Technology

Walmartongoing push to cut away unprofitable or slow-growing international operations, to shore up its resources to compete against Amazon at home and in Asia on digital fronts, had another development today. The worldlargest retailer today announced that it has finalised a deal to sell 80 percent of its business in Brazil to private equity firm Advent International, with Walmart keeping the remaining 20 percent.

The deal has been in the works for months and is expected to close later this year.

Walmart and Advent are not disclosing the terms of the deal (we are asking) but Walmart did note in a statement that it would record a non-cash net loss of $4.5 billion in Q2 as a result.

&A significant portion of the net loss is due to the recognition of cumulative foreign currency translation losses and the final loss could fluctuate significantly due to changes in currency exchange rates up to the date of close,& noted Walmart.

Although Brazil represents the biggest single market in Latin America, the company has found it a struggle to grow that business substantially and last quarter said that it would wind down its first-party e-commerce business in Brazil, too. &Walmart is committed to building strong, resilient businesses that continuously adapt to local customers& needs in a rapidly changing world,& said Enrique Ostale, EVP and CEO of Walmart UK, Latin America and Africa, in a statement. &We will retain a stake in Walmart Brazil and continue to share our global retail expertise, giving our Brazil business the best opportunity for long-term growth, providing opportunities for associates and low prices for customers.&

Advent is a prolific investor and controls a number of businesses in Brazil, including many retail companies, and the idea appears to be to use some of that to expand the operation in ways that Walmart hadn&t managed to do on its own.

&We have been in Brazil for over 20 years and are excited about this partnership with one of the countryleading retailers,& said Patrice Etlin, a Managing Partner at Advent International in Brazil, in a statement. &We believe that with our local market knowledge and retail expertise we can position the company to generate significant results and reach new levels of success in Brazil. We plan to invest in the business, work with the Walmart Brazil management team, associates, Walmart and our industry advisors to create a more agile and modern company to accelerate its development and improve the customer experience.&

Walmart stepping back from its Brazil efforts comes at the same time as it is stepping up in another so-called BRIC economy.

The divestment comes just weeks after Walmart announced that it would be taking a majority stake in Flipkart, the largest online retailer in India, its largest deal to date. To double down on growth in Asia and also to compete better against Amazon in online retail globally, Walmart is taking a 77 percent stake in the Indian startup for $16 billion. Just before that, Walmart had announced that it would be selling a majority of its holdings in Asda, its UK business, to local rival Sainsbury&s. Unlike the Brazil deal, that Asda divestiture will net Walmart about $4 billion.

After a week of rumors, Microsoft today confirmed that it has acquired GitHub, the popular Git-based code sharing and collaboration service. The price of the acquisition was $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. GitHub raised $350 millionand we know that the company was valued at about $2 billionin 2015.

Former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman (and now Microsoft corporate vice president) will become GitHubCEO.GitHub founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow and work on strategic software initiatives. Wanstrath had retaken his CEO role after his co-founder Tom Preston-Werner resigned following a harassment investigation in 2014.

The fact that Microsoft is installing a new CEO for GitHub is a clear sign that the companyapproach to integrating GitHub will be similar to hit it is working with LinkedIn. &GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries,& a Microsoft spokesperson told us.

GitHub says that as of March 2018, there were 28 million developers in its community, and 85 million code repositories, making it the largest host of source code globally and a cornerstone of how many in the tech world build software.

But despite its popularity with enterprise users, individual developers and open source projects, GitHub hasnever turned a profitand chances are that the company decided that an acquisition was preferable over trying to IPO.

GitHubmain revenue source today is paid accounts, which allows for private repositories and a number of other features that enterprises need, with pricing ranging from $7 per user per month to $21/user/month. Those building public and open source projects can use it for free.

While numerous large enterprises use GitHub as their code sharing service of choice, it also faces quite a bit of competition in this space thanks to products like GitLab and AtlassianBitbucket, as well as a wide range of other enterprise-centric code hosting tools.

Microsoft is acquiring GitHub because ita perfect fit for its own ambitions to be the go-to platform for every developer, and every developer need, no matter the platform.

Microsoft has long embraced the Git protocol and is using it in its current Visual Studio Team Services product, which itself used to compete with GitHubenterprise service. Knowing GitHubposition with developers, Microsoft has also leaned on the service quite a bit itself, too and some in the company already claim it is the biggest contributor to GitHub today.

Yet while Microsoftstance toward open source has changed over the last few years, many open source developers will keep a very close look at what the company will do with GitHub after the acquisition .Thatbecause there is a lot of distrust of Microsoft in this cohort, which is understandable given Microsofthistory.

In fact, TechCrunch received a tip on Friday, which noted not only that the deal had already closed, but that open source software maintainers were already eyeing up alternatives and looking potentially to abandon GitHub in the wake of the deal. Some developers (not just those working in open source) werenot wasting time even to wait for a confirmation of the deal before migrating.

While GitHub is home to more than just open source software, if such a migration came to pass, it would be a very bad look both for GitHub and Microsoft. And, it would a particularly ironic turn, given the very origins of Git: the versioning control system was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 when he was working on development of the Linux kernel, in part as a response to a previous system, BitKeeper, changing its terms away from being free to use.

The new Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella strikes us as a very different company from the Microsoft of ten years ago— especially given that the new Microsoft has embraced open source — but ithard to forget its earlier history of trying to suppress Linux.

&Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,& said Nadella in todayannouncement. &We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the worldmost pressing challenges.&

Yet at the same time, itworth remembering that Microsoft is now a member of the Linux Foundation and regularly backs a number of open source projects. And Windows now has the Linux subsystem while VS Code, the companyfree code editing tool is open source and available on GitHub, as are .NET Core and numerous other Microsoft-led projects.

And many in the company were defending Microsoftcommitment to GitHub and its principles, even before the deal was announced.

Still, you can&t help but wonder how Microsoft might leverage GitHub within its wider business strategy, which could see the company build stronger bridges between GitHub and Azure, its cloud hosting service, and its wide array of software and collaboration products. Microsoft is no stranger to ingesting huge companies. One of them, LinkedIn, might be another area where Microsoft might explore synergies, specifically around areas like recruitment and online tutorials and education.

The beauty of serverless computing services like AWS Lambda is that they abstract away the server itself. That enables developers to create applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, but it also creates a set of new problems. Without a static server, how do you debug a program thatrunning Ita challenge that Israeli startup Rookout has solved in its latest release.

The company has achieved this by providing a way to mark the serverless code with &breakpoints.& Rookout can then collect developer-defined information about the serverless code, allowing them to track issues even while the application is live running in a serverless environment.

This ability to run a trace, which is common in traditional applications, is much more difficult in a serverless one because there is no permanent underlying machine on which the application is running, says Rookout CEO Or Weis.

Rookout running serverless debugger. The information at the bottom of the screen gives developers insight to debug code running on AWS Lambda. Photo: Rookout

&Specifically with serverless, it is extremely hard to predict how your software will behave in that new environment [because] itextremely hard to know where software is running and [it has been] almost impossible to see how itbehaving in production,& Weis explained. . He said the only way to solve that to this point has been writing more code in the form of log lines and SDK calls, which creates a whole administrative layer that Rookout wanted to eliminate from the process. By providing an interface to see whathappening inside the code, the company is giving developers a way to debug live code running in a serverless environment in the same fashion they have debugged more traditional applications.

They can share this information with a myriad of popular adjacent tools including application performance management (APM) like New Relic, log management like Splunk or alerting like PagerDuty. They can also use it to simply go back in and fix the code issue if thatwhatrequired.

While serverless computing isn&t truly serverless, there isn&t a dedicated server running the application. Instead, the vendor provides the required amount of server resources based on a particular event trigger. When that event happens, the code runs and the customer gets charged. This is in stark contrast to traditional development where you allocated a server to run the application and you pay for it, regardless of whether you use it or not.

__

Rookout Lambda debugging demo: