The new extension for Azure Functions lets a function seamlessly interact with Dapr for building cloud-native applications.  

Azure Functions provides an event-driven programming model and Dapr provides a set of essential cloud-native building blocks. 

“With this new extension, you can now bring both together for serverless and event-driven apps that can use the growing set of capabilities Dapr provides. Developers, teams, and organizations can use these tools to build functions that use a powerful set of capabilities with little code,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

Codefresh’s $27 million round of funding
Codefresh said it plans to use the funding to invest in open source and expand on continuous delivery to allow customers to complete DevOps automation from code to cloud. 

The company said it is also aiming to create enterprise-grade security with the new Codefresh Runner that helps organizations run Codefresh pipelines behind a firewall without having to manage a full on-premise solution. 

Additional details are available here.

Pega software hackathon winners
Pega announced the winners of the Pega Community Hackathon 2020 with the Best in Show award going to Angelo Mermiklis for his ‘V for Volunteer’ omni-channel application that connects employees with open volunteering opportunities in their organization. 

The Runner Up Award went to the srcLogic team for ‘Pyra,’ a web-app that enables employees to suggest and vote on new ideas that could impact change in their organization. 

“We were impressed with the level of participation, skill, and passion from our global developer community who used their time and talents for the greater good,” said Stephanie Louis, the senior director of community and developer programs at Pegasystems.

The full list of other awards is available here.

Red Hat collaborates with cnvrg.io on MLOps
The data science platform cnvrg.io is now part of the Red Hat OperatorHub as a certified platform to deliver AI lifecycle management, and simplified MLOps to enterprise DevOps and data science teams across industries.

“Together with cnvrg.io and Red Hat OpenShift, data scientists, IT and DevOps teams are empowered to better manage infrastructure in the hybrid cloud and accelerate the ML workflow in one automated and unified platform,” the company wrote in a post.

The integration with Red Hat, users will have access to managed Kubernetes deployment on any cloud or on-premises environment, fully automated installation and lifecycle management, and all the tools data scientists need for ML/AI development from research to deployment. 

Apache weekly roundup
Last week week saw the release of Apache Chart 3.0.0 and SkyWalking Python 0.1.0 with built-in libraries `http` and `urllib.request`, and support for third-party library `requests.’

Other updates included Apache Avro 1.10.0, Apache Storm 2.2.0, and Apache Kylin 3.1.0 in the Big Data space. 

The full list of new releases from Apache is available here.