The year is coming to an end, but learning never stops. This week’s TWIL features an extremely interesting (and a bit long) report on the state of AI, a few articles on serverless computing and new stuff about .NET 6. I hope you find it useful.

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Podcasts

.NET Rocks

Episode 1769: OpenSilver Ships with Giovanni Albani
OpenSilver reaches V1! Carl and Richard talk to Giovanni Albani about OpenSilver – an open-source, plug-in-free implementation of Silverlight. Giovanni talks about how the client-side of OpenSilver is different from Silverlight, using Web Assembly to eliminate the need for the plug-in. But the developer SDK side is as close to identical as possible. The conversation explores going beyond compatibility with Silverlight 5 from 2011 to more modern capabilities, including the latest versions of .NET and C#. OpenSilver is not just a migration solution – it’s a cross-platform development platform that is continuing to grow!

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Artificial Intelligence

State of AI Report 2021
The State of AI Report analyses the most interesting developments in AI. We aim to trigger an informed conversation about the state of AI and its implication for the future. The Report is produced by AI investors Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth. Now in its fourth year, the State of AI Report 2021 is reviewed by AI practioners in industry and research, and features invited contributions from a range of well-known and up-and-coming companies and research groups.

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Serverless

Design Patterns for Serverless Systems
In the software architecture as well as in the application design landscape, design patterns are among the fundamental building blocks. Within the current technological spectrum, serverless is one of the most significant and vibrant approaches, especially in the IaaS and Cloud landscape.

The true value of serverless computing
Have you heard about serverless computing? Guess what, it’s not serverless at all. It just automates the allocation of back-end servers you’ll need to complete a particular task. Today we have dozens of types of serverless systems from databases to containers to more traditional development systems. They all hold the same promise: to provide vertical and horizontal scaling automatically without having to configure servers ahead of time.

How to choose a cloud serverless platform
From AWS Lambda and Azure Functions to Knative and OpenFaaS, we have at least a dozen functions-as-a-service platforms to choose from. Here’s how to navigate the options.

OpenFaaS – Run Containerized Functions On Your Own Terms
For a long time, serverless has been just a synonym of AWS Lambda for me. I moved away from AWS a couple of years ago, and since then, I’ve been missing this ease of deploying serverless functions. So I was pleasantly surprised when I learned about the OpenFaaS project. It makes it simple to deploy functions to a Kubernetes cluster, or even to a VM, with nothing but containerd.

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Microservice Architectures

Breaking Up a Monolithic Database with Kong
If your microservice design results in a very large API or multiple services accessing a single database, check out why Kong Gateway should be part of your project. While the primary objective of this article is to move toward a true microservice design that includes a dedicated database, Kong provides core aspects for a true microservice design that are scalable and easy to adopt.

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.NET 6

Your First Microservice in .NET 6
More than a buzzword, microservices are here to stay and are currently gaining popularity due to their acceptance in the systems development market. In this article, we’ll explore some valuable features available on the .NET platform and create our first microservice.

What’s new for gRPC in .NET 6
gRPC is a modern, cross-platform, high-performance RPC framework. gRPC for .NET is built on top of ASP.NET Core and is our recommended way to build RPC services using .NET. .NET 6 further improves gRPC’s already great performance and adds a new range of features that make gRPC better than ever in modern cloud-native apps. In this post I’ll describe these new features as well as how we are leading the industry with the first gRPC implementation to support end-to-end HTTP/3.

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Cloud Services

Top 13 most underrated Microsoft Azure services
In this article, Lars Klint presents his findings on the most underrated Azure services, according to his poll on Twitter. You might be surprised to know that Azure Event Grid, Azure Storage (including Table Storage) and Azure Bastion are on that list.

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Have an awesome week!

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash