Issue 292: 20th September 2020
Is everyone getting ready for Microsoft Ignite? Remember, this year it's totally free to attend, so no excuse not to sign-up and attend a session or two. See more details over here.
Some pre-Ignite announcements for you that have appeared in the last week. There's now NFS 4.1 support for Azure Files is now in preview for those that require a fully POSIX compliant NFS file system. Access time-tracking and access time-based lifecycle management For Azure Blob storage is now in preview, allowing you to get more clever about which blobs to transition between access tiers, and potentially which to delete because of inactivity. There's also now a new API to Get Retail Rates for all Azure Products/Services, which you can use to build robust cost models, for example, rather than manually retrieving pricing details.
A few blogs to highlight this week: Inderjit Rana has highlighted the Azure Data Factory Mapping Data Flows Performance Pitfall to avoid (pesky cluster start-up times!), James Serra has written about the various Query options in Azure Synapse Analytics, and Aaron Powell has wondered Can we make GraphQL type safe in code?
Elsewhere, Antti K. Koskela has shared a helpful blog describing How to remove your account as a guest in another Azure AD tenant, and Richard Fennell has answered the question How can I automatically create Azure DevOps Release Notes and how can I publish them?
Issue 291: 13th September 2020
This week some of the new blob features have gone into general availability: Change feed support is now generally available, and so is Azure Blob storage object replication. It has also been announced that Visual Studio Codespaces is consolidating into GitHub Codespaces, so in line with this the updates team have highlighted that you should begin migrating your codespaces to GitHub Codespaces.
Elsewhere, Sebastian Volg has written a great post on how to add Small Talk support to your Power Virtual Agents Chatbot. And Martin Brandl provides a walkthrough of working the CosmosClient in Azure Functions.
Issue 290: 6th September 2020
We've been busy this week here at endjin with many of our endjineers recording talks which they'll be presenting at SQLBits in a few weeks time! I definitely recommend registering if you haven't already - it's going to be a great event!
This week the updates team have announced that you can now manage your Azure & Amazon Web Services (AWS) spending in a single location with Azure Cost Management and Billing. Also, that Azure Blob versioning is now general available, which is huge news for recoverability and reliability in Blob Storage!
Elsewhere, on Azure Tips and Tricks, Michael Crump lists the top 10 Azure resources that you can use today. And, on the DEV site, Chloe Condon walks through building a Heart Rate Monitor with Azure IoT Hub, and Aaron Powell explores Serverless CosmosDB.
Finally, for any of you who are interested in learning about how to make the most of the Azure Marketplace, we'd like to highlight two new Webinars. Firstly, there is a session around the Commercial Marketplace, which will take place on the second Tuesday of every month and provide an overview of updates, the roadmap, and new resources. Secondly, there are also "office hours" aimed at Marketplace Developers, which will help you integrate with the marketplace as quickly and easily as possible!
Issue 289: 30th August 2020
Welcome to Issue 289 of Azure Weekly - Bumper Edition! Firstly, I know that many of you noticed the lack of newsletter last week - apologies! I was having some pretty major rennovations work done to my house (upgrading the power line) and just ran out of time. Sorry! To make up for it, this week we have a bumper edition containing the last two weeks of content, just in time for the UK bank holiday weekend!
The Serverless offer for Azure Cosmos DB now in preview, which provides a much lower, consumption based, entry price for consumers. This is very exciting for those of us operating with small-to-medium workloads! I'm currently working on an update to the tool I used to create this newsletter and this announcment couldn't have come at a better time.
Also, an update to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 access control list recursive update is in public preview. You can now recursively apply ACLs to child folders after creation, which will make permissions management in existing Data Lakes significantly easier.
The Log Analytics REST API is now general availability, and Immersive Reader is now generally available, Mark Russinovich has written an excellent post covering automation, communication, and transparency after an outage, and Anand Raman discusses Empowering remote learning with Azure Cognitive Services.
And, on the Microsoft blog, Shengyu Fu has written a really interesting article on the making of Visual Studio IntelliCode's first deep learning model. Elsewhere, on the Azure Academy YouTube channel, Phil Gibson has provided an Open Service Mesh (OSM) demo, along with a GitHub repo of the code.
Nadeem Ahamed has summarised the Azure Functions Live session from August 2020. Elle Crosby discusses some Azure cost best practices and the resources that can cause surprises in your Azure bill. Mauro Minella discusses Responsible AI in action, locally and on Azure Machine Learning, providing some excellent theory and examples.
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