Amazon Connect: Customer Support as a Service

excellent podcast:
AWS Podcast | Listen & Learn About AWS

Amazon Connect – Cloud-Based Contact Center
"Amazon Connect is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost. Amazon Connect is based on the same contact center technology used by Amazon customer service associates around the world to power millions of customer conversations. The self-service graphical interface in Amazon Connect makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics – no specialized skills required. There are no up-front payments or long-term commitments and no infrastructure to manage with Amazon Connect; customers pay by the minute for Amazon Connect usage plus any associated telephony services."

Microsoft Small Basic

About Microsoft Small Basic

"Small Basic combines a friendly environment with a very simple language and a rich and engaging set of libraries to make your programs and games pop. In a matter of few lines of code, you will be well on your way to creating your very own game!"

Windows install tool: Squirrel

Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows: An installation and update framework for Windows desktop apps
@GitHub, MIT license

"Windows apps should be as fast and as easy to install and update as apps like Google Chrome. From an app developer's side, it should be really straightforward to create an installer for my app, and publish updates to it, without having to jump through insane hoops."

Guide to the CoreCLR Source Code

A Hitchhikers Guide to the CoreCLR Source Code · Performance is a Feature!



Notice "Smalltalk 0.6%"  !?

gadget: NexDock laptop with Intel Compute Card

NexDock - The World’s Most Affordable Laptop
"with Intel® Compute Card"


"A Laptop With the Heart of a Smartphone"
"Just slightly longer than a credit card at 95mm x 55mm x 5mm, the Intel Compute Card is a fully self-contained computer that includes a CPU and GPU, RAM, storage and wireless connectivity."NexDock: The World’s Most Affordable Laptop | Indiegogo

cloud appliances, serverless functions (Azure Stack, AWS Snowball)

The simplest and most efficient way to scale and deploy SaaS platform are microservices functions.
Internally they are usually based on some variation of containers.

Demand for "hybrid cloud", that includes running subset of "cloud" features on premise or on remote location produced "cloud appliances" like AWS Snowball and Azure Stack.
One of services that are being added to those appliances are cloud functions.

The design approach from Amazon and Microsoft is different, reflecting their background.
Microsoft provides and manages software and working with select hardware partners.
Amazon sells real appliance, almost like a Kindle tablet reader just much bigger.

Microsoft’s Azure Stack preview adds support for Azure Functions and App Service | TechCrunch

Microsoft’s Azure Stack Delayed to Allow Partners Time to Certify Hardware | Hybrid Cloud content from Windows IT Pro
"Microsoft will be tapping HPE, Dell, and Lenovo to start, to provide Azure Stack certified hardware and services to help companies create internal clouds based on Microsoft’s One Azure Ecosystem"

Deploy App Service in an Offline Environment - Azure Stack | Microsoft Docs

Using AWS Lambda with a Snowball Edge - AWS Snowball

What Is AWS Snowball? - AWS Snowball



AWS Snowmobile – Massive Exabyte-Scale Data Transfer Service


Google Search Appliance 7.6 - Google Enterprise Search

Google Search Appliance: So Long | Fortune.com
"Google has decided to sunset the hardware-based Google Search Appliance (GSA) and focus their engineering efforts on cloud-based solutions."