Issue 382: 14th August 2022
James Dawson continues his exploration of Dapr; taking the Dapr Traffic Control sample from the Dapr for .NET Developers book and replacing containerised components with Azure PaaS services. In Episode 3, he replaces MQTT-based Mosquitto with Azure Storage Queues.
Microsoft recently rebranded its IDAM offerings under the new Entra brand, and the first new service, Microsoft Entra Verified ID , focused on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) is now generally available. This is a new approach, based on new standards utilising distributed ledger technologies, and is worth spending some time learning about.
Finally, a few other noteworthy updates: the General Availability of WordPress on Azure App Service, an exciting new release of SynapseML, and Cloud pubsub services compared: Azure Web PubSub vs Ably
Issue 381: 7th August 2022
Three very interesting updates this week; firstly Azure Neural TTS previews a new contextual voice model for long-form paragraph reading. I've been playing with this service for the last couple of years to see if we could use it to turn some of our thought leadership blog posts into podcasts, but I've never been happy with the results to the point where I'd publish them. I've re-run my experiments and the results have significantly improved. I was particularly impressed by the "Tony (Neural) Preview" voice, which you can test on the product landing page. It's not just the quality of the voice synthesis that's improving, but also the number of supported languages: Microsoft expands global language support for Speech-to-Text & Text-to-Speech. And an article that brings to life an idea that was deemed "impossible" 15 years ago when I worked in ecommerce: When AI meets fashion: Azure Video Indexers new model for detecting Featured Clothing in videos.
There's a lot of hype about no-code/low-code, but if you're creating processes that an organisation will depend upon for its BAU activities, you can't disregard standard engineering practices (testing / versioning / DevOps). There's an interesting post that highlights a recent feature: Testing Azure Logic Apps with Mock Data.
Issue 380: 31st July 2022
Crossplane is a CNCF control plane framework. In First steps with Crossplane Geert Baeke combines it with GitOps (via Flux) to deploy Azure Resources. Vincent Nwonah describes How to deploy a Local Docker Container to Azure Container Apps.
Other highlights include: Public Preview: Enhanced My Apps experience, Discover your applications breakpoint using Azure Load Testing, and finally Building Industrial IoT applications with the Microsoft Cloud.
Issue 379: 24th July 2022
To kick off, two articles about Azure Synapse: What is the Shared Metadata Model in Azure Synapse Analytics, and why should I use it and Synapse Link for SQL Deep Dive.
With a new release of .NET expected towards the end of this year. .NET 7 support for Azure Functions in an isolated process in public preview. Charbel Nemnom has a great post about Data Storage in Azure – The Ultimate Know it All Guide.
There have been a couple of big releases around Confidential Computing and Blockchain: Latest innovations in Azure confidential computing and Azure confidential ledger is now Generally Available. In Networking, Gateway Load Balancer now generally available in all regions.
And finally an interesting read about Project AirSim, an end-to-end platform to accelerate autonomous flight from Microsoft.
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