Progressive Rollout (aka "Canary Deployment") in the Cloud

A canary deployment is an old concept with a new branding in the age of cloud, and terminology-wise is used by both Google, AWS and Azure. Kubernetes technology is one way to manage canary deployments.

Canary deployments are progressive rollouts where new functionality is released to a subset of specially selected users. Therefore the canary deployment runs in parallel to current production deployment used by your regular users. This gives you more time and space to test the reliably of new features "in the wild".

Introducing the Azure SRE Agent

The new Azure SRE agent (announced May 2025) and demonstrated at MS Build, is designed to make it easier to "sustain production environments". This includes taking toil away from checking log files, analyzing historical changes and augmenting this with LLMs. Incident and infrastructure management is set to be transformed, with the Azure SRE agent able to partner in incident investigation and root cause analysis. An example prompt may be: "visualize HTTP request and 500 errors for last week for my app".

Data Flywheels

 The concept of a data flywheel is central to continuous improvement of AI systems.

AI Resources

Good AI resources (what's happening in the AI world):

Unite.AI

Fastcompany AI

VentureBeat

And company specific AI news:

IBM AI

Microsoft AI

Oracle AI

Nvidia AI

Anaconda AI Platform | Anaconda

Notion

CNCF

We have discussed CNCF in the context of gRPC. 

Other famous hosted projects are Kubernetes, Prometheus and CoreDNS. 

In their own words they host "critical components of the global technology infrastructure". They also organize conferences.

wsl for Windows 11

 wsl is not installed by default on Windows 11. To install, just type wsl and tap any key to install.

You can then type wsl --version to get version info.

This will tell you the wsl version (e.g. 2.4.13.0), kernel version (5.15.1674-1) and MSRDC version (e.g. 1.2.5716).

The kernel version does not refer to the Windows kernel version but the WSL kernel version. 

Kernel releases can be found here.  MSRDC version refers to Remote Desktop Client whose versions can be found here (and which can be used to connect with Azure Virtual Desktop).

TCF Vendors

On some websites, when presented with the option to accept cookies, you may see a header with TCF vendors.

TCF refers to the Transparency and Consent Framework (a voluntary standard) being promoted by IAB Europe, a Europe-level association for the digital marketing and advertising ecosystem.

This facilitates compliance with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation which came into force on 25 May 2018) and the ePrivacy directive (aka "ePD", a 2002 directive also known as the "cookie law") proposed to be replaced by some upcoming EU regulation.

An example of a data collector who might be surfaced through the TCF are:

• BeeswaxIO Corporation (a programmatic advertising company now owned by Comcast)
• Magnite, Inc
• Comscore BV
• LiveIntent Inc (acquired by Zeta Global)
• Amazon Advertising

Papers with Code

Papers with Code is a Meta AI initiative that organizes machine learning papers under various themes including Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Reasoning, Time Series and Knowledge Representation. Some of these papers are written by corporate researchers contributing to open source.

Visual Studio Magazine

MSVS is large, complex and suitably changing enough to warrant its own magazine. Read it well.

Dot net (.NET) MAUI for Dummies

Dot net (.NET) MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) is a cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop applications with C# (and XAML optionally).

The upside is you just have one codebase which can be used to render UI on Windows, Android, iOS, macOS and Samsung Tizen. 

For Windows, WinUI 3 is used as the native platform (this means it will work on Windows 10 version 1809 or later, and Windows 11).

Mermaid has evolved from multifarious UI technologies.