F5 has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Volterra, a universal edge-as-a-service platform provider, for approximately $440 million in cash. According to F5, it will incorporate Volterra’s technology platform to create its own edge platform built for enterprises and service providers that will focus on security and scalability. 

“With Volterra, we advance our Adaptive Applications vision with an Edge 2.0 platform that solves the complex multi-cloud reality enterprise customers confront,” said François Locoh-Donou, the president and CEO of F5. “Our platform will create a SaaS solution that solves our customers’ biggest pain points. The success of F5’s software transformation has put us in a position to deliver on the potential of Edge 2.0 and redefine our competitive position.”

Volterra’s new Edge 2.0 open edge platform provides “build once, deploy globally” app delivery that removes the issues of cloud complexity. It also runs all servers on any server. Across all clouds and data centers, according to the company in a post.

WinUI 3 preview 3 released
In this latest preview, Microsoft focused on decoupling the XAML UI framework from the Windows OS, which enables developers to support XAML in older versions of Windows 10 without the need for an upgrade. 

Developers can leverage the Windows UI stack from a Win32 application all while using a Visual Studio Template, as was demonstrated in this blog post by Alexandre Zollinger Chohfi, a senior software development engineer from the PAX team at Microsoft. 

“That is the beauty of WinUI Desktop. You can leverage the latest and greatest native UI stack on our oldest process execution model, which gives you more flexibility for creating your applications,” Chofhi wrote. 

Intel RealSense ID Facial Authentication
This new identification solution RealSense ID from Intel combines an active depth sensor with a specialized neural network. 

The facial authentication technology can be used on smart locks, access control, point-of-sale, ATMs, kiosks and more. It processes all facial images locally and also adapts to users over time, even as they change their physical features. 

Intel RealSense ID boasts a one-in-1-million false acceptance rate and can detect false entry attempts that involve photographs, videos or masks. 

Additional details on the new solution are available here.

MariaDB releases new R2DBC connector
The new MariaDB connector uses Reactive Relational Database Connectivity (R2DBC) which uses a stream-oriented approach to interactions with relational databases. It also uses declarative programming techniques to provide more efficient and scalable Java Virtual Machine (JVM) solutions. 

“Reactive, or non-blocking behavior through the use of asynchronous data streams can be extremely useful for improved efficiency of resource usage and for increased throughput. Beyond that, reactive programming enables a variety of real-time streaming use cases. Being able to realize these benefits using popular relational databases such as MariaDB is a game changer,” said Mark Paluch, the spec lead of the R2DBC specification.

MariaDB also introduced a new Developer Hub that helps developers learn about MariaDB Connectors, as well as analytics for cloud data warehousing, JSON for hybrid data modeling and hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) for real-time smart transactions.