Microsoft Cloud Blogs

That's a great question. Stress testing, which is what you are suggesting helps, but is not super effective and often misses bugs. You need tools which can precisely control the task/go-routine scheduling during testing and systematically explore the various interleavings which can happen in the system. We generally don't have good tool support for such testing. There are promising tools emerging however; here is a case study of one such tool and how it was used to reliably reproduce and fix a subtle concurrency bug: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/07/14/extreme-program…

That's not a great comparison. The author probably should have compared Docker with Webassembly. Kubernetes isn't really about running many containers sharing a physical hardware. You can do that with Docker as well. What Kubernetes offers that Docker does not offer, is self-healing and resilience when managing many containers spread across many underlying nodes. There is no monolithic "Kubernetes" running. Rather, Kubernetes is designed as a set of microservices loosely coupled and maintaining desired states. The resiliency comes from that design. Because it is architected as microservices, Kubernetes is also extensible. Operators, for example, which manage a single distributed system (such as etcd, or postgres, or mongodb) can only be created because Kubernetes was architected as a set of loosely-coupled microservices. WebAssembly is the container runtime without the orchestration capabilities. However, Kubernetes is capable of being modified such that it can schedule, orchestrate, and manage WebAssembly containers: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/04/07/announcing-krus…

Microsoft recently open sourced[1] one of the main tools they use for web accessibility testing. Accessibility Insights for Web (https://accessibilityinsights.io) is a Chrome extension that guides you through doing an accessibility assessment of a website. It includes a combination of automated checks (using aXe[2]) and assisted/guided manual checks. Its rules are based on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines[3]; passing a full assessment in the tool amounts to meeting all the "A" and "AA" WCAG 2.0 requirements. Like other commenters have mentioned, automated checks (like aXe) are a great start, but aren't really sufficient on their own. Accessibility Insights will lead you through how to test different aspects of screen reader usage (and other types of accessibility issues, too!). It will also help you track issues as you go, and produce a pretty report at the end that you can attach to a bug. As with most types of UI testing, no matter what tools you're using, there's really no substitute for watching a real user try to use your product. Disclaimer: I am an engineer that works for Microsoft on the Accessibilty Insights team. [1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/03/12/microsoft-open-… [2] https://www.deque.com/axe/ [3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/

Just a small digression. Microsoft is using A.I. statistical algorithms [1] to create batteries with less reliance on lithium. If anyone is going to be responsible for unleashing AGI, it may not be some random open source projects. [1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/quantum/2024/01/09/unlocking-a-new-er…

Eric Lippert used to publish some good stuff, and Michael Kaplan. Occasionally there is decent technical content from the SQL Server team [1]. [1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2022/07/21/improve-scalabil…

Not to be confused with Onnx, a popular language for machine learning models, that is also commonly used with WebAssembly. Even the logo looks similar. https://onnx.ai/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/09/02/onnx-runtime-we…

They are one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source software in the world, both in money and in code contributions. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2018/03/19/microsoft-open-… Actions speak louder than words. The Microsoft of 1996 is not the Microsoft of 2023.

People have been doing it for long with WebGL, see eg https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs and https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/09/02/onnx-runtime-we…

the TaxGPT example in the GPT-4 Developer Livestream [1] was powerful. I'm hoping (soon?) for a Microsoft 365 assistant that can do the same trick on ALL your MS cloud data (docs/files/mails/notes...) Edit : the included "Business Chat" goes in the same direction (on what they call the Microsoft Graph) Also, there were interesting "coding" examples in the same livestream. So the coming GPT-4 (and 5) integration in the Power Platform [2] could be a game-changer for less technical staff. [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share&t=1136 [2] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/03/16/power-platfo…

They most likely would. There are about half a dozen DB vendors that have announced support, including Microsoft's own SQL Server 2022: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2023/03/09/sql-server-2022-… The other DBs with support are all "cloud era" technologies that are infrequently deployed on-prem.

note that they already supported this migration capability to AWS and Azure. example: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/industry-blog/microsoft-in-business/b…

You made me realize that Windows does supprot BPF! I saw that before but forgot about that. Thanks for the reminder! Such a crazy operating system (an applause.) https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/05/10/making-ebpf-wor…

Surprisingly, ROCm support has been getting a lot better over the very recent years. In my experience the pytorch support is essentially seamless between CUDA and ROCm. Also, I know some popular frameworks like DeepSpeed have announced support and benchmarks on it as well: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2022/03/21/supporting-effi…

> Kubernetes could run webassembly packages in addition to container images. https://github.com/krustlet/krustlet https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/04/07/announcing-krus… “Despite the excitement about Wasm and WASI, it should be clear that containers are the major workload in K8s, and for good reason. No one will be replacing the vast majority of their workloads with WebAssembly. Our usage so far makes this clear. Do not be confused by having more tools at your disposal.”

My experience also. This is particularly bad in the SQL Server space, since Microsoft essentially dropped source control integration in SQL Server Management Studio 2016 and later (there's an official workaround[0], but it's not well received). Most likely they're happy to offload version control to add-ins. There are a few, but most of them are way out of budget for small businesses or small IT departments. Which means version control usually doesn't happen. This has been such a problem for me with clients that I started a side project[1] to try to help fill the gap. If anything it's shown me that the problem is more widespread than I originally thought. [0] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2016/11/21/source-control-i… [1] https://www.versionsql.com/

See also Microsoft‘s sqpal https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2016/12/16/sql-server-on-li… Note however that DBOS inverts what sqlpal is doing.

Given that MinIO seems to be canonical way to add S3 API compatibility to Azure Blob Storage[1], this is not very encouraging. We have a lot of products that use S3 API and Azure was the only cloud that did not offer that out of the box - at first I could not believe this was the case, because even smaller providers like Linode or Digitalocean offer S3 API compatibility. But then I found the post linked below. [1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2017/11/09/s3cmd-amazon-s3…

I've seen news that Microsoft is adopting Rust for safe systems programming. I believe they've been investing in Rust for a while. - https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe-systems-p… - https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs - https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/microsoft-joins…

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/microsoft-joins… They are one of the founding member of Rust Foundation, and from the article it seems that they do use Rust in some of their products.

Indeed there were also announcements from Microsoft[0], Amazon[1] and Google[2], all of which were posted on the main thread. Are we going to have a new thread for each of them? [0]: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/microsoft-joins… [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/congratulations-rustaceans-on-… [2]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/02/google-joins-rust-foundation…

Microsoft also joined the Rust Foundation [0] [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26072627 [1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/microsoft-joins…

Because, effectively, the exFAT filesystem is OSS since August 2019 and Microsoft released all the specifications to it [0]. Microsoft has essentially taken public, legal steps to ensure that anyone else can use exFAT without legal encumbrances and without threat of lawsuit. IANAL - so there's likely some caveats (you probably can't just use the exFAT name unless certain qualifications are met, just like you can't use Firefox's trademarks willy-nilly), but that should be good enough for just about anyone. Including paranoid OSS peeps like me :) 0: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-ker…

Microsoft actually already ships a Windows layer on Linux, as part of SQL Server for Linux. The approach is somewhat similar to WSL1's: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2016/12/16/sql-server-on-li…

I assume you are aware of Direct.ML and its Tensorflow integration? https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/09/08/open-sourcing-t…

Microsoft made an official statement almost a year ago that it was OK to use exFAT, and they published the specs as well. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-ker… I won't argue how groundbreaking their technology is of late, but in all fairness they have been much more open with their code.

The modern answer is exFAT. August last year Microsoft opened up the specifications, and pledged that it won't be patent encumbered[]. How well an operating systems has a separation of concerns between interface and implementation really has very little (unfortunately) to do with business incentives. Even if the Linux kernel had perfect separation of concerns, there's no way to force Microsoft or Apple to support it in their products. Not to mention the problem with standards: https://xkcd.com/927/ [1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-ker…

The first paragraph of the article states the code is "Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored". The code is open source and missing features, if any, could be added. Microsoft has explicitly endorsed its usage in the kernel [0] and its architecture is fully documented [1]. What more do you want? [0] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-ker… [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-specificat…

Can the link be updated to https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/10/10/microsoft-open-… The original link is just a repeat with less detail than Microsoft's own article.

Maybe a better link: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/10/16/announcing-open… and to the GitHub projects themselves https://openappmodel.io/ https://github.com/oam-dev/spec/ https://github.com/oam-dev/rudr/

According to John Gossman "Microsoft Distinguished Engineer & Linux Foundation Board Member" in a related announcement, Microsoft plans to contribute it to the Linux kernel: We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees. Still some patent squirrelly words (they imply you have to sign a patent cross licensing agreement with the OIN - not sure of the implications) and no timeline. Ref: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-ker… OIN Ref: https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/