Issue 283: 12th July 2020
This week, we continue our exploration of Azure Synapse; Jess Panni has recorded a video tutorial on Serverless Data Prep using SQL On Demand and Synapse Pipelines.
In exciting news the Azure Machine Learning Studio Web Experience is generally available, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now supports confidential workloads through DCSv2 SKUs, and .NET Core support for Azure Analysis Services client libraries is in preview, and some interesting Azure Digital Twins enhanced features are now in public preview.
Finally Michael Crump shares some tips and tricks about Azure Certifications for Developers, and Mike Larah shares some tips for debugging web apps in Visual Studio with custom browser configurations.
Issue 282: 5th July 2020
This week, Kaiser Larsen has listed five reasons that you should watch the Azure Synapse: How it Works event, and we agree! You can watch Jess' contributon on the event here. Ian Griffiths has also published the next video in his Azure Synapse "hands-on" series - this time covering running a Scala custom Spark job.
On the Azure blog, the updates team have announces that Durable Functions now supports Python, and highlighted the Azure Firewall July 2020 update.
Elsewhere, Ryan Kennedy has provided a great walkthrough of Getting Started with Azure Databricks, and David O'Brien has highlighted a new preview feature - you can now answer the question: What if I deployed this Azure ARM Template?
There are also some great posts around JulyOT - A month dedicated to learning and building IoT Projects, including some fun IoT projects to do at home.
And finally, the Azure updates team have made a few exciting announcements around Azure Data Lake Storage: Archive tier is now generally available, Immutable storage is now in preview, File snapshots are now in preview and, Static website now in preview!
Issue 281: 28th June 2020
Ian Griffiths has recorded a nice tutorial on creating Custom C# Spark Jobs in Azure Synapse. There are also a couple of interesting announcements this week; Apache Spark Connector for SQL Server and Azure SQL is now open source and the Azure SDKs June 2020 release is out.
Mark Russinovich has written an excellent post about simplifying declarative deployments in Azure. This covers the new "pre-deployment impact analysis", and how to manage groups/subscriptions at scale, along with some other useful tips! And, though this has been around for a little while now, James Serra has highlighted that you can now Upload files to ADLS Gen2 from the portal. As previously this had to be done via storage explorer, this is a great time saver!
Business Continuity has been a hot topic during the pandemic. Many organised only had Business Continuity plans drawn up to deal with a localised incident (a data centre outage, or a physical office being affected by a terrorism incident), but had no plans for having to allow all their employees to work from home during a pandemic. Endjin went remote in 2017 as part of our Business Continuity plans after one of the major train stations in London was closed for an entire month for engineering works meaning that most employees couldn't commute into the office. It worked so well, we never went back! Sarah Lean has created a short series of videos on the topic in Business Continuity With Azure. Well worth a watch.
Finally congratulations to Carmel Eve for passing her Azure AZ-204 exam this week! Gregor Suttie has some useful exam resources on his blog if getting certified is something you're interested in.
Issue 280: 21st June 2020
Welcome to the 280th edition of Azure Weekly! This week endjin had the privilege to be a part of the Azure Synapse Analytics "how it works" global virtual event! Over the past year we've been working with the Synapse Product Group, putting it through its paces, andwe are very impressed with the results! Here Jess Panni highlights his Talk about Azure Synapse on Microsoft Mechanics which formed part of the event. This is is real data, and a real world business problem and there are no edits or time jumps, all the queries are happening in real time. Well worth a watch!
There have also been a couple of announcements from the Azure team about reliability for Azure Storage: Azure geo-zone-redundant storage is now generally available, and Azure Storage account failover is now generally available
And in an interesting case study, Kirsten Walker explores how the Town of Cary innovates flood prediction with IoT.
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