Open Source Weekly #6

This week’s Microsoft Connect(); event has been a demo-packed few days, highlighting Microsoft’s continuing commitment to delivering open technologies and contributing to and partnering with open source communities. From joining the MariaDB Foundation to launching a new Apache Spark-based analytics platform and previewing Visual Studio Code Live Share, there’s a ton of open source goodness to catch up on in this edition of the Open Source Weekly.
Microsoft joins MariaDB Foundation: Microsoft joined the MariaDB community as a platinum member of the MariaDB Foundation. As part of this membership, we’ll be working closely with the foundation, actively contributing to MariaDB and the MariaDB community. We also announced a preview of Azure Database for MariaDB, which will bring the fully managed service capabilities of Azure to MariaDB. Developers can sign up for the upcoming preview here. Below is Monty Widenius, creator of MySQL and MariaDB, talking about the projects named after his daughters My and Maria and our new partnership.

GitHub Partnership on GVFS: Microsoft and GitHub are partnering to bring GVFS to GitHub’s 25 million users. GVFS is an open source extension to the Git version control system developed by Microsoft to support the world’s largest repositories. Below Ed Thompson talks about how GVFS works.

AWS joins Microsoft and Facebook in the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) initiative: Framework support for the open AI ecosystem grew this week, as Microsoft and Facebook announced that Amazon Web Services is contributing ONNX support for Apache MXNet and joining the ONNX initiative. It’s great to have another major framework support ONNX: Caffe2, PyTorch, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, and now MXNet.
A long list of roadmap announcements happened during Microsoft Connect(); this week. Below are some of the open source related highlights.
Visual Studio Code Live Sharing: Microsoft announced a private preview for Visual Studio Code “Live Share,” which enables developers to quickly collaborate on the same codebase without the need to synchronize code or to configure the same development tools, settings, or environment. When you share a collaborative session, your teammate sees the context of the workspace in their editor. This means your teammate can read the code you shared without having to clone a repo or install any dependencies your code relies on. They can use rich language features to navigate within the code, not only opening other files as text, but also using semantic analysis-based navigation like Go to Definition or Peek. Learn more here.
Azure Databricks: Designed in collaboration with the founders of Apache Spark, the preview of Azure Databricks is a fast, easy and collaborative Apache Spark-based analytics platform that delivers one-click setup, streamlined workflows and an interactive workspace. Native integration with Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Active Directory and Power BI simplifies the creation of modern data warehouses that enable organizations to provide self-service analytics and machine learning over all data with enterprise-grade performance and governance.
Azure Cosmos DB with Apache Cassandra API: With this preview, developers now get a Cassandra-as-a-service using the Cassandra SDKs and tools they are familiar with using the power of Azure Cosmos DB. Developers re-use existing code they’ve already written and build new applications using the Cassandra API against Azure Cosmos DB’s globally distributed, multi-model database service. Azure Cosmos DB has been designed to scale throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions with comprehensive SLAs and with greater consistency levels for more precise data latency management.
Azure DevOps Projects: Microsoft released a new “Getting Started” experience for developers called Azure DevOps Projects.  This experience enables you to very easily create a new small sample app, using a wide variety of tech stacks (.NET, Java, Node.js, Python, etc.) and configure a full CI/CD pipeline. With a few clicks, you get a Git repo with the sample app, a CI build definition, a release pipeline and a provisioned and deployed app.  If you already have your own app in a Git repo, we’ll help you get a CI/CD pipeline set up for that too. The entire experience is done within the Azure portal and starts by creating a new DevOps Project.
Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft announced the public preview of new Azure IoT Edge capabilities, including a new AI Toolkit for Azure IoT Edge available on Github. Azure IoT Edge can be used in many IoT scenarios and is designed to run on multiple platforms (Windows and many versions of Linux) and hardware architectures (x64 and ARM). To deploy workloads, Azure IoT Edge can use Linux Containers for Docker or Windows Containers for Docker, with an open design to incorporate number of popular container management systems. Azure IoT Edge also allows developers to write their own code in multiple languages (C#, C and Python for now, with more coming in the future).
Even the keynotes at Microsoft Connect(); were demo-packed.

Build almost anything: Mac, Linux, and Windows builds in VSTS: In this session, Jessica Deen shows you how to quickly build nearly anything—for Mac, Linux, or Windows—by using Visual Studio Team Services.

Kubernetes development with the Visual Studio connected environment: Scott Hanselman demos the Visual Studio connected environment—Kubernetes development in Azure from Visual Studio 2017, as announced at Connect 2017.

Below are two of the many updates this week to docs.microsoft.com, our home to thousands of pages of technical documentation, API reference, code examples, and more for developers and IT professionals.
Deploy an Azure Container Service (AKS) cluster: Azure Container Service (AKS) manages your hosted Kubernetes environment, making it quick and easy to deploy and manage containerized applications without container orchestration expertise. It also eliminates the burden of ongoing operations and maintenance by provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources on demand, without taking your applications offline. In this quickstart, an AKS cluster is deployed using the Azure CLI.
Introduction to Apache Cassandra API for Azure Cosmos DB: Azure Cosmos DB can be used as the data store for apps written for Apache Cassandra, by using the Apache Cassandra API. This means that by using existing Apache licensed drivers compliant with CQLv4, your application written for Cassandra can now communicate with the Azure Cosmos DB Cassandra API. Check out the complete introduction, including quickstarts, here.
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