News For Dev-ops

The Windows 2000 launch in San Francisco was accompanied by an expo, and a large number of Windows 2000 team members were dispatched to run the various booths and stations, give informal presentations on the new features of Windows 2000, and answer technical questions from the various attendees. And from among the people who were sent to the expo, a smaller group was selected to attend the launch event itself in person. Related reading : A ticket to the Windows 95 launch . After a few of us arrived early at the Civic Auditorium for the launch event, we had to entertain ourselves until the doors opened. There was some speculation as to who the celebrity host would be, since it hadn't been announced. One of my colleagues tried to sneak into what looked like a VIP tent.¹ I, on the other hand, went exploring. I found an unlocked door that took me into the empty upper level of the main auditorium. I took a seat and tried not to be noticed. The stage was set up with a 10-meter tall...

Under the Hood: The Research Behind Microsoft SQL, part 2 Here’s a scenario that used to be genuinely frightening: you kick off a bulk load of a few hundred million rows in a single transaction. Somewhere in the middle, the server goes down. Not because of your load, just an unlucky reboot. When SQL Server comes back, it has to undo everything that transaction did before anyone can touch those tables. Row by row (I think I’ve heard probably Bob Ward say “row by agonizing row” to describe this). Working backwards through the log. That exact thing happened to an Azure SQL customer, and the team wrote it into the opening of their paper: “Unexpected failure occurred while one of our customers was attempting to load hundreds of millions of rows in a single transaction. The database required 12 hours to recover while the corresponding tables were completely inaccessible.” Twelve hours. The paper is Constant Time Recovery in Azure SQL Database (VLDB 2019), and it explains how recover...

AWS Agent Registry, available through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, is now available in four additional AWS Regions: Europe (London) eu-west-2, Europe (Frankfurt) eu-central-1, US East (Ohio) us-east-2, and Canada (Central) ca-central-1. AWS Agent Registry is a fully managed discovery service that provides a centralized catalog for organizing, curating, and discovering resources across your organization. With AWS Agent Registry, you can publish MCP servers, tools, agents, agent skills, and custom resources into a searchable registry, control access through an approval workflow, and enable both human users and AI agents to discover the right tools and agents through hybrid search, catalog browsing, and a native MCP endpoint. AWS Agent Registry is now available in nine AWS Regions. For a complete list of Region availability, see the AWS Regional Services List. To get started, see the AWS Agent Registry documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/registry.h...

Today, AWS Marketplace and Amazon Business announced the unified storefront. Organizations can now give their teams one curated catalog that puts software, data, and AI tools from AWS Marketplace alongside physical goods and supplies from Amazon Business. Many enterprises already buy from both, but they manage two catalogs with duplicated approval rules and separate reporting. The unified storefront can now give procurement teams one front door for both. Built on AWS Marketplace Storefront, the unified storefront lets administrators connect their organization's Amazon Business account and import Amazon Business products into their branded storefront. Administrators set governance rules once, and they apply across both catalogs. Buyers can browse AWS Marketplace listings and Amazon Business products in one place. Purchases of AWS Marketplace listings complete directly in the storefront and appear on the customer's AWS invoice. When a buyer selects an Amazon Business product, si...

Copilot UX components are generally available with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) 1.24. Bring interactive dashboards, forms, and business actions directly into the Copilot conversation. Build with familiar web technologies, with component hosting handled by Microsoft 365. People do not just need an answer. They need a clear way to act on it. Copilot UX components let organizations bring interactive web experiences , such as dashboards, forms, approvals, and live business data, directly into the Microsoft Copilot canvas . Instead of sending someone to another portal or app, an agent can present the information and controls needed to complete a task in the conversation. A sales dashboard can open in the conversation when someone asks how the quarter is tracking, with filters to explore the numbers. A time-off request can show the employee’s leave balance, proposed dates, and a Submit button together. The person can review the details a...

If a system becomes CPU-starved, all processes begin to suffer. This includes the taskbar and Task Manager, even though they are often the tools you want to use to stop whatever it is that's making your system suffer. Why can't we run the taskbar and Task Manager at high priority? The catch with running anything at high priority is that unless you have been very careful to avoid it, you will eventually run into a shared resource that you will have to wait for, and you are now stuck. Your priority checkout pass gets you to the front of the line, but if the person at the register has a large shopping cart full of groceries, you just have to wait until they are done before you get your chance. Even if the code that protects the shared resource is careful to avoid priority inversion by transferring the priority of the waiter to the thread that owns the resource, you are still stuck waiting, and that owning thread might be doing something that takes a long time, like, say, accessi...