CNCF Illuminates Serverless Vision

Serverless or Function as a Service is one of the hottest topics these days. But what is "serverless computing" and who is it for? Can it replace the existing models? These are some of the many questions the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNFC) is attempting to answer in a paper drafted by the CNCF Serverless Working Group.

"Serverless is a natural evolution of cloud-native computing. The CNCF is advancing serverless adoption through collaboration and community-driven initiatives that will enable interoperability," said Chris Aniszczyk, COO, CNCF.

According to the whitepaper, "Serverless computing refers to the concept of building and running applications that do not require server management. It describes a finer-grained deployment model where applications, bundled as one or more functions, are uploaded to a platform and then executed, scaled, and billed in response to the exact demand needed at the moment."

Being a new technology, there is a lot of work to be done for the healthy growth of serverless ecosystem. The CNCF has recognized its role in the space and is attempting to address those needs. The CNCF will start a drive to encourage more serverless technology vendors and open source developers to join the CNCF. It will also look at ways to foster an open ecosystem by establishing interoperable APIs, ensuring interoperable implementations with vendor commitments and open source tools.

CNCF is a Linux Foundation Collaborative project that was created to foster innovation in the cloud native space. Kubernetes was its anchor project.

You can read the whitepaper on GitHub.

Red Hat Decision Manager 7 Released

Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Decision Manager 7, an open source product that makes it easier for businesses to automate business decisions.

If you want to book a flight, several variables might affect the cost. An airline or a travel agent platform needs rules that reflect those variables. Traditionally, those rules were created by business operators and implemented by software developers. Red Hat Decision Manager 7 eases that process by automating it.

According to industry analyst firm IDC, non-traditional developers are expected to build 20 percent of business applications and 30 percent of new application features by 2021.

Business processes play an important role in helping organizations improve efficiency and reduce workloads, and at the heart of every business process are business rules.

Red Hat Decision Manager 7 is a low-code development tool that enables businesses to take a more active role in application development by creating an environment for collaboration between business and IT professionals. Red Hat Decision Manager 7 is built for both traditional and cloud-native applications.

Topological Superconductor Could Lead to Quantum Computing with Weird Fermions

With their natural insensitivity to decoherence, Majorana particles, which are also called Majorana fermions, have long been considered a promising ingredient for quantum computing, but the difficulty in obtaining and containing the illusive particles has limited their usefulness in quantum research. A team at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has announced that they have developed a means for corralling Majorana particles using topological superconductivity.

According to the announcement at Physics.org, "Majorana fermions are highly original particles, quite unlike those that make up the materials around us. In highly simplified terms, they can be seen as half-electron. In a quantum computer, the idea is to encode information in a pair of Majorana fermions separated in the material, which should, in principle, make the calculations immune to decoherence."

According to team leader and Chalmers professor Floriana Lombardi, "For practical reasons, the material is mainly of interest to those attempting to build a topological quantum computer. We want to explore the new physics hidden in topological superconductors--this is a new chapter in physics."