Azure Weekly

Your weekly Azure news fix

Azure Weekly is a summary of the week's top news to help you build on the Microsoft Azure Platform.

From AI to Availability Zones, it aims to keep you on top of the latest Azure developments.

Issue 464: 28th April 2024

In AI we have a good mix of high-level and deep-dive technical articles. Next-Gen Customer Service: Azure's AI-Powered Speech, Translation and Summarization, and Using Kernel Memory to Chunk Documents into Azure AI Search. I find Agentic AI an absolutely fascinating area, so always happy to see new content:GoEX: a safer way to build autonomous Agentic AI applications and a really interesting articles on Reducing the Environmental Impact of Generative AI: a Guide for Practitioners.

In Hybrid, Getting started with Azure Arc-enabled servers, and Azure Arc: Validate ESU enrollment, and in identity: How to Safely Disable Security Defaults in Microsoft Entra ID: A Step-by-Step Guide.

Finally, there are three interesting posts: Protecting your IP in the Azure Marketplace, a long awaited new feature: Trusted Signing is in Public Preview, and a nice post we tired out this week: Azure DevOps + Mural Awesome Visualizations.

Issue 463: 21st April 2024

Kicking off with AI: Build Intelligent RAG For Multimodality and Complex Document Structure and Load balancing OpenAI API calls with LiteLLM, and two posts which feature Azure API Management: Intelligent Load Balancing with APIM for OpenAI: Weight-Based Routing and the exciting Azure API Management v2 Explained.

Two posts of note about Hybrid and IoT: Onboard to Azure Arc with Security in Mind, and secondly Connect ESP32 to EventGrid over MQTT with Nanoframework.

In data: Testing of the new ESG data estate capability for sustainability reporting in Microsoft Fabric, and a detailed guide to The Ins and Outs of Data Transfer: On-Premises SQL Server to Azure, and a post highlighting Microsoft Purview new data governance features.

And finally, Barry Smart has written a detailed post about the less often talked about aspects of creating a high performance data team as part of a data modernisation strategy in Data is a socio-technical endeavour. Well worth a read.

Issue 462: 14th April 2024

Starting off with AI: Optimize Azure OpenAI Applications with Semantic Caching and Build a serverless ChatGPT with RAG using LangChain.js. Two good tutorials: How to build a Copilot for Security API Plugin – Part 1 and Implementing a Blazor-based BFF in Azure Container Apps.

In Cloud Native App Dev: Deploy Kaito on AKS using Terraform, and Unified Kubernetes Management Across Clouds with Azure Arc, and Update Microsoft Sentinel Analytics Rules at Scale.

In Data and Analytics: Building a Real-Time medallion architecture using Eventhouse in Microsoft Fabric, two interesting posts about Cosmos DB: Initial testing of Mirroring Azure Cosmos DB Databases in Microsoft Fabric, and A new way to change a Partition Key in CosmosDB, and a look at Exploring Azure Storage Actions for Blob Storage.

Finally, I've written a blog post. We've been modernising a number of our internal line of business applications. Some we've migrated to Microsoft Fabric, some we've turned into Streamlit applications. But we have a number of complex web applications. We settled on a modern stack of ASP.NET Core + Razor + HTMX hosted in Azure Container Apps and it's vastly simplified the codebase and improved performance. One challenge was integrating HTMX's elegant Hypermedia approach with more traditional HTTP JSON API requirements for data visualisation like Chart.js. I created a POC last year to demonstrate how we could leverage HTMX's extensibility mechanisms to combine the two worlds. The result has worked well for us. I've written a deep dive blog post, called ASP.NET Core + Razor + HTMX + Chart.js and provided a GitHub repo with the POC.

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