We are living in the future – it is just unevenly distributed with “an outstanding amount of hype and this anthropomorphization of what [AI] technology can actually provide for us,” observed Hilary Mason, general manager for machine learning at Cloudera, who led a keynote on “AI in the Real World: Today and Tomorrow,” at the recent Open FinTech Forum.

AI has existed as an academic field of research since the mid-1950s, and if the forum had been held 10 years ago, we would have been talking about big data, she said. But, today, we have machine learning and feedback loops that allow systems continue to improve with the introduction of more data.

Machine learning provides a set of techniques that fall under the broad umbrella of data science. AI has returned, from a terminology perspective, Mason said, because of the rise of deep learning, a subset of machine learning techniques based around neural networks that has provided not just more efficient capabilities but the ability to do things we couldn’t do at all five years ago.

Imagine the future

All of this “creates a technical foundation on which we can start to imagine the future,’’ she said. 

Watch the complete video at The Linux Foundation

The bi-annual CNCF survey takes a pulse of the community to better understand the adoption of cloud native technologies. This is the second time CNCF has conducted its cloud native survey in Mandarin to better gauge how Asian companies are adopting open source and cloud native technologies. The previous Mandarin survey was conducted in March 2018. This post also makes comparisons to the most recent North American / European version of this survey from August 2018.

Key Takeaways

• Usage of public and private clouds in Asia has grown 135% since March 2018, while on-premise has dropped 48%.
• Usage of nearly all container management tools in Asia has grown, with commercial off-the-shelf solutions up 58% overall, and home-grown solutions up 690%. Kubernetes has grown 11%.
• The number of Kubernetes clusters in production is increasing. Organizations in Asia running 1-5 production clusters decreased 37%, while respondents running 11-50 clusters increased 154%.
• Use of serverless technology in Asia has spiked 100% with 29% of respondents using installable software and 21% using a hosted platform.

Growth of Containers

Container usage is becoming prevalent in all phases of the development cycle. There has been a significant jump in the use of containers for testing, up to 42% from 24% in March 2018 with an additional 27% of respondents citing future plans. There has also been an increase in use of containers for Proof of Concept (14% up from 8%).

Read more at CNCF

The online prequel to the epic Fallout series, Fallout 76 throws you into a multiplayer-filled wasteland where you all must work together (or not) to survive the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, all the while experiencing the largest, most dynamic open world ever created in the legendary Fallout universe. Brought to you by the award-winning creators of Skyrim and Fallout 4, Fallout 76 is now available on Xbox One.

A Player-Filled Wasteland

Forge your own path in a wild wasteland with tons of new and unique locations to discover. With a refined S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system that lets you craft your own personality in this new world, you will have the option to journey alone or with friends.

Almost Heaven

With all-new graphics, lighting, and landscape tech, six distinct West Virginia regions will be brought to life in Fallout 76. From the thick, green forests of Appalachia to the toxic expanse of the Cranberry Bog, each unique region will offer its own risks and rewards — post-nuclear America has never looked so good.

Go C.A.M.P.ing

Introducing the all-new Construction and Assembly Mobile Platform (C.A.M.P.). With the C.A.M.P. you can build and craft anywhere in the world of Fallout 76. Use it to create much-needed shelter, safety, and supplies to survive the West Virginia wasteland. You can also use the C.A.M.P. to trade with other survivors (players). Just keep a close eye on neighbors who might be a little too friendly…

Get Contaminated

Part of your adventure may lead you to uncover the ultimate weapon in Fallout 76: Nuclear Missiles. Now you can be part of the destruction of humanity when the bombs fall, where the destruction will leave behind a high-level zone with rare and valuable resources. It’ll be up to you to unleash or protect the power of the atom.

Fallout 76 is available now on the Microsoft Store for the Xbox One family of devices and is an Xbox One X Enhanced title. You can also pick up the Fallout 76: Tricentennial Edition that includes bonus in-game digital items like Tricentennial Power Armor, a Vault Boy Mascot Head, Patriotic Uncle Sam Outfit, and more. Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for all of the latest news on your favorite Xbox One games as well as the latest news and updates on Fallout 76.

“Developers! Developers! Developers!” That phrase is synonymous with Microsoft’s history of democratizing complex technologies and empowering anyone with an idea to build software.

Over four decades, we’ve lowered barriers to development with developer tooling, enterprise integration, DevOps, PaaS, and SaaS. Today, serverless offerings from Functions and Logic Apps to Azure DevOps and IoT Central remove friction for development in the cloud.

This morning, we’re excited to announce the initial release of the Azure Blockchain Development Kit which is built on Microsoft’s serverless technologies and seamlessly integrates blockchain with the best of Microsoft and third-party SaaS.

This kit extends the capabilities of our blockchain developer templates and Azure Blockchain Workbench, which incorporates Azure services for key management, off-chain identity and data, monitoring, and messaging APIs into a reference architecture that can be used to rapidly build blockchain-based applications.

These tools have become the first step for many organizations on their journey to re-invent the way they do business. Apps have been built for everything from democratizing supply chain financing in Nigeria to securing the food supply in the UK, but as patterns emerged across use cases, our teams identified new ways for Microsoft to help developers go farther, faster.

This initial release prioritizes capabilities related to three key themes: connecting interfaces, integrating data and systems, and deploying smart contracts and blockchain networks.

Connect

To deliver end to end blockchain solutions for consortiums, developers need to enable organizations, people, and devices to connect to the blockchain and do it from a heterogenous set of user interfaces.

Take for example an end to end supply chain for a commodity such as cocoa.

• SMS and voice interfaces enable small hold farmers in Africa to transact and track their goods at the first mile of the supply chain.
• Internet of Things (IoT) devices deliver sensor data to track the conditions of the goods at different points in their journey to market – tracking the humidity in the containers where the beans are held to the temperature of the end product of ice cream that it is incorporated into.
• Mobile clients enable logistics providers to accept and transfer responsibility for products on their journey from manufacturer to retail using the compute power that already exists in the pockets of its employees. Mobile devices also have sensors such as GPS and cameras that can add complementary data that can help attest to the what, where, and when of deliveries.
• Backend Systems and Data in the form of ERP systems such as Dynamics and SAP are used to manage core processes for different participants. These systems also become clients via extension and need to interact with smart contracts to provide and receive attestable data on behalf of an organization.
• Bots and assistants enable manufacturers and retailers to interact with the supply chain. This includes interacting with smart contracts for orders and provenance using natural language and using attestable data from the blockchain to direct actions taken on behalf of a user.
• Web clients enable end consumers to query the origin of the product purchased at retail, typically a mix of provenance and story of their journey of their product from “farm to fork”

The Azure Blockchain Development Kit includes samples for all of these scenarios, including inbound and outbound SMS, IVR, IoT Hub and IoT Central, Xamarin mobile client for iOS and Android, Dynamics integration via Common Data Service (CDS), bots and assistants (Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant) and web UX.

Integrate

Businesses are using blockchain and smart contracts to facilitate multi-party processes. Blockchain also delivers real-time transparency of the states and events of those contracts to appropriate participants.

End to end blockchain solutions require integration with data, software, and media that live “off chain”. External updates and events can trigger actions on smart contracts. Smart contract events and state changes can then trigger actions and data updates to “off chain” systems and data. These external systems and AI will also need the ability to query attestable data from smart contracts to inform action.

Specifically, there are two areas of integration where guidance is most needed:

Documents and Media: Documents and media do not belong on chain, but business processes often involve images, videos, audio, Office documents, CAD files for 3D printers or other file types.

The common pattern is to generate a unique hash of the media and the metadata that describes it. Those hashes are then placed on a public or private chain. If authenticity of a file is ever questioned, the “off chain” files can be re-hashed at a later time and that hash is compared to the “on chain” hash stored on the blockchain. If the hashes match, the document is authentic, but if so much as a pixel of an image or letter in a document is changed, the hashes will not match and this will make obvious that tampering has occurred.

Today we’re releasing a set of Logic Apps that enable the hashing of files and file related metadata. Also included are smart contracts for files and a file registry to store the hashes on chain.

Logic Apps have been created to deliver this functionality for files added to the most popular sources for documents and media, including Azure Storage, OneDrive, One Drive for Business, SharePoint, Box, Adobe Creative Cloud, and FTP.

Smart Contract Interaction: Getting blockchain off the whiteboard and into production means dealing with the realities of how counterparties interact today. That reality is that Enterprise integration is messy.

Microsoft brings our decades of experience in this area to blockchain. Our work with integrating Enterprise systems began almost two decades ago with the introduction of BizTalk server, and our focus on database integration traces back to our co-development of Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) in the 1990s. All of our experience has been captured and made available in Azure services. This includes 200+ connectors available in Logic Apps and Flow, and the robust capabilities in our data platform.

The Blockchain Application Development Kit includes Workbench integration samples in the following areas:

Logic App Connectors for Blockchain

Today, we are also announcing that we will release a set of Logic App and Flow Connectors to extend these samples to ledgers like Ethereum, Corda, Bitcoin, and others.

“At R3, we are committed to ensuring developers can deploy CorDapps quickly, securely and easily. The Azure Blockchain Development Kit will give our enterprise customers tools to integrate with the applications, software, and devices that people use every day like Outlook, Alexa, SMS, and web UX. Blockchain is moving out of the labs and into everyday business applications.”

– Mike Ward, Head of Product Management, R3

The Ethereum blockchain connector is available today and enables users to deploy contracts, call contract actions, read contract state and trigger other Logic Apps based on events from the ledger.

Deploy

With the mainstreaming of blockchain technology in enterprise software development, organizations are asking for guidance on how to deliver DevOps for smart contracts and blockchain projects.

Common questions include:

• My business logic and data schema for that logic is reflected in smart contracts. Smart contracts are written in languages I’m less familiar with like Solidity for Ethereum, and Kotlin for Corda, or Go for Hyperledger Fabric.  What tools can I use to develop those in?
• How do I do unit testing and debugging on smart contracts?
• Many blockchain scenarios reflect multi-party transactions and business workflows. These workflows include signed transactions from multiple parties happening in specific sequences. How do I think about data for test environments in that context?
• Smart contracts are deployed to the blockchain, which is immutable. How do I need to think about things such as infrastructure as code, local dev/test, upgrading contracts, etc.?
• Blockchain is a data technology shared across multiple organizations in a consortium, what are the impacts on source code control, build and release pipelines in a global, multi-party environment?

While there are some nuances to the approach, the good news is that just like other types of solution development, this model can readily be addressed in a DevOps model.

Today, we’re announcing the release of the whitepaper, “DevOps for Blockchain Smart Contracts.”

“We’re excited to work with Microsoft to create the canonical DevOps experience for blockchain engineers. Our paper, ‘DevOps for Blockchain Smart Contracts’, goes into rigorous detail and provides examples on how to develop blockchain applications with an eye toward CI/CD in consortium environments.”

– Tim Coulter, Founder of Truffle

Complementing the whitepaper is an implementation guide, available through the Azure Blockchain Development Kit, that shows how to implement CI/CD for smart contracts and infrastructure as code using Visual Studio Code, GitHub, Azure DevOps and OSS from Truffle.

A great platform for blockchain application development

The Azure Blockchain Development Kit is the next step in our journey to make developing end to end blockchain applications accessible, fast, and affordable to anyone with an idea. It is built atop our investments in blockchain and connects to the compute, data, messaging, and integration services available in both Azure and the broader Microsoft Cloud to provide a robust palette for a developer to realize their vision.

Logic Apps and Flow deliver a graphical design environment with more than 200 connectors dramatically simplifying the development of end to end blockchain solutions, and Azure Functions enable the rapid integration of custom code.

A serverless approach also reduces costs and management overhead. With no VMs to manage, built-in scalability, and an approachable pricing model the Azure Blockchain Development Kit is within reach of every developer – from enthusiasts to ISVs to enterprises.

Solutions are written using online visual workflow designers and Visual Studio Code, a free download that provides an integrated development environment on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The resulting applications will run atop a network that has higher rated cloud performance than other large-scale providers and enable federating identities between participants using Azure Active Directory. With Azure, those applications can be deployed to more regions than any other cloud provider and benefit from more certifications.

We look forward to seeing what you’ll build, and we’ll continue to both listen and look for ways to help as we build a decentralized future together.

To learn more about how to use these samples to build and extend blockchain applications, you can find a host of videos on our Channel 9 show Block Talk.

You can also stay up to date with the latest updates from Azure Blockchain by following us on Twitter @MSFTBlockchain.