As you probably know, recently Amazon held their AWS re:Invent 2018 conference, Microsoft held their Connect(); 2018 event and Google held 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:
Among the new features 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
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 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. 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 ? blockhain as a service ?) 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 (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 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
I feel like Azure deserves more attention :-)
Google Flutter Live
Flutter (now at 1.0) can be added to existing native apps
Finally Flutter can use the WebView (both on Android and iOS)
Google is hiring Flutter developers. I know there a few around here so someone might be interested :D:
(the screenshot is from https://flutter.io/)
And you? What did you find interesting?
Latest comments (13)
Such a great summary :D
Thanks! There's much more, I had to select my favorites :D Maybe you're interested in the new managed time series database AWS launched: aws.amazon.com/timestream/ (quite expensive though)
I spotted that in the long, long list of releases that came out of re:Invent. The future is definitely serverless and streaming in the AWS world. Interesting times ahead :)
Also worth mentioning that Flutter code can now compile for various environments. This includes the web under what they call the Hummingbird project.
There's Desktop, IoT, And many more surprises to come.
A lot of desktop embedding such as google's own desktop-embedding and go-flutter-desktop-embedding(pretty much the same). I was also shocked at the presentation powered by Flutter engine itself, I thought it was some Google Slides or something.
I'm glad I am now in the Dart side. Never ever be a dead horse project now fellas!
Yup, the presentation was awesome. Glad I was there to witness with my own eyes 👀
Dart is returning strong. Success stories are usually preceded by a boat-load of failures.
This is exciting!
What’s the story for Dart running natively ever? Would this be a WebAssembly thing at this point?
So from the article I linked to, they are currently exploring these approaches:
This is due to their strong support across browsers. No mention of WASM. I can only hope they're secretly looking into it because till yesterday, I had no clue that they got Flutter already compiling for the web.
Ah interesting!
I’m definitely checking out that article. Thanks for the tldr 🙂
Would you characterize this as their attempt of building an alternative to React Native?
I would characterise this as an attempt at presenting another option on the market for cross-platform development. Kinda makes sense since Dart can already compile to JavaScript since day 1.
Yes/No. RN right now is decreasingly popular. If they ever surpass the new RN architecture, I wouldn't be surprised as Flutter is three step ahead to REACT.
Absolutely