AWS announces the general availability of the Amazon EC2 U7inh instance, featuring 1920 vCPUs, 32 TB of memory, and enhanced EBS bandwidth, built on HPE's 16-socket Compute Scale-up Server 3200 with Intel's Sapphire Rapids processors, offering SAP certification for major HANA workloads and facilitating seamless migrations from on-premises HPE hardware to AWS for enterprise-scale in-memory database tasks.

Google's Willow chip, hailed for executing a computation in under five minutes—a task that would daunt supercomputers for 10 septillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) years—sparks wild multiverse theories by leveraging qubit quantum mechanics to reduce calculation errors, prompting the tech industry to question if Google's self-set benchmarks adequately validate its multidimensional performance claims.

Amid quantum threats, post-quantum cryptography thrives on innovative Gaussian noise, with Sungho Kim's team using tin disulfide crystal imperfections to develop hardware-based generators that promise robust data protection but face hurdles in scalability and cost.

Amazon Q Developer integrates AI capabilities into developers' environments, streamlining development tasks beyond coding for heightened productivity. GitLab Duo with Amazon Q combines the power of Amazon Q Developer with GitLab's popular DevSecOps platform, offering enhanced capabilities for feature development, code review, unit testing, and more. By leveraging AI agents, developers can seamlessly tackle complex workflows and accelerate their daily tasks within the familiar GitLab environment.

The past year at ISRG has been a great one with Let’s Encrypt serving more websites worldwide than ever before. The introduction of shorter-lived certificates with a lifetime of six days is a major upgrade for TLS security, requiring the issuance of potentially 100,000,000 certificates per day in the future. The success of Let’s Encrypt and other projects is thanks to the support of donors and partners, shaping the future of internet security.

Traditional DBAs may hinder agility and collaboration in organizations, with successful companies reducing their roles through database guardrails that automate routine tasks, empower developers, streamline workflows, and allow DBAs to focus on strategic architectural challenges.

AWS Cost Explorer and related tools like Cost Allocation Tags, Budgets, and Compute Optimizer empower technical teams by offering granular cost tracking, forecasting, and resource optimization, which can lead to significant savings, such as a 25% reduction through informed decisions on EC2 instances, storage classes, and instance types, while ensuring efficient budgeting through centralized management and integrated alerts.

November's release notes mentioned that YSH now has objects, using plain data over pipes like JSON or TSV, with seven use cases explained. Notably, methods, flag parsing, modules, polymorphism, pure functions, and pure config are being utilized, with YSH objects being a minimal mechanism for polymorphism and namespace creation. Additionally, objects like ENV are being used as a linked list stack, focusing on safety and access control.

Migrating from legacy mainframes to AWS serverless with tools like Lambda, EventBridge, and API Gateway can cut infrastructure costs by up to 90%, simplify scalability, and enhance operational flexibility; however, organizations must navigate complex challenges such as data migration, legacy code adaptation, and performance optimization while leveraging AWS's suite of services and modernization programs.

The Codapi tool is a wrapper around Docker that enables the creation of isolated sandboxes through an API. By using Codapi, users can easily execute code and configuration commands without the need to set up local instances. The tool also offers a JavaScript widget that allows for the creation of interactive code snippets that can be run directly in the browser.

Incorporating an AI SRE Agent like Aptible's into incident response can revolutionize processes by mitigating reliance on a few experts, lowering MTTR, and enabling faster, more comprehensive data retrieval through integrations with tools like Chainlit and LLMs, while carefully balancing speed, model selection, and functionality to effectively address complex engineering tasks.

Terminal behavior is mostly consistent even without explicit standards, with users often expecting noninteractive programs to quit on Ctrl-C, TUIs to exit on Ctrl-Q, REPLs to end on Ctrl-D when they hit an empty line, and applications to stick to 16 ANSI colors for better compatibility with users' terminal settings; though exceptions exist, these conventions help users predict program behavior, despite the lack of official guidelines.

A quick guide on the advantages of using GitHub Actions as your preferred CI/CD tool—and how to build a CI/CD pipeline with it.

Andrei Kvapil shares insights on how they implemented their own extension api-server in Cozystack, exploring the API aggregation layer's benefits such as supporting imperative logic, managing subresources, using alternative backends like Postgres, and providing full control over conversion and output formatting. The extension api-server allows for dynamic resource registration without the need to pre-register CRDs, but caution is advised in cases of unstable backend or slow requests to avoid impacting cluster stability.

Deploying Robinhood, Dropbox's advanced in-house load balancing system leveraging PID controllers, has reduced hardware costs by 25% and improved infrastructure reliability by addressing imbalances and adapting to evolving workloads, while the integration of service discovery with Envoy's xDS protocol accommodates both Envoy and gRPC clients.

The Microsoft Graph extension for Bicep enables Azure users to manage Microsoft Graph and Azure Active Directory (Entra ID) resources using infrastructure as code (IaC) by allowing the direct definition of resources within a Bicep template. This integration ensures consistent deployment practices for Azure and Entra ID resources, enhancing security and efficiency in resource management. The extension supports role-based permissions and provides a robust authoring experience, leading to standardized deployments and streamlined operations across environments.

Kubernetes 1.32 introduces a beta feature that optimizes memory usage in kube-apiserver by switching from list to watch requests, effectively reducing memory consumption by up to 90% during simultaneous large list requests, by leveraging an in-memory cache to stream items individually, addressing the fatal out-of-memory issues often exacerbated by heavy cluster loads or unexpected network events.

Kevin shares a candid tale of cloud overspend with Azure Functions, highlighting their affordability and dynamic scalability but warns against extending their use with Elastic Premium for memory-heavy, persistent queues, suggesting Azure Container Apps as a resource-efficient alternative.

Brian Wald, GitLab's field CTO, envisions a future where AI-powered DevSecOps platforms centralize security and operational tasks to rapidly identify and fix vulnerabilities, reduce technical debt, enhance developer productivity, and enable large-scale cloud migrations, ultimately transforming application modernization into an economically viable endeavor by lowering costs and complexity.

In the landscape of cloud computing and AI, Azure ensures high-quality Linux VM images for mission-critical workloads. Overcoming challenges such as multiple update cycles and complex platform stacks is essential to ensure consistent performance, minimize downtime, and enhance security. Azure employs rigorous testing processes and validation strategies at every stage, including upstream kernel validation and package updates. With a strong focus on quality, Azure collaborates with distribution partners to deliver reliable and secure Linux VM environments for businesses.

OSX (macOS) inside a Docker container.

Sequoia is a cool new OpenPGP implementation.  It consists of several crates, providing both a low-level and a high-level API for dealing with OpenPGP data.

Windows for ARM in a Docker container.

Terrateam is an open-source GitOps CI/CD platform for automating infrastructure workflows. It integrates with to orchestrate Terraform, OpenTofu, CDKTF, and Terragrunt operations via pull requests.

Build AI assistants that interact with your systems

Did you know that Stripe processes 500 million API requests per day? To ensure reliability and speed, Stripe's infrastructure is built using a mix of Ruby and Go. Ruby powers their core business logic, while Go handles high-performance tasks, like API endpoints, due to its concurrency and efficiency. Stripe also heavily relies on Kubernetes for container orchestration and PostgreSQL for managing massive amounts of transactional data.

 “Make it work, then make it beautiful, then if you really, really have to, make it fast. 90 percent of the time, if you make it beautiful, it will already be fast. So really, just make it beautiful!” ~ Joe Armstrong  - Erlang and OTP in Action