Puppet is inviting developers to take its annual State of DevOps survey. Through this survey over the years, Puppet has been able to survey more than 20,000 technical professionals and learned about IT and organizational performance.

This year, Puppet has added new areas of research that reflect the community’s concern with DevOps. These areas include ROI of IT performance, quality, containers, and lean practices.

Possible questions to explore include:

  • Where does security and compliance fit in a DevOps environment?
  • What implications does the adoption of containers have on IT performance?
  • How does throughput, stability and quality measures affect the bottom line?
  • Does speed and reliability actually equate to higher-quality software?
  • What does it mean for organization to go lean?

The survey is available here.

Facebook releases Chef cookbooks
Facebook has released 14 of its internal Chef cookbooks for anyone who wants to use its model of Chef in their own environment.

Over the years, Facebook has released tools for Chef. Now it has refactored 14 of its core cookbooks for generic use. They are used internally in Facebook’s production environment, and the company hopes to increase the amount of cookbooks it releases over time.

Facebook has a quick tour for developers to get started with Chef. There is a document for developers here to help them get started. Like other open-source projects, Facebook is welcoming contributors. Those who wish to contribute can find guidance on contributing here.

Khronos introduces provisional specifications for parallel programming
The Khronos Group, an open consortium of software and hardware components, announced the availability of the OpenCL 2.2, SYCL 2.2, and SPIR-V 1.1 provisional specifications.

“OpenCL 2.2 brings the most developer-requested feature into core: the OpenCL C++ kernel language,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and chair of the OpenCL working group. “Overall, Khronos is releasing three specifications today in a coordinated push to increase parallel programming productivity.”

OpenCL 2.2 incorporates the OpenCL C++ kernel language for parallel programing, while SYCL 2.2 allows host and device code to be contained in a single source file as it leverages OpenCL C++. The other specification, SPIR-V 1.1, extends the representation defined by Khronos with native support for shader and compute kernel features to support OpenCL C++.

The specifications can be found on Khronos’ website, and developers can provide feedback before their finalization.

SmartBear releases AQtime Pro 8.5
SmartBear Software released AQtime Pro 8.5, a tool for application performance and memory profiling. This is the latest version, and it adds integration with Embarcadero RAD Studio 10 Seattle.

With this new release, it is now easier to locate and address performance issues and memory leaks for Delphi and C++Builder applications directly from RAD Studio. It also allows developers to analyze and optimize applications without leaving the IDE, and developers can pinpoint exact functions and lines of code that are causing performance issues or memory leaks, according to a release.