HTTP Reverse proxy

Reverse proxy - Wikipedia


download: URL Rewrite : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

Setup IIS with URL Rewrite as a reverse proxy for real world apps. – Blog de l'équipe support IIS/Azure France — French IIS/Azure Support Team Blog



IIS with URL Rewrite as a reverse proxy – part 2 – dealing with 500.52 status codes – Blog de l'équipe support IIS/Azure France — French IIS/Azure Support Team Blog


NGINX Reverse Proxy | NGINX

Reverse Proxy Guide - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4

AI: $100 million Amazon's "Alexa Fund"

The Alexa Fund
"The Alexa Fund provides up to $100 million in venture capital funding to fuel voice technology innovation. We believe experiences designed around the human voice will fundamentally improve the way people use technology. Since introducing Alexa-enabled devices like the Amazon Echo, we’ve heard from developers, device-makers, and companies of all sizes that want to innovate with voice. Whether that’s creating new Alexa capabilities with the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), building devices that use Alexa for new and novel voice experiences using the Alexa Voice Service (AVS), inventing core voice-enabling technology, or developing a product or service that can expand the boundaries of voice technology..."

Amazon beefs up machine learning presence in UK with new team of researchers - GeekWire

Why Apple Just Acquired This A.I. Startup for a Reported $200 Million | Inc.com

cloud: FaaS: Function-as-a-Services, Azure Functions

FaaS, PaaS, and the Benefits of the Serverless Architecture @ InfoQ

Serverless Architectures @martinfowler.com


Azure Functions Fundamentals | Pluralsight

Troy Hunt: Azure Functions in practice


Pricing includes a permanent free grant of 1 million executions and 400,000 GB-s execution time per month.

Scott Allen: ASP.NET Core, TypeScript, Azure

pragmatic views & nice collection of links

ASP.NET Core Opinionated Approach with Scott Allen @ .NET Rocks! vNext (podcast interview)

• Functional JavaScript
• ASP.NET Core
• Serilog
• DreamSpark for Students
• FeatureFolders
• MediatR
• WebPack
• JavaScript Services
• npm
• Bower
• BabelJS
• TypeScript
• DefinitelyTyped
• Jasmine xUnit

Scott Allen | Profile @ pluralsight

Starbucks's Virtual Assistant

Starbucks unveils a virtual assistant that takes your order via messaging or voice | TechCrunch
"Starbucks is embracing the trend towards voice-based computing with the launch of a new feature in its mobile app called My Starbucks barista, which allows customers to order and pay for their food and drinks just by speaking. This includes being able to modify their drink order, as if they were speaking with a barista in real life. Additionally, the company is launching a skill for the Amazon Alexa platform, which lets customers re-order their favorite items by speaking to their Echo speaker or other Alexa-powered device."

'Alexa, order my Starbucks': Coffee giant launches 'reorder skill' for Amazon's voice assistant - GeekWire

ex-Microsoft executive, Starbucs president to become CEO
Kevin Johnson | Starbucks Newsroom

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is joining the Starbucks board | TechCrunch

Tesla electric Power Plants

This would make Nikola Tesla proud...
Using battery storage as an alternative to "peak demand" natural gas powered power plants.
Tesla Motors built one in California in only 3 months.

Tesla’s Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass - Bloomberg

The state of Jupyter (iPython Notebooks)

a detailed  summary of iPython Notebooks (now called Jupyter) 

The state of Jupyter - O'Reilly Media

1. "Why does the project exist? That is, what are our motivations, goals, and vision?
2. How did we get here?
3. Where are things headed next, in terms of both Jupyter itself and the context of data and computation it exists in?"

The Jupyter Notebook Format — nbformat 4.0 documentation

Jupyter Client 5.0 — jupyter_client 5.0.0.dev documentation

JupyterCon, August 22 - 25, 2017, New York, NYCall for Participation closes: March 7

a solution for twits over 140 characters: image

A Disturbing 1995 Prediction by Carl Sagan Accurately Describes America of Today | Big Think

Suspecting Carl Sagan had either a time machine or a crystal ball.

Ok, probably the time machine. pic.twitter.com/zpKH1HUYhz

— Charles Bergquist (@cbquist) January 23, 2017

IoT: $5 Linux Computers with Wi-Fi and more

The Onion Omega2 is a tiny little computer that only costs $5 - The Verge

Omega2: $5 Linux Computer with Wi-Fi, Made for IoT by Onion — Kickstarter



Omega2: $5 Linux Computer with Wi-Fi, Made for IoT | Indiegogo



Onion – Invention Platform for IoT

Products – Onion

This Week in Google 387 Mommy's Special Shawl | TWiT

Onion Creates a $5 Linux Computer with Wi-Fi, Designed for IoT Applications @ InfoQ

8 superb -- and cheap -- Raspberry Pi alternatives @betanews



"coin-sized Linux computer/fully functional wireless router last week. It’s a cube-shaped device that comes packed with ports, including Ethernet, USB 2.0, microSD slot, and audio jack. You can read more about it here. The full VoCore2 costs just $11.99, but there’s a Lite version priced at just $3.99."

You can get one by pledging on Indiegogo now. Shipping is due to begin next month.

Signl.fm: real-time transcript player

Hanselminutes Player

Speech to Text in 2017 with Signl.fm on the Hanselminutes Technology Podcast: Fresh Air for Developers

signal.fm



Signl.fm

Blog – Signl.fm

cloud quantum computing: D-wave

The latest in quantum computing: 10ft tall, 2,000 qubits, $15m price tag | ZDNet


"...D-Wave customers include Google, Lockheed Martin, NASA Ames, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The 10-foot high 2000Q, which D-Wave says is worth $15m, is shipping to customers this quarter and is also accessible online under a subscription."

Elon Musk: boring tunnels, AI for human IO

Elon Musk could soon share more on his plan to help humans keep up with AI | TechCrunch


Elon Musk might actually be serious about digging tunnels under Los Angeles

Next big thing from Elon Musk? It could be 'boring'

free ebooklet: Azure: A mobile developer’s guide

Cutting Right to the Code: A mobile developer’s guide (19 pages)  PDF



Azure Newsletter January 2017

ideas: a new SMART acronym

Podcast: Take Control of the New Year with Michael Hyatt - Evernote Blog

"Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Risky—this is a key idea here—and then finally Time-keyed.

Risky. Most people set their goals too low. Sometimes people translate the R into Realistic. Actually, that’s the worst thing you could possibly do if you want to follow through on a goal. All the research shows this. If you want to follow through on a goal, it needs to be harder, not easier. A goal that’s easy won’t command your attention. You need for it to be in your discomfort zone.

there are three zones: 

• "comfort zone: Nothing hard about it. It’s forgettable.
  You don’t need a goal that’s in the comfort zone
• discomfort zone: is when you begin to feel a little bit of fear, a little bit of uncertainty, a little bit of doubt. Those negative emotions are actually positive indicators that you’re on the right path, that this is something where you’re going to get a breakthrough result. Something where you’re going to experience something extraordinary.
• delusional zone. This is where you set the goals so high that there’s no way that you could possibly accomplish it, or no way that you could accomplish it without sacrificing all the other areas of your life."

"Failure’s kind of overrated. One of the best ways to make progress is to fail and to fail fast."

“There’s no failure; there’s only feedback.” - John Maxwell

Microsoft Cloud Deals (for IT & Dev)

Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials
a free annual subscription which includes cloud services, education, and support benefits. IT Pro Cloud Essentials provides IT Implementers with hands-on
Dev Essentials | Visual Studio
Free tools, cloud services, and training
...everything you need to build and deploy your app on any platform. With state-of-the-art tools, the power of the cloud, training, and support,

Azure Skills

Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Overview

The Future of SharePoint - Office Blogs

Software-Defined Networking (SDN)

Cloud computing is based and accelerated on SDNs...

Enabling the Digital Revolution: SDN and Beyond @ MIT TR
"...data centers are undergoing a once-in-a-generation architectural shift, from hardware- to software-centric models. Just as virtual machines supplanted physical servers as the fundamental element of modern server applications, software-defined networking (SDN) is now emerging as a more flexible, manageable way to organize a data center’s network needs."

Software-defined networking - Wikipedia

"Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to programmatically initialize, control, change, and manage network behavior dynamically via open interfaces [1] and abstraction of lower-level functionality. SDN is meant to address the fact that the static architecture of traditional networks doesn't support the dynamic, scalable computing and storage needs of more modern computing environments such as data centers. This is done by decoupling or disassociating the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane)."

Software Defined Networking (SDN) @ Microsoft TechNet

Software-Defined Networking (SDN)—Windows Server 2016 | Microsoft

Microsoft SDN stack to challenge Cisco, VMware

mini PC: Asus Tinker Board

The Asus Tinker Board is a powerful Raspberry Pi rival that plays 4K video | PCWorld
4K GPU, 2GB RAM, Gbps Ethernet: $57
 

Asus takes on Raspberry Pi with 4K-capable Tinker Board | Ars Technica

Android Instant Apps, Chrome OS += Android Apps

The differences between running web and Android apps are blurring.
Android can now run apps without installing them
(by making apps modular and downloading and running only parts necessary).
Chrome OS is now also able to run Android apps.

Android Instant Apps are here

Google I/O 2016 Event - Android Instant Apps - YouTube


Google Is Taking on Microsoft's Windows Cash Cow, and the Stakes Are High - TheStreet

photos: Earth and Moon

Satellite's 1st Views of Earth (and Moon) Are Jaw-Dropping @ Space.com

Amazon's Disruptive Innovation

Now not only in dedicated appliance Echo, Amazon's Alexa AI voice assistant
is being embedded in many devices of other manufacturers.
It is another example of Amazon's "disruptive innovation"
where a common technology is being applied in not yet common ways to create new markets.

Alexa, What's The Future Of AI? | On Point

Next:Economy Newsletter - O'Reilly Media

What would Alexa do? - O'Reilly Media

How to sell a server appliane without calling it by this name?
Amazon has a tallent for unusual feature and naming.
AWS Snowball Edge – Petabyte-Scale Data Transport with On-Board Storage and Compute

Azure SQL Database In-Memory Performance

Improving Azure SQL Database Performance using In-Memory Technologies  @ InfoQ
9 times improvement of CPU, 3 times on IO with using in-memory option!

In-Memory OTLP in Azure SQL DB | Data Exposed | Channel 9

Azure SQL Database In-Memory technologies | Microsoft Docs

Release IoT Smart Grid sample v1.0 · Microsoft/sql-server-samples @ GitHub
Good example how to efficiently add data to database (batch, native compiled stored procedures)

SQL 2016 – It Just Runs Faster Announcement – CSS SQL Server Engineers
"DBCC scales 7x better
Various spatial patterns execute 100s of times faster with specific paths up to 2000x faster"

Azure Monitoring Tools

Monitoring your Azure App with Tom Kerkhove @ .NET Rocks! vNext

• One terabyte USB Stick!
• Tom's Blog Microsoft
• Operations Management Suite
• Azure Application Insights
• Mastering Azure Analytics
• Polly
• HockeyApp
• Azure Monitor
• Azure Service Bus

Windows 10 Mobile Print

Windows 10 Phone is mostly neglected now
and Windows 10 Mobile running on it is similar, but not same as Windows 10 "standard" (home, pro)
Printing is one of technical differences

Printing on Windows 10 Mobile explained (video) - MSPoweruser



Windows 10 Mobile: Printing - Petri

Supported Printers for Windows 10 Mobile

HP is the the only "commited" maker of Windows Phones now...
HP Elite X3 business | HP® Official Store

That may change if rumors of Microsoft Surface phone come true.
Microsoft Surface Phone: Everything you need to know

Microsoft patent reveals foldable phone that turns into a tablet - The Verge

PowerShell Show-Command

"CLI" (Command Line Interfaces) are very popular now, but not intuitive.
Optional GUI can help with commands that are not used frequently.
PowerShell got it right, with auto-generated forms GUI.

Show Command
"Creates Windows PowerShell commands in a graphical command window."Using the Show-Command cmdlet in PowerShell 3.0 | Pipe2Text.com



QualiSystems/Azure-Shell: A CloudShell 'Shell' that allows integrating Azure as an app's deployment option.

aPaaS vs PasS

4 letter acronyms are not enough anymore, now we need 5 letters... "aPaaS" The idea of RAD (Rapid Application Development) is almost as old as software development... what is different this time?

Application Platform as a Service - aPaaS | WaveMaker
"...services that primarily offer application development and deployment are referred to as application Platform as a Service or aPaaS while PaaS refers to entire spectrum of middleware as a service offerings..."

Market Guide for Application Platforms @ Gartner
"Commercial Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platforms' revenue declined in 2015, indicating a clear shift in the application platform market. 
...
Application platform as a service (aPaaS) revenue is currently less than half of application platform software revenue, but aPaaS is growing at an annual rate of 18.5%, and aPaaS sales will supersede platform software sales by 2023."

SalesForce is more than 50% of SaaS market now, and Microsoft is growing quickly Office 365. They both support "Apps" and marketplaces / stores for those apps.

free ebooks: National Parks (Owners) Guides

Travel Ideas | National Park Foundation

cloud containers: Kubernetes for Windows 2016

Kubernetes: Update on Kubernetes for Windows Server Containers

Kubernetes 1.5 comes to Windows Server 2016 | InfoWorld

Kubernetes Now Leads on LinkedIn and Other Awesome Stats (Infographic) - Apprenda

SIG-Windows presents Windows Server Containers with Kubernetes, running on Microsoft Azure - YouTube
"Microsoft, in collaboration with Docker, is introducing a new feature called Windows Server Containers with Windows Server 2016, which enables Docker containers to run on Windows.

The Kubernetes SIG-Windows team, led by Apprenda, has enhanced Kubernetes to support Windows Server Containers (and Windows Server 2016 as the operating system of choice for the windows-based kubelet)."

Kubernetes - Production-Grade Container Orchestration

Kubernetes - Wikipedia

"Kubernetes (commonly referred to as "k8s") is an open source container cluster manager originally designed by Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a "platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts".[3] It usually works with the Docker container tool and coordinates between a wide cluster of hosts running Docker."

Kubernetes: Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes
All of Google services run only on containers, never on VMs.
The management evolved from "Borg" to now "Kubernetes".

SDN is missing on Windows, so no complete parity with Linux for now.
What is software-defined networking (SDN)? - Definition from WhatIs.com

Also, no support for UDP based DNS on Windows, yet. Instead using proxy.
Windows solution is simpler than on Linux, but more CPU intensive.

GitHub - kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way: Bootstrap Kubernetes the hard way on Google Cloud Platform or Amazon EC2. No scripts.

Brendan Burns | LinkedIn
moved from Google to Microsoft

centOS, #sig-windows, slack channel

Windows Server Containers - Kubernetes

Cloud Academy: training, free ebooks

Learn Cloud computing, test your skills and get a certification


Free Cloud Computing eBooks by Cloud Academy (mostly about AWS)

Azure Cloud Solutions Architect Interview | Cloud Academy

CloudAcademy Blog

The Top Tech Cloud Computing Hiring Trends and Jobs Sites | Arnaud Roussignol, MS | Pulse | LinkedIn

tool: UWP Tile Generator

A useful open-source tool for Visual Studio 2015
for making required icons for Windows (10) Store Apps

UWP Tile Generator - Visual Studio Marketplace

"Generates all the required tiles for your UWP. Simply right click on a square png or svg and select Generate UWP Tiles - within seconds you'll have all the recommended tile sizes and what's more the extension will also update your package manifest so you don't have to."

shenchauhan/UWPTileGenerator: This is the home of the UWP Tile Generator which can provide all the tiles you need to submit your application to the store from a single high resolution source file.
@GitHub

book: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating...

podcast interview:
#180: Chris Voss—Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It | EntreLeadership

Amazon.com: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It eBook: Chris Voss, Tahl Raz: Kindle Store
useful materials:

Top 3 Negotiation Mistakes @blackswanltd

3 Steps to Find Out If You've Left Anything On The Table

'GOALS2017' @ infusionsoft

Grow Your Business with a Solid Strategic Plan for 2017

more podcasts:
Posts | EntreLeadership

#179: The Top 10 EntreLeadership Podcasts of 2016 and What They Taught Us | EntreLeadership



Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss, Tahl Raz - Hardcover

book's web site: Never Split The Difference

Chris Voss on How to Master Negotiation in Business and Life with Lewis Howes - YouTube

3 Steps to Find Out If You've Left Anything On The Table

Albert Mehrabian’s 7-38-55 Rule of Personal Communication

Stack Overflow vs Cloud

podcast interview with site admin + MANY great web links
Optimizing Websites like Stack Overflow - MS Dev Show Podcast

Apparently site is still running on a single IIS and SQL Server! 44th global web site!
So what is the "trick?" Continuous "engineering optimization" of every part of system.
Most important next improvement: HTTP 2.0

Claiming that be price just for SQL databases on Azure would be for a month that they paid for the server! An alternative to consider to overcome 1 TM size limitation on a single database, one can run a VM with SQL server on Azure with limit higher. I would suggest using "G Series" VMs.

Stackoverflow.com Traffic, Demographics and Competitors - Alexa
Global Rank   44 3
Rank in China   33

Nick Craver - Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition



Performance - Stack Exchange

Pricing - Windows Virtual Machines | Microsoft Azure

book, app: Wake Up!

Wake Up!
"Wake Up! is an app, a book and a workshop. It is here to make our lives more conscious, joyful and inspired. A series of human, playful activities designed to get us off autopilot, engage with the world and make every day count."

podcast interview:
#181: Chris Baréz-Brown—Escaping a Life on Autopilot | EntreLeadership
"It’s been estimated that more than 80% of our time awake is spent on autopilot, leading to a life of missed moments and even less enjoyment at home and at work. This week’s guest, Chris Baréz-Brown, is on a mission to help us escape that routine. The inspirational speaker, author and business beatnik joins us to share his tips on how to feel more conscious, joyful and inspired, and how to avoid missing what matters most"

Wake Up!: Escaping a Life on 
Autopilot: Amazon.co.uk: Chris Baréz-Brown: 9780241977422: Books

Wake Up! App - Android Apps on Google Play


SMS Opt-in 'GOALS2017' - Powered by Infusionsoft

Global Azure Bootcamp 2017

Global Azure Bootcamp – Global Azure Bootcamp 2017
"Around the world user groups and communities want to learn about Azure and Cloud Computing! On April 22, 2017, all communities will come together once again in the fifth great Global Azure Bootcamp event!"

Events (Locations) – Global Azure Bootcamp

info from:
Migrating to Azure with Christos Matskas @ .NET Rocks! vNex
many useful links

#GlobalAzure Bootcamp 2015 | Blog | Microsoft Azure

GitHub - Azure-Readiness/DevCamp

A better way to teach/learn modern C++: skip C

C++ was created by extending C, and this mix creates a confusion and complexity.
Suggested better way to teach C++ is to jump directly to modern C++ features directly.
This saves time and produces better programmers and programs.

podcast interview:
C++ for a New Generation with Kate Gregory @ .NET Rocks! vNext

CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory “Stop Teaching C" - YouTube

Kate Gregory | LinkedIn (she has a PhD)

Kate Gregory | edX

Kate Gregory - .NET Author | Pluralsight

Kate Gregory's Blog

C++ conference videos
CppCon - YouTube

CppCon 2015: Bjarne Stroustrup “Writing Good C++14” - YouTube

CppCon 2014: Herb Sutter "Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style" - YouTube

"new" and "delete" operators not needed anymore
C++ Stack Semantics for Reference Types

C++ running in web browser, by transpiling to JavaScript first:
Main — Emscripten 1.36.14 documentation
"Emscripten is an LLVM-based project that compiles C and C++ into highly-optimizable JavaScript in asm.js format. This lets you run C and C++ on the web at near-native speed, without plugins."

Microsoft Azure Architecture Icon Set

Download Microsoft Azure, Cloud and Enterprise Symbol / Icon Set
- Visio stencil, PowerPoint, PNG, SVG from Official Microsoft Download Center

Import downloaded stencils - Visio
"... save .vss files to your Windows My Shapes folder, which is located inside your default Documents folder (My Documents or Documents, depending on your version of Windows..."

TechNet Microsoft Integration Stencils Pack for Visio 2016/2013

Laurent Duveau - Azure, Cloud and Enterprise Icon Set



Windows Azure (and cloud services) Symbol and Icon Set (Visio, PPT, PNG) - Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day

Icons/symbols to draw pretty Azure design diagrams... - Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day

Amazon - https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/

Cisco - http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/microsoft-visio-stencils-faq.html

Google- https://design.google.com/icons/

SyncFusion free icon library - https://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/metrostudio

Azure Service Fabric: "PasS 2.0 for microservices"

Azure podcast: Episode 160 - The Service Fabric Way

Overview of Service Fabric | Microsoft Docs



Understanding microservices | Microsoft Docs

Tesla Motors += Chris Lattner (LLVM, Swift)

Tesla Motors just hired one of brightest minds of computers science today.
Chris Lattner is creator of LLVM, a widely used compiler infrastructure.
iOS is where it is today in part thanks to efficient compilers he helped evolve and create.
Swift language is now also used for server side programs.

Tesla hires Apple’s creator of Swift as new VP of Autopilot Software | TechCrunch

"Tesla has a new vice president heading up Autopilot efforts — Chris Lattner, whose departure from Apple was reported only earlier today. Lattner worked at Apple for 11 years, where his chief contribution was creating Swift, Apple’s most recent programming language
...
Lattner’s history includes creating the Clang compiler and designing the LLVM compiler optimization infrastructure."

Chris Lattner (@clattner_llvm) | Twitter

Machine Learning for Developers @ Channel 9

Machine Learning for Developers | Technical Summit 2016 - connecting.technologies. | Channel 9
by Seth Juarez


numl open source project from the same person
a general purpose machine learning framework in .NET Core

AI: SQL Server Deep Learning, with R

Benefits of data processing close to data storage (inside of SQL Server): performance and security

How six lines of code + SQL Server can bring Deep Learning to ANY App | SQL Server Blog

"public preview of the next release of SQL Server, ... added significant improvements into R Services inside SQL Server including a very powerful set of machine learning functions ... This brings new machine learning and deep neural network functionality with increased speed, performance and scale to database applications built on SQL Server. We have just recently showcased SQL Server running more than one million R predictions per second, using SQL Server as a Machine Learning Model Management System"

(Microsoft) Machine learning algorithm cheat sheet

10 years of iPhone

10 years ago today: Remembering Steve Jobs make iPhone history - CNET
"Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything..."

History of iPhone: From revolution to the next big thing | iMore

Steve Jobs Unveils The Original iPhone - Macworld San Francisco 2007 - YouTube

Chartopia: More charts about Apple - Six Colors

Cloud, Mobile: CPU vs SoC, FPGA, TPU, GPU...

Cloud and mobile are introducing significant changes in types of processors used.
Engineering optimization is not limited to ever higher number of transistors in chips resulting in Moore's law of doubling every 18-24 months. Alternative architectures are also used now.
This is a significant opportunity for businesses to leverage.
It is also a classic "numbers game", where huge sales are driving specialized optimization.

The moonshot that succeeded: How Bing and Azure are using an AI supercomputer in the cloud - Next at Microsoft
"FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment’s notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter."

Programmable chips turning Azure into a supercomputing powerhouse | Ars Technica

Microsoft's Internet Business Gets a New Kind of Processor | WIRED

Microsoft's Love For FPGA Accelerators May Be Contagious
"Intel’s $16.7B acquisition of FPGA leader Altera now appears to have been prescient; at the time of the acquisition they predicted that 30% of servers would require FPGA acceleration by 2020."
Developer Preview – EC2 Instances (F1) with Programmable Hardware | AWS Blog
"Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA. In contrast to a purpose-built chip which is designed with a single function in mind and then hard-wired to implement it, an FPGA is more flexible. It can be programmed in the field, after it has been plugged in to a socket on a PC board."

Amazon EC2 F1 Instances

Google Cloud Platform Blog: Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

"Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC we built specifically for machine learning — and tailored for TensorFlow. We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law)."

Applications that scale using GPU Compute (presentation from AzureCon)

Elastic GPUs - Amazon Web Services

How the SoC is Displacing the CPU – Medium
"This shift from mostly performance-centric chips to mostly power-constrained chips and the focus on lowering cost and increasing system-level integration has disrupted the traditional semiconductor landscape within just a decade and continues to reshape the industry today."

"Mobile SoCs are now very competitive to standalone CPUs. They offer matched/better compute performance, matched/better graphics within a lower power envelope and a 10X lower price-point. In addition, a single chip SoC solution is far better suited to a mobile formfactor than a multi-chip CPU solution (Source: Intel/Chipworks)"

Getting started with FPGAs - O'Reilly Media

Ryan Cousins on field programmable gate arrays - O'Reilly Media
ARM + integrated FPGA = much simpler robotic and IoT solutions

CES 2017: AI Assistants

Apparently Amazon's Alexa was getting most of attention (and support from some HW vendors)
Microsoft is working with car manufactures to integrate with Cortana cloud intelligence...
Apple's was early with Siri, no much attention recently...

Best of CES 2017: The Wild and Wondrous Technologies of the Year Ahead - WSJ.com
"Computers we talk to can be anywhere. To work best, they have to be everywhere—at home and in the office, in our cars, on the go."

Good Alexa, Bad Alexa: Amazon’s Talking OS Is Everywhere
"At CES, the popular virtual assistant turned up in cars, watches and robots—but does voice control solve more problems than it creates?"
Why Apple’s Critics Are Right This Time - WSJ

CES 2017 News - The Verge

CES 2017 Las Vegas - January 5-8 - CNET

Newest Products From CES 2017 - Las Vegas - CNET

Meural is a screen that brings fine art to your home - CNET

Cloud Quantum Computing by IBM

podcast interview:
Chris Lirakis on the promise of quantum computing - O'Reilly Media
...novel computing architectures at IBM... quantum computing platform in the cloud,
the “IBM Quantum Experience,” was opened up to researchers, scientists, and the public.

IBM Quantum Computer is running on extremely cold environment, very near absolute 0 K and it has total of (only) 5 Qubits accessible via cloud, used mostly for scientific research. 

Quantum physics is well established science (while complex and mind-bending) but technology is using it for computing is still in early stages. "Cloud" is a very useful for providing access to such complex tools. Google also has a quantum computer for its internal usage. 

Quantum computing - Wikipedia

"Whereas common digital computing requires that the data be encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one of two definite states (0 or 1), quantum computation is analog and uses quantum bits, which can be in an infinite number of superpositions of states. 

(0, 1, and any value between them)

Running an experiment in the IBM Quantum Experience - YouTube

Michio Kaku: How to Program a Quantum Computer - YouTube

more interesting stories at: 

O'Reilly Hardware Podcast - O'Reilly Media

Azure & AWS compared

Azure and AWS services compared - multicloud | Microsoft Docs

"This article helps you understand how Microsoft Azure services compare to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Whether you are planning a multicloud solution with Azure and AWS, or migrating to Azure, you can compare the IT capabilities of Azure and AWS services in all categories."

Introduction to Azure for AWS experts | Microsoft Docs

"This article helps Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts understand the basics of Microsoft Azure accounts, platform, and services. It also covers key similarities and differences between the AWS and Azure platforms."