Amazon Web Services (AWS) officially joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) last week, two weeks after Microsoft did the same. According to Business Insider, “With Amazon’s membership, CNCF now has the support of all five of the top cloud service providers, which is good news for Kubernetes, a CNCF-managed container project.” Google created Kubernetes, a key tech in its own cloud platform, but offered it up as an open source project in 2014. With growing industry support, the tech could become the standard in container management software, to help facilitate writing apps for the cloud. Continue reading AWS, Microsoft to Pay $350K Annually for CNCF Board Seats

Google is joining Facebook in seeking to undercut Snapchat by offering similar features. The company is reportedly developing Stamp, a so-called news product that will offer articles in a magazine-like design, similar to Snapchat’s Discover feature. Snap, however, isn’t standing still, with plans to focus Discover more on episodic video content. News of Google’s development of Stamp follows buzz that the company floated an offer last year to purchase Snap for $30 billion, according to sources who call it an “open rumor.” Continue reading Google Aims to Take On Snapchat With New Stamp Product

Hulu has joined the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) to help promote the AV1 AOMedia Video codec. The alliance’s video compression standard “strives to deliver improved compression efficiency over the current cutting-edge video compression standards HEVC/H.265 and VP9, in addition to providing the industry with an open source, royalty-free, interoperable video format,” wrote Hulu CTO Tian Lim. “Hulu joins other streaming media industry leaders in pursuit of a common goal — to accelerate development and facilitate friction-free adoption of new media technologies that benefit the streaming media industry and our viewers.” Continue reading Hulu Is Latest SVOD Service to Back AOMedia Video Codec

Google, IBM and Lyft have come together for Istio, an open-source project to consolidate microservice management and security. Microservices are a nascent sector whereby large application software is discrete and independent modular services can be combined to form more complex applications. Red Hat, Pivotal, Weaveworks and Tigera are early supporters. So-called “service orientation” actually has a history, with BEA, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and TIBCO promoting a service orientation for applications. Continue reading Google, IBM and Lyft Debut Istio to Streamline Microservices

Voyager, Facebook’s telecom infrastructure effort, is a side project, but it’s still rattling the telecom industry, which worries that revenues from its specialized products are at risk. Facebook and European telecom company Telia tested Voyager over the latter’s thousand-kilometer-telecom network, and German-based ADVA Optical Networking, which is manufacturing the device, has nine potential customers trying it out. Also testing Voyager is Paris-based Orange, working with Equinix and African telecom company MTN. Continue reading Facebook’s Open-Source Telecom Project Challenges Telcos

Google is working on its third operating system after Android and Chrome OS, this one dubbed Fuchsia, an open-source, real-time OS that first appeared in August last year as a command line. Rather than being based on Linux, Fuchsia relies on a microkernel called Magenta that was developed by Google and incorporates other Google-developed software. According to Google, Magenta is aimed at “modern phones” and PCs with fast processors and large amounts of RAM with “arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation.” Continue reading Google Reveals More of Its Fuchsia OS for ‘Modern Phones’

Headed by camera expert Brian Cabral, a team of Facebook engineers unveiled plans for two new orb-shaped cameras to capture 360-degree video. With an eye towards image fidelity, one of the cameras features 24 lenses and the other, less expensive one boasts six. Both feature six axes or “degrees of freedom,” meaning they have a great range of motion for capturing a more complete image. With the new cameras, Facebook aims to outfit professional filmmakers with the ability to capture 2D and 3D 360-degree video. Continue reading Facebook Advances its Plans for New Virtual Reality Cameras

Google’s Spanner, developed a decade ago, created a way to store information across millions of machines in a multitude of data centers around the world. Despite its global reach, Spanner behaves as if it operates in a single location, meaning it can reliably replicate and change data without contradicting actions taken at a different location, and retrieve copies if one of the centers goes down. Since its creation, Spanner has become the foundation for 2,000 Google services including Gmail and AdWords. Now, Google plans to unveil Spanner to everyone as a cloud computing service. Continue reading Google Offers Up its Global Cloud-Based Database Technology

Microsoft has come up with a new camera rig that allows HoloLens mixed reality app makers to capture video from a HoloLens and make it easier to show a person interacting with that app, something Microsoft dubs “spectator view.” The details of the hardware-software combo were published as open source on the HoloLens’ GitHub page. The HoloLens headset is wireless, which lets the user move around the room freely, and is based on four cameras, lightly tinted lenses and a holographic processing unit. Continue reading Microsoft Camera Rig Gives HoloLens Developers Video Hack

Microsoft debuted Microsoft Azure IP Advantage, which provides payment for legal costs to customers using the open-source technology that is part of Azure services, including Hadoop data analysis. The rationale behind this new Advantage program is that, by offering Azure customers protection from intellectual property litigation, Microsoft removes an obstacle to the cloud computing service’s growth. This litigation protection service is already in place for Azure customers developing apps with Microsoft technology. Continue reading Microsoft Offers Lawsuit Protection for Azure Cloud Customers

In its Q4 earnings report, Facebook revealed that sales rose 51 percent to $8.81 billion, above the $8.51 billion average analyst prediction. The bump in revenue is largely attributed to advertising on mobile phones. Also, within the space of a year, monthly active Facebook users increased 17 percent to 1.86 billion people, with 1.23 billion checking daily and 1.74 billion accessing the social network via their smartphones. Facebook has now cemented its No. 2 position in the mobile advertising market behind Google. The company is also making a major move into video content. Continue reading Facebook Eyes Success with Mobile Ads and Focus on Video

To improve encryption, Google has launched an open source project, Key Transparency, a follow-up to its Certificate Transparency, both of which focus on the need to verify the authenticity of the person or server the user believes he is connecting to. Keybase, a collection of verified users and their “cryptographic credentials” is one solution, but Google now wants to ascertain that the contacts are verified systematically and are privacy-protected, by having the address “double-check” itself. Continue reading Google Key Transparency Project to Boost Messaging Security

Last week, Netflix opened the doors to downloaded content for offline viewing on mobile devices. Now, the company is describing some judicious technology adjustments it made to ensure viewers enjoy an improved video image, and that the resulting content doesn’t eat up the mobile device’s storage. The company did that by switching video codecs, although the result favors Android users, as well as improving its already-established method of varying data rates based on the needs of each scene in a movie or TV show. Continue reading Netflix Makes Updates to Improve Visual Quality of Downloads

Facebook is intent on helping innovate technological advances as it grapples with increasingly more video, and pushing down prices for hardware. To that end, the company has created Voyager, a high-speed, long-distance networking system, and will share its plans with other companies, per its commitment to open source software. Voyager will enable data centers in different locations to link with fiber-optic cables. The company also unveiled Backpack, its 100G-switch platform for connecting racks inside the data center. Continue reading Facebook Debuts New Optical Networking Tech, 100G Switch

Microsoft is submitting designs for its new server, Project Olympus, to the open source Open Compute Project eight months before it will be completed, in an effort to influence the data center market. By offering open source designs, the company pressures hardware manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard to lower pricing of its own cloud infrastructure products. Among the new server’s key strengths are that it can use different international power standards without a need to tweak the hardware and can run a variety of applications. Continue reading Microsoft Releases its Server Design Early to Jumpstart Cloud