Spring Cloud Azure is a framework that provides a way to build cloud-native applications using Azure services. It provides a set of tools and libraries that enable developers to integrate Azure services with their existing applications and take advantage of the cloud for scalability, reliability, and cost savings.

Since both Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL support integration with Azure Active Directory, users can authenticate using Azure AD users, applications, or managed identities.

The company also designed the Azure Developer CLI template for the new version, which enables users to more easily experience PostgreSQL passwordless features on Azure. 

Other updates include the removal of warning logs of Kafka passwordless autoconfigurations and an enhanced token authentication converter and Azure AD Resource Server configurer adapter to accept the custom jwt granted authorities converter.

Microsoft stated that it would continue to focus on adding passwordless features to Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Redis, Azure Service Bus JMS, and other services.

The full details on the new release are available here.

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Users can sign into the Azure portal and search for dev box to begin creating dev boxes for their organization. 

“With Microsoft Dev Box, developers can focus on writing the code only they can write instead of trying to get a working environment that can build and run the code,” Anthony Cangialosi, principal group PM at Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

Dev Boxes are ready-to-code and pre-configured by the team with all the tools that developers need. Developers can also create their own dev boxes whenever they need to switch between projects, experiment on a proof-of-concept, or start a full build in the background.

Dev Box supports any developer IDE, SDK, or tool that runs on Windows. It also supports building cross-platform apps because of Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android. 

“Using Azure Active Directory groups, IT admins can grant access to sensitive source code and customer data for each project. With role-based permissions and custom network configurations, developer leads can give vendors limited access to the resources they need to contribute to the project—eliminating the need to ship hardware to short-term contractors and helping keep development more secure,” Cangialosi added. 

For centralized governance and management, IT administrators can set conditional access policies to ensure that users only access dev boxes from compliant devices while keeping dev boxes up-to-date using expedited quality updates to deploy zero-day patches across the organization. 

Organizations get the first 15 hours of the dev box 8vCPU and 32 GB Memory SKU for free every month, along with the first 365 hours of the dev box Storage SSD 512 GB SKU. 

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The platform currently stands as the second largest cloud offering in the world with 21% market share, following AWS’s 39% as of Q3 2021, according to Statista. It has a faster growth rate than its larger competitor at 59% for Azure and 32% for AWS. 

It offers many features in the data and analytics space, ranging from Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions for data and big data management and analytics, to multiple AI and machine learning offerings, to specialized Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions such as Azure Purview,which is a unified data governance solution that helps users manage and govern their on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS data. 

However, from a PaaS perspective of the cloud, Microsoft Azure is the leader.

“So from a whole cloud point of view, from just moving compute and workloads, Amazon is still the market share leader. But when we look at this from (the standpoint of) developing and running applications, Microsoft is the leader with a little bit more than 25% of market share, followed by AWS at 15%,” said Lara Greden, research director for IDC’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) practice. 

Azure’s expansion is a combination of both people who are already customers as well as more small and medium-sized businesses that are poised to become larger, especially those that are poised to utilize Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures. 

“I think Microsoft Azure really has the kind of leadership to tell people to come here to create the new applications to be a digital-first,” Greden said. 

The cloud in general has reached an inflection point as 75% of companies already have some combination of rehost, replatform, and refactor into the cloud, said Sambit Ghosh, senior vice president of the Microsoft practice at Datavail. Two-thirds of those are most likely lift-and-shift. 

“At this point Azure has definitely been creating and enhancing their cloud-native services in a more accelerated fashion in the last several years,” Ghosh said. 

Ghosh noticed that many customers are running applications in Oracle and are looking to move that into Azure Cloud. 

Now, Azure has opened up support for Linux and open-source technology to meet that need. Azure now offers full support for common Linux distributions, including Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Oracle Linux and CoreOS. The endorsed Linux distributions are created and published by Linux partners for use in Azure environments. 

Platform experience important

In addition to pushing cloud-native, Microsoft Azure offers a plethora of features and integrations to entice people into their platform and to advance the way that people can meet their business goals more efficiently if they’re on the platform already. 

Part of this comes from meeting developers where they already are, whether they’re collaborating on Microsoft Teams – which doubled in usage from April 2020 to 2021 and now has 145 million worldwide users, according to Statista – or by building on the skill sets that many developers already have. 

“Microsoft has the leadership ability there, because so many developers have skills in .NET. And then the integrations can be created in .NET with their integration suite. Now, you don’t just have to have a central team doing it,” IDC’s Greden said. “Integrations with legacy systems continue to be the key enabler in today’s economy and for the foreseeable future.” 

Microsoft is helping companies with integrations by dispersing that key scaling capability among all of their developers, rather than having integrations managed by a central integration team.

“They’re providing that flexibility to customers to meet them in their journey, which I think is definitely a smart move in driving adoption onto the cloud, rather than switching platforms,” Datavail’s Ghosh said. 

Azure includes features like Azure Cosmos DB, which integrates with Azure services and allows users to choose from multiple database APIs including MongoDB, Cassandra API, and many others. 

It also offers plugins for companies that want to run Red Hat or JBoss Enterprise or some other Java apps through the Azure Marketplace.

More people can get their hands on integrations because Azure helps citizen developers utilize integrations through its Power Apps, Microsoft’s low-code offering. 

Microsoft recognized the importance an elastic cost model has in alleviating one of the major concerns of moving the cloud: cost. Power Apps are now available in a pay-as-you go model as of Microsoft’s announcement at its Ignite event in November 2021. 

“[The pay-as-you-go model] basically allows you to take more risks and create more apps, because you’re going to pay the right amount,” Greden said. “Let’s say you have 1,000 users use it once a month; you’re not going to pay the same as somebody who’s having 1,000 users using it every day.”

Microsoft added many new capabilities to Power Apps such as built-in commenting where users can write and share Office-like comments directly inside the authoring canvases of Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate.

Data insights can now be used to discover inefficiencies in workflows and business processes with Process Advisor in Microsoft Power Automate.

AI a heavy emphasis

Azure is putting a heavy emphasis on strengthening its low-code capabilities through AI and its ownership of GitHub, according to Greden. 

“[Azure] is able to take all the data in GitHub and feed that through AI models to be able to do AI pair programming and we’re just at the cusp of what that will enable companies to do,” Greden said. “This is key to Microsoft’s strategy because it enables more people to develop with better quality because quality is still a really big issue when it comes to applications.” 

All of the main AI capabilities that companies seek out have now been bundled into one kind of offering: Azure Applied AI Service,  announced at Microsoft’s 2021 Build event. The service includes Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Form Recognizer, and Azure Immersive Reader, in addition to newer offerings like Azure Bot Service, Azure Metrics Advisor, and Azure Video Analyzer. Azure Bot Service makes it easier to build, test, and publish text-, speech-, or telephony-based bots through an integrated development experience. Azure Metrics Advisor, now generally available, automatically detects and diagnoses issues to minimize downtime.

“There are a lot of custom applications out there. We see companies running certain (electronic medical records systems) like hospital systems running more specific custom .NET applications that they have written. A lot of colleges have a lot of custom (learning management systems) applications that are running. Banking also has a lot of customization. So within that, AI has been something that companies are more and more interested in,” said Errin O’Connor, founder and chief architect for EPC Group and the author of four Microsoft Press books covering Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure.

Embracing data 

O’Connor said that the number one request he is seeing from Azure customers is that they want to move their existing on-premise SQL servers to Azure and then create a data warehouse. 

“Some of the services they’re rolling out around Synapse and Purview are around data governance; that’s all driving and analytics modernization into Azure,” Datavail’s Ghosh said. 

Azure Synapse Analytics was launched in 2019 as a service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. Users can query data on their own terms with either serverless or dedicated options at scale. 

The service provides a unified experience to ingest, explore, prepare, transform, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

“It’s a little strange because you have Power BI and then you have Azure Analytics. But Analytics is more for Big Data,” EPC Group’s O’Connor said. 

This way, users can easily create a holistic, up-to-date map of their data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage and enable data consumers to find valuable, trustworthy data, according to Microsoft in a post.

“We’re seeing a drive for modernizing applications being motivated by companies wanting to leverage data more and more to convert the data into information that they can then leverage to make intelligent decisions,” Datavail’s Ghosh said. “But in order to do that, you need to first start automating some of your processes and taking the data from your business and bringing it into a common data store.”

Hybrid cloud models

Azure is expanding its customizability by embracing hybrid cloud models, and the platform offers ways to accomplish hybrid data integration.   

“I think Microsoft has done a good job of making that key and central to their strategy. Like they recognize that hybrid cloud will include other clouds and it will include people’s own data centers,” IDC’s Greden said. “I think AWS is probably still a little heavy on the single cloud sort of point of view, but the rise of Kubernetes is definitely lending itself to that multiple cloud or data center type of operation.”

For hybrid data integration, Azure includes Azure Data Factory, which enables users to build, manage and run ETL and ELT processes at any scale using code-free interactive user interfaces. This allows for many capabilities to be automated since they are exposed through APIs. 

“They’re releasing Azure Kubernetes Service and other container instances on top of their hybrid offerings, which allows you to bring your applications into Azure Cloud but you’re not locked into Azure Cloud,” Datavail’s Ghosh said. 

Going down the path of a hybrid model and containerization, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Container Apps at Ignite 2021. It functions as a managed serverless container service for developers who want to run microservices in containers without managing infrastructure. 

The service offers full support for Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and scales dynamically based on HTTP traffic or events powered by Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA). 

Security, governance are challenges for some moving to Azure

When it comes to Azure’s security and governance models, some people are still wary of joining Azure for these reasons, according to Errin O’Connor, founder and chief architect for EPC Group and the author of four Microsoft Press books covering Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure.

“When COVID kicked in, people were moving to the cloud like crazy and a lot of people didn’t do it right. So their governance and security model is terrible,” O’Connor said. “There’s just a lack of Azure governance. And there’s typically one or two or five people that know what the hell they’re doing in the company with Azure. And they’re typically so busy that they don’t have time to do much of anything except the task that’s at hand,” O’Connor said. “They’re doing all these great things, but are they really thinking of the 12 or 24 month roadmap?”

At first, it’s most important to align the business needs and then to work around that in building out which Azure features to take on, according to O’Connor. 

“It’s like you have the Honda, the Porsche, and you have the Lamborghini options with Azure. In a lot of cases the Honda’s gonna work just fine. But then you have some CIOs or CFOs that are going to want the Lamborghini option. And so how do you match those together so that regardless of what option they take, it’s still going to flow together and also work via the security model,” O’Connor said. “There are all these event grid services, there’s web functions, functions, API, app logic…you can name all these different features, but I think they really need to dumb down what their services are and make it so that a person that’s been in it for 15 years might know what’s going on.”

When thinking of moving to the cloud, it’s important to first look at one’s existing tech stack and personal skill sets and make the choice around that, according to Datavail’s Ghosh. Other important considerations when moving to Azure would be to do a careful discovery roadmap and planning of the cloud journey and to look at the cost profile. 

“If you’re looking to move to Azure and you do the cloud strategy, the cloud planning, careful thought process and looking at what’s the right thing, what is the right provider for your company, I think the cloud journey itself can be much, much less challenging,” Ghosh said. 

How these two companies rated their Azure journey

Incorporation Insight

The main Azure feature that helped Incorporation Insight, a company that helps customers incorporate businesses, to find success is Azure Stack’s ability to store sensitive data and automatically optimize and process it with Azure Cloud, according to Michael Knight, the company’s co-founder. 

“We opted for Microsoft Azure particularly for its generous features that will enable us to address anticipated data distribution complexities due to the ever changing digital usage of consumers,” Knight said. “Being able to host DevOps public or private cloud interfaces also gives us greater flexibility as a scaling business.”

Knight also said that his company chose Azure because of its budget-friendly subscription model that charges based on consumption and helps save money on IT. Other top features that he found included Azure’s cybersecurity guarantees and multiple compliance provisions.

CTDev 

CTDev, a company that builds custom solutions of various complexity levels in the reinsurance business domain, found that using the Azure DevOps service as a CI/CD managed service provides frees up a lot of value and free-up operation people from managing worker nodes that use nontraditional continuous integration tools like Jenkins.

Viachaslau Matsukevich, a solutions architect at CTDev, said that one can use Azure DevOps as a version control system for storing infrastructure as a code repository. Release management is also greatly implemented here so you can easily track which particular commit was deployed to the end system. Azure DevOps also has great integration with other Azure services.

“Another feature that makes Azure stand out for me is resource groups. It is especially good for (proof of concept) or lab environments where you can clean up everything with a single click and don’t have to worry about some resource leftovers that will cost you money in the future,” Matsukevich  said. “The biggest reason for companies to switch to Azure is their partnership with Microsoft. Also, Microsoft offers great discounts if you already have licenses purchased for MS products like Office or Windows.”

New Azure features

Azure Synapse Analytics service (December 2020)

Azure Synapse Analytics brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It enables users to query data using either serverless or dedicated options at scale.

Azure Applied AI Service (May 2021)

The service brings together Azure Cognitive Services, task-specific AI, and business logic to offer users AI services for common business processes. The Azure Applied AI Services are Azure Video Analyzer, Azure Metrics Advisor, Azure Bot Service, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Form Recognizer and Azure Immersive Reader. 

Azure support for Linux (August 2021)

Azure now supports common Linux distributions and enables users to create their own Linux VMs, deploy and run containers in Kubernetes, or choose from hundreds of pre-configured images and Linux workloads available in Azure Marketplace. 

Azure Purview (September 2021)

This enables users to maximize the value of their on-premises, multicloud, and SaaS data with this unified data governance solution. Users can create a unified map of your data assets and their relationships with automated data discovery and sensitive data classification and get insights. 

Partial document update in Azure Cosmos DB (November 2021)

Azure Cosmos DB Partial Document Update feature (also known as Patch API) provides a convenient way to modify a document in a container. This provides an API for developers, performance improvements, and multi-region writes. 

Azure Container Apps preview (November 2021)

A serverless container service built for microservice applications and autoscaling capabilities without the overhead of managing complex infrastructure. Users can run containers and scale in response to HTTP traffic or a growing list of KEDA-supported scale triggers including Azure Event Hub, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ Queue, MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. 

Ultra disks support on AKS (January 2022)

Azure ultra disks offer high throughput, high IOPS, and consistent low latency disk storage for stateful applications.  Ultra disks are suited for data-intensive workloads.

Azure IoT Edge tools for Visual Studio extension now supports Visual Studio 2022 (January 2022)

Developers can now code, build, deploy, simulate and debug their IoT Edge solutions in Visual Studio 2022. This includes a new Azure IoT Edge project targeting different platforms, a new  IoT Edge module and support of of .NET 6 for the C# module. 

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• Bigger plots
• Plot configuration has been moved to the left side of the tab
• Improvements to lets-plot library graphics 

Additionally, JetBrains Datalore has added transitions from the Visualize tab to Chart cells, allowing users to more easily customize plots and create multi-layered visualizations on them. 

Several other updates have been made including improvements to storage optimization for Reactive mode, hiding cells on a specific worksheet, and rendering of scala-datable. To learn more, visit here. 

Testlio launches fused testing 

Testlio, the network testing organization, recently released fused testing. This type of testing is a combination of expert manual testing and test automation aimed at helping engineering and product leaders meet growing customer demands.

The launch of fused testing includes

• On-demand quality engineers
• Automated testing ecosystem
• Free platform capabilities
• Expanded client services 

This announcement comes on the heels of an influx of Series B funding announced in October as well as an annualized revenue run rate of over $20 million. To learn more, visit here.  

Azure SDK January release 

Microsoft today announced the new Azure SDK release for the month of January. This release brings updates to many libraries, including 

• Azure Container Registry for .NET, Java, and JavaScript
• Azure Functions for .NET
• Azure SDK management libraries for JavaScript/TypeScript 
• Cloud Native Cloud Events with Event Grid for Java

Additionally, stable releases this month include Azure Cosmos DB for Java, Azure Tables for .NET and Java, Azure MonitorQuery for .NET, and several others. This month also brings many beta releases, including Azure Form Recognizer for Java, Identity for Go, and Schema Registry Avro for .NET.

For a full list of releases, see here.  

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In order to do this, the release includes

•  simplification and deep automation of data migration to the cloud from on-premises enterprise data warehouses and Hadoop
• automated migration of legacy data workloads
• over 200 data source connectors to onboard and consolidate data from common enterprise and cloud data sources, and a unified console to design 
• deploy, and orchestrate data and data workloads across multiple data lakes, and cloud data warehouses in hybrid cloud environments. 

Microsoft updates Azure REST API guidelines 

Microsoft recently released major updates to its Azure REST API guidelines. This will help to drive greater consistency across the portfolio of Azure service APIs. This new level of consistency will benefit users that access Azure services through the REST APIs as well as users of Azure SDKs and Azure CLI.

The updated guidelines can serve as a reference when designing any REST API, with a focus on cloud-based applications and services. The new guidelines will help users: create more durable APIs, accelerate development, and yield cleaner, more consistent SDKs, whether the user is updating their existing API or creating a new one.

For more information on the updated guidelines, visit here.

NowSecure announces EAP for its bill of materials for mobile apps tool

 NowSecure announced an early access program for the NowSecure Platform Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). With this, organizations can now gain visibility into the more important components of any mobile app running on iOS or Android.

With the NowSecure Platform SBOM tool, organizations gain visibility into four aspects of the mobile apps they build and use. This allows users to better understand certain supply chain risks. 

The aspects that the platform focuses on include: 

• the list of first-party and third party libraries and frameworks identified as transitive dependencies in the compiled mobile app binary 
• the licenses relevant to each component of the app 
• the list of endpoints and geolocation information for detected data transmission found during dynamic analysis 
• a summary of security vulnerabilities detected while analyzing the app to generate the SBOM.

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Also, CloudNative Cloud Events for .NET version 1.0 has released a new stable version. 

Additional details on all of the highlights, stable releases, and preview releases are available here.

Puppet shares future plans for its developer kit 

Moving forward, the DevX strategy for Puppet is to build a new PDK while maintaining the existing PDK at version 2.x.

Updates to the PDK 2.x will be limited to bug fixes and updates to support the latest Puppet gem, according to Dave Armstrong, a senior software engineer on the DevX team at Puppet in a blog post.

“Since its launch, the PDK has come to support the creation of more than just modules and classes. With each successive addition, the template and the packaging system had to support more dependencies, and these dependencies needed to be monitored and updated in line with Puppet agent support and things like security fixes,” Armstrong added. “This overhead meant the PDK couldn’t move forward quickly in supporting the wealth of content our users wanted.”

F5 announces acquisition of Threat Stack

F5 today announced their acquisition of Threat Stack, a cloud security and workload protection company. This combination will make it easier for users to adopt consistent security in any cloud by enhancing visibility across application infrastructure and workloads. 

Customers will have easy access to real-time threat detection and Threat Stack’s proactive risk identification as well as F5’s application insights and controls, accelerating the delivery of these capabilities.

The acquisition is subject to closing conditions and is projected to close in F5’s first quarter fiscal year 2022.

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It provides developers with streamlined data collection so that they can save time setting up analytics infrastructure and improve the performance of their apps and websites by using the most performant data sources. 

New additions to the toolkit include Analytics.js 2.0, batching for Analytics.js 2.0, Swift and Kotlin libraries, destination actions, and multi-instance destinations. 

Additional details on the new toolkit are available here. 

New Jupyter Notebooks improvements in Azure DevOps

Microsoft announced an enhanced Jupyter experience with Azure DevOps, which allows users to render their .ipynb notebook files directly in Azure DevOps now with an improved viewing experience.

The Jupyter team also added new features to enhance Jupyter Notebook support including Notebook Exports and Function Definition Viewers. 

Also launched is a function definition viewer that allows users to view documentation of a class or method by hovering over it. 

Additional details are available here. 

JetBrains releases EduTools Plugin 2021.8

JetBrains Plugin 2021.8 comes with new improvements for the Codeforces integration, support for Android course creation, and many enhancements and big fixes. 

Starting from EduTools 2021.8, course creators can specify the required plugins for a given course and it is also now possible to create Android courses right inside the IDE. 

JetBrains also announced the 2021.2 versions of PyCharm Edu and IntelliJ IDEA Edu, which include the latest fixes for PyСharm and IntelliJ IDEA, as well as the latest EduTools plugin updates.

Additional details are available here.

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The dtSearch Engine for macOS release candidate adds support for Apple Silicon M1/ARM; the dtSearch Engine developer SDKs for macOS, Linux, and Windows share cross-platform.

The beta also adds Hancom Office HWPX support to the many data types covered by dtSearch’s proprietary document filters.

Postman raises $225 million in Series D funding 

Postman closed a $225 million series D round, bringing its total valuation to $5.6 billion. 

The company said it will use the funding to further its growth and to invest in its community of developers across the globe, support students through innovative API literacy programs, and contribute toward open-source projects to foster a strong and thriving API ecosystem. 

Postman is an API platform that is used by more than 17 million developers and 500,000 organizations worldwide for building and using APIs. 

Apple SharePlay developer updates

SharePlay has been disabled for use in the developer beta 6 versions of iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and tvOS 15, and will be disabled in the upcoming beta 6 release of macOS Monterey.

SharePlay will be enabled for use again in future developer beta releases and will launch to the public in software updates later this fall, according to Apple. 

“We appreciate how many teams have been hard at work building SharePlay experiences and to ensure there is no interruption in your development, we have provided a SharePlay Development Profile which will enable successful creation and reception of GroupSessions via the Group Activities API,” Apple stated in a post. 

AlmaLinux now available on Azure Marketplace

The AlmaLinux OS is now available on the Azure marketplace. Images are available for both Gen1 and Gen2 and are deployable from the Azure Cloud, Azure command-line utility as well as from the marketplace link. 

Aside from images, AlmaLinux announced a worldwide mirror network with Azure regions in order to make the user experience when installing updates or new software better. 

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The update provides automated detection and response capabilities, which allow weaknesses and malicious activity to be discovered before a compromise occurs. 

With the new integrations, developers now have access to simplified CI/CD pipelines and can orchestrate automated deployments across multiple platforms. 

Additional details are available here. 

Emerson launches Plantweb Optics Data Lake 

Emerson announced the launch of its Plantweb Optics Data Lake, which helps manufacturers reduce data complexity.

The new advanced data management solution securely identifies, collects and contextualizes disparate data at scale. This includes data that is often in different formats and siloed across a plant.

“Many legacy systems at manufacturing sites across the world are already over a decade old, and they’re often isolated from each other, impeding teams from effectively accessing data at scale for operational improvements,” said Peter Zornio, chief technology officer of Emerson’s Automation Solutions business. “Aggregating information between systems without disrupting production is extremely complex and difficult. Emerson’s software allows users to securely manage operational data centrally, scale it easily and gain critical insight into their operations at the enterprise level.”

Melissa named leader in Data Quality G2 Grid Report Summer 2021

Melissa has been named a leader for the eighth consecutive time in the Grid Report for Data Quality Summer 2021 on G2, a business solutions review website for its Melissa Clean Suite and Melissa Data Quality Suite.

Some of the highest-rated features for both suites include preventative cleaning, identification and normalization.

Melissa’s Data Quality Suite is a toolkit of on-premise APIs or Web services that can be integrated into webpages, forms and custom applications to provide data verification at point of entry or in batch. The Melissa Clean Suite corrects and appends customer contact data records in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Qumulo on Azure as a Service now available

Qumulo on Azure as a Service is a petabyte-scale file data management platform in the cloud that is offered as a managed service.

“Qumulo on Azure as a Service eliminates the trade-offs customers face in building at scale file based workloads in the cloud. Azure customers can now easily build file data applications with a scalable, enterprise-class and secure platform offered as a fully managed cloud native service,” said Bill Richter, CEO of Qumulo. “With Qumulo’s availability on Microsoft Azure, we can offer ultimate flexibility to run anywhere our customers want and with no need to manage hardware, software upgrades or complicated systems at scale.”

This new offering can scale to multiple petabytes in a single namespace and enable high capacity workloads across any Windows, Mac or Linux device.  

SnapLogic launches certification program 

SnapLogic’s new Enterprise Automation Professional Certification program is aimed at helping customers, partners and developers become experts in utilizing the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform.

“Certification makes it easier for customers and partners to find and select the right integration experts for their SnapLogic implementations. By working with a certified integrator, organizations can rest easy knowing that whomever they choose to work with has been trained on the latest methods and best practices and can help them rapidly see a return on their investment,” said Karthik Bandi, vice president of global field technical operations at SnapLogic.

The SnapLogic integration platform uses AI-powered workflows to automate all stages of IT integration projects whether on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid environments. 

Altova launches MobileTogether 7.3 

Altova announced the release of MobileTogether 7.3, which introduces additional options to help developers monetize the apps they create using MobileTogether and integrate them in other applications.

This includes support for in-app purchases, the ability to embed the MobileTogether Windows client in one’s own Universal Windows Platform application, support for tooltips and more. 

The latest release also introduces support for Android 11 and additional database versions. 

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For those customers who wish to continue using Azul OpenJDK-based distributions, Azul will publish free updates of Azul Zulu builds of OpenJDK, with optional commercial support available through Azul. 

Microsoft Build of OpenJDK will be used for Java 11 and future versions and Eclipse Adoptium’s Temurin will be available for Java 8. 

Additional details are available here. 

Google updates Passes API to store COVID vaccine and testing info on Android devices

Google updated its Passes API to be able to store COVID vaccination and testing information on Android devices. 

Developers from healthcare organizations, government agencies, and organizations authorized by public health authorities to distribute COVID vaccines and/or tests will have access to these APIs to create a digital version of COVID vaccination or test information, according to Google in a blog post. 

Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW source code sold for $5.4 million USD

The original files that contained the source code for the World Wide Web were sold for $5.4 billion offered as an NFT. 

“Until very recently, selling a digital-born artifact was not a possibility, however the advent of NFTs has now made this possible, allowing the buyer to prove that the files on offer here are the original, digital- born manuscript for the greatest and most consequential invention of modern times, direct from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, their creator,” the auction catalogue on Sotheby’s stated. 

NFTs use blockchain technology to ingrain provable scarcity within files, which doesn’t allow it to be infinitely reproducible. 

Additional information on the sale is available here. 

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