Issue 470: 9th June 2024
Another AI heavy edition, but exploring some interesting topic areas. Introducing Our New Whitepaper: GDPR & Generative AI – A Guide for Customers, and AI-as-a-Service: Architecting GenAI Application Governance with Azure API Management and Fabric, and DevOps in the era of Generative AI: Foundations of LLMOps, and AI+API better together: Benefits & Best Practices using APIs for AI workloads, and Doing RAG? Vector search is not enough.
In Analytics: Eventhouse OneLake Availability is Generally Available, and Validate CSV files before ingestion in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory Pipelines.
Finally in Cloud Native, this week marks 10 Years of Kubernetes and there's an interesting article about Advanced Network Observability – Supercharging Container Network Observability in Azure Kubernetes Service AKS.
Issue 469: 2nd June 2024
A slight post-BUILD lull this week, but there's still plenty of interesting posts. First up, in AI: Business-in-a-box: Applying AutoGen and multi-agent systems to an enterprise context and Small Language Models with Phi-3 Cookbook: A Guide and Best Practice Guidance for Provisioned Throughput Units for Azure OpenAI, and Load Testing RAG based Generative AI Applications.
In Analytics: What is Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric?, Create an assessment in Purview to view ESG data estate data in Fabric, and Optimizing ETL Workflows: A Guide to Azure Integration and Authentication with Batch and Storage, and Working with Data in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL using Open PSQL Shell.
In Cloud Native: Understanding the New AKS Deployment Safeguards, and Running CBL-Mariner 2.0 Azure Linux on Hyper-V for Docker Container Host and Azure CLI. Finally, a post from me highlighting a scenario we in the free Introduction to Rx.NET book showing how to Observe File System Changes with Reactive Extensions for .NET.
Issue 468: 26th May 2024
Brace for impact - it's a Microsoft BUILD Conference special. There's so much content, I've decided to highlight the posts I found interesting.
In AI: Copilot in Azure Technical Deep Dive, and Mitigating Prompt Injections with Azure AI Prompt Shields and Terraform Deployment, and Microsoft and Hugging Face deepen generative AI partnership, and Introducing Model Customization for Azure AI, and the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.
In Data & Analytics: Microsoft Fabric May 2024 Update, and Profiling Microsoft Fabric Spark Notebooks with Sparklens, and Empowering Lakehouse Users – Data Engineering with Fabric.
In Cloud Native: What's new in Azure Container Apps at Build 24, and Project Legion - the platform that powers a number of the compute services, Public Preview of Azure Functions Flex Consumption, and AKS at Build: Enhancing security, reliability, and ease of use for developers and platform teams, and the Public Preview of Azure Compute Fleet
And finally, Introducing Local Emulator for Azure Event Hubs, and App Spaces: Building a full-stack app with Google Authentication and ARM Deployment Stacks now GA.
Issue 467: 19th May 2024
Microsoft have been quick off the mark with the latest OpenAI model; Introducing GPT-4o: OpenAIs new flagship multimodal model now in preview on Azure. Three other interesting AI articles: Large Language Models with Azure AI Search and Python for OpenAI RAG, this is particularly fascinating if you've ever wondered "why is this taken so long?" The LLM Latency Guidebook: Optimizing Response Times for GenAI Applications. I've spent quite a bit of time this week learning how to fine tune Phi3 locally on my Surface Studio Laptop 2, and have plenty of thoughts about how immature this space is right now, but I found this blog post an interesting read: Evaluate Small Language Models for RAG using Azure Prompt Flow LLama3 vs Phi3.
I'm very pleased that the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference Europe has been announced. We wanted to attend the recent event in Las Vegas, but we decided it would generate too big a carbon footprint from the UK... and any excuse to visit Stockholm. In other Fabric news: Microsoft Fabric Monitoring with Metrics App and Data Activator, and the public preview of task flows in Microsoft Fabric - including a quote from endjin's own Ed Freeman!
Finally some other impactful announcements: Microsoft will require MFA for all Azure users, and guide demonstrating how to Secure your Container Apps with Key Vault Certificates and possibly one of the most important new service announcments I've seen in the last few years. This looks like a game changer for secure, multi-tenant or untrusted workloads. I'm very much looking forward to creating some proof of concepts using this: New: Secure Sandboxes at Scale with Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions.
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