Issue 308: 24th January 2021
There's a lot of great content to highlight, so I'll jump right in. In the analytics space, Jon George shows how to trigger an Azure Synapse pipeline run from C#. Next - how to perform Group By in Synapse Analytics Spark, and the LIKE keyword support now generally available in Azure Cosmos DB.
In the Engineering, DevOps & Tooling space: Design for transient faults in Azure, an In-Depth Guide to Building a PowerShell Pipeline in Azure DevOps, the Best Visual Studio Code extensions to work for Azure (Part 2 - All Around Azure), and AI powered Azure tools.
In containers, "AKS Zero To Hero – Series for everyone", in APIM Importing an OpenAPI API into Azure API Management Service, in storage Prevent Shared Key authorization on Azure Storage accounts is in public preview, and in DevSecOps Secure DevOps Kit for Azure (AzSK).
Finally, an interesting post about a customer of ours, which delves into how the Earth's atmosphere has been modelled in Microsoft Azure as part of a project to tackle climate change caused by aviation, and an interesting podcast about Project Natick.
Issue 307: 17th January 2021
To kick off this edition - there are a couple of good videos on Channel 9; first up Alex Frankel joins Abel Wang discuss Project Bicep – the next generation ARM Templates - we've been converting some of our more advanced ARM Templates to Bicep to put it through its paces; we're happy with the direction of travel - each new release improves the experience. Something to keep an eye on. Secondly, the Microsoft Graph should get more attention / love than it currently does; Cecil Phillip delves into Change Notifications with Microsoft Graph On .NET
Another post with some personal interest is Processing CloudEvents for Azure EventGrid via Azure Functions as we've adopted the CloudEvents standard for a serverless workflow engine we've been building over the last year. On the Azure blog, Alex Simon discusses how Azure Active Directory empowers frontline workers with simplified and secure access. Sarah Lean lists ten things you can implement to save costs in your Azure environment. Incredibly useful as we all ramp up our projects and resources for the new year!
Mark Serafine provides an introduction to Microsoft Azure Government Secret - which supports agencies working with highly classified data. And Kenneth Omorodion runs through how to create Azure DevOps Analytics Visuals with Power BI OData Queries.
Finally, this week our newest endjineer - Barry Smart - has written his first endjin blog, covering the Doing Data Together Conference and how we can take learnings from the Covid 19 pandemic and apply them to wider data and analytics scenarios.
Issue 306: 10th January 2021
It's quite a bumper edition as we're covering the content published over the festive break. So let's start off with learning goals. Over the last year Microsoft have put in huge amounts of effort to improve the Azure certifications process, revamping the learning pathways and content to better reflect the latest services in Azure. If my LinkedIn feed is anything to go by, many people focused on learning during the pandemic. Two interesting posts in this topic are: Microsoft Certification Changes 2021 and Beyond and to help with your learning - five more free services now available in the Azure free account.
In the data & analytics space there have been a few posts of note: 4 common analytics scenarios to build business agility, How to use Azure Cosmos Emulator as a local MongoDb database, Resources for the SQL Server and Azure Data community, and Bulk upload files to Azure Blob Storage with the Azure CLI
On the Serverless front Barbara Forbes talks about Azure Durable Functions for PowerShell and a really interesting post from Guillaume Docquier about detecting anomalies in Azure costs with TensorFlow and Azure Functions. I'll stop there and let your read the rest of the newsletter!
Issue 305: 20th December 2020
There are still a flood of posts following the Synapse GA and Purview public preview announcements at the start of December; first How Azure Synapse unifies your development experience, then Azure Synapse Analytics Data Integration and Orchestration and Enable unified data governance with Azure Purview.
If you spend a lot of your time writing Infrastructure as Code, What-If for ARM Template deployments is now Generally Available makes life considerably easier to see what your template changes will do without altering deployed resources. Earlier in the year we released the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library; this week Mike Larah published a post and template for installing Mattermost using the Azure CNAB Quickstart Library.
Finally, Azure Digital Twins is now generally available, Azure Cost Management and Billing have published a year in review, Philip Cumner writes about Streaming Pixel Server Data to Azure EventHubs via the Kafka Streaming Protocol. and Lior Kamrat shares that the Azure Arc Jumpstart site is live.
There have been 49 issues of Azure Weekly in 2020, our subscriber growth has increased by 20%, our @AzureWeekly twitter account is a hive of activity, and we get a constant stream of emails with people proudly sharing the content they have created. 2020 marked the 10th anniversary of starting endjin, and the 6th anniversary of Azure Weekly. Have a great festive break and we'll see you all again in January.
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