ITPro SnapShot: What Else Happened This Week? (Dec. 16 - 22, 2017)

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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Windows 10 Pro for Workstations: Power Through Advanced Workloads

Earlier this year Microsoft announced a new version of Windows 10 Pro that was focused on high-end workstations. This new version of the operating system is appropriately called Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.

This is not a version of Windows 10 you can buy over the counter, however; you can either purchase new hardware from Microsoft OEM's or upgrade you current device to gain the benefits of Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.

Some of the benefits of this version of Windows 10 on the right hardware include:

- Devices with persistent memory speed up data storage
- SMB direct speeds up file transfers between your PC and servers.
- Resilient storage for large volumes of data
- Detects and repairs data corruption on your drives
- Take advantage of increased compute power on machines with more than 4 CPUs and 6TB of memory

ARCore Developer Preview 2

Google not only released its second preview of its Augmented Reality (AR) solution for Android devices but also moved to retire support for its original AR technology called Project Tango.

Google expects to release version 1.0 of ARCore sometime in 2018.

AWS OpsWorks is Now Available in 9 Regions

Amazon has two products - Chef Automate and AWS OpWorks for Puppet Enterprise - that are automation platforms to help you use code to configure your servers automatically.

These two services are now available in six new regions:

- US East (Ohio)
- US West (Northern California)
- EU (Frankfurt)
- Asia Pacific (Singapore)
- Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
- Asia Pacific (Sydney)

There are now 9 AWS regions supporting OpsWorks.

Getting Started with Google Compute Engine: A Guide to All the Guides

If you want to learn more about Google's Compute Engine Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) then these guides will give you plenty to read over the next couple of weeks.

The primary focus of Google Compute Engine is to help you procure and setup Virtual Machines in the Google Cloud. These VMs in turn can be used for a variety of functions within your organization.

Azure HDInsight Integration with Azure Log Analytics is Now Generally Available

This global scale service, which is used for analyzing big data from applications, helps you monitor infrastructure, detect failures, and remedy issues.

All of this helps you provide better customer service and experiences by keeping your apps working as intended.

AWS and NICE Announce the General Availability of Desktop Cloud Visualization (DCV) 2017

DCV 2017 provides support for on-premises deployments and can be used on EC2 instances for a customer at no extra cost.

The DCV 2017 service has several capabilities, according to AWS:

- DCV 2017 uses the high-performance NICE DCV protocol for enabling remotization of the full desktop on both Windows and Linux.
- DCV 2017 leverages the latest Nvidia GRID technologies, and uses hardware accelerated H.264 encoding on Kepler cards and above. DCV also supports H.264 hardware encoding on EC2 Accelerated Computing instance types with Nvidia GPUs like the G3 instance type.
- DCV 2017 supports HTML5 clients in the form of modern web browsers (IE 11, Edge, Firefox and Chrome) on desktop operating systems.
- On the server-side, DCV now supports modern Linux desktop environments like Gnome 3 on RHEL 7.
DCV 2017 incorporates security improvements like TLS-based security at the protocol level and support for authenticated proxies.
- DCV 2017 can be installed and used on EC2 instances. DCV also supports Elastic GPU for low-cost GPU-enabled remote visualization.

But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.