The company calls its Corona component for Hadoop "the next version of Map-Reduce" and says it improves scaling, latency and cluster utilisation. Corona is tailored for Facebook's very large infrastructure.

The mDNS standard, used by Apple as Bonjour and used by all their products, works well on small networks but is a headache for enterprises. A newly proposed IETF working group is setting out to remedy those issues.

Is Microsoft still a safe bet for the IT pro? In a word: No.

The new version of the Amazon PHP SDK for Amazon Web Services is a complete reworking of the previous SDK, written from scratch in modern PHP and designed to be faster, more robust and much easier to work with.