Smart DevOps Round-up With SiliconANGLE

Last week, Microsoft announced Docker container engine for its Azure platform, also Orchestrate added Orchestrate Enterprise for rapid, massively scalable enterprise application development. Oculus Rift took the virtual reality to the next level by open sourcing its developer kit.

This and more in this week DevOps round up.

Open source role for developer community

Oculus VR took an important step last week by making the Oculus Rift developer kit (DK1) open source. All mechanical plans (to build the VR), electrical diagrams and even the firmware are available on GitHub. Anyone can therefore set up their own DK1; the only requirement is having the skills necessary to understand the files.

By making the kit as open source, Oculus is promoting the emergence of a complete ecosystem of games with virtual reality applications in mind. Oculus hopes to attract business and create an emulation around virtual reality. Just what the company plans to do with the technology is unknown, but the Oculus VR headset is not just about games or services. The services offer essentials for multiplayer features like voice chat and object replication.

Microsoft is aggressively adopting open source technology for its Azure infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Early this month, the Redmond company revealed plan to make future versions of Windows Server compatible with the Docker container engine and last week it rolled out support for Apache Storm.

The Apache Storm support will provide developers to match the real-time analytics capabilities offered by arch-rival Amazon, whose Kinesis service already supports the engine. The engine includes fault tolerance functionality that automatically reacts to infrastructure failures and guaranteeing that every last tidbit of incoming information is processed at least once.

Docker makes inroads into enterprises

The developers of the Docker project have released version 1.3 of the tool. In addition to a preview regarding the benefit of digital signatures, the update also includes new commands and other security options. Docker and Microsoft plan to work more closely in the future.

One highlight of this release is that Docker 1.3 beefs up the security for virtual containers.

The Docker Engine will now automatically verify the provenance and integrity of all Official Repos using digital signatures. Docker plans to expand the capability to automatically block malicious software upon detection, and it intends to extend support beyond the Official Repos to non-official sources. The roadmap for the project also includes security functionality such as publisher and image authentication, public key encryption and more.

Android 64-bit emulator

In an attempt to compete with Apple on building 64-bit apps, Google has announced availability of the Android Lollipop 64-bit emulator for Intel x86 architectures. The advantages of the official 64-bit support by Android L will include larger addressable memory area, an enhanced instruction set for a greater efficiency of the code and generally better performance.

Following the release of Android Lollipop, the 64-bit emulator allows app developers to test and optimize their existing and upcoming apps for the 64-bit architecture. A 64-bit environment will allow developers to recognize devices with more than 4 GB of RAM thus allowing manufacturers to include more memory on future devices.

Google hopes this development kit will give developers a head start on building 64-bit optimized apps. The result: when Android Lollipop rolls out, there will be plenty of apps ready to take the hardware advantage.

Orchestrate empowers database developers

Poland based DBaaS vendor Orchestrate introduced Orchestrate Enterprise, a complete database portfolio for rapid, massively scalable enterprise application development. Orchestrate Enterprise delivers a portfolio of NoSQL databases that meets the needs of most enterprise application by increasingly turning to APIs and the cloud for agile development, and to tackle new requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and big data.

By consolidating databases in a single service, Orchestrate may decrease deployment time to production tenfold, along with drastic savings in cost, time and operational support. Orchestrate provides developers with a single API to work with a wide variety of databases. Developers can use Elasticsearch, Hbase and MySQL in a single footprint.