GitHub shows dependencies, AWS finally allows multiple SSL certificates, AWS and Microsoft work together on Gluon, and a new Kindle Oasis.

GitHub Dependencies

At their Universe event GitHub introduced a couple of new features. The most interesting of these is the new Dependency Graph. This graph lists the dependency of your project¹, although only for Ruby and JavaScript projects². The choice for these is obvious, as the dependencies can be determined with either a Gemfile or a package.json. And in fact, if your project has dependencies that are managed differently, the graph won’t see them.

While having a pretty overview of your dependencies can be nice, the really interesting part is actually what else can be done with this. GitHub has announced one useful upcoming feature already, which is security alerts. That means you’ll get an automatic notification if one of your dependencies has a security issue, and possibly even a suggested fix.

Multiple Certificates on ALBs

From the category of “finally” comes the ability to assign multiple certificates to a loadbalancer in AWS. Yes, it was already possible to do so if you made them available on different ports, but that wasn’t as useful as being able to have multiple certificates on the standard https port.

What this means is that you can now add up to 26 certificates to a single ALB and let your backend instance(s) sort out which site it should serve for that. This is especially useful if you manage a lot of websites on a single server and can potentially save you a lot of money if you used to run a separate loadbalancer for each SSL’d domain. Alternatively, if you didn’t run a loadbalancer because it was too expensive to do so for all of those sites this makes it a lot cheaper to do so and will give you the security benefits that come with doing so.

Gluon

In my opinion, Google is ahead of every other cloud provider when it comes to machine learning. Because of that it makes sense for Amazon and Microsoft³ to team up in an effort to improve something other than TensorFlow. Gluon is a tool for defining machine learning models and can be used with Apache MXNet, with support for other frameworks coming⁴.

Where it comes to how well this works, and what the actual advantages are, I can only point you to the above links. Some time soon I really need to dive a bit more into this sort of thing so I can understand what it all means.

Kindle Oasis 2.0

As an avid Kindle reader, I couldn’t let the release of a new Kindle go by without a mention. About 1.5 year after the release of the Oasis, Amazon has released a new version of their fanciest e-reader. With a bigger screen (but pretty much the same form factor), the return of features such as the adaptive lighting and audio support, and it being waterproof this one looks really promising. If you can stomach the 250 dollar starting price, more than 3 times that of the basic Kindle.