InfoQ – May 2021

From PHP on Google Cloud Functions to the AWS Free Tier, from Amazon Nimble Studio to Elastic Stack on Azure: a recap of the topics I covered for InfoQ in May 2021.

Google Cloud Supports PHP on Cloud Functions

Google Cloud recently announced the public preview of PHP on Cloud Functions. The Functions Framework for PHP supports HTTP functions, to respond to HTTP events, and CloudEvent functions to process events sourced from external and internal Google Cloud services like Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and Firestore.

Amazon Nimble Studio: Visual Effects, Animations, and Interactive Content on AWS

Amazon has recently announced Nimble Studio, a service for creative studios to produce visual effects, animations, and interactive content. The cloud-based studio provides on-demand access to virtual workstations, elastic file storage, render farm capacity and tools to manage security, permissions, and collaborations.

Amazon Open Sources DeepRacer Device Software

Amazon has recently open-sourced the DeepRacer device software, the software used to run AWS DeepRacer. The 1/18th scale autonomous vehicle and the DeepRacer events allow developers to create machine learning models and race them in a cloud based 3D racing simulator.

Amazon Introduces Incident Manager for Automated Response Plans

AWS recently introduced Incident Manager, a new capability of AWS Systems Manager that helps customers prepare and respond to application and infrastructure incidents.

Growing Concerns Among Developers About the AWS Free Tier

In recents weeks many experts in the AWS community have been advocating for sandbox accounts on AWS and hard billing limits that cannot be exceeded to let engineers experiment with new services without jeopardizing their personal well-being.

Microsoft and Elastic Partner to Offer Elastic Stack on Azure

Microsoft and Elastic have recently announced Elastic on Azure, a preview service that offers managed Elastic, Logstash, and Kibana to search, analyze, and visualize data in real time on Azure.