There are a few differences between Amazon Linux 2 and AL2023. One of the most important differences is that Amazon Linux 2 offers long-term support until June 30, 2023, while AL2023 has a predictable two-year major release cycle and long-term support.

“The distribution locks to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository, giving you control over how and when you absorb updates. By default, and in contrast with Amazon Linux 2, a dnf update command will not update your installed packages. This helps to ensure that you are using the same package versions across your fleet”,

explained Sebastian Stormack, chief developer advocate at AWS.

AWS is also distributing Amazon Linux 2023 as Docker images from Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) and Docker Hub. These images are built from the same software components included in the Amazon Linux 2023 AMI.

The rumors were true: Facebook’s parent company Meta is preparing to launch a Twitter Blue-like subscription service called Meta Verified. On Sunday morning, Mark Zuckerberg took to his newly launched broadcast channel to share the news.

He said the subscription service will give users a blue badge, additional impersonation protection, and direct access to customer service.

“This feature is about enhancing the authenticity and security of our services.”

Zuckerberg said

He added that Meta will test the subscription first in Australia and New Zealand before rolling it out to other countries. Meta Verified will cost $15 per month when users subscribe through the company’s iOS and Android apps. On the web, where app store commissions don’t apply, the service will cost US$12 per month. The subscription will cover Instagram and Facebook accounts, Engadget wrote on the subject.

12 bucks a month to be verified on Facebook… I wonder if people will keep that same Twitter Blue outrage energy 😅 pic.twitter.com/ZPJsIHBerO

— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) February 19, 2023

Users will have to meet certain eligibility requirements before they can sign up for Meta Verified. Specifically, the company told Engadget that the subscription will only be available to users aged 18 or older.

Meta will also require potential subscribers to share a government-issued ID that matches the name and profile picture on their Facebook or Instagram account. Once verified, you can’t change your account name, username, date of birth or photo without going through the verification process again. Accounts that were verified prior to today’s announcement due to their notoriety will remain verified.

Couchbase Capella is a fully managed database with JSON documents and key-values with SQL access and built-in full-text search, event creation and analytics. It can be distributed globally via AWS and GCP through their data centers and availability zones. In addition, the company now provides the database in Azure, allowing its customers to flexibly use Capella across all three major cloud service providers, Infoq wrote on the topic.

The company made the service available first on AWS and has since made several enhancements to the DBaaS offering, including a new developer user experience, SOC 2 Type 2 compatibility, a fully managed backend designed for mobile, IoT and edge applications with App Services, and a new Magma HD storage engine that gives customers the ability to support more use cases with much larger data sets at high speed.

Microsoft offers Azure Cosmos DB, a competitive service comparable to Couchbase Capella. Couchbase previously compared the two offerings, with several differences, such as that Capella is memory-based, while CosmosDB is caching-based, and consumption is on a per-node basis versus per-unit queries.

Finally, developers can try out Capella by signing up for a 30-day period. Finally, customers who want to use Capella in Azure can purchase the offering from the Azure marketplace.

“Cloud computing continues to be an important technology trend, with ever more businesses becoming cloud-native. In the process, a major persisting challenge they face is to make applications more scalable and easier to deploy. We believe Kubeark is addressing this need by abstracting the complexity and allowing the user to define business rules that power the deployment process,”

said Ondrej Bartos, Co-founder and General Partner at Credo Ventures

The open, infrastructure-independent platform facilitates and innovates the way companies develop business models. With Kubeark, software providers can remove the complexity of the application development lifecycle by seamlessly deploying, managing and scaling applications across any type of infrastructure – from private or public cloud to on-premises, for both open and closed systems.

“Software vendors currently struggle with their hybrid cloud infrastructure and the transformation of products from on-premises to cloud on a large scale. Kubeark helps them achieve operational excellence regardless of where their infrastructure resides: on premises, on public, or on private cloud,”

Bogdan Nedelcov, Kubeark CEO and Co-founder said.

“Our platform ushers in a new era in which software products are delivered as true SaaS products, helping vendors speed time-to-value, hyper-scale their distribution, and SaaSify any piece of software instantly,”

he added.

The investment will help Kubeark accelerate platform development and build a strong network of global partners in order to advance and scale the adoption of its technology.

The frequency and scale of cyberattacks on energy facilities is rising, and many countries are seeking new and efficient methods for protecting critical resources such as water, electricity and gas, as well as the facilities that produce, dispense and store energy.

According to a report of the World Economic Forum, published in 2020, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure facilities ranks 5th in terms of level and number of threats. Dr. Rami Puzis, Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering, BGU, said:

“ICRDE aims to promote joint R&D for protection from energy-related cyberthreats and will encompass the following categories: establishing a database of cyber-physical system (CPS) attacks on energy facilities and simulation of these attacks in a controlled research environment; development of technology and advanced tools for monitoring and correlating the information technology (IT) and the operational technology (OT) layers of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) to protect energy infrastructures from attacks.”

He added:

“Joint teams will develop, assess, and incorporate new technologies developed by the consortium members, transforming them into cybersecurity solutions for Israel and the US.”

This high threat level prompted the two governments to acknowledge the urgent need to invest resources to minimize the danger and the scope of potential damage. The climate crisis also highlights the need to recruit the most accomplished researchers to develop products and services to deal with the effects of climate change.

In order to protect energy facilities, the consortium will promote projects focusing on all manufacturing stages, as well as storage and energy distribution. The consortium provided a detailed work plan based on comprehensive research by American and Israeli researchers, and was also noted in the publication.

Apple announced Swift 5.5 in June at its annual developer conference WWDC with headline features including ‘Swift Concurrency‘ for asynchronous and concurrent programming, improved package management and distribution, and standard library packages.

One notable change was that developers can now grab packages from a search screen in Xcode, Apple’s IDE or integrated development environment. So-called “package collections“, or selected lists of packages, make it easier to distribute and consume collections of packages for specific uses.

Tiobe, which regularly publishes a list of the most popular languages, has argued that Swift adoption was hampered by the availability of languages that supported cross-platform mobile development.

Tiobe placed Swift as the 15th most popular language in September 2021, down from 12th a year ago. Developer analyst firm RedMonk puts Swift at 11th in July. According to RedMonk, Swift was the fastest-growing language in the past decade, but the pace of its growth has been matched by TypeScript, Microsoft’s superset of JavaScript.

“We are thrilled to partner with SoftBank to accelerate DevOps adoption in Japan. This partnership will be a catalyst in a world where every company becomes a DevOps company. Companies build and release more software to stay ahead of their competitors, software must be updated, and updates can be only achieved with secure binary deployment to the edge. We believe the combination of JFrog’s Platform and SoftBank expertise will boost cloud-native and DevOps adoption in Japan.”

JFrog’s hybrid, universal, end-to-end DevOps Platform powers over 6,000 companies worldwide including the majority of the F100 list, and solves challenges found in critical pieces of the DevOps supply chain, such as safely storing, managing, securing, and distributing all types of software packages, collecting key metrics, correlating them across diverse systems, and providing actionable information to improve software update and release cycles. The JFrog Platform works in self-hosted, SaaS, hybrid and multi-cloud environments across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, providing the confidence that releases are tested and secured as they move to production environments. Mr. Kazuya Kusakawa, Board Director, Executive Vice President, Head of ICT Business Unit, SB C&S Corp, commented:

“We quickly understood the benefits DevOps and continuous software delivery offers and welcome the start of a new partnership with JFrog Japan Co. SB C&S has been promoting DevOps since 2017 and we see great value in working with JFrog, a leading platform, to continue sharing DevOps best practices with leading companies in Japan.”

The partnership enables the complete JFrog Platform to be available immediately in Japan, including:

• JFrog Artifactory: As the world’s first universal binary repository, JFrog Artifactory is the heart of the JFrog Platform. It functions as a single source of truth for all types of software packages that follow the DevOps lifecycle from development to the edge.
• JFrog Xray: JFrog Xray enables multi-layer composition analysis across various software aspects such as container and artifact vulnerabilities and quality assurance against open-source license violations.
• JFrog Pipelines: Enables CI/CD as an integral part of the platform to automate DevOps processes for all teams and tools so that teams can release software updates quickly across their CI/CD pipelines.
• JFrog Distribution: Helps customers securely package production artifacts and rapidly distribute software around the world.
• JFrog Mission Control & Insight: This dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of JFrog Platform services, delivery visibility and metrics across your geographically dispersed sites.

“This is huge, because it shows that developers do upgrade their Java version beyond Java 8 to some extent. The mantra that most Java developers are comfortable staying on Java 8 seems to be slowly breaking apart,”

However, half of the Java 11 users which is currently the most used version still use Java 8 in their production stack.

The JVM Ecosystem Report 2021 was conducted over a period of six weeks through February and March 2021, gathering the responses of over 2000 Java developers.

In addition, almost half of developers (44%) use the free AdoptOpenJDK distribution in production as one of their JDKs and 48% use it in development.

Oracle is still a big player in the market with 28% of developers using it for their OpenJDK build and 23% for the commercial OpenJDK. The third most popular supplier of JDKs in production is Azul, at 15.5% adoption.

The survey also found that 37% of respondents said they are using at least two different JDKs and 12.5% even use three or more different JDKs in production.

Other findings are that Java is still by far the most popular language by a long shot and Snyk stated it will probably remain that way in the foreseeable future and that JetBrains IntellIJ IDEA still remains dominant as an IDE in the Java ecosystem.

Today’s topic will be related to the inclusive and supportive team cultures and human-centered developer tools

The Microsoft team has been advocates for human-centered design ever since its beginning. This method helps their team to create lifesaving solutions using community co-creation and Customer-Driven Playbook for building developers’ tools. The process starts with an open-ended inquiry to figure out where exactly developers are experiencing pain-points. While talking with development team members we can see how much they are eager to collaborate and learn from each other in pair-programming, mentoring, defining component boundaries, and debugging.

Over the past decade, there have been some challenges in building social capital– the type of connection with a colleague that makes it easier to overcome challenges together, because teams are now more distributed. Оther crucial pointс are building the right team culture and encouraging team communication, normalizing asking for help, and making it a priority for previous employees to support onboarding. The conclusion from last year is that connection and bonding are very important elements if we want to be successful at the workplace. Because of that in the next few years, we will see an emerging need for human-centered coding experiences.

Human-centered coding can help individuals learn about their colleague’s habits, coding styles, practices, and knowledge while also providing them with high-bandwidth optimized tools for collaboration like Visual Studio Live Share. Human-centered coding also means bringing external human perspectives into your individual process which requires engagement with other users and developers for feedback and input.

As the Open-source Lead  Sarah Novotny says:

“Success in open source is just as much about your own contributions to the community as it is about what you learn from the community.” 

This has always been a tenet of open source, and we’re now seeing it apply to product development at large. Microsoft promises that the work across companies and industries will continue in 2021 and beyond so we are all looking forward to learning, growing, and earning our place in open-source communities.