NLP with a fashion twist: Zalando’s natural language processing framework

Zalando research brings the latest flair to the scene. (Yes, that Zalando. The German-based fashion and beauty online shop operates in fifteen different European countries.) Flair is a simple framework for state-of-the-art natural language processing. It builds on top of Pytorch – a popular deep learning platform, which makes it easy to use. A powerful NLP library. Flair allows you to apply our state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models to your text, such as named entity recognition (NER), part-of-speech tagging (PoS), sense disambiguation and classification.
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The Guardian’s Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS

The Guardian migrated their CMS’s datastore in 2018 from a self-managed MongoDB cluster to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS for a fully managed solution. The team did an API-based migration without any downtime. Guardian’s in-house CMS – called Composer – which stores articles, blog content, photo galleries and video was originally built on top of MongoDB as a datastore. This was preceded by a vendor software backed by an Oracle database.
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Running Kubernetes in the Federal Government

Tackling security compliance is a long and challenging process for agencies, systems integrators, and vendors trying to launch new information systems in the federal government. Each new information system must go through the Risk Management Framework (RMF) created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in order to obtain authority to operate (ATO). This process is often long and tedious and can last for over a year.
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Monitoring Kubernetes, part 1: the challenges + data sources

Our industry has long been relying on microservice-based architecture to deliver software faster and safer. The advent and ubiquity of microservices naturally paved the way for container technology, empowering us to rethink how we build and deploy our applications. Docker exploded onto the scene in 2013, and, for companies focusing on modernizing their infrastructure and cloud migration, a tool like Docker is critical to shipping applications quickly, at scale.
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Creating a Zoo of Atari-Playing Agents to Catalyze the Understanding of Deep Reinforcement Learning

Some of the most exciting advances in AI recently have come from the field of deep reinforcement learning (deep RL), where deep neural networks learn to perform complicated tasks from reward signals. RL operates similarly to how you might teach a dog to perform a new trick: treats are offered to reinforce improved behavior. Recently, deep RL agents have exceeded human performance in benchmarks like classic video games (such as Atari 2600 games), the board game Go, and modern computer games like DOTA 2.
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MySQL High Availability Framework Explained – Part II

InPart I, we introduced a High Availability (HA) framework forMySQL hostingand discussed various components and their functionality. Now in Part II, we will discuss the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication and the related configuration settings that help us ensure redundancy and consistency of the data in our HA setup. Make sure to check back in for Part III where we will review various failure scenarios that could arise and the way the framework responds and recovers from these conditions.
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Enterprise grade CI/CD with GitOps

Implementing Continuous Delivery[1] at enterprise scale is a major challenge. As every company has to innovate their software delivery methods, we need to allow individual teams to learn and improve their own delivery pipeline. This is especially true in the Cloud Native world, where many best practices are still emerging. However, giving teams flexibility to experiment needs to be balanced with security and compliance requirements. In this post, I will explore how we successfully employed the GitOps architecture pattern to find a good balance between flexibility and security at a large enterprise customer of Container Solutions.
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Courier: Dropbox migration to gRPC

Dropbox runs hundreds of services, written in different languages, which exchange millions of requests per second. At the core of our Service Oriented Architecture is Courier, our gRPC-based Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework. While developing Courier, we learned a lot about extending gRPC, optimizing performance for scale, and providing a bridge from our legacy RPC system. Courier is not Dropbox’s first RPC framework. Even before we started to break our Python monolith into services in earnest, we needed a solid foundation for inter-service communication.
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New whitepaper: Achieving Operational Resilience in the Financial Sector and Beyond

AWS has released a new whitepaper, Amazon Web Services’ Approach to Operational Resilience in the Financial Sector and Beyond, in which we discuss how AWS and customers build for resiliency on the AWS cloud. We’re constantly amazed at the applications our customers build using AWS services — including what our financial services customers have built, from credit risk simulations to mobile banking applications. Depending on their internal and regulatory requirements, financial services companies may need to meet specific resiliency objectives and withstand low-probability events that could otherwise disrupt their businesses.
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Western Digital HDD Simulation at Cloud Scale – 2.5 Million HPC Tasks, 40K EC2 Spot Instances

Earlier this month my colleague Bala Thekkedath published a story about Extreme Scale HPC and talked about how AWS customer Western Digital built a cloud-scale HPC cluster on AWS and used it to simulate crucial elements of upcoming head designs for their next-generation hard disk drives (HDD). The simulation described in the story encompassed a little over 2.5 million tasks, and ran to completion in just 8 hours on a million-vCPU Amazon EC2 cluster.
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