2019-03-28 Thursday - TensorFlow-2.0.0-alpha (TF 2.0 Alpha)

Today I spotted Cassie Kozyrkov's article on Hackernoon (she's Chief Decision Scientist at Google, Inc) :

• TensorFlow is dead, long live TensorFlow!
• https://hackernoon.com/tensorflow-is-dead-long-live-tensorflow-49d3e975cf04
• " TensorFlow has just gone full Keras"
• "Keras is a specification for building models layer-by-layer that works with multiple machine learning frameworks (so it’s not a TF thing)"
• "Going forward, Keras will be the high level API for TensorFlow and it’s extended so that you can use all the advanced features of TensorFlow directly from tf.keras." 

Here are some of the relevant 2.0 documentation resources

• https://www.tensorflow.org/alpha 
• https://www.tensorflow.org/install 

• $ pip install tensorflow==2.0.0-alpha0

• https://www.tensorflow.org/install/gpu
• https://www.tensorflow.org/alpha/tutorials/keras
• https://www.tensorflow.org/alpha/guide/effective_tf2
• https://www.tensorflow.org/alpha/tutorials/quickstart/beginner

35 videos from the TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019 (March 6th and 7th at the Google Event Center in Sunnyvale, CA.), touching specifically on TF 2.0, are available here:

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQY2H8rRoyvzoUYI26kHmKSJBedn3SQuB

TensorFlow Youtube Channel

• https://www.youtube.com/tensorflow

I also took a moment to upgrade to the recent Python 3.7.3 release (from 3.7.2)

• https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-373/
• Note: If you are installing on Windows 10, be sure to use one  of the x64 installers (e.g. Windows x86-64 executable installer)
• https://docs.python.org/3.7/

  

2019-03-12 Tuesday - Researching Knative

My research notes on Knative:
"Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads."

General References

• https://github.com/knative/
• https://github.com/knative/docs
• "Knative (pronounced kay-nay-tiv) extends Kubernetes to provide a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center."
• https://www.cncf.io/

• https://cloud.google.com/knative/

Video Presentations/Overviews:

What is Knative?
(8 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69OfdJ5BIzs

"Knative is a new and exciting open source platform released as a collaborative effort by IBM, Google, Lyft, and many more. But what exactly does Knative do and how does it make a developer's life easier? Sai Vennam is back to explain the basics of Knative, showing how Knative provides developers with the building blocks for serverless platforms to run on Kubernetes."

KubeCon 2018, Keynote: Kubernetes, Istio, Knative: The New Open Cloud Stack - Aparna Sinha
(6 minutes)



KubeCon 2018, Knative: Scaling From 0 to Infinity - Joseph Burnett & Mark Chmarny, Google
(32 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPSIPr-Cybs

"Knative Serving builds on Kubernetes and Istio to provide request driven compute that can scale to 0. It supports a variety of pluggable scaling strategies and tools for managing concurrency and trade-offs between cost and latency. This presentation reviews the challenges of designing and building a system that can rapidly scale serverless workloads to 1000's of pods. And scaling to and from 0 when idle. It presents the scaling capabilities and extension points of Knative Serving and how to configure it to take advantage of both horizontal and vertical scaling. And the concurrency controls to configure Knative Serving as a single-threaded function framework or a multi-threaded application framework (or something in-between)."

Re: IBM Articles:

• https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2018/12/unifying-containers-apps-and-functions/

Re: General Knative Cloud Portability Articles 

• https://thenewstack.io/knative-enables-portable-serverless-platforms-on-kubernetes-for-any-cloud/
• https://www.solstice.com/fwd/knative-as-inversion-of-native-serverless-applications

Re: Azure Deployment Tooling, Article, Issues

• https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-core-tools
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Articles:
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/bringing-serverless-to-azure-kubernetes-service/
• https://github.com/knative/docs/blob/master/install/Knative-with-AKS.md
• https://triggermesh.com/2018/11/13/running-knative-functions-with-the-azure-functions-runtime/
• "“Can I run my functions in the Azure function runtime within knative?” - "Yes"
• https://blog.appdynamics.com/tag/azure-functions/
• Possible alternatives?
• https://www.pulumi.com/azure/
• Issues:
• https://github.com/knative/eventing/issues/827
• https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-core-tools/issues/866

2019-03-04 Monday - Interesting 2018 Talks and Articles

A great list of top DevOps Articles from 2018

• https://squadex.com/insights/top-devops-articles-2018/

And a list of some very interesting 2018 talks curated here

• https://tech.hbc.com/2018-12-31-presentations-we-love.html

For example, this talk in particular is very interesting:

QCon New York 2018: Design Microservice Architectures the Right Way

"Michael Bryzek highlights specific key decisions that very directly impact the quality and maintainability of a microservice architecture, covering infrastructure, continuous deployment, communication, event streaming, language choice and more, all to ensure that teams and systems remain productive and scale."

 

2019-03-03 Sunday - Exploring Quantum Computing with Microsoft Quantum Development Kit (and Q#)

My work-in-progress notes here:
https://github.com/intltechventures/Lab.QuantumComputing/tree/master/Companies/Microsoft