News briefs for May 2, 2018.

Feral Interactive tweeted yesterday that THRONES OF BRITANNIA will be released for Linux soon: "We are closing fast on the macOS and Linux versions, and are currently *aiming* for macOS and Linux releases one to two months after the Windows release on May 3rd."

Google Cloud announced this week that NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs (beta) are now available on Google Computer Engine and Kubernetes Engine. According to the ZDNet story, "The Tesla V100 GPU equates to 100 CPUs, giving customers more power to handle computationally demanding applications, like machine learning, analytics, and video processing."

LINBIT recently announced the public beta of LINSTOR, "new open-source software-defined storage available for Kubernetes and OpenShift environments". According to the LINBIT announcement, "LINSTOR takes advantage of DRBD, a part of the Linux kernel for nearly a decade, to deliver fast and reliable data replication. By simplifying storage cluster configuration and ongoing management, then plugging into cloud and container front-ends, users get the resilient infrastructure they need while retaining flexibility to choose vendors."

Red Hat and the Kubernetes community yesterday announced the Operator Framework, a new open-source toolkit for "managing Kubernetes native applications, called Operators, in a more effective, automated and scalable way". They describe the concept like this: "an Operator takes human operational knowledge and encodes it into software that is more easily packaged and shared with consumers. Think of an Operator as an extension of the software vendor's engineering team that watches over your Kubernetes environment and uses its current state to make decisions in milliseconds."

Google Cloud yesterday launched Cloud Composer (beta), a "fully managed workflow orchestration service built on Apache Airflow". Cloud Composer "empowers you to author, schedule, and monitor pipelines that span across clouds and on-premises data centers". Also, as it is built on the open-source Apache Airflow project and operated with Python, Cloud Composer is "free from lock-in and easy to use". See the TechCrunch story for more details.