Fugue reduces the cloud's new kinds of undifferentiated heavy lifting—the generic, often complex cloud work every business has to contend with—in a single system that delivers control, visibility, and speed for application governance. Reducing the lift is baked into every part of Fugue, including the first step, installation. With Fugue, no preliminary, extra layers of infrastructure creation, care, and feeding are required to get started. One command bootstraps everything!

Fugue now supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud region, which means federal agencies, like enterprises, can automate operations in the cloud fast, while simultaneously meeting regulatory demands. Fugue deployments start with powerful, but easy-to-understand code declarations in a composition that governs a system’s infrastructure. By including select libraries in that composition with simple import statements, a particular agency’s compliance regime gets integrated from the start. This kind of fully realized policy-as-code provides a scalable protocol for agency cloud ops and increases speed to mission.

Whether businesses are using cloud providers, on-premise data centers, or hybrid setups to host web services and backends, infrastructure failures are a fact of life. They have to be on our radars as a matter of routine. This makes architecting for failure and for the future, from the start, among the most pressing imperatives for business IT departments. The next five years will see the rise and democratization of centralized control systems for cloud ops with fault tolerance architected into the very fabric of those systems. (This article was first published in DZone's Cloud Zone on April 3, 2017.)

We’re a couple of weeks out of re:Invent and its dizzying buzz—the slew of service and feature announcements, the industry tracks and community meetings, the Mini Cons, the integration and how-to session deep dives, the intensive networking, the mall of sponsors with every manner of product presentation … even festive bling from the ever-present registration DJ. We’ve had some time to digest it all and think about a few of the more compelling offerings. Let’s zero in on a handful of this year's provocative developments.

This year, 2016, is a year of expansion. Here you see an aggregate mapping of a wide swath of Earth’s cloud “hardware”—installed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM/Softlayer. All of it, arguably, can be and eventually will be manipulated as parts of the same machine.

Jared's article in this month's issue of PragPub, The Pragmatic Bookshelf's magazine affiliation, is a helpful read if you're interested in functional programming and Haskell in particular.

We thought it would be fun to have our friends, music professors Laura Renninger and Shaun Amos, answer that for us in this short video blog about the fugue in music. Enjoy!

We ask hard questions while celebrating the remarkable life of Hypatia, patron pagan saint of (computer) science, precursor to Admiral Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Carol Shaw, and to many esteemed, unsung women in mathematics and physics.