key management service that provides audit logs, automatic key rotation, etc. Additionally hard drives and SSDs additionally use hardware encryption and are only reused after a thorough multi-step erase process.
Internet communication
Google infrastructure is isolated from the internet and only a subset of machines are exposed to external traffic. The cornerstone of Google approach is the Google Front End (GFE), which provides a registration and publication services for all internal services that are available on the internet. GFE ensures that TLS termination is handled correctly, enforces best practices, and provides Denial of Service (DOS) protection by acting as a reverse proxy. DOS protection is effectively enforced through a dedicated, central service that oversees all incoming requests at the load balancer and can instruct it to drop or throttle attack traffic.
A key step to secure internet communication is user authentication, that manifests itself through Google login page and is backed by a central identity service. As it may be widely known, Google authentication does not rely only on username and password bu challenges any login attempt for additional information such as the device that is used, its location, etc. For increased security, Google authentication also offers support for two-factor authentication.
Additional aspects of securing Google infrastructure concerns operational security, which deals with how software is created, with protecting employees’ machines and credentials, and protecting against possible threats from insiders and external actor.
A lot more of details are available on Google web site, including a list of pointers to documents covering specific areas in great detail.

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Docker Inc. launched end of last year into public beta its answer to Amazon ECS : an AWS-compatible service for managing and orchestrating Docker containers. Now, Docker for AWS is generally available.
With its public beta announcement, Docker Inc. noted several new enhancements. All container logs are now shipped to AWS CloudWatch for improved aggregation, analytics, reporting and monitoring, reducing the need for using SSH to log into individual hosts. The service also comes with a diagnosis tool, which can be used to facilitate support. Furthermore, a new option allows selection of a broader range of root volumes, which means that host-local SSDs are now available. A demo of Docker for AWS is available.
When InfoQ asked Docker Inc. about how Docker for AWS compares to Amazon’s ECS, Suzanne Panoplos, director of corporate communications, explained:
Docker for AWS is built and shipped by Docker Inc. Releases are synced with regular Docker releases, so with Docker for AWS you can always get the latest and greatest Docker version.
Docker for AWS sets up a standard Docker environment with swarm mode enabled. That means you can use Docker’s built-in secure and high-performance orchestrator, without extra configuration steps. Docker with swarm-mode capabilities is available for use on any infrastructure. ECS uses its own scheduler designed for use only in an AWS environment. ECS uses different tools than what those developing with Docker are used to: e.g. to deploy apps with ECS, you cannot use `docker` or `docker-compose`, but have to use the ECS CLI which doesn’t support the same things as the open-source Docker tools.
At the time of writing, Amazon ECS supports versions of Docker up to 1.12.6 , although the latest stable release of the Docker Engine at the time of writing is 1.13.0.
Although Docker for AWS is a managed service, it provides the full breadth of the Docker CLI (via SSH). Amazon ECS may require significant effort to implement any scheduling beyond the rudimentary. To address this shortcoming, Amazon recently introduced Blox , a scheduling framework for ECS. Blox ships with two components, a daemon-scheduler, which executes a task on every container, and a cluster-state-service, which monitors an SQS queue for CloudWatch events emitted from ECS and provides convenient, current state for scheduler components through a REST API. This provides the foundation for building more complex scheduling capabilities across the cluster.
However, Docker does not plan to add support for Blox in Docker for AWS. According to Panoplos, “Docker for AWS uses Docker’s built-in swarm-mode orchestration and scheduling and has been developed based upon the feedback and requirements of our millions of users.” Instead of support for Blox, Docker has been collaborating with Amazon on decoupling its core container runtime, containerd , which it hopes will be used by Blox in the future.
Before its GA release, the public beta announcement was a follow-up to Docker’s previously announced private beta program for Docker for AWS, which integrated with AWS Elastic Load Balancing and EC2 Security Group and KeyPair security features.

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Microsoft has crossed the $500 billion mark in terms of market value after having last attained it nearly 17 years ago. The company beat Wall Street’s expectations again for seven out of the last eight quarters owing to strong growth in cloud services and Office.
Previously, the Redmond company had reached the milestone back in March 2000 with a market cap of over $550 billion when the Internet was still evolving from its early stages. As it stands now, the market cap for the company stands at $510 billion with shares at an all-time high of $65.78, representing a growth of 2.1%.
This growth can be attributed to Satya Nadella, who took over the reins of the company in 2014 when its market capitalization was $315 billion. His « cloud first, mobile first » vision became a mantra for a reinvigorated Microsoft. While he has been criticized for his handling of the phone division , almost every other aspect of the company has witnessed growth with cloud leading from the front. The Surface line, brainchild of former CEO Steve Ballmer, really came into its own under Nadella and made the company exciting again. The company’s acquisition of LinkedIn also took place under Nadella’s watch, which led an analyst to predict that the firm « will be the first ever trillion dollar company ».
Further bolstering Microsoft’s recent performance, RBC Capital Markets analysts wrote:
The corporation still lags its rivals in market cap – Apple ($642 billion) and Alphabet ($570), but it’s a bright outlook nonetheless with 27 of the 37 analysts covering the stock rating it « buy » or higher, two rating it « strong sell », while eight had a « hold » rating.
Source: Reuters

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