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RDO at FOSDEM this week

This week, RDO will have a presence at the FOSDEM conference, in Brussels, Belgium.

First, on Friday, there will be a number of RDO-related presentations at the CentOS Dojo which will be held at the Marriott Grand Place. Registration is free but there are a very limited number of spaces available, so register soon to secure your spot.

On Saturday and Sunday, RDO will be sharing space with CentOS in the stands area, along with dozens of other Free/Open Source organizations, projects, and foundations. We’ll also be helping to staff the OpenStack stand.

If you’re going to be at FOSDEM, and want to help us staff the OpenStack stand, have a look at the schedule and sign up.
Quelle: RDO

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Microsoft and Tierion collaborate on attestations & Blockchain proofs

Daniel Buchner from the Identity team is working with a wide array of organizations on the decentralized identity initiative here at Microsoft.  One such organization, Tierion, has just committed to a collboration on attestations, which is described in this post.

The goal of Microsoft’s decentralized identity initiative is to give people and organizations control of their identity and related data. We’re building technology that lets users sign data, claims, or agreements with their identities. These bits of identity-signed data are called attestations. Microsoft and Tierion are collaborating on a service that generates, manages, and validates attestations. Together we’re exploring how this technology serves the needs of developers and organizations.

In the future, you might take an online course and receive an attestation proving you completed the required work. This attestation is digitally signed by the educational organization’s decentralized identifier and a timestamp proof that is rooted in a secure public blockchain. Anyone can verify the identities and validate this data without trusting the signers or their service providers. The blockchain serves as the root of trust. Attestations will be kept in secure datastores that are fully controlled by users. The industry sometimes calls this self-sovereign identity.

How does Tierion fit into this picture? Non-repudiation is important to regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and insurance. These organizations need to prove there hasn’t been collusion to backdate or modify data. Tierion links data to the blockchain and generates a timestamp proof of the data’s integrity and existence. Anyone with this proof can independently verify the data without relying on a trusted authority.

Public blockchains such as Bitcoin are exceptionally secure, but slow. The current throughput of the Bitcoin network is about four transactions per second. Tierion solves this scalability problem by cryptographically linking millions of data points to a single transaction. We’re working with Tierion on a service that leverages the open source Chainpoint protocol their team developed for using the blockchain as a trust anchor.

The collaboration between Microsoft and Tierion is another important step in bringing the best blockchain-based tools and services to developers. As we move forward with our decentralized identity initiative, look for more content, collaborations, and announcements in the coming months.

 
Quelle: Azure

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SQL Database Query Editor available in Azure Portal

We are excited to announce the availability of an in-browser query tool that provides you an efficient way to execute queries on your Azure SQL Databases and SQL Data Warehouses without leaving the Azure Portal. This SQL Database Query Editor is now in public preview in the Azure Portal.

With this editor, you can access and query your database without needing to connect from a client tool or configure firewall rules.

The various features in this new editor create a seamless experience for querying your database.

Query Editor capabilities

Connect to your database

Before executing queries against your database, you must login with either your SQL server or Azure Active Directory (AAD) credentials. If you are the AAD admin for this SQL server, you will be automatically logged in when you first open the Query Editor using AAD single sign-on.

Learn more about how to configure your AAD server admin. If you are not currently taking advantage of Azure Active Directory, you can learn more.

Write and execute T-SQL scripts

If you are already familiar with writing queries in SSMS, you will feel right at home in the in-browser Query Editor.

Many common queries can be run in this editor, such as create new table, display table data, edit table data, create a stored procedure, or drop table. You have the flexibility to execute partial queries or batch queries in this editor. And by utilizing syntax highlighting and error indicating, this editor makes writing scripts a breeze.

Additionally, you can easily load an existing query file into the Query Editor or save your current script in this editor to your local machine. This ability provides you the convenience to save and port the queries between editors.

Manage query results

Another similarity between this Query Editor and SSMS is the ability to resize the Results pane to get the desired ratio between the Editor and Results sections. You can also filter results by keyword rather than having to scroll through all the output.

How to find Query Editor

SQL Database

You can find this experience by navigating to your SQL database and clicking the Tools command and then clicking Query Editor (preview), as shown in the screenshots below. While this feature is in public preview, you will need to accept the preview terms before using the editor.

SQL Data Warehouse

You can find this experience by navigating to your SQL data warehouse and clicking on Query Editor (preview), shown in the screenshot below. While this feature is in public preview, you will need to accept the preview terms before using the editor.

Run sample query

You can quickly test out the editor by running a simple query, such as in the screenshot below.

Send us feedback!

Please reach out to us with feedback at sqlqueryfeedback@microsoft.com.
Quelle: Azure

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Guest post: building IoT applications with MQTT and Google Cloud Pub/Sub

By Rick Erickson, Co-founder and EVP and Paul Lundberg, CTO, Agosto

[Editor’s note: Today we hear from Agosto, a Google Cloud Premier Partner that has been building products and delivering services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) since 2012, including Internet of Things applications. Read on to learn about Agosto’s work to build an MQTT service broker for Google Cloud Pub/Sub, and how you can incorporate it into your own IoT applications.]

One of our key practice areas is Internet of Things (IoT). Using the many components of GCP, we’ve helped customers rapidly move their ideas from product concept to launch.

Along the way, we evaluated several IoT platforms and repeatedly came to the conclusion that we’d be better off staying on the GCP stack than a single IoT platform with costly licensing hooks and closed-source practices. Our clients also like being able to build scalable, functional prototypes using pre-existing and standard reference architectures and tools.

One of the many challenges we faced along the way was picking an efficient transport for two-way messaging between “things” and GCP. After evaluating a number of emerging and mature protocols, we settled on Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). The MQTT protocol has been around since the early 2000’s and is now an ISO Standard. Originated in 1999 by Andy Stanford-Clark and Arlen Nipper, it’s lightweight, has solid documentation and has tens of thousands of production deployments. Furthermore, many existing pre-IoT or “Machine to Machine” projects already use MQTT as their transport from embedded device to the back-office. With MQTT, we’ve been able to increase velocity and reduce complexity for our IoT products and services.

MQTT is a great transport protocol, but it can be challenging to manage at scale, particularly when it comes to scaling message storage and delivery systems. As one of the earliest Google partners to develop a set of reusable tools, reference architectures and methods for accelerating IoT products to market, we’ve been impressed with Google Cloud Pub/Sub, a durable, low-latency and scalable service for handling many-to-many asynchronous messaging. But Cloud Pub/Sub uses HTTPS to transfer data. Over numerous small requests, all those HTTP headers add up to a lot of extra data — a no-go when you’re dealing with a constrained device that communicates over a mobile network, and where you pay for each byte in mobile data charges, battery usage — or both.

We needed to bridge the gap between IoT-connected devices and Cloud Pub/Sub, and began investigating ways to connect MQTT to Cloud Pub/Sub using and extending RabbitMQ.

After initial load tests showed this approach was viable, Google asked Agosto to develop an open-source, highly performant MQTT connection broker that integrates with Cloud Pub/Sub. With low network overhead (Agosto has seen up to 10x less compared to HTTPS in scenarios we’ve tested) and high throughput, MQTT is a natural fit for many scenarios.

The resulting message broker integrates messaging between connected devices using a MQTT client and Cloud Pub/Sub; RabbitMQ performs the protocol conversion for two-way messaging between the device and Cloud Pub/Sub. This means administrators of the RabbitMQ compute infrastructure don’t have to concern themselves with managing the durability of the data, or scaling storage.

Our message broker can support both small and very large GCP projects. For example, with smaller projects and IoT prototypes, you can rapidly deploy a single node of Agosto’s MQTT to Pub/Sub Connection Broker supporting up to 120,000 messages per minute for as little as $25/month for the compute costs. Larger production deployments with load-balanced brokers can support millions of concurrent connections and much higher throughput.

Download the broker, follow the instructions and learn more about leveraging MQTT and GCP for your IoT project.
GitHub: https://github.com/Agosto/gcp-iot-adapter

And if you’re looking for a more customized implementation of our MQTT to Pub/Sub Connection broker, visit our website to learn more about our offerings.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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What’s brewing in Visual Studio Team Services: January 2017 Digest

This post series provides the latest updates and news for Visual Studio Team Services and is a great way for Azure users to keep up-to-date with new features being released every three weeks. Visual Studio Team Services offers the best DevOps tooling to create an efficient continuous integration and release pipeline to Azure. With the rapidly expanding list of features in Team Services, teams can start to leverage it more efficiently for all areas of their Azure workflow, for apps written in any language and deployed to any OS.

Release Management is generally available

Release Management is now generally available. Release Management enables you to create a continuous deployment pipeline for your applications with fully automated deployments, seamless integration with Azure, and end to end traceability.

Azure App Services Continuous Delivery

Additionally, Release Management is now available in the Azure Portal. You can start using this feature today by navigating to your app’s menu blade in the Azure portal and clicking on APP DEPLOYMENT > Continuous Delivery (Preview).

Package Management is generally available

Package Management is available as an extension to Team Services and Team Foundation Server 2017 for hosting your packages and making them available to your team, your builds, and your releases. In addition to support for NuGet packages, Package Management now support npm packages. If you’re a developer working with node.js, JavaScript, or any of its variants, you can now use Team Services to host private npm packages right alongside your NuGet packages.

Work Item Search is now in public preview

While Code Search is the most popular extension for Team Services and has been available for a while now, Work Item Search is now available in public preview. You can install the free Work Item Search extension from the Team Services Marketplace. With Work Item Search you can quickly and easily find relevant work items by searching across all work item fields over all projects in an account. You can perform full text searches across all fields to efficiently locate relevant work items. Use in-line search filters, on any work item field, to quickly narrow down to a list of work items.

Import TFS servers directly into Team Services

We are very excited to announce the preview of the TFS Database Import Service for Visual Studio Team Services. In the past, we have had various options that offered a low-fidelity method for migrating your data.  The difference today is that the TFS Database Import Service is a high-fidelity migration that brings over your source code history, work items, builds, etc. and keeps the same ID numbers, traceability, settings, permissions personalizations, and much more.  Our goal for your final production import is that your team will be working in TFS on a Friday and then be continuing their work in Visual Studio Team Services when they come back to work on Monday.

Public preview of Linux in the hosted build pool

That’s right – we have added Linux containers to our host build pool. These are running on Ubuntu Linux inside the vsts-agent-docker container. This container includes all the standard Java, Node, Docker, and .NET Core tooling. You can create or spawn other Docker containers as part of your build or release process using either a script or the Docker extension in the Visual Studio Marketplace. To use Linux, just choose Hosted Linux Preview for the default agent queue in the General section of your build definition.

Improvements to the pull request experience

We continue to enhance the pull request experience, and we’ve now added the ability to see the changes in a PR since you last looked at it, add attachments in comments, and to see and resolve merge conflicts.

JBoss and WildFly extension

The JBoss and WildFly extension provides a task to deploy your Java applications to an instance of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7 or WildFly Application Server 8 and above over the HTTP management interface.  It also includes a utility to run CLI commands as part of your build/release process.  Check out this video for a demo. This extension is open sourced on GitHub so reach out to us with any suggestions or issues.  We welcome contributions.

There are many more updates, so I recommend taking a look at the full list of new features in the release notes for November 23rd and January 5th.

Happy coding!
Quelle: Azure

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Square Really Wants More Businesses To Use Apple Pay

Square

Square, the mobile payments company run by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is offering US businesses a special promo this year: It won't charge them any fees to process about $12,000 worth of Apple Pay transactions if they&039;re using Square&039;s chip and contactless payments reader. Square&039;s normal processing fee is 2.75%, so companies can save up to $350.

Though Square is most commonly associated with small retailers, this promotion extends to companies of any size, according to the company. Companies already using Square&039;s reader or new customers who sign up in 2017 can take part. If the company is new to Square, it can purchase a reader at a discount, and the deal will apply for a year after it signs up.

The promotion is contingent on the retailer setting up marketing materials at their point of sale — Square asks them to verify this with a picture — encouraging customers to use Apple Pay. The company piloted the program in Portland, OR in 2016 and said that the number of contactless transactions at retailers tripled.

The company said it hopes to “educate buyers and sellers” about the benefits of contactless payments, namely increased security and speedier transactions. For that reason, the promotion is aimed at sellers with a visible point of sale — like a countertop.

Jesse Dorogusker, head of hardware at Square, told BuzzFeed News, “We&039;re promoting contactless and bringing it to our customer base because it’s typically the small businesses who lag behind in technological innovation, who don&039;t reap the benefits of technological advances.”

The promotion is part of a larger effort to integrate Square with Apple Pay and for each to promote the other. Square CEO Jack Dorsey announced in December 2016 that Square Cash, the company&039;s virtual bank account that can link to a Visa debit card, would integrate with Apple Pay.

When asked why the company focused so much on the partnership with Apple, Dorogusker said, “Contactless is new in the States. The only way to break through is with pristine implementation, and the two of us are really the only ones who have that right now.”

Chip credit cards proliferated throughout the US during 2016, but they&039;ve encountered issues with their processing speeds. Many people hate them.

Square claims their chip card reader is much faster than others, and the company hopes that encouraging use of contactless payments will give it a further edge over other payments processors.

Dorogusker said, “We&039;ve been focusing on the performance of our chip card reader, and that&039;s going well, but the ritual of a tap makes way more sense.”

Quelle: <a href="Square Really Wants More Businesses To Use Apple Pay“>BuzzFeed