Technology

Apple last week released an update for macOS High Sierra, boosting the numeric label to 10.13.5 and simultaneously starting the clock on ending support for 2015's El Capitan.

Approximately one in eight Mac owners currently runs OS X 10.11, otherwise known by the Yosemite landmark of "El Capitan," according to analytics vendor Net Applications. Data published June 1 by the metrics firm said that during May El Capitan powered 12.9% of all Macs.

Apple's update for 2017's High Sierra - the already-mentioned 10.13.5 - patched 32 security vulnerabilities, including critical bugs in the operating system's kernel that were reported by researchers working for Google. The High Sierra update also added support for storing Messages' texts and attachments, such as photographs and videos, in iCloud, freeing up storage space on the Mac's own drive.

Back in 2013, Yelp was a 9-year old company built on a set of internal systems. It was coming to the realization that running its own data centers might not be the most efficient way to run a business that was continuing to scale rapidly. At the same time, the company understood that the tech world had changed dramatically from 2004 when it launched and it needed to transform the underlying technology to a more modern approach.

Thata lot to take on in one bite, but it wasn&t something that happened willy-nilly or overnight says Jason Yellen, SVP of engineering at Yelp . The vast majority of the companydata was being processed in a massive Python repository that was getting bigger all the time. The conversation about shifting to a microservices architecture began in 2012.

The company was also running the massive Yelp application inside its own datacenters, and as it grew it was increasingly becoming limited by long lead times required to procure and get new hardware online. It saw this was an unsustainable situation over the long-term and began a process of transforming from running a huge monolithic application on-premises to one built on microservices running in the cloud. It was a quite a journey.

The data center conundrum

Yellen described the classic scenario of a company that could benefit from a shift to the cloud. Yelp had a small operations team dedicated to setting up new machines. When engineering anticipated a new resource requirement, they had to give the operations team sufficient lead time to order new servers and get them up and running, certainly not the most efficient way to deal with a resource problem, and one that would have been easily solved by the cloud.

&We kept running into a bottleneck, I was running a chunk of the search team [at the time] and I had to project capacity out to 6-9 months. Then it would take a few months to order machines and another few months to set them up,& Yellen explained. He emphasized that the team charged with getting these machines going was working hard, but there were too few people and too many demands and something had to give.

&We were on this cusp. We could have scaled up that team dramatically and gotten [better] at building data centers and buying servers and doing that really fast, but we were hearing a lot of AWS and the advantages there,& Yellen explained.

To the cloud!

They looked at the cloud market landscape in 2013 and AWS was the clear leader technologically. That meant moving some part of their operations to EC2. Unfortunately, that exposed a new problem: how to manage this new infrastructure in the cloud. This was before the notion of cloud-native computing even existed. There was no Kubernetes. Sure, Google was operating in a cloud-native fashion in-house, but it was not really an option for most companies without a huge team of engineers.

Yelp needed to explore new ways of managing operations in a hybrid cloud environment where some of the applications and data lived in the cloud and some lived in their data center. It was not an easy problem to solve in 2013 and Yelp had to be creative to make it work.

That meant remaining with one foot in the public cloud and the other in a private data center. One tool that helped ease the transition was AWS Direct Connect, which was released the prior year and enabled Yelp to directly connect from their data center to the cloud.

Laying the groundwork

About this time, as they were figuring out how AWS works, another revolutionary technological change was occurring when Docker emerged and began mainstreaming the notion of containerization. &Thatanother thing thatbeen revolutionary. We could suddenly decouple the context of the running program from the machine itrunning on. Docker gives you this container, and is much lighter weight than virtualization and running full operating systems on a machine,& Yellen explained.

Another thing that was happening was the emergence of the open source data center operating system called Mesos, which offered a way to treat the data center as a single pool of resources. They could apply this notion to wherever the data and applications lived. Mesos also offered a container orchestration tool called Marathon in the days before Kubernetes emerged as a popular way of dealing with this same issue.

&We liked Mesos as a resource allocation framework. It abstracted away the fleet of machines. Mesos abstracts many machines and controls programs across them. Marathon holds guarantees about what containers are running where. We could stitch it all together into this clear opinionated interface,& he said.

Pulling it all together

While all this was happening, Yelp began exploring how to move to the cloud and use a Platform as a Service approach to the software layer. The problem was at the time they started, there wasn&t really any viable way to do this. In the buy versus build decision making that goes on in large transformations like this one, they felt they had little choice but to build that platform layer themselves.

In late 2013 they began to pull together the idea of building this platform on top of Mesos and Docker, giving it the name PaaSTA, an internal joke that stood for Platform as a Service, Totally Awesome. It became simply known as Pasta.

Photo: David Silverman/Getty Images

The project had the ambitious goal of making their infrastructure work as a single fabric, in a cloud-native fashion before most anyone outside of Google was using that term. Pasta developed slowly with the first developer piece coming online in August 2014 and the first production service later that year in December. The company actually open sourced the technology the following year.

&Pasta gave us the interface between the applications and development teams. Operations had to make sure Pasta is up and running, while Development was responsible for implementing containers that implemented the interface,& Yellen said.

Moving to deeper into the public cloud

While Yelp was busy building these internal systems, AWS wasn&t sitting still. It was also improving its offerings with new instance types, new functionality and better APIs and tooling. Yellen reports this helped immensely as Yelp began a more complete move to the cloud.

He says there were a couple of tipping points as they moved more and more of the application to AWS — including eventually, the master database. This all happened in more recent years as they understood better how to use Pasta to control the processes wherever they lived. Whatmore, he said that adoption of other AWS services was now possible due to tighter integration between the in-house data centers and AWS.

Photo:erhui1979/Getty Images

The first tipping point came around 2016 as all new services were configured for the cloud. He said they began to get much better at managing applications and infrastructure in AWS and their thinking shifted from how to migrate to AWS to how to operate and manage it.

Perhaps the biggest step in this years-long transformation came last summer when Yelp moved its master database from its owndata center to AWS. &This was the last thing we needed to move over. Otherwise itclean up. As of 2018, we are serving zero production traffic through physical data centers,& he said. While they still have two data centers, they are getting to the point, they have the minimum hardware required to run the network backbone.

Yellen said they went from two weeks to a month to get a service up and running before this was all in place to just a couple of minutes. He says any loss of control by moving to the cloud has been easily offset by the convenience of using cloud infrastructure. &We get to focus on the things where we add value,& he said — and thatthe goal of every company.

When people think of music startups in the tech world, the focus is often on streaming, or figuring out how to better track and monetise those streams, or perhaps hardware to make those streams sound better. But today comes news of funding for a startup that is tackling a different kind of challenge: tapping innovations from the tech world to develop new instruments and ways of creating music.

Roli, a London-based startup that develops new styles of keyboards to compose and play music that subsequently can be consumed and engaged with using smartphones and other devices, has announced new strategic investment from the Sony Innovation Fund, the VC arm of the Japanese consumer electronics and entertainment giant. The plan is to use the funds to expand its range of connected instruments — or, as the tech world might call it, hardware — as well as to develop the software that runs on them.

&We&re developing new music-making tools across hardware and software,& founder and CEO Roland Lamb said. &Itpart of our long-term plan to create the first totally integrated hardware-software platform for music creation. The funding from SIF accelerates this,and positions us to continue focusing on innovative research and development as we scale.&

This is a strategic investment for Sony across a number of areas. Among two of the biggest: Sony has a sizeable business in audio hardware; and, by way of Sony Music, one of the worldbiggest recording label conglomerates. (Italso the owner of a vast gaming empire and film and television studios, giving it a number of entry points to working with Roli .)

Neither Roli nor Sony are disclosing the amount of funding, but for some context, PitchBook notes that Roli had previously raised around $46 million, and today the company said that the total raised is &over $50 million.& Sony is not the first strategic investor in the company: others from the music world include Universal Music; Pharrell Williams, who is also Rolichief creative officer; and Onkyo, the Japanese audio company that also controls the Pioneer brand of home entertainment devices — which had invested previously but is only getting disclosed today.

Technology backers, meanwhile, include a strong list of VCs such as Index Ventures, Foundry Group, Balderton, Horizons Ventures, Founders Fund, Kreos, BGF and Local Globe, Saul Kleinnew fund.

The fact that there are so many tech investors in the company is notable. It underscores how Roli is aiming to build not just a music company, but one that is rooted in tech and views a large part of the effort here as one of hardware and building software that is able to recreate on digital platforms something that has in its traditional way remained an analogue undertaking. It also speaks to how investors are looking for what new frontiers tech might be tackling, beyond those where it is already alive and well.

Roli is not disclosing its valuation with this investment, but from what we understand, Sonyfunding will have a &neutral& impact. PitchBookrecords note that the most recent round before this (in January 2017) put the companyvaluation at around $82 million.

To date, Roli has released two primary devices: the Seaboard, which resembles a traditional keyboard; and the modular ROLI BLOCKS, square-shaped pads that use light to indicate sounds, pitches and volumes. Both are characterised by their touch-sensitive squidgy material covering, which isn&t hit (as you would a normal piano or keyboard) as much as it is pressed, smudged and tapped in order to create and bend different sounds.

These work in conjunction with each other, as well as an array of other accessories and variations, with prices for the main building blocks starting at $200 and reaching up to the $3,000 range depending on what combination of devices and accessories you get.

The idea is that by changing the interface a musician or composer has with the device that producer uses to create the sounds, you are opening up a new world of music that couldn&t have been made before, or could have been made but with more work and expense involved.

One big question for me with Roli has always been the mainstream potential of its products. There has long been a gulf between creating music yourself and consuming it, with the latter being much easier to do than the former. But now that we have lightweight devices that link up with your smartphone, and make music-making something that is not the exclusive terrain of those who have put in many hours of practice time, or those who have the space to accommodate instruments, will this actually lead to more people wanting and using those devices

The company has never released any numbers that indicate how well they sell, but they are sold in 30 markets and the plan will now be to expand that number. Of note, Roli has a deal with Apple to sell its devices in Appleretail stores, which speaks to how the company pitches its products and, presumably, some of the success it has had with sales.

The Sony investment being announced today is another indicator of Rolitraction. Sony has a long legacy in audio equipment and audio technology, and one result of this partnership could be closer integration between Roli devices and, for example, Sonyline of speakers and audio services to help the latter with its sales, in particular to a new wave of consumers who might not be as swayed by Sonystoried history and brand as older users might be.

&A Sony Walkman was one of the first music products I ever owned,& Lamb said. &I took it on my first trip to Japan as a teenager. It was a magical way to bring my musical world with me everywhere that I went.&

Lamb himself is not a technologist by training but an avid amateur musician who studied philosophy and product design, and believes that there is a parallel between the innovations Sony helped usher in and what Roli is trying to do. &WhatROLIis doing with BLOCKS is very similar to what Sony did with the Walkman, but in our case we&ve made a music creation device that you can take with you anywhere. Itpioneering a new, liberating way of making music, just like Sony pioneered the modern revolution of music listening which hundreds of millions of people benefit from today.&