Amazon has released SageMaker Canvas, the company’s no-code machine learning service.
No-code is one of the fastest growing sectors within development. In fact, Gartner predicts that no-code development will account for 80% of tech products and services by 2024.
Amazon is getting in on the action with its SageMaker Canvas, a no-code tool with machine learning applications in mind.
“Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of Amazon SageMaker Canvas, a new visual, no code capability that allows business analysts to build ML models and generate accurate predictions without writing code or requiring ML expertise,” writes Alex Casalboni, AWS Developer Advocate. “Its intuitive user interface lets you browse and access disparate data sources in the cloud or on-premises, combine datasets with the click of a button, train accurate models, and then generate new predictions once new data is available.
“SageMaker Canvas leverages the same technology as Amazon SageMaker to automatically clean and combine your data, create hundreds of models under the hood, select the best performing one, and generate new individual or batch predictions. It supports multiple problem types such as binary classification, multi-class classification, numerical regression, and time series forecasting. These problem types let you address business-critical use cases, such as fraud detection, churn reduction, and inventory optimization, without writing a single line of code.”
Low-code may be one of the fastest growing trends in development, but over a quarter of C-level execs haven’t heard of it.
Low-code and no-code solutions allow individuals to create applications and services with little to no coding or past experience. The tech is a boon to companies of all sizes, speeding up development and letting non-IT departments contribute. Low-code is gaining ground so fast that Gartner predicts that 80% of tech products and services will be built using low-code by 2024.
Unfortunately, according to research from CLEVR, 27% of C-level execs have never heard of low-code or no-code.
“It reminds me of when cloud technology was just on the rise and many businesses thought it was the same as iCloud or Dropbox,” Angelique Schouten, CEO of CLEVR, told WebProNews. “To fully access the power of low-code and no-code platforms, you must understand it first.”
CLEVR’s research illustrates the importance of closing the knowledge gap for one of the most important trends in modern development.
Prosus has announced it is buying Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion, as it increases its focus on the online learning market.
Prosus is a consumer internet group that has investments in the online classifieds, education technology, food delivery and payments and fintech markets. The company is the largest shareholder of Tencent Holdings, the Chinese company behind some of the biggest games, including Fortnite, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Call of Duty: Mobile and Ring of Elysium.
Prosus appears to be making a major move in the online education market with the acquisition of Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is one of the top 50 websites in the world, with an extremely active user base. In fact, 85% of the site’s community visits every week to access the 52+ million questions and answers, most about programming and development.
“We are delighted to be welcoming Stack Overflow to the Prosus family as we increasingly focus on the future of workplace learning,” Larry Illg, CEO of EdTech at Prosus, said. “Learning of any kind typically begins with a question and their platform is critically important for global developers when they have questions about their work. There is an opportunity to connect more deeply with their community through our other education platforms to further fulfill their learning needs.
“With enduring skills shortages and ever-evolving needs within technology organizations, technology training has emerged as the largest and fastest growing segment of corporate learning and development,” Illg continued. “As an operator of businesses across 90+ countries, we understand the needs of technologists and developers, particularly in high-growth markets. In addition to further scaling its community in the markets we know well, we want to help Stack Overflow Teams to expand within enterprises to address an underserved opportunity to transform their technology learning and collaboration.”
“We are excited to be joining the Prosus family, which catapults us into a new phase of growth and allows us to expand and accelerate Stack Overflow’s impact around the world,” Stack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, said. “Prosus’s expertise growing and nurturing communities, especially in a global context, will make our public platform even more invaluable in helping developers and technologists learn and grow. Given Prosus’s focus on the future of the workplace, their partnership will allow our market leading SaaS collaboration product, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking institutional knowledge.”
Microsoft is integrating GPT-3 — a natural language model developed by OpenAI — with its low-code development tools.
Microsoft Power Apps is the company’s low-code development platform, designed to allow individuals to create software with minimal coding experiencing. GTP-3 is a natural language model developed by OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that was co-founded by Elon Musk.
By combining GTP-3 and Power Apps, Microsoft hopes to revolutionize low-code development, alowing individuals to program using natural expression commands.
Microsoft’s Jennifer Langston outlined the benefits in a company blog post:
For instance, the new AI-powered features will allow an employee building an e-commerce app to describe a programming goal using conversational language like “find products where the name starts with ‘kids.’” A fine-tuned GPT-3 model then offers choices for transforming the command into a Microsoft Power Fx formula, the open source programming language of the Power Platform, such as “Filter(‘BC Orders’ Left(‘Product Name’,4)=”Kids”).
Integrating GPT-3 into Power Apps will help the company’s development tools go from low-code to no-code.
“Using an advanced AI model like this can help our low-code tools become even more widely available to an even bigger audience by truly becoming what we call no code,” said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s low code application platform.
“This will allow people to query and explore data in ways they literally couldn’t do before, and that will be the magical moment,” Lamanna added.
Microsoft’s Build conference, aimed at developers, has been confirmed for May 25 – 27, 2021.
Microsoft Build is the company’s conference aimed at web and software developers, and helps showcases the company’s technologies. Per the company:
Microsoft Build is where developers, architects, start-ups, and students learn, connect, and code together, sharing knowledge and expanding their skillset, while exploring new ways of innovating for tomorrow.
Microsoft has confirmed May 25 – 27 as the dates, dates that were originally leaked several weeks ago. Just like last year, the conference will be entirely virtual, due to the pandemic, and will be free to attend.
The digital-only MVP Summit this year was very worthwhile. I feel sure the organizers learned a lot from the experience to make next year's event even better.
Microsoft has updated Visual Studio Code, adding support for Apple’s new Macs running on its M1 custom silicon.
Visual Studio Code is a free, open source programming text editor available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s based on Electron and supports a variety of programming languages, including Java, Python, C++, C#, Ruby, Go, Dart, JavaScript and more. In fact, Microsoft says Visual Studio Code supports virtually every major programming language.
The latest release, version 1.54 adds support for Apple’s new custom silicon.
We are happy to announce our first release of stable Apple Silicon builds this iteration. Users on Macs with M1 chips can now use VS Code without emulation with Rosetta, and will notice better performance and longer battery life when running VS Code. Thanks to the community for self-hosting with the Insiders build and reporting issues early in the iteration.
The default download of VS Code for macOS is now a Universal build that runs natively on all Macs. On the Downloads page, you can find more links to architecture-specific builds for Intel or Apple Silicon, which are smaller downloads compared to the Universal package.
Visual Studio Code is already a popular option for developers. This latest update will will be a welcome improvement for developers running Apple’s newest machines.
GitHub has been granted a license to operate in Iran, giving Iranian developers access to a valuable resource.
US sanctions against Iran have far-reaching consequences, including on many aspects of the tech industry. GitHub was one of those impacted, with sanctions preventing the company from offering its tools in Iran.
GitHub announced today that has now secured a license from the US government, paving the way for it to offer the full range of its services — both free and paid — in Iran.
First, even as we complied with sanctions, we went to great lengths to keep as much of GitHub available to as many developers as possible under US sanctions laws, making public repos available even in sanctioned countries.
And separately, we took our case to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), part of the US Treasury Department, and began a lengthy and intensive process of advocating for broad and open access to GitHub in sanctioned countries.
Over the course of two years, we were able to demonstrate how developer use of GitHub advances human progress, international communication, and the enduring US foreign policy of promoting free speech and the free flow of information. We are grateful to OFAC for the engagement which has led to this great result for developers.
This is good news for GitHub and Iranian developers.
Apple has released figures about the iOS App Store and revealed it has created 300,000 new jobs since the coronavirus pandemic began.
Apple has been under fire for how it operates and manages its App Store. In particular, it is locked in a legal battle with Fortnite maker Epic over the fees it charges. It’s little wonder that Apple is eager to prove the App’s Store’s value.
“The iOS app economy has created nearly 300,000 new jobs since April 2019, helping to provide opportunities for Americans of all ages even as COVID-19 continues to create immense challenges and uncertainty for communities across the country,” reads Apple’s blog post. “Developers nationwide — including companies such as Caribu, H‑E‑B, and Shine — have adapted their businesses to make sure they can keep supporting their customers during a challenging time.
“Since the App Store launched in 2008, the iOS app economy has become one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy. Despite the pandemic, the App Store continues to provide economic opportunities for entrepreneurs of all sizes, helping anyone with an idea reach customers around the world and take advantage of new opportunities that would never be possible without it. The App Store ecosystem now supports more than 2.1 million US jobs across all 50 states — an increase of 15 percent since last year — as part of the 2.7 million jobs Apple supports across the country.“
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a beta of Honeycode, a low-code development service for cloud computing.
AWS is the current, undisputed champion of cloud computing, with a commanding lead in the market. In spite of that, both Microsoft and Goole have made headway and are chipping away at AWS’ lead.
Simultaneously, one of the biggest trends in the tech industry is low or no-code development. These tools provide a way for organizations to quickly prototype, develop and deploy applications with minimal coding. This can significantly reduce investment cost, and speed up development. Both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud offer low-code development options.
Now Amazon is playing catchup, with the release of Honeycode. Honeycode is described as “a fully managed service that allows customers to quickly build powerful mobile and web applications – with no programming required.”
According to the company’s announcement, “customers can use a simple visual application builder to create highly interactive web and mobile applications backed by a powerful AWS-built database to perform tasks like tracking data over time and notifying users of changes, routing approvals, and facilitating interactive business processes. Using Amazon Honeycode, customers can create applications that range in complexity from a task-tracking application for a small team to a project management system that manages a complex workflow for multiple teams or departments.”
It’s a safe bet Honeycode will be a popular addition to the AWS ecosystem and help the company as it continues to fend off Microsoft and Google.
GitHub has announced that its core features, including private repositories with unlimited collaborators, are now free for all users.
GitHub provides one of the most popular platforms for software development version control, as well as collaboration and bug tracking features. Git is used by developers around the world, in companies and organizations of all size.
In a post on the company’s blog, CEO Nat Friedman made the announcement, saying that “until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub for private development, you had to subscribe to one of our paid plans. But every developer on earth should have access to GitHub. Price shouldn’t be a barrier.
“This means teams can now manage their work together in one place: CI/CD, project management, code review, packages, and more. We want everyone to be able to ship great software on the platform developers love.”
The company is also lowering the price of its paid Team plan from $9/month per user to $4. The change goes into effect immediately.
Friedman’s announcement is good news for developers and organizations alike.
Google has announced it is shutting down App Maker, its low-code development environment.
App Maker was unveiled in 2016 and provided a way for IT departments, developers and enthusiasts to create apps to improve G Suite workflows. App Maker users will need to find another solution, however, as the development environment is nearing the end of its life.
In the blog post announcing the change, Google said existing apps made with App Maker will continue to work, and critical bugs will be addressed, but the tool is no longer under active development. Effective April 15, 2020, developers will no longer be able to create new applications and effective January 19, 2021, all App Maker apps will stop working.
The company says there is no migration path to other platforms, including any of its own tools. In the meantime, Google encourages app developers to start recreating their apps using AppSheet, a similar product the company acquired in mid-January. Of course, given the abandonment of App Maker, with no easy migration path, Google may have trouble convincing users to trust another of the company’s solutions.
Google has announced its acquisition of “AppSheet, a leading no-code application development platform used by a number of enterprises across a variety of industries.”
Custom applications are an excellent way for businesses to meet their needs and adapt to an ever-evolving landscape. As Google points out in their post, however, not all businesses have the resources to have a large, in-house development team. No-code or low-code solutions are an excellent way to address that shortcoming and AppSheet is one of the best available.
The platform uses a database, spreadsheet or form to build a mobile app. According to the company site, “AppSheet will automatically generate an app by using the data in your column header (i.e. the first row of your spreadsheet) as fields. These fields determine how the app captures or displays data.” Once the data is pulled in, the platform’s tools provide a way to alter how the app looks and behaves.
“AppSheet complements Google Cloud’s strategy to reimagine the application development space with a platform that helps enterprises innovate with no-code development, workflow automation, application integration and API management as they modernize their business processes in the cloud,” wrote Amit Zavery, Google Cloud VP of Business Application Platform. “AppSheet’s ability to power a range of applications—from CRM to field inspections and personalized reporting—combined with Google Cloud’s deep expertise in key verticals, will further enable digital transformation across industries like financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, communication and media & entertainment.”
AppSheet currently works with AWS, Box, Dropbox, Office 365, Salesforce and other cloud hosted databases. Both Google’s announcement and an announcement on AppSheet’s site reassures users AppSheet will remain cross-platform.
According to a post on Apple’s developer site, the company will start enforcing notarization prerequisites in February 2020.
Apple previously announced that “Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store must be notarized by Apple in order to run on macOS Catalina.” The move is meant to improve security on macOS by ensuring only legitimate applications can be run.
To ease the transition, however, in September Apple announced the requirement would not take effect until the new year. With the latest announcement, Apple is informing developers their grace period is coming to an end and they will need to have Apple notarize their software before February 3, 2020. Any application not notarized by then will not be able to run on Apple’s latest macOS.
Lowe’s slogan is “do it right for less.” While that primarily applies to home repair and improvement, the company is also applying it to the world of software development.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Lowe’s is looking to retool its e-commerce solutions. The goal is to have 80% of the applications it uses be built internally by 2020. This will involve looking at their application portfolio and replacing commercial, off-the-shelf applications with custom replacements. This will involve hiring as many as 2,000 software engineers, data analysts and infrastructure specialists.
As Mark Driver, research vice president at Gartner, Inc. told the WSJ, “we’re in an age where people have their clothes custom fit. The same thing goes with software; it’s about gaining that advantage.”
This is just the latest move on the part of the home-improvement giant to modernize its IT infrastructure. Shortly after being hired as CIO, Seemantini Godbole told analysts and investors the retailer’s technology was “well behind leading retailers in terms of strategy, architecture, process maturity and capabilities.” Ms. Godbole helped unveiled a plan to invest $500 to $550 million per year through 2021, in an effort to modernize the retailer’s decade-old e-commerce system.
The announcement by Lowe’s is just the latest in a solid growth trend for the custom software development market, as companies increasingly turn to custom solutions to achieve tighter integration, better performance and lower cost.
On September 10, Apple held their “By Invitation Only” event, unveiling new iPhones, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+ and iOS 13. While many of the event’s announcements were aimed squarely at the consumer market, there were a number of things surrounding the iOS update that impact businesses, especially when it comes to marketing and development.
For years, despite Apple working to protect customers’ privacy, companies have found ways to continue tracking iPhone users, often without their permission. Recent news articles have highlighted how companies are using Bluetooth to track individuals. Similarly, some apps try to use GPS to track people even when not using the app. Facebook is one such company that was recently busted for using precise location data to track users without their knowledge or consent.
As a result, in addition to iOS 13’s general facelift and improvements, there are a number of privacy-related features that will likely have a significant impact on marketing and development teams who have previously relied on these tracking methods.
Bluetooth Tracking
One of the biggest changes to iOS 13 is how Bluetooth connections are handled. Prior to this update, apps could access the iPhone’s Bluetooth functionality to track a user’s whereabouts thanks to tracking beacons. Customers in a store could be tracked as they walked around to different sections, giving the store information about what displays and product categories were driving the most foot traffic. Similarly, shopping malls can use beacons to track individuals and determine movement patterns, store popularity and more.
That’s not to say that all apps requesting Bluetooth access are using it for tracking. Smartwatches, health monitors and the like will need to connect to their corresponding apps via Bluetooth. But it’s clear that many apps don’t need access. For example, Dominoes and Macy’s are two apps that request access for the purpose of tracking users’ whereabouts.
Bluetooth Privacy
For marketing firms and departments who have relied on this technology, iOS 13 represents the end of an era. Instead of using Bluetooth to track individuals without their consent, marketing departments will need to find other ways to engage with customers. In some cases, this may involve adding an incentive for the customer to allow tracking. In other cases, it may require adding a check-in option instead of automatic tracking.
iOS 13’s change has significant implications for development teams as well. In many cases, Bluetooth tracking functionality was included in various software development kits (SDK) as a bundled benefit of using that particular SDK. With more and more customers choosing not to be tracked, developers will need to find other ways to make their SDKs stand out and provide value to their customers.
GPS Tracking
GPS tracking is another area where some companies have abused consumer trust. Facebook and others have been accused of using precise location data to track users, even when the app is not active.
GPS Privacy
iOS 13 offers an updated option to GPS permissions. In addition to “Don’t Allow” and “Allow While Using App,” iOS 13 includes an “Allow Once” option. When a user chooses this, the app is granted a one-time access to GPS functionality and the user will be prompted to give it access again the next time they open that app.
Again, for companies whose apps rely on GPS functionality, it will be increasingly important to ensure their app is using GPS for a specific reason, to offer their customers an improved experience. Otherwise, if an app’s request for GPS access is suspect or without a clear reason, customers may switch to an app that respects their privacy.
Wrapping Up
As with many iOS updates, iOS 13 brings a number of significant changes, not the least of which is improved customer privacy. This will undoubtably present a challenge to some businesses, not only those who may have been abusing these features in the past, but also businesses whose apps will simply be collateral damage in the battle to protect user privacy.
On the other hand, companies who are quick to adapt, work to protect user privacy and look for new ways to engage their customers will likely find new opportunities open to them.
When writing code in Visual Studio, you may find that you have to pull code samples from StackOverflow or MSDN. You would normally just have to copy and paste the code over and then make some modifications so it fits in with your previously written code. Now Microsoft is making it easier to do through Bing.
The Bing team announced today that it has worked with the Visual Studio and Microsoft Research teams to develop what it calls the Bing Code Search Visual Studio extension. As its name implies, it’s a new extension that uses Bing to find “relevant code samples in Visual Studio providing you with the ability to review and add that code in the code editor.” The Bing team notes that searches are context sensitive so you’ll get samples that use the same variable names in your own code.
Bing says Code Search pulls from MSDN, StackOverflow, Donnetperls and CSharp411. Here’s how it works:
Bing uses signals and metadata including project type and semantic context (e.g. C#/VB compiler) combined with our vast index to deliver relevant code samples directly into the Visual Studio experience. In a few short clicks, you have a set of code snippets for review and copy into the Visual Studio editor without missing a beat.
If you want to see Bing Code Search in action, you can watch a video of it being used here. Unfortunately, there’s no embed just yet, but I’ll update this story with one if Microsoft Research ever bothers to upload it to YouTube.
If you feel your life would be greatly improved through the use of Bing Code Search, you can download the extension here.
Sony devoted significant portions of both its February PlayStation 4 announcement and its big E3 conference to its embrace of game developers, including indie game developers of all sizes. These announcements have built good will for Sony with both developers and consumers, but it seems that the company is not only paying lip service to the idea of supporting developers. Sony today revealed that it is reaching out even to developers who have not started developing games yet.
Sony has announced that it is adding the PlayStation 4 to its PlayStationFirst Academic Development Program. PS4 development kits will be available to universities that currently have PlayStation Vita development kits. The company stated that the program supports its goal of supporting indie developers and established studios by educating students in PlayStation development.
“The next generation of Indie developers are now in education,” said Maria Stukoff, head of Academic Development for SCEE. “PlayStationFirst is at the forefront of enabling students to gain future-fit skills for PlayStation console development by providing access to real professional tools”
Sony is also soliciting emails from universities that are interested in getting in on the dev kit program.
“PlayStation 4 is setting the pace for global Indie development,” said Mike Hocking VP at Evolution Studios. “Now is the time for new talent to get skilled up on PS Vita and explore the future of PlayStation game development.”
After teasing the service last Friday, AOL has begun to give beta access to some users for their new RSS Reader, appropriately titled AOL Reader. Upon first look, it’s a basic, perfectly functional RSS reader that doesn’t bring a whole lot of new features to the table (yet, at least), but will be familiar to Google Reader users.
As of right now, you can sign in with an AOL account or you can request access to the beta with another email address (I joined using my Gmail address).
Upon signing in and accessing the beta, AOL prompts you to get started by manually adding new subscriptions of importing from another RSS reader (Google Reader included).
After that, you’ll be met with a familiar setup – a big list view of new article in your feeds. Like Google Reader and other readers, your specific RSS feeds will be accessible from the left-hand side, with articles appearing on the right-hand side. You can change the layout format to one of four different options: list view, card view, full view, and pane view. The reader also has some basic sorting options like view unread and sort by oldest or newest.
You can also star articles and sort by starred as well. Like most other readers, there’s a “mark as read” feature as well.
Once you view an article inside AOL reader, you also have some social sharing options – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and of course, email.
Also, AOL Reader API is ready and free while the product is in beta.
Like I said before, the beta is currently pretty barebones, but clean and functional. AOL says that there are plenty of new features on the way, however, including sharing within AOL Reader and other RSS readers, search, notifications, and native iOS and Android apps.
As you know, Google Reader is shutting down for good on July 1st. It’s not surprising that AOL decided to throw their hat in the ring – they’ve been surfacing and outputting content for years. But it could be a little late. The RSS reader-to-replace-Google-Reader battle already has a lot of participants. But it’s a solid effort from AOL. As we say with most of these new RSS products (Digg’s got one on the way) – we’ll just have to wait and see how it shakes out.
It looks like AOL is getting ready to throw their hat in the who-wants-to-replace-Google-reader ring. The Next Web discovered reader.aol.com – a barebones site that features just one message:
“AOL Reader: All your favorite websites, in once place.”
It says that the product is in private beta and lets you submit an email address to request an invite. Also, the site has a familiar favicon – the universal symbol for RSS.
Also, from TNW:
[T]he site’s CSS styles reveal that the service will offer mobile Web optimizations for touch devices. Additionally, it appears LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Facebook sharing will be supported, judging by the CSS.
As you probably know, Google Reader’s days are numbered. The service will go dark on July 1st. And with that shutter, millions of RSS users will go scrambling for something to latch onto (the ones who haven’t left already). Of course, there are already options out there like Feedly, Netvibes, The Old Reader, Bloglovin’, NewsBlur, FlipBoard, Pulse, and Zite. And Digg just announced a private beta for its new RSS reader, set to launch to all on June 26th. Oh, and maybe Facebook could be in the mix as well?
The point is, the space is crowded.
UPDATE: AOL just posted this Vine video. See you Monday!
One of the most popular feed readers around is shutting down this year – due to declining usage.
Google Reader, the platform Google first launched in 2005, is simply one of the many Google services on the chopping block this week. Google has just put out their annual list of spring cleaning, which consists of features and products that Google is canning in 2013 in order to “focus, otherwise they spread themselves too thin.”
Here’s what Google had to say about Reader in a blog post:
We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.
“If you’d like to download a copy of all your Reader data before then, you can do so through Google Takeout. You’ll receive your subscription data in an XML file, and the following information will be downloaded as JSON files,” says Google.
You can go here to start downloading your Reader data from Takeout. Google assures users that the data will be easily transferrable to another similar product.
“These changes are never easy. But by focusing our efforts, we can concentrate on building great products that really help in their lives,” says Google.
But from the immediate backlash seen on Twitter and other social media, it’s clear that this decision is not going over well with longtime Google Reader users. There’s already a petition on change.org asking Google to reconsider.
Other Google products to get the axe alongside Reader include Google Building Maker, Google Cloud Connect, and Google Voice for BlackBerry.
As we reported on last month, Linux developers are becoming more important to businesses the world over. Their jobs are just about to get easier with the release of Linux version 3.3.
The release notes for Linux 3.3 is pretty big, but here’s the summary that should give you all the important details before we dive into the nitty gritty of it all:
This release features as the most important change the merge of kernel code from the Android project. But there is more, it also includes support for a new architecture (TI C6X), much improved balancing and the ability to restripe between different RAID profiles in Btrfs, and several network improvements: a virtual switch implementation (Open vSwitch) designed for virtualization scenarios, a faster and more scalable alternative to the “bonding” driver, a configurable limit to the transmission queue of the network devices to fight bufferbloat, a network priority control group and per-cgroup TCP buffer limits. There are also many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available.
The biggest change is definitely the Android merge. While Android is built on a version of Linux, the two were separate entities from the start. The release notes claim this was from developers on both projects not being able to agree on several differences. This is just the start of the merger with more Android features making their way into Linux with future updates.
The Open vSwitch addition is not meant to replace the current Linux bridge switch. It’s simply meant to help Linux handle more complex scenarios. It also supports standard management interfaces like sFlow, Netflow, RSPAN and CLI.
They are also implementing byte queue limits which is a “configurable limit of packet data that can be put in the transmission queue of a network device.” This will allow users to make sure high priority packets receive reasonable amounts of latency.
A super cool addition is a new Linux architecture that supports the Texas Instruments C6X. This opens up Linux to the TI family of C64x single and multicore DSPs.
The rest of the document details the massive amounts of changes coming to drivers, cores, memory management, file systems, networking, virtualization, crypto, security and tracing/profiling. You can check out the full release at the Linux page.
With the release of Linux 3.3 and its merging with Android, it will make Linux even more desirable for developers. Are you excited to use 3.3? Are you already using it? How is it? Let us know in the comments.
