A few things released recently that I find interesting
Tags: discuss
Published: 2018-12-05 12:01:15

As you probably know, recently Amazon held their [AWS re:Invent 2018](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-previews-and-pre-announcements-at-reinvent-2018-andy-jassy-keynote/) conference, Microsoft held their [Connect(); 2018](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/connectevent) event and Google held [Flutter Live](https://developers.google.com/events/flutter-live/).

In this post I'm going to list a few things that I find interesting for me. If I were to talk about everything I would probably finish by next year's conferences.

## AWS re:Invent

AWS as usual released a lot of features and improvements. Their dashboard is famously overpacked and I have no idea what half of those thing do:

![](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/br8m4snhee2qceui4gx5.png)

Among the [new features](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-previews-and-pre-announcements-at-reinvent-2018-andy-jassy-keynote/) a few stroke a chord:

* AWS Lambda (it's only 4 years old!) gets support for shared code and a Runtime API that allows you to write functions in whatever language. Ruby, C++, Rust, Erlang and others are all in. This is huge, especially for developers who don't want to maintain more than one environment in their distributed apps. You can read all about it here: [Use Any Programming Language and Share Common Components](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-use-any-programming-language-and-share-common-components/)

* AWS has launched ARM based processors in their infinite offer of instance types. Using their words: 

> They are a great fit for scale-out workloads where you can share the load across a group of smaller instances. This includes containerized microservices, web servers, development environments, and caching fleets.

It seems a cost effective way to scale horizontally for web apps on EC2

* AWS Firecracker (the naming department needs therapy :D) is a technology for micro virtual machines with security and isolation builtin. All cloud companies for obvious reasons (saving money and energy and improve security) are all, albeit differently, going in the same direction, see [Cloudfare's isolates](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/) for example. Firecraker enables you to start the VM in 125ms occupying as little as 5MB, Lambda already uses it, you can have many of those on the same instance. Ah, and it's [open source and written in Rust](https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker). You can read more about it here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ - This is huge in my opinion

AWS is clearly set on ruling the world ([satellite as a service](https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/27/aws-launches-a-base-station-for-satellites-as-a-service/) ? [blockhain as a service](https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/amazon-gets-into-the-blockchain-with-quantum-ledger-database-managed-blockchain/) ?) but I wonder how many of the hundreds of features they release each year can they actually sustain and improve and support. The feeling of "let's be in as many markets as we can at the same time" is evident, and the same principle driving the actual Amazon company.

## Microsoft Connect();

* Azure Functions gets [Python 3.6 support](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-functions-python-support-public-preview-2/) (in preview). Both AWS (Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby, plus the new runtime for everything else) and Azure (C#, JavaScript, F#,  Java, Python, PHP, Bash,  PowerShell) are clearly trying to support as many runtimes as possible. Google Cloud only supports JavaScript and, since recently, Python 3.7. 

* Azure Serverless Community Library: an [open source library](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/serverless-community-library-is-in-preview/) of functions ready to use. 

* CORS support for Azure Cosmos DB. Cosmos DB is one of the most interesting pieces of DB technology out there in my opinion. It's a globally distributed DB with "infinite" scalability, minimal latency and that can be accessed with many different types of APIs (as a traditional SQL DB, as a graph DB, as a Mongo DB and others). Well, now we can use it directly from a JavaScript frontend: [CORS Support in Azure Cosmos DB](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/cors-support-in-azure-cosmos-db/)

I feel like Azure deserves more attention :-)

## Google Flutter Live

* Flutter ([now at 1.0](https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/flutter-10-googles-portable-ui-toolkit.html)) can be [added to existing native apps](https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Add-Flutter-to-existing-apps)

* Finally Flutter can [use the WebView (both on Android and iOS)](https://github.com/flutter/plugins/tree/master/packages/webview_flutter)

* Google is hiring Flutter developers. I know there a few around here so someone might be interested :D:

![](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/uimrg7qh8zfa5qs6gqu8.png)

(the screenshot is from https://flutter.io/)

And you? What did you find interesting?