Kubernetes is often touted as the Linux of the cloud world, and that comparison is fair when you consider its widespread adoption. But, with great power comes great responsibility and, as the home of  Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) shoulders many responsibilities, including learning from the mistakes of other open source projects while not losing sight of the main goal. The rapid global growth of CNCF also means increased responsibility in terms of cultural diversity and creating a welcoming environment.

Rise of Kubernetes in China

CNCF in general has more than 216 members, making it the second largest project under the umbrella of The Linux Foundation. The project is enjoying massive adoption and growth in new markets, especially in China. For example, JD.com, one of the largest e-commerce companies in China, has moved to Kubernetes.

“If you are looking to innovate as a company, you are not going to always buy off-the-shelf technologies, you take Open Source technologies and customize them to your needs. China has over a billion people and they have to meet the needs of these people; they need to scale. Open Source technologies like Kubernetes enable them to customize and scale technologies to their needs,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF.

This growth in Asia has inspired CNCF to bring KubeCon and CloudNativeCon to China. The organization will be organizing their first KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Shanghai, November 11-13, 2018. China is already using open source cloud-native technologies, and through these and other efforts, CNCF wants to build a bridge to help Chinese developers increase their contribution to various projects. CNCF is also gearing up to help the community by offering translations of documentations, exams, certifications, etc.

In interviews and at events in China, language often becomes a barrier to collaboration and the free exchange of ideas and information. CNCF is aware of this. And, according to Aniszczyk, is working on plans for live translation at events to allow presenters to speak in their native language.

CNCF projects are growing not only in new regions but also in scope; people are finding new use-cases every day. While they are enjoying this adoption, the community has also started to prepare themselves for what lies ahead. They certainly can’t predict how some smart organization will use their technology in an area they never envisioned; but they can prepare the community to embrace new requirements.

We have started to hear about CNCF 2020 vision that goes beyond Kubernetes proper and looks at areas such as security and policy. The community has started adding new projects that deal with some of these topics, including Spiffy, which helps users deal with service identity and security at scale for Kubernetes related services, and OPA, a policy management project.

“We are witnessing a wide expansion of areas that CNCF is investing in to bring cloud native technologies to users,” said Aniszczyk.

Bane or boon?

Adoption is great, but we have seen how many open source projects lose track of their core mission and became bloated in order to cater to every use-case. The CNCF is not immune to such problems, but the community — at both developer and organizational level — is acutely aware of the risk and is working to protect itself.

“We have taken several approaches. First and foremost, unlike many other open source projects, CNCF doesn’t force integration. We don’t have one major release that bundles everything. We don’t have any gatekeeping processes that other foundations have,” said Aniszczyk.

What CNCF does do is allow its members and end users to come up with integration themselves to build products that solves the problems of their users. If such integration is useful, then they contribute it back to CNCF.  “We have a set of loosely coupled projects that are integrated by users; we don’t force any such integration,” said Aniszczyk.

According to Aniszczyk, CNCF  acts almost like a release valve and experimentation center for new things. It creates an environment to test new projects. “They are like sandbox projects doing some interesting innovation, solving some serious problems. We will see if they work or not. If they do work then the community may decide to integrate them, but none of it is forced,” said Aniszczyk.

It’s magic

All of this makes CNCF a unique project in the open source ecosystem. Kubernetes has now been widely adopted across industries. Look at cloud providers, for example, and you see that Kubernetes has the blessing of the public cloud trinity, which includes AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Three top Linux vendors — SUSE, Red Hat, and Canonical — have put their weight behind Kubernetes, as well as many other companies and organizations.

“I‘m so proud of being a person that’s been involved in open source and seeing all these companies working together under one neutral umbrella,” Aniszczyk said.

Join us at Open Source Summit in Vancouver, August for 250+ sessions covering the latest technologies and best practices in Kubernetes, cloud, open source, and more.

Technology is changing the way people get things done. We’ve picked up the pace. Our work is more collaborative. And we’re blurring the boundaries of time and place. When we ask customers why they continue to choose Office for their most important work, they tell us that they love the power the Office apps offer. The breadth and depth of features is unmatched in the industry and allows them to do things that they just can’t do with other products. But they also tell us that they need Office to adapt to the changing environment, and they’d love us to simplify the user experience and make that power more accessible. Today, we’re pleased to announce user experience updates for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook rolling out gradually over the next few months. These changes are inspired by the new culture of work and designed to deliver a balance of power and simplicity.

Office is used by more than a billion people every month, so while we’re excited about these changes, we also recognize how important it is to get things right. To guide our work, we came up with “The Three Cs”—a set of guiding principles that we use as a north star. Because these principles will make this process feel different than any previous user experience update, we thought it would be useful to share them with you.

Customers—We’re using a customer-driven innovation process to co-create the design of the Office apps. That process consists of three phases: initial customer research and analysis; concepting and co-creation; and validation and refinement.

Context—Customers love the power of Office, but they don’t need every feature at the same time. We want our new designs to understand the context that you’re working in, so you can focus on the job at hand. That means surfacing the most relevant commands based on the work you’re doing and making it easy to connect and collaborate with others.

Control—We recognize that established skills and routines are powerful—and that the way someone uses the apps often depends on specific parts of the user interface. So we want to give users control, allowing them to toggle significant changes on and off.

These updates are exclusive to Office.com and Office 365—the always up-to-date versions of our apps and services. But they won’t happen all at once. Instead, over the next several months we will deploy new designs to select customers in stages and carefully test and learn. We’ll move them into production only after they’ve made it through rigorous rounds of validation and refinement.

The initial set of updates includes three changes:

Simplified ribbon—A new, updated version of the ribbon is designed to help users focus on their work and collaborate naturally with others. People who prefer to dedicate more screen space to the commands will still be able to expand the ribbon to the classic three-line view.

The first app to get this new experience will be the web version of Word and will start to roll out to select consumer users today on Office.com. Select Insiders will then see the simplified ribbon in Outlook for Windows in July.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows offer our deepest, richest feature set—and they’re the preferred experience for users who want to get the most from our apps. Users have a lot of “muscle memory” built around these versions, so we plan on being especially careful with changes that could disrupt their work. We aren’t ready to bring the simplified ribbon to these versions yet because we feel like we need more feedback from a broader set of users first. But when we do, users will always be able to revert back to the classic ribbon with one click.

New colors and icons—Across the apps you’ll start to see new colors and new icons built as scalable graphics—so they render with crisp, clean lines on screens of any size. These changes are designed to both modernize the user experience and make it more inclusive and accessible.

The new colors and icons will first appear in the web version of Word for Office.com. Then, later this month, select Insiders will see them in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows. In July, they will go to Outlook for Windows, and in August they will begin rolling out to Outlook for Mac.

Search—Search will become a much more important element of the user experience, providing access to commands, content, and people. With “zero query search,” simply placing your cursor in the search box will bring up recommendations powered by AI and the Microsoft Graph.

Commercial users can already see this experience in action in Office.com, SharePoint Online, and the Outlook mobile app, and it will start rolling out to commercial users of Outlook on the web in August.

For an overview of these changes, check out the video below by Jon Friedman, our chief designer for Office.

Video source.

To develop these initial designs, Jon’s team worked closely with customers. They collected data on how people use the apps and built prototypes to test new concepts. While we have plenty of work left to do, we’ve definitely heard encouraging things from customers using early builds:

“It’s simpler and I feel like I can open it and immediately get my bearings and move forward. Not a lot of extra information. The tasks are obvious on this screen.”

“The toolbar provides the most frequently used features…maximizing the screen real estate for the actual content.”

“I like the extra space. What I do find is that the feature to toggle it off/on is helpful because occasionally I can’t figure out (quickly) where something went.”

We plan on carefully monitoring usage and feedback as the changes roll out, and we’ll update our designs as we learn more.

Technology is changing the way people get things done at work, at school, and at home, resetting expectations for productivity. Inspired by these changes, these updates are designed to deliver a balance of power and simplicity. But what’s most exciting for us is that over the next few months we’ll be co-creating and refining these new experiences with our customers—and making the power of Office more accessible for everyone.

Join us August 29-31, in Vancouver, BC, for 250+ sessions covering a wide array of topics including Linux Systems, Cloud Native Applications, Blockchain, AI, Networking, Cloud Infrastructure, Open Source Leadership, Program Office Management and more. Arrive early for new bonus content on August 28 including co-located events, tutorials, labs, workshops, and lightning talks.

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Read more at The Linux Foundation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to be a key area of investment for Microsoft, and we’re pleased to announce that for the first time we’ve leveraged AI at scale to greatly improve the quality and reliability of the Windows 10 April 2018 Update rollout.  Our AI approach intelligently selects devices that our feedback data indicate would have a great update experience and offers the April 2018 Update to these devices first.  As our rollout progresses, we continuously collect update experience data and retrain our models to learn which devices will have a positive update experience, and where we may need to wait until we have higher confidence in a great experience.  Our overall rollout objective is for a safe and reliable update, which means we only go as fast as is safe.

Early returns are very positive: With over 250 million machines on the April 2018 Update, we are seeing higher satisfaction numbers, fewer known issues, and lower support call volumes compared to previous Windows 10 releases.

Our AI/Machine Learning approach started with a pilot program during the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update rollout.  We studied characteristics of devices that data indicated had a great update experience and trained our model to spot and target those devices.  In our limited trial during the Fall Creators Update rollout, we consistently saw a higher rate of positive update experiences for devices identified using the AI model, with fewer rollbacks, uninstalls, reliability issues, and negative user feedback. For the April 2018 Update rollout, we substantially expanded the scale of AI by developing a robust AI machine learning model to teach the system how to identify the best target devices based on our extensive listening systems.

AI means both safe AND fast

Our AI approach has enabled us to quickly spot issues during deployment of a feature update, and as a result has also allowed us to go faster responsibly.  In fact, the April 2018 Update is officially the fastest version of Windows 10 to reach 250 million devices, achieving that mark in less than half the time it took the Fall Creators Update!

When our AI model, feedback or telemetry data indicate that there may be an issue, we quickly adjust and prevent affected devices from being offered the update until we thoroughly investigate.  Once issues are resolved we proceed again with confidence.  This allows us to throttle the update rollout to customers without them needing to take any action.

In cases where devices already offered the update may see issues, we communicate via our customer service forums to let our customers know what is occurring and actions we are taking.  A recent example from the past month was a black screen/reboot issue we detected within 24 hours of it first appearing. We immediately blocked all PCs that could be impacted by this issue from being updated, and communicated to customers within 24 hours, including an initial work around. In the next 24 hours, in cooperation with Avast, Microsoft identified an element of the Avast Behavior Shield that conflicted with the April 2018 Update. Avast immediately released a fix to prevent this issue from further occurring, enabling us to continue to safely roll out the April 2018 Update to those devices.

Windows 10 continually improving quality

We are also seeing quality improvements in Windows 10, which is approaching 700 million monthly active devices.  Early data shows the quality of the April 2018 Update exceeding earlier versions of Windows 10 in both reliability and performance.  Of course, this work is never done, and we continue to partner to with our hardware and software partners to drive additional performance and reliability improvements in Windows 10.  Improvements in the April 2018 Update include:

• 20% reduction in system stability issues
• 20% total reduction in operating system and driver stability issues, in collaboration with our hardware partners, on over 400k ecosystem drivers
• Faster updates by reducing the amount of time your device is offline updating by up to 63%
  (Fun Fact: telemetry shows a U.S.-based PC updated from the Fall Creators Update to the April 2018 update in just over three minutes!)
• Edge launch times improved by up to 40-50% (post-logon window)

Our internal customer support teams are seeing a continued reduction in call and online support requests for Windows 10 with the April 2018 Update.  Our OEMs also continue to experience reductions in monthly customer support volumes with this update.

More devices, declining customer support volume:

Windows 10 April 2018 Update (1803) is now fully available

Based on the update quality and reliability we are seeing through our AI approach, we are now expanding the release broadly to make the April 2018 Update (version 1803) fully available for all compatible devices running Windows 10 worldwide. Full availability is the final phase of our rollout process. You don’t have to do anything to get the update; it will rollout automatically to you through Windows Update.

Enterprise customers can also follow the same targeted approach for the Semi-Annual Channel and fully deploy Windows 10, version 1803 when ready.  IT administrators can decide when to broadly deploy once you have validated the apps, devices, and infrastructure in your organization work well with this release.  For an update overview see What’s new for IT pros in Windows 10, version 1803.  Additionally, you can leverage Windows Analytics tools that help you plan, test and deploy Windows 10 to your organization, and help accelerate Windows 10 migration. You can learn more about Windows Analytics tools and the Semi-Annual Channel releases.

An up-to-date device is the most secure device

The ability to rollout an updated version of Windows 10 safely at massive scale and velocity leveraging AI allows us to ensure the broadest number of customer devices have the latest security, technology and features in the shortest period.  As I’ve noted many times, we’re always actively listening. If you have any feedback, please share it with us via the Feedback Hub app.

Details of the first of the second wave of Spectre-style vulnerabilities in Intel processors has been published earlier than expected, with the “LazyFP” vulnerability potentially allowing an attacker to access sensitive data, such as cryptographic keys.

Part of a secondary collection of processor vulnerabilities discovered following the Spectre and Meltdown disclosures, LazyFP (CVE-2018-3665) was originally found by researchers working for Amazon and Cyberus Technology earlier this year. As part of the process of responsible disclosure, details of the flaw were provided to Intel and other related firms, with a release to the public scheduled after a defined period of time had taken place.

In May, it was reported Intel had successfully negotiated with researchers to delay the release by a few weeks, but wanted to push it further back, potentially until July. According to Cyberus, the embargo was set to lift in August, but rumors of the vulnerability forced an earlier disclosure, possibly to try and pressure Intel and other vendors to work faster in creating and implementing a solution.

While the LazyFP whitepaper explaining the issue is being withheld, following a request by Intel, some details about how the vulnerability works have been issued.

LazyFP centers around the use and abuse of the Floating Point Unit (FPU), and associated registers in the processor. To enable multitasking, the FPU needs to be able to store its state in order to switch between tasks.

Using what is described by Intel as a “Lazy FP state restore technique,” the restoration of an FPU’s state can be delayed until an instruction operating on it is executed by a new process. “Eager FPU switching” saves the state on a context switch without any delay, whereas the “lazy” version is an optimized way that accounts for processes that don’t use the FPU all the time.

While the details of the attack are not explained, it is suggested it is based on the manipulation of the FPU and how it holds data while the Lazy FP technique is used.

According to Intel’s advisory report on the vulnerability, it has a severity rating of “moderate,” and is described as affecting “Intel Core-based microprocessors,” but not specific models. There is also no mention of which operating systems are affected by the vulnerability.

It is unknown if Apple has been affected by the flaw, but as all current Macs and MacBooks use Intel processors and have done for a number of years, it is still plausible. Apple usually posts details about the vulnerabilities it fixes in its software on its security updates page, but there doesn’t appear to be a reference to the latest disclosure as of yet.

Revealed in January, the Meltdown and Spectre chip flaws in Intel and ARM-based processors allowed the creation of a number of exploits in systems using the components. All Mac and iOS devices were found to be affected by the issue, but Apple advised at the time it had already mitigated the issues for current operating system versions, and was working to develop other fixes.

The more recent batch of eight similar security flaws were found to be caused by the same design-related issue, and includes four classified by Intel as “high risk.” While seven of the eight are thought to have the same impact as Spectre, the eighth is thought to be a greater threat against enterprise systems, in being able to allow attackers to exploit a virtual machine to attack the host.

Our eagle-eyed peers over at TouchArcade have spotted an update to the iOS version of Valve’s Steam Link App. While Apple prevented the app from releasing on iOS due to “business conflicts”, if you get invited to the TestFlight you can still try out a beta version of the streaming software.

This morning, the TestFlight was updated with a few UI tweaks and one key changes – you can no longer purchase games via the Steam Link app, although TouchArcade reports you can still buy certain things via Steam Wallet funds on the Marketplace.

Image courtesy of TouchArcade

Hopefully this concession will be enough for Apple to greenlight the app so that iOS users can enjoy the novelty of their Steam library on their phone.

Remember if you’re an Android user, you can download the beta-version of the app right now and take it for a spin. Gadget Hacks has a great guide for getting your Steam Controller to work with your phone (it requires signing up to Steam’s beta and doing a firmware update), and the app analyses your network to see if you’re likely to get a good performance while using it. You can still purchase games via Steam Link on Android as well.

We plan to take the app for a spin ourselves soon, so we’ll report back our findings when we can.

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Newsbrief: Fortnite has grown to 125 million registered players since launching less than a year ago on July 25, 2017. 

Publisher Epic Games broke the news in a blog post, where the main focus was the game’s $100 million push into esports.

While the popular multiplayer shooter did indeed hit shelves in July last year, the stand out battle royale game mode was only added in September.

Since then, the title has gone from strength to strength, and is now available on most major platforms including PS4, Xbox One, PC, MacOS, mobile, and Nintendo Switch.

Yesterday’s Nintendo Treehouse: Live presentation featured a healthy segment on the upcoming turn-based RPG Octopath Traveler, and details surrounding the game’s length and new demo were revealed.

The demo, which is officially called the Octopath Traveler Prologue Demo, should be available to download from the Nintendo eShop today in North America, with other regions coming shortly after. You’ll be able to play as all eight characters from the game, and there will be a three-hour time limit. Your efforts won’t be wasted, however, as this data will carry over to the final version of the game when it launches next month.

Perhaps more interestingly, though, the main game’s full length was revealed to be very impressively high for those who want to lose themselves in the game’s beautiful, pixelated world. The main story will provide players with around 50 – 60 hours of playtime, but plenty of sub-stories and side quests will also be available, pushing that time up to 80 – 100 hours. It seems that you’ll certainly be getting your money’s worth if the quality is as good as the quantity.

You can check out these details being confirmed in this video below:

Are you looking forward to Octopath Traveler? Will you be downloading this new demo and trying it out for yourself?