There's a lot of product announcements every week -- and sooner or later, something gets announced that you'll want to know. Every Friday, we'll connect some of these newsy little dots and draw a picture as to what's going on with tech vendors and industry trends.
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Introducing Google Maps Platform
This week, Google announced their latest updates to their 13-year-old maps system, and debuted a new name for the service.
The Google Maps Platform will include new APIs and other solutions to help developers serve up innovative apps and services.
- Streamlined products to create new location-based experiences
- One pricing plan, free support, single console access
- Scale up as needed
The service includes $200 each month for using the services Maps, Routes, and Places.
Windows ADK for Windows 10, Version 1803
Earlier this week, Microsoft made their latest feature update for Windows 10 available for download across several channels.
At this point in a new feature update rollout, most of the seekers of the update are consumer enthusiasts and similar geeks. For enterprise and business customers that process will not begin for a few months.
The Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for this update to Windows 10 -- officially referred to as the Windows 10 April 2018 Update or Version 1803 -- is a tool that can be used by IT Pros as they prepare to roll out this update to their end users.
The ADK assists in building customized Windows images plus testing the quality, performance, and components of a system.
AWS Service Catalog Introduces the Ability to Chain the Launch of Multiple Products
This new service has one intent for customers - reduce the complexity of their applications on AWS.
In the past, any service used by enterprise customers, system integrators, and managed service providers was one complete template on AWS. That basically puts all of your eggs in one basket and makes for a management challenge.
This new ability on AWS to chain products together means you can build out your service with smaller modules that when launched in this chain format produces your complete service.
The smaller templates are easier to manage and update compared to the current all in one method.
Announcing Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring: Comprehensive Kubernetes observability from the start
Kubernetes already makes it simpler to create and use container-based applications. However, the monitoring of the underlying services that create that simplicity is challenging.
This new Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring service on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides tools to make it easier for developers and DevOps folks to monitor those Kubernetes instances.
For those of you on multiple public clouds or on-premises, this will work for you as well. That means you can bring all of those sites and their monitoring into one screen on the GCP.
Ingram Micro and Microsoft Announce Strategic Partnership to Accelerate Service Providers’ Digital Transformation with the CloudBlue Platform
This new partnership between Microsoft and Ingram Micro will deliver Ingram Micro's commerce platform, CloudBlue, to Azure. IN turn, that service will be available for new service partners to sell who sign up for Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider program.
CloudBlue takes advantage of the Microsoft Azure platform which allows customers to scale quickly and use Azure features such as hybrid and intelligent cloud infrastructure to meet customer needs at any level.
Amazon Inspector Adds the Ability to Schedule Recurring Assessment Runs and Install the Agent from the Console
The latest update to Amazon Inspector now allows you to take full control over when recurring assessments are conducted on your AWS services.
A tool like this becomes very valuable as the implementation date for the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) approach later this month. Automatic scheduling means you can set and forget the assessments and wait for the results.
