Google Pay is Google’s new payment solution. There’s an initial X-Ray SDK for Ruby and Kubernetes is available in Docker for Mac.

Google Pay

Google is extending Android Pay beyond the mobile phone and renames it to Google Pay. This basically means that it’s becoming similar to Apple Pay in a potential one stop payment solution that you can use in stores, apps, on the web, and even to pay friends.

I’m curious to see how this last one will roll out. Apple Pay is still stuck in US-only land for private payments so if Google is quicker that could be an important differentiator. And the same goes for availability in different countries for the base functionality. It’s understandable that things take time when deals and agreements have to be made with banks, but it can be frustrating to see useful things available that you can’t use yet¹.

I haven’t seen any implementation details, but I assume this will be similar to Apple Pay in how it works privacy wise. In other words, with sites that accept it you will no longer need to provide them your credit card details making that a lot safer.

AWS X-Ray for Ruby

A developer preview for the AWS X-Ray SDK for Ruby is out. Considering that Ruby on Rails is still a big platform, this will make it easier for a lot of people to do debugging on their live environment. As there is no Ruby support available yet in Lambda² this is only useful for applications running on EC2 or containers. Still, that is a lot of applications so if you’re someone running a stack liked that I recommend trying it out.

Kubernetes in Docker

Docker decided that the best time to enable the public beta for Kubernetes in Docker for Mac³ was the day before I left on holiday. As I don’t bring my Mac on holidays, that means my experience with this feature is limited to clicking the checkbox to install it and afterwards verify that that at least was successful. While I’d love to say more I’ll just refer you to this excellent writeup by Docker Captain Alex Ellis. Based on that, and other articles, the experience seems very smooth and transparent. But of course, the best thing is to install it from the Docker Edge release yourself and try it out.