标签：#ATF

The ATF is the latest federal government agency in recent years to notify Congress of a "major incident" involving its cybersecurity.

Ian Nowland discusses why conventional CI/CD practices break down for stateful, core infrastructure. Drawing from his leadership at AWS and Datadog, he shares actionable techniques for safe progressive deployments, synthetic testing in production, and mitigating blast radius in complex software platforms. By Ian Nowland

Watch a developer start an agent session on real enterprise work and you will see a ritual. Before the first useful prompt, they gather. They paste the deployment standard, link the runbook, and explain what the criticality tiers mean. Then they correct the agent's first confident guess about a naming convention the team retired two years ago. Tomorrow they will do it all again, because the agent will not remember. We have quietly decided that this gathering is the developer's job. Every guide to working with AI repeats some version of the same advice: give the model good context. So developers hunt for it, one session at a time, across systems that were never designed to answer an agent's questions. I think that framing is backwards, and I think fixing it is platform work. In Your Platform Has a New User: The Agent , I argued that internal platforms now serve two personas: the developer and the developer's agent. Near the end, I wrote that context is becoming part of the platform. I called it one of the most important developer experience problems of the next few years. That idea got four paragraphs. It deserves an essay, so here is the longer version. The gathering is the tax Agents can remember more than they used to. What they cannot reliably accumulate on their own is organizational truth. A new engineer pays the onboarding cost once, then amortizes it over years of context, hallway conversations, and scar tissue. An agent may retain instructions, memory, or project state. None of those automatically tell it which standard is authoritative, which exception still applies, or which decision was reversed six months ago. Whatever it needs to know about your organization still has to come from somewhere. Now multiply that across hundreds of engineers. People rediscover the same standards, fork the same repo, re-paste the same runbooks, and retype the same corrections, day after day. Quality varies too. Your strongest engineers assemble excellent context and get exce

If you have ever wanted to ship an AI-powered application without managing GPUs, model servers, or scaling infrastructure yourself, this guide is for you. Managed inference simply means letting a cloud provider run the AI model for you: you send a request, the platform handles the compute, and you get a response back. On Google Cloud, the cleanest way to do this today is to pair the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI) with Google Cloud Run , dividing responsibilities between the two services. The Agent Platform serves as the orchestration and intelligence engine, while Cloud Run hosts your custom application logic, front-end UIs, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. By the end of this article, you will be able to: Explain the hybrid architecture and why each layer exists Define an AI agent in code using the Agent Development Kit (ADK) Deploy your app layer to Cloud Run with a single command Choose between online and batch inference for your workload Secure and monitor the whole setup in production New to the underlying concept? Start with Google Cloud's primer: What is AI inference? Prerequisites To follow along hands-on, you will need: A Google Cloud project with billing enabled The gcloud CLI installed and authenticated Python 3.10+ and the ADK installed ( pip install google-adk ) You can also read this purely as an architecture walkthrough; every step is explained, not just shown. 1. The Architectural Blueprint This pattern splits your system into independent, auto-scaling tiers: [ Client / Web UI ] ──> [ Cloud Run Service ] (App Logic / Tool Front End) │ ▼ [ Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform — Agent Runtime ] (Orchestration, Intent Analysis, Memory) │ ▼ [ Managed Inference / Model Garden ] (Gemini 3.x Pro / Flash models) Why split it this way? Each tier scales independently and fails independently. Your web front end can handle a traffic spike without touching the model layer, and you can swap models without redeploying your application code

Meryem Arik discusses strategies for designing low-cost LLM inference architectures for high-volume, non-real-time workloads. She explains how software architects and engineering leaders can achieve order-of-magnitude cost reductions by making critical trade-offs across hardware, inference runtimes, speculative decoding, and smart queue reordering. By Meryem Arik

JetBrains has described how it began centralising AI usage after development-related spending increased roughly tenfold in six months. Rather than restricting engineers to a small set of approved tools, the company built a shared access and accounting layer intended to preserve tool choice while giving teams greater visibility and control over consumption. By Matt Foster

Platforms are finally recognizing that people don’t want to consume AI slop. A growing number of sites and apps now have tools and policies to flag, label, and ban AI-generated content.

Cloud Native Buildpacks, which graduated within the CNCF in July 2026, move base image choice out of per-service Dockerfiles into a single builder owned by platform engineering, enabling fleet-wide patching. BellSoft's hardened Paketo builder is the latest sign that vendors now treat the builder, not the Dockerfile, as the container security control point. By Mark Silvester

In today's digital world, businesses face the challenge of developing, deploying, and scaling applications faster and more efficiently. One of the key technologies supporting this transformation is container technology. What are Containers and Why Are They Important? Containers allow applications to be packaged into lightweight, self-contained, and portable units that can run consistently in any environment—from a local development machine to a cloud platform. This reduces dependencies and significantly simplifies application deployment and scalability. Unlike virtual machines (VMs), containers share the operating system kernel, making them more resource-efficient. This leads to higher efficiency and allows businesses to run more applications on the same infrastructure. Introduction to Kubernetes: Orchestration of Containers While containers represent a revolutionary approach to developing and running applications, it’s not enough to simply have containers. Once applications consist of dozens or hundreds of containers, managing, orchestrating, and scaling them becomes critical. This is where Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes is the world’s most widely used container orchestration platform. It enables the automatic deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications in clusters. With Kubernetes, companies can ensure their applications are always available, automatically recover from failures, and roll out new versions without downtime. Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS): Kubernetes in the Cloud Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) is Microsoft’s fully managed Kubernetes solution. With AKS, businesses benefit from simplified Kubernetes deployment by offloading infrastructure management to Microsoft. This means you can focus on developing and scaling your applications while AKS simplifies the management and maintenance of Kubernetes clusters. Benefits of AKS: Fully managed: AKS takes care of the management and patching of Kubernetes, allowing businesses to focus on

Uno Platform 6.6 introduces Native AOT publishing across five target platforms, an optional Vulkan rendering backend, and automatic registration for the framework’s Model Context Protocol servers. The release also reduces XAML boilerplate, expands cross-platform WinUI API coverage, and improves accessibility and multilingual text handling. By Edin Kapić

Dumanshu Goyal discusses optimizing data layers for low-latency workloads like AI feature stores. Drawing lessons from NASA's Space Shuttle, he explains how proxy architectures introduce hidden CPU costs, elevated tail latencies, and blast-radius risks. He demonstrates how direct-access Valkey architectures achieve microsecond latency, improve resilience, and slash infrastructure costs. By Dumanshu Goyal

Microsoft and Uno Platform have released the first stable versions in the SkiaSharp 4 series, beginning with SkiaSharp 4.148.0 and followed shortly afterward by 4.150.0. A 4.151.0 prerelease line is also available, demonstrating the project’s new approach of aligning package versions and release cadence with upstream Skia milestones. By Edin Kapić

Looking for Contributors to Build Zentrail IDE — An AI-Native Open Source Desktop IDE Hello everyone! 👋 I'm building Zentrail IDE , an open-source, AI-native desktop IDE designed for the next generation of software development. The goal isn't to build another code editor. The goal is to create an IDE where multiple AI agents can collaborate with developers in a single workspace to plan, write, review, test, and manage code. We're still in the early architecture and planning phase, and I'm looking for developers, designers, and AI enthusiasts who want to help build it from the ground up. 🎯 Project Vision Create an AI-first development environment that combines: 🧠 Multi-Agent Collaboration 💻 Native Desktop Performance 🤖 AI CLI Integration 📦 Plugin & Skill Ecosystem 🌍 Open Source Community ⚡ Modern Developer Experience ✨ Planned Features Workspace System Multi-project workspaces Workspace memory Persistent sessions Task management AI Workspace Agents Multiple AI agents running simultaneously Shared workspace memory Parallel task execution Intelligent task orchestration AI CLI Support Claude Code Gemini CLI OpenAI-compatible providers Local AI models Custom AI CLIs Git Automation AI-assisted commits Pull requests Code reviews Branch management Repository insights Skill System Install reusable AI workflows with a single command. Examples: Security Review Code Refactoring API Generator Documentation Writer Test Generator Plugin SDK A modular extension system for adding custom functionality without modifying the core IDE. 🛠 Tech Stack Frontend TypeScript React Tauri v2 Monaco Editor Tailwind CSS Backend Go gRPC WebSocket AI Runtime Python MCP LangGraph Database SQLite 🤝 We're Looking For We're looking for contributors interested in: Frontend React TypeScript UI/UX Monaco Editor Backend Go gRPC WebSocket Performance optimization AI Python MCP Agent orchestration Prompt engineering Desktop Tauri Windows development Cross-platform architecture Design UI/UX Design Icons Develo

Platform engineering maturity is emerging as an important factor in determining whether organizations can turn AI adoption into sustainable operational value, according to Perforce Software's 2026 Platform Engineering Report. By Craig Risi

Chris Richardson discusses leveraging Team Topologies and internal platforms to accelerate microservices delivery. He explains six key platform patterns - from security and observability to build and deployment - and shares strategies for minimizing cognitive load on stream-aligned teams while avoiding common platform engineering pitfalls. By Chris Richardson

An algorithmic trading platform doesn't operate in isolation it responds to the changing conditions of the financial markets. One of the biggest factors affecting automated trading performance is the market session. Liquidity, volatility, trading volume, and price movements can vary significantly throughout the trading day, influencing how an algorithmic trading platform executes trades. Understanding how different market sessions impact automated trading can help traders choose the right strategies, manage risk more effectively, and improve overall trading performance. What Are Market Sessions? A market session refers to a specific period during which a stock exchange is open for trading. In India, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) follow a structured trading schedule that includes the pre-open session, regular trading hours, and post-closing session. Each session has unique market characteristics, making it important for traders to understand how their automated strategies may behave during these periods. Why Market Sessions Matter in Algorithmic Trading An algorithmic trading platform follows predefined rules, but the market environment changes throughout the day. A strategy that performs well during high-volume periods may struggle when trading activity is low. Market sessions influence several key factors, including: Trading volume Market liquidity Price volatility Bid-ask spreads Order execution quality Recognizing these differences allows traders to build strategies that are better suited to specific market conditions. Pre-Open Session The pre-open session is used to determine the opening price of securities before regular trading begins. During this period: Orders are collected but not executed immediately. Prices may fluctuate as the market discovers the opening level. Liquidity can be limited. Large overnight news events may influence price movements. Most intraday automated strategies are designed to become active only afte

One thing Microsoft is not good at is naming things, and sadly it's happened again. But let's go back to the beginning: what are Skills? Skills are targeted prompts/context that are modular, so they are not always included in the LLM session. They are Markdown files with selected metadata in YAML, all in a file normally named skill.md (the parent folder and YAML metadata identify it). They were created by Anthropic (Claude) and were designed for both the user to add in a prompt ( /Skill ), or for the LLM to decide. Similar to Skills are Plug-ins. These can (and often do) include skill.md files, but can also have scripts, MCP servers, and other tools. So back to Microsoft naming things badly. Copilot Studio (Azure Bot Framework version) had skills, but they were not skills. The new Copilot Studio has Skills, but they are not Skills, they are actually Plug-ins. Plug-ins include Skills, so why does it matter? Well, it doesn't really, but I like to moan, and it means sometimes cool functionality can be left on the table because we presume Microsoft names things accurately. Anyway I digress (I like to do that), now we understand what Skills/Plug-ins are I wanted to dive into them within Copilot Studio and cover: Why Are They Cool Building Powerful Skills Adding Scripts/Templates Using Skills 1. Why Are They Cool I often go on about skills being cool, but why? There are a few reasons. Context Management Before skills, the standard approach was to give the LLM everything and let it figure out what it needed. The problem with this is twofold. First, more context equals more tokens, which equals more cost. Second—and more importantly—too much unrelated context can have a detrimental impact on the LLM response. LLMs work by using input tokens to predict the next token, so polluted input tokens can make the LLM predict the wrong next token (this is a huge simplification, but you get what I mean). Transferable As skills are simple Markdown files, they can easily be transferred

If you run more than a handful of OpenTelemetry Collectors, you already know the pain: a config change means SSHing into boxes, redeploying DaemonSets, or babysitting a Git pipeline per cluster, and you never quite trust that every agent is running the config you think it is. OpAMP fixes exactly that. It is a protocol that lets a central server push configuration to a fleet of Collectors, watch their health, and roll changes out in stages, without you touching each host. This post walks through how OpAMP works, the two ways a Collector can speak it, and the config you need to wire one up. The problem OpAMP solves A single Collector is easy. A hundred of them, spread across clusters, VMs, and edge nodes, is a fleet-management problem that has nothing to do with telemetry itself. Every observability team eventually builds some version of the same thing: a way to ship a new pipeline config, confirm it actually applied, and back it out when a processor starts dropping spans. Without a management protocol you end up gluing that together from ConfigMaps, Ansible runs, and dashboards that only tell you an agent is alive, not what config it is actually running. Config drift creeps in. One node keeps an old sampling rate for months because its rollout quietly failed and nobody noticed. OpAMP, the Open Agent Management Protocol, is the OpenTelemetry answer to this. Splunk donated it to the project in 2022, and it has since become the standard control channel for the Collector. It is worth pairing with a clear-eyed view of what a Collector actually is versus lighter agents; the OpenTelemetry Collector vs Grafana Alloy comparison covers that trade-off if you are still choosing a data plane. What OpAMP actually is OpAMP is a client/server network protocol for remote management of large fleets of data-collection agents. It is transport-flexible: agents connect to the server over either plain HTTP or a WebSocket, and the WebSocket path gives you a persistent bidirectional channel

Herodotus wrote of a bird that lived five hundred years in Arabia, and when its life came to an end, it did not wait to be surprised by death. It built its own nest of cinnamon and myrrh, set the nest and itself alight, and let a new bird rise from what the fire left behind. The Hestia argued for tending a fire that must never go out. That’s true, and it isn’t the whole truth. Teams end. People leave. Companies get acquired, reorganized, shut down, and five years from now some part of this whole model will probably look as dated as the practices it was written to replace. No amount of tending prevents that. Pretending otherwise is its own kind of Alexandria , a slow decline dressed up as continuity, right up until the fire goes out anyway and nobody chose the moment. The bird in Herodotus doesn’t get caught by surprise. It builds the pyre itself. Chooses the moment, gathers what matters, and burns deliberately, trusting that what rises afterward carries the shape of what came before, not because the fire preserved the old bird whole, but because starting over was never the same thing as starting from nothing. That’s the part tending alone can’t promise. A team that’s about to be split up can hand its shared model to whoever inherits the work on purpose, the way a rep in the Boule carries a decision back instead of leaving it to travel however it happens to travel. A team about to lose its most experienced person can spend the weeks before that departure making sure the framing, not just the conclusions, made it into someone else’s head, the way the Mimesis argued a junior actually learns. None of that stops the ending. It decides what the ending leaves behind. This series doesn’t get to end with a fire that never goes out. Nothing does. It gets to end with the only thing actually inside anyone’s control. Build the pyre on purpose. Choose what goes into the fire. References The Myth of the Phoenix: Rebirth and Renewal : Greek Mythology, on Herodotus’s original accoun

Google Cloud has published a new blueprint setting out how organisations should secure artificial intelligence workloads running on Google Kubernetes Engine, arguing that the shift from prototype to production has outpaced traditional security models. The document sets out a three layer approach covering infrastructure, model integrity and application security. By Matt Saunders