On Monday long-time Slashdot reader TorinEdge wrote that Microsoft "appears to have botched an internal Office365 cloud services rollout today, with outages confirmed up and down the West Coast of North America. Confirmed roll backs were good early omens, but in the end did not appear to be successful... Symptoms may include: All 365-related services flaking out, borking, alternately approving logins and confirming they definitely do not exist." CRN reported service was impacted for five hours. But on Thursday some users were now intermittently unable to access Microsoft Exchange from 12:52 a.m. until 10:50 p.m., "according to a Microsoft email update to Office 365 administrators..." "Some partners believe the tech giant is grappling with a DevOps crisis." "It looks like they are pushing out software updates that are causing the outages," said a channel source impacted by one of the outages. "They have so much going on right now, rolling Teams out at a breakneck pace. I think they are running into an issue where code tested out fine but there is a configuration problem when they deploy it." DevOps is a set of practices that, according to the Wikipedia definition, shortens the systems development life cycle and provides continuous delivery of code with high software quality... A senior executive for one of Microsoft's top partners, who did not want to be identified, said he sees both recent outages as clearly DevOps-related... "Microsoft is a development first company, well known in general for DevOps, so the question is: why is this happening?" said the executive. "I love Microsoft but why is a company that paid $7.5 billion for Github, the leading source code repository company in the world, getting taken down by code that is not being well tested or has a single point of failure. That is ridiculous. If we caused this kind of production outage for a customer we would be fired and possibly blacklisted from the ecosystem. We have to bat 1,000 as a partner." The lesson from the outages may well be that a company's DevOps is only as "good as the humans who configure it and execute upon it," said the executive. The executive said the outages will definitely have a ripple effect in the channel. "I bet the Google G Suite sales reps threw a party when they saw this," he said. "No cloud vendor is immune to downtime," Microsoft says in a statement quoted by CRN. "Our number one priority is to get to resolution as quickly as possible and ensure our customers stay updated along the way, as was the case here. "We continuously invest in the resilience of our platform and focus on learning from these incidents to ultimately reduce the impact of inevitable outages..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Seems everything charges a monthly fee, these days. It also seems that every Apple event brings another way to fork over $10 a month to the company. This time out, it was the addition of Fitness+, which brings metric-focused video workouts to an Apple TV near you. To keep things simple (and to keep you subscribing), the company is offering up a trio of new Apple One bundles. It's not quite mix and match yet, but there are three pricing tiers. Individual offers Apple Music, TV+, Arcade and iCloud for $15 a month. The Family version will get you those four services for $20 a month. For the hardcore, there's the $30 a month Premier tier, which bundles iCloud, Music, TV+, Arcade, News+ and Fitness+.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is looking to challenge Amazon in offering a service that connects satellites directly to the company's cloud computing network, according to documents the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission last month. From a report: The effort shows how the two largest providers of cloud infrastructure -- data centers in far-flung places that can host websites and run applications with a smorgasbord of computing and storage services -- regularly seek to one-up each other. That way, the companies can appear ready and willing to meet many of the needs of prospective customers. Microsoft plans to connect a Spanish imaging satellite to two ground stations -- both located in Microsoft's home state of Washington -- to show that it can directly download satellite "data to the Azure Cloud for immediate processing," the FCC documents said. A ground station, sometimes called an earth station, is the vital link for transmitting data to and from satellites in orbit. Microsoft notably proposed to construct one of the two ground stations itself at its data center in Quincy, Wash. The FCC on Sept. 2 authorized Microsoft to perform proof-of-concept demonstrations of the service. The authorization gives Microsoft a six month license that allows for communications and imagery data downloads. The Spanish satellite, called Deimos-2, was launched into orbit in June 2014. The satellite is operated by a subsidiary of Canadian satellite imagery company UrtheCast and, for the tests, the Deimos-2 satellite will only be in range of Microsoft's antennas for "just a few minutes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet reports: An anonymous reader shares this enthusiastic report from ZDNet: Earlier this year, Linus Torvalds approved of adding drivers and other components in Rust to Linux.* Last week, at the virtual Linux Plumbers Conference, developers gave serious thought to using the Rust language for new Linux inline code. ["Nothing firm has been determined yet," reported Phoronix, "but it's a topic that is still being discussed."] And, now Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its just-released Bottlerocket Linux for containers is largely written in Rust. Mozilla may have cut back on Rust's funding, but with Linux embracing Rust, after almost 30-years of nothing but C, Rust's future is assured. Rust was chosen because it lends itself more easily to writing secure software. Samartha Chandrashekar, an AWS Product Manager, said it "helps ensure thread safety and prevent memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities." Many other developers agree with Chandrashekar. Bottlerocket also improved its security by using Device-mapper's verity target. This is a Linux kernel feature that provides integrity checking to help prevent attackers from overwriting core system software or other rootkit type attacks. It also includes the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), In Linux, eBPF is used for safe and efficient kernel function monitoring. * Linus's exact words were "people are actively looking at, especially doing drivers and things that are not very central to the kernel itself, and having interfaces to do those, for example, in Rust. People have been looking at that for years now. I'm convinced it's going to happen one day." The article also reminds readers that AWS's Bottlerocket "is also designed to be quick and easy to maintain... by including the bare essentials needed to run containers..." "Besides its standard open-source elements, such as the Linux kernel and containerd container runtime, Bottlerocket's own code is licensed under your choice of either the Apache 2.0 or the MIT license."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced Wednesday that its cloud wing has received a contract from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to develop artificial intelligence solutions for cancer screening at Department of Defense (DOD) facilities. The Hill reports: The project is aimed at helping analyze data collected when making diagnostic and treatment decisions to help lower the misdiagnosis rate. Google Cloud is planning to provide DIU with a prototype of an augmented reality microscope that provides doctors with real-time info while working. The technology will first be available at a few Defense Health Agency and Veteran's Affairs facilities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier today, quantum computing startup Xanadu launched its quantum cloud platform, where developers can access the company's gate-based photonic quantum processors with 8-qubit or 12-qubit chips, with 24-qubit chips coming "in the next month of so." "The startup expects to 'roughly double' the number of qubits available in its cloud every six months," reports VentureBeat. "The hope is Xanadu Quantum Cloud will let businesses, developers, and researchers build novel solutions to problems in finance, quantum chemistry, machine learning, and graph analytics." From the report: Quantum computing leverages qubits (unlike bits that can only be in a state of 0 or 1, qubits can also be in a superposition of the two) to perform computations that would be much more difficult for a classical computer. Based in Toronto, Canada, Xanadu has been developing quantum computers based on photonics since its founding in September 2016. The choice of technology means Xanadu's quantum processors operate at room temperature (most other examples of quantum computing tech have to be cooled to very low temperatures) and can be integrated into existing fiber optic-based telecommunication infrastructure. Xanadu is best known for the development of PennyLane, an open source software library for quantum machine learning, quantum computing, and quantum chemistry. The company also develops Strawberry Fields, its cross-platform Python library for simulating and executing programs on quantum photonic hardware. Both open source tools are available on GitHub, and they have a growing community fostering tutorials and educational materials for anyone interested in developing and experimenting with quantum applications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is signing deals with foreign governments to offer cloud-infrastructure packages similar to the bundle it assembled for the U.S. Defense Department, according to CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, cloud offering for the Defense Department provides cloud-based computing and storage resources at all government security classification levels, as well as devices that can work offline until they sync back with cloud infrastructure. The Pentagon awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft in October. The contract is worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. Outside the U.S., Microsoft has seen interest in the type of relationship that it has formed with the Pentagon, said one of the people. Specifically, Microsoft has committed to staffing the Pentagon initiative with people who hold sufficient government security clearances, and to delivering a group of existing products and services, as opposed to specially built technologies, at a customized price. Microsoft employees began work on cloud contracts for foreign governments after it became clear that the JEDI work would be put on hold because of a legal challenge from Amazon, Microsoft's main rival in cloud computing, this person said. The company plans to announce the effort later this year, one person said, adding that intelligence agencies and militaries outside the U.S. might use it. Another person briefed on the work said Microsoft already has foreign cloud government contracts, despite that it has not announced the new strategy yet. It's not clear which countries Microsoft is most focused on. "We've worked with governments around the world on a longstanding and reliable basis for four decades," a spokesperson told CNBC in an email. "We have government customers using our products to enhance their services with the latest in commercial innovations, deeply engage and connect with citizens in powerful ways, and empower government employees with the modern tools they need to be more efficient and effective, and to give them time back to focus on their agency mission."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KindMind shares a report from The Register: Toyota has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services in ways that will see many of its models upload performance data into the Amazonian cloud to expand the services the auto-maker offers to drivers and fleet owners. [...] Toyota reckons the data could turn into "new contextual services such as car share, rideshare, full-service lease, and new corporate and consumer services such as proactive vehicle maintenance notifications and driving behavior-based insurance." The two companies say their joint efforts "will help build a foundation for streamlined and secure data sharing throughout the company and accelerate its move toward CASE (Connected, Autonomous/Automated, Shared and Electric) mobility technologies." Neither party has specified just which bits of the AWS cloud Toyota will take for a spin but it seems sensible to suggest the auto-maker is going to need lots of storage and analytics capabilities, making AWS S3 and Kinesis likely candidates for a test drive. Whatever Toyota uses, prepare for privacy ponderings because while cheaper car insurance sounds lovely, having an insurer source driving data from a manufacturer has plenty of potential pitfalls.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.