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We’re announcing the preview of Azure Spot Virtual Machines. Azure Spot Virtual Machines provide access to unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts. Spot pricing is available on single Virtual Machines in addition to Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS). This enables you to deploy a broader variety of workloads on Azure while enjoying access to discounted pricing. Spot Virtual Machines offer the same characteristics as a pay-as-you-go Virtual Machines, with differences in pricing and evictions. Spot Virtual Machines can be evicted anytime if Azure needs capacity.

The workloads that are ideally suited to run on Spot Virtual Machines include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:

• Batch jobs.
• Workloads that can sustain and/or recover from interruptions.
• Development and test.
• Stateless applications that can use Spot Virtual Machines to scale out, opportunistically saving cost.
• Short-lived jobs which can easily be run again if the Virtual Machine is evicted.

On December 12, it became known from Nginx's employee Twitter that the company's office was searched due to the criminal case under Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 'Violation of Author's and Neighboring Rights'. The claim belong to Rambler Group was, although formally the complaintant is Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, to which the rights were transferred. The last-mentioned is related to the co-owner of Rambler Group, Alexander Mamut.

The point of the claim: Igor started working on Nginx as an employee of Rambler and only after the tool became popular he founded a separate company and attracted investments.

Here is how the events unfolded.

We have already presented Tarantool Cartridge that allows you to develop and pack distributed applications. Now let's learn how to deploy and control these applications. No panic, it's all under control! We have brought together all the best practices of working with Tarantool Cartridge and wrote an Ansible role, which will deploy the package to servers, start and join instances into replica sets, configure authorization, bootstrap vshard, enable automatic failover and patch cluster configuration.

Interesting, huh? Dive in, check details under the cut.

Warning

First, all the objects and theories described in this article have the status of hypothetical at the moment. That is, the holographic hypothesis and string theories have not been experimentally confirmed many.

Second, a fundamentally new type of mechanical gyroscope with six degrees of freedom is proposed for experimental verification (base) of hypotheses. Of the two and three degrees of freedom mechanical gyroscopes known to science, this is the last of the possible types with the maximum number of degrees of freedom in the holonomic system (GYRO_6DoF).

Third, with the advent of the experimental base — the tops of the physical pyramid, string theories, and the holographic hypothesis, which is actually the foundation of the future Theory of Everything, are temporarily removed from criticism until the moment of practical implementation of the experiment and measurements.

Abstract

Even people far from physics know that the maximum possible data transmission rate of any signal is equal to the speed of light in a vacuum. It is denoted by the letter «c», and this is about 300 thousand kilometers per second. The speed of light in a vacuum is one of the fundamental physical constants. The impossibility of achieving speeds exceeding the speed of light in three-dimensional space is a deduction from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (SRT). Usually, when it is argued that SRT prohibits the transmission of the information above the speed of light, an implicit assumption is made that there is no other way other than to «bind information» to a photon and transmit it. However, there is another way. The well-known physical hypothesis — the Holographic Principle (a modern and widely used tool in theoretical physics) points to an interesting phenomenon: “Phenomena taking place in three-dimensional space can be projected onto a remote screen without losing information” — Leonard Susskind “The World as a Hologram ”[p. 3].

According to one of the employees Nginx's Moscow office is being searched due to the criminal case brought by Rambler Group (the official response of the company's press office to this issue and confirmation of claims against Nginx is below). The photo of the search warrant is provided as the evidence of the criminal case initiated on December 4, 2019 under Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 'Violation of Author's and Neighboring Rights'.


It is assumed the complaintant is Rambler, and the defendant is still an 'unidentified group of persons', and in the long run — the founder of Nginx, Igor Sysoyev.

The point of the claim: Igor started working on Nginx as an employee of Rambler and only after the tool became popular he founded a separate company and attracted investments.

It is not clear why Rambler revised its 'property' only 15 years later.

More than 100 Azure services offer everything you need to build and run your applications with all the performance, redundancy, security, and scale that the cloud has to offer. But knowing where to begin with all these services can seem overwhelming. 

Read this e-book to build your cloud computing skills quickly and efficiently. You’ll be productive immediately, and when you finish, you’ll be well on your way to Azure mastery. 

Learn more below.

In the previous Python tutorial posts, I have introduced the Ontology Smart Contract in
Part 1: Blockchain & Block API and
Part 2: Storage API
Part 3: Runtime API
Part 4: Native API and described how to use smart contracts for ONT / ONG transfer.

Today we will talk about how to use Upgrade API to upgrade smart contract. There are 2 APIs: Destroy and Migrate.

Another release is out for the Windows Terminal preview! This release is labeled as v0.7 in the About section of the Terminal. As always, you can download the Terminal from the Microsoft Store and from the GitHub releases page. Here’s what’s new in this release:

Windows Terminal Updates

Panes

You are now able to split your Terminal window into multiple panes! This allows you to have multiple command prompts open at the same time within the same tab.

Note: At the moment, you’re only able to open your default profile within a new pane. Opening a profile of your choice is an option we’re planning to include in a future release!



Read more below.

Nowadays everyone knows about cloud services. Many companies have cracked this market segment and created their own cloud services of various purposes. Recently our team has also been interested in these services in terms of integrating the PVS-Studio code analyzer into them. Chances are, our regular readers have already guessed what type of project we will check this time. The choice fell on the code of Huawei cloud services.

Hi there!

The latest years Powershell started expansion to other platforms and now works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS (I even managed to start it on raspberry Pi Debian distro).

And nowadays the main way for installing modules is PowerShell Gallery but in some situations, it still convenient to install modules directly from the source (the main reason — the main PowerShell modules repo configured to MyGet or NugetServer).

And it can be painful to install Module from GitHub — you should download archive, find modules folder extract archive content and then copy module folder to the Powershell Profile directory.

Moreover — people like me don't want to create a separate repository for each module (yes, I like the Release-Flow approach) so download and extract only the modules you are like -it even more difficult.

This article continues the series of publications on usage of PVS-Studio in cloud systems. This time we'll look at the way the analyzer works along with GitLab CI, which is a product made by GitLab Inc. Static analyzer integration in a CI system allows detecting bugs right after the project build and is a highly effective way to reduce the cost of finding bugs.

Another update to the Windows Terminal has just been released! As always, you can download the Terminal from the Microsoft Store, the Microsoft Store for Business, and GitHub.

Note: In the About popup within the Terminal, this version will appear as v0.6.

Modern networking contains a number of improvements over the basic TCP/IP stack. One of this, particularly useful inside datacenter was developed by Microsoft Research in 2010 and called, surprisingly, DataCenter TCP (DCTCP).

DCTCP is a set of modification to TCP, targeting to fulfill two properties:
1. Improve latency for latency-sensitive small messages
2. Not to decrease the throughput for throughput-sensitive big flows

Recently, a colleague asked me in a chat:

— Is there an article how to pack servers into the racks properly?

I realised that I'm unaware of it. So, I decided to write my text.

Firstly, this is an article about bare metal servers in the data centre (DC) facilities. Secondly, we estimate that there are a lot of servers (hundreds or thousands); the article doesn't make sense for fewer quantities. Thirdly, we consider that there are three constraints in the racks: physical space, electric power per each one, and cabinets stay in the rows adjacent to each other, so we can use a single ToR switch to connect servers in them.

The practical means of applying public key cryptography to secure network communications were introduced by Loren Kohnfelder in his MIT S.B. (BSCSE) thesis written in May 1978. After that, the public key infrastructure (PKI) has gone through several iterations of changes and updates, but it still preserves its traditional methodology. PKI requires implicit trust from a single entity or entities chain called a certificate authority (CA). This approach has led to a breakdown in confidence. However, through the years, having one root entity to control the way public key certificates are issued has shown that it can cause major complications with transparency and security.

In this article, we will once again dive deeper into the problems of PKI and consider the solutions being developed that can overcome existing shortcomings.

Kubernetes has already become a de-facto standard for running stateless applications, mainly because it can reduce time-to-market for new features. Launching stateful applications, such as databases or stateful microservices, is still a complex task, but companies have to meet the competition and maintain a high delivery rate. So they create a demand for such solutions.

We want to introduce our solution for launching stateful Tarantool Cartridge clusters: Tarantool Kubernetes Operator, more under the cut.

Blockchain oracles resolve the issue of delivering external data to the blockchain – but we still need to know which of them we can trust.

Earlier, I have introduced the Ontology Smart Contract in
Part 1: Blockchain & Block API and
Part 2: Storage API
Part 3: Runtime API
Today, let’s talk about how to invoke an Ontology native smart contract through the Native API. One of the most typical functions of invoking native contract is asset transfer.

In 2017, we won the competition for the development of the transaction core for Alfa-Bank's investment business and started working at once. (Vladimir Drynkin, Development Team Lead for Alfa-Bank's Investment Business Transaction Core, spoke about the investment business core at HighLoad++ 2018.) This system was supposed to aggregate transaction data in different formats from various sources, unify the data, save it, and provide access to it.

In the process of development, the system evolved and extended its functions. At some point, we realized that we created something much more than just application software designed for a well-defined scope of tasks: we created a system for building distributed applications with persistent storage. Our experience served as a basis for the new product, Tarantool Data Grid (TDG).

I want to talk about TDG architecture and the solutions that we worked out during the development. I will introduce the basic functions and show how our product could become the basis for building turnkey solutions.

Starting from the version 7.04, the PVS-Studio analyzer for C and C++ languages on Linux and macOS provides the test feature of checking the list of specified files. Using the new mode, you can configure the analyzer to check commits and pull requests. This article covers setting up the check of certain modified files from a GitHub project in such popular CI (Continuous Integration) systems, as Travis CI, Buddy and AppVeyor.