OPEN SOURCE
GOOGLE: Offers Up Its Entire Machine Learning Library as Open-Source Software. Via its research blog, Google announced on Monday that it was releasing the second generation of its machine learning framework as an open-source library called TensorFlow. “The most important thing about TensorFlow is that it’s yours,” write Google Technical Lead Rajat Monga and Google Senior Fellow Jeff Dean. “We’ve open-sourced TensorFlow as a standalone library and associated tools, tutorials, and examples with the Apache 2.0 license so you’re free to use TensorFlow at your institution (no matter where you work).” Read more
[MOTHERBOARD.VICE.COM]
FEDERAL IT: Open Source Software Gains Traction in Federal IT. “If you don’t innovate in the open, you are missing an orders-of-magnitude opportunity to discover something,” says Greg Godbout, CTO of the EPA. A former executive director of GSA’s digital team 18F, Godbout says he used to think of open source code as inferior to proprietary code. But his opinion changed. “The very core of our citizen government is open sourced,” he says. Read more
[FEDSCOOP.COM]
AZURE MARKETPLACE: Yellowfin And Microsoft Launch Free Cloud BI Environment. Microsoft and Yellowfin have launched a business intelligence (BI) offering that will be available for free from Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace. The product will help businesses deploy an enterprise-grade BI environment in just a few clicks, allowing organisations to start analysing the information they hold straight away and helping them make sense of the
large, complex data issues they face every day to create real insights. Read more
[CLOUDPRO.CO.UK]
MICROSOFT: Azure Welcomes MariaDB Open-Source Database. The Microsoft-Red Hat deal wasn’t the only cloud-related development with an impact on Azure. On Nov. 4, Microsoft made big waves when it announced a wide-ranging cloud partnership with Red Hat, an alliance between once-fierce rivals that would have seemed unimaginable just a few short years ago, given Microsoft’s historic stance on open-source software. The move, said Red Hat Executive Vice President Paul Cormier during a live Nov. 4 Webcast, “will help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility.” Read more
[EWEEK.COM]
CLOUD SERVICES & SECURITY
VERIZON: Exec Denies It’s Selling Off Cloud Infrastructure. Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, strongly denied recent reports that the company is selling off the infrastructure underlying its cloud business. Late Friday, Reuters reported that Verizon was weighing a sale of enterprise assets, including what used to be known as MCI and Terremark, a data center-and-cloud company Verizon bought 5 years ago to boost its presence in cloud computing. The report said the company was seeking up to $10 billion in a potential sale. A Verizon spokesman had no comment on the report. Read more
[FORTUNE.COM]
GSA: Mulls New Cloud Acquisition Vehicle. The General Services Administration is considering establishing a broad cloud-specific contracting vehicle that would help agencies handle their growing cloud service needs. GSA’s existing cloud blanket purchase agreements are expiring, and federal customers are evolving past the cloud services designations under GSA’s Schedule 70 and other contracting vehicles that include cloud services. Therefore, the agency is thinking about creating a next-generation cloud-specific contract, said Stan Kaczmarczyk, director of GSA’s Cloud Computing Services Program Management Office. Read more
[FCW.COM]
PUBLIC CLOUD: 11 Top IaaS Cloud Computing Certifications. One way to stay abreast of the fast-changing cloud market is to get trained on the leading cloud platforms, open source technologies and vendors that make up this increasingly important industry. These are some of the leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing certifications, listed in alphabetical order. Read more
[NETWORKWORLD.COM]
INDUSTRY INSIGHT: Making the Most of the Hybrid Cloud. Cloud services rank No. 2 on state and local CIO’s top 10 priorities list for 2015, an emphatic indication of how essential they have become to day-to-day and mission critical operations. It is clear that agencies are moving beyond just dipping their toes into the cloud, as 20 percent of states are now highly invested in cloud services, according to a survey of CIOs conducted by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, Grant Thornton and TechAmerica. Read more
[GCN.COM]
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