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How a maverick genius at IBM helped to change the course of computing forever. The RISC idea has now been around for around fifty years and it’s been the subject of debate and a degree of controversy for much of that period. By Babbage.

But some of IBM’s engineers were convinced of the benefits of a simple yet powerful computer. So members of the project returned to IBM Research and started work to turn the ideas into a general-purpose computer.

The main sections in the article:

• Origins
• Enter Ericsson
• Work starts on the 801
• Instruction traces
• Building the RISC philosophy
• The 801 architecture
• The revised 801
• The 801 delivers

The term RISC came to be used first in the RISC-1 project led by David Patterson at U.C. Berkeley. Along with John Hennessy at Stanford University, Patterson and his students would pick up the RISC concept and build the first microprocessors using RISC principles. And that’s where our series goes next. Nice one!

Whether prices are up or down, for many investors in cryptocurrency, the real appeal is that there’s nobody in charge. But a new report finds that the decentralized system might not be working as well as many crypto enthusiasts assume.or a one-time activity like creating a cluster, but not for continuous tasks like app delivery and configuration management.

The report was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the work was done by the software security research company Trail of Bits.

“It’s been taken for granted that the blockchain is immutable and decentralized, because the community says so,” says Trail of Bits CEO Dan Guido.

But in practice, he says, these networks have evolved in ways that concentrate power in the hands of certain people or companies, including the large pools of “miners” whose computers earn virtual currency by maintaining the blockchains. Guido’s team calls these potential situations “unintended centralities” — situations in which someone gains leverage over the decentralized system, creating opportunities for tampering with the record of who owns what.

Another example in the report of this kind of concentration is the fact that 60% of Bitcoin traffic is handled by just three internet service providers.

“Let’s say somebody with great top-down control of the internet in their country starts to interfere with that network,” Guido says. By slowing down or stopping legitimate blockchain traffic, an attacker could become the “majority” voice in the consensus of what’s written to a blockchain at that moment. “They can rewrite history. They can censor transactions. They can make it so that you can’t spend your Bitcoin,” says Guido. “It’s definitely something people would want to do if they want to ‘grief’ the network.” To learn more follow the link to original article. Excellent read!

In this article, you will learn how to create a Kubernetes cluster with Terraform and then manage it with Argo CD. Terraform is very useful for automating infrastructure. On the other hand, Argo CD helps us implement GitOps and continuous delivery for our applications. It seems that we can successfully combine both these tools. Let’s consider how they can help us to work with Kubernetes in the GitOps style.

Here’s the list of things you are going to do in this tutorial:

• In the first step, we will create a local Kubernetes cluster using Terraform
• Then we will install OLM (Operator Lifecycle Manager) on the cluster. We need it to install Kafka with Strimzi (Step 5)
• We will use Terraform to install Argo CD from the Helm chart and create a single Argo CD Application responsible for the whole cluster configuration based on Git
• After that, Argo CD Application installs Strimzi Operator, creates Argo CD Project dedicated to Kafka installation and Argo CD Application that runs Kafka on Kubernetes
• Finally, the Argo CD Application automatically creates all the CRD objects required for running Kafka

Author wanted to define the whole cluster and store its configuration in Git. It was not possible to use only Argo CD to achieve it, because Argo CD must run on the existing Kubernetes cluster. That’s why a tool that is able to create a cluster and then install Argo CD there seems to be Terraform. It is perfect for a one-time activity like creating a cluster, but not for continuous tasks like app delivery and configuration management. Good read!

In this article, we introduce Kueue, an open source job queueing controller designed to manage batch jobs as a single unit. Kueue leaves pod-level orchestration to existing stable components of Kubernetes.

In the article you will find:

• Why Kueue?
• How Kueue works
• Resource model
• Example use case

With Kueue we decided to take a different approach to job queueing on Kubernetes that is anchored around the following aspects:

• Not duplicating existing functionalities already offered by established Kubernetes components for pod scheduling, autoscaling and job lifecycle management
• Adding key features that are missing to existing components

Job queueing is a key feature to run batch workloads at scale in both on-premises and cloud environments. The main goal of job queueing is to manage access to a limited pool of resources shared by multiple tenants. Job queueing decides which jobs should wait, which can start immediately, and what resources they can use. Good read!

Before understanding DevSecOps, let’s understand what is DevOps. DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. In fast-moving projects, security often lags behind and given low priority which may lead to buggy code and hacks. Let’s see how we can reduce the risk of attack by integrating security in our DevOps pipeline. By Alok Maurya.

The article then reads about:

• What is to DevSecOps (DevOps + Security)
• What are the benefits of using DevSecOps?
• How to make security culture your default state?
• Plan/Design
• Develop
• Build and code analysis
• Test
• Deploy
• Monitoring and Alerting
• Best practices to secure your infrastructure for DevSecOps CI/CD

… and more. Each section above is full fo details, with code and config examples. Implementing DevSecOps best practices reduces the risk of vulnerabilities and hacking. Scanning all parts of your infrastructure and application gives full visibility of potential threats and possible ways to remediate them. “The only way to do security right is to have multiple layers of security” hence we talked about multiple methods and tools that can be used for finding vulnerabilities. Exciting read!

Updates introducing a breaking change are unwelcome, especially when this happens without warning. Semantic versioning is one of the most popular solutions for this. By Tomas Fernandez.

One of the drawbacks with all of these versioning approaches is that they don’t tell us anything about compatibility between releases. The way to find out is to dig through changelogs.

In the article:

• What is semantic versioning?
• Automating versions with semantic-release
• How to get started with semantic-release
• Semantic versioning with CI/CD
• Disable tags on Semaphore
• Continuous delivery pipeline with semantic versioning
• Extending the delivery pipeline

Semantic versioning is a versioning scheme that aims to communicate the level of compatibility between releases at a glance. It uses a three-part numbering system: major.minor.patch (e.g. 1.2.3) which may or may not be suffixed with special identifiers such as -alpha or -rc1. Maintaining consistent version numbers will help you gain the trust of users and other developers. Good read!

When building security solutions using OAuth and OpenID Connect (OIDC), we frequently discuss tokens. Sometimes these systems are even referred to as token-based architectures. By Jonas Iggbom.

The article dives into:

• Types of tokens
  • Access tokens
  • Bearer tokens
  • Sender constrained tokens
  • Refresh tokens
  • ID tokens
• Token formats
  • Opaque tokens
  • JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
• The best of both worlds
  • Phantom tokens
  • Split tokens
  • Token handler

Tokens play a core role in authorizing access to applications, services and APIs. They also enable secure, flexible and scalable access management. Using tokens means applications don’t have to maintain a static API key or, even worse, hold a username and password. Nice one!

Why AI is the perfect accompaniment to modern mobile app development and how it’s already being used to transform the apps we use every day. Artificial intelligence has been breaking into the mobile app development industry and becoming part of more developers’ tools in their wheelhouse. This is because AI and machine learning are able to provide many benefits to not only the team building the application but to the end user as well. By @ninetwothree.co.

The article then guides you through use cases for ai in mobile apps:

• Face recognition
• Facial identification
• Voice recognition
• Vocal identification
• Recommendations for using ai in mobile development

Based on user input, mobile AI can recommend ever better content to the user. Customers save time on finding the products they truly desire. Unknown products that might enhance the individual’s life can pop up on the screen with a higher probability. Good read!

In this article, Google Cloud Product Manager Rachel Tsao explores how to save on compute costs with modern container platforms. Many tech companies and startups are built to operate under a certain degree of pressure and to efficiently manage costs and resources. These pressures have only increased with inflation, geopolitical shifts, and supply chain concerns, however, creating urgency for companies to find ways to preserve capital while increasing flexibility. The right approach to containers can be crucial to navigating these challenges. By Rachel Tsao.

The ways to control compute costs with containers:

• Identify opportunities to reduce cluster administration
• Consider serverless to maximize developer productivity
• Save with committed use discounts
• Leverage cost management features
• Match workload needs to pricing models

Beyond cost savings, many tech and startup companies are seeking improved business agility, which is the ability to deploy new products and features frequently and with high quality. Excellent read!

Tutorial describing how to deploy a webhooks application on a real production cluster. We will create this cluster on Civo. Civo is a cloud provider with a unique offering of managed Kubernetes clusters based on k3s. By Luc Juggery.

Tutorial then dives straight into:

• Creation of a k3s cluster
• Installation of a Ingress Controller
• Running the application
• Testing the whole thing

Civo clusters are shipped with a StorageClass as well, we’ll use it in a next article adding persistent storage to the application’s database. Traefik ingress controller, helm, Let’s Encrypt for TLS certificates - are all used together with newly created cluster. You also get plenty of screenshots and code together with config fiels used in the article. Nice one!