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.
Issue 461: 7th April 2024
Highlights this week include: LangChain integration with Azure Database for PostgreSQL Part 1 and cost-effective RAG at scale with Azure AI Search
Three great posts from the community: Configure Azure Functions to use Identity Based Connections, and Azure Cosmos DB: container items and generics, and Syncing a git branch between Windows and WSL filesystems.
And finally, a mixed bag of interesting posts: Managing Failed Pipeline Runs in Azure Data Factory, and Query and Send Results To a New Table in Log Analytics, and Choosing the right Azure API Management tier for your networking scenarios, and Managed SD-WAN in vWAN: throughput considerations and underlay options, and Azure Event Grid Namespace: An Introductory Guide.
Issue 460: 31st March 2024
Following the trend from last week, there are a number of new retirement notices again. In AI there were a number of interesting posts focusing on "Responsible AI": Detect and Mitigate Ungrounded Model Outputs, and March Responsibly: Creating effective security guardrails with metaprompt/system message engineering. There's an interesting post about what powers all these AI services in: Annual Roundup of AI Infrastructure Breakthroughs for 2023, and a fascinating post about Leveraging Knowledge Graphs with Azure OpenAI.
It was the first Fabric Conference in Las Vegas this week, the pace of innovation in Microsoft Fabric is quite staggering, which you can see in the Microsoft Fabric March 2024 Update release notes. There's also an useful post detailing how to Grow your FinOps practice with the Microsoft community.
Two really very useful new features in Azure Container Apps were announced this week: Generally Available: Free managed certificates on Azure Container Apps and Public preview: Support for Key Vault Certificates in Azure Container Apps. There's also a useful guide to Azure Network Subnetting made easy.
A busy week at endjin; first up Ian Griffiths appeared on the Real-world Serverless podcast to give a Azure Functions Deep Dive, Barry Smart published his yearly summary of SQLbits 2024 - The Best Bits. Matthew Adams reflects on SQLBits in Data and AI Engineering Maturity - Fix our problems before we hit the buffers, and I unveiled a tool I've been working on for a few years: adr - A .NET Tool for Creating & Managing Architecture Decision Records.
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