Azure Weekly

Issue 297: 25th October 2020

This week, Jen Looper discusses how Azure Maps is providing an alternative form of Halloween celebrations, as an alternative to the normal trick-or-treating.

And, particularly exciting for us at endjin, there is a new Microsoft Stories podcast, this week focusing on OceanMind! We feel very priveliged to have been a part of OceanMind's cloud migration journey, and the podcast is definitely worth a listen.

Continuing the exciting blob storage updates, the updates team have announced that Azure Blob storage lifecycle management now supports blob versions management, and in security, Azure role-based access control RBAC for Azure Key Vault data plane authorization is now in preview.

And, on the endjin blog, Ed Freeman has run through how to fix the "You need permission to access workspace..". error in Azure Synapse Analytics, and on our YouTube channel, Ian Griffiths discusses Data Exploration & Experimentation with Notebooks in Azure.

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This week the Azure Updates Team have announced that Azure Cognitive Services has achieved human parity in image captioning, which is a huge breakthrough in Microsoft's push towards full accessibility. And, elsewhere, they have announced that Azure Blob storage point-in-time restore now generally available.

Also around Machine Learning, Sander van de Velde has provided a great example of running ML.Net models inside an Azure IoT Edge module.

On the Azure DevOps podcast, Stefan Schackow runs through what's New in Azure App Service. On Azure Tips and Tricks, Michael Crump walks through 5 Tips to save money with Virtual Machines.

On the endjin blog, Ed Freeman has written a post detailing how to use the Azure CLI to manage access to Synapse Studio, and James Dawson says GitOps - it's not just for Kubernetes!

Finally there's a very interesting article about using the Azure CLI to query for consumption cost data (az consumption usage list). This could prove very useful when benchmarking workloads.

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This week, Anthony van der Hoorn has appeared on DotNetRocks to discuss GitHub Codespaces.

On the endjin blog, James Broome asks: "Does Azure Synapse Link redefine the meaning of full stack serverless?", and Carmel Eve walks through how to update your Microsoft Authenticator App for a work/school account. And on our YouTube channel, James talks through detecting Anomalies in IoT Telemetry with Azure Synapse.

And the Azure Updates Team has announced that Azure Data Lake Storage immutable storage, and Azure Data Lake Storage static website features are now in preview.

The latest episode of the Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast takes a first look at Azure Communication Services, to see what you can do with it. Did you know you can manage pre-releases Azure Services using Azure Preview Features? That was news to me too! Another interesting read is Microsoft's Best practices for defending Azure Virtual Machines. Finally, in case you missed it, on the Azure Podcast Jeffery Palermo runs through the book of news from Microsoft Ignite 2020.

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There have been some great summaries of Microsoft Ignite last week - James Serra runs through the Microsoft Ignite Announcements, Sam Cogan discusses some Microsoft Ignite 2020 Azure Announcement Highlights, and Shayne Boyer rounds up a Blazing Week at Microsoft Ignite!

This week was also Create:Serverless - a one of a kind live event about all things serverless, and you can watch the whole event here. Another interesting post in this area is CLAD (Code, Libraries, Access, Data) Model for Serverless Security. Azure Friday focuses on a slightly lesser known serverless Azure Container Instances ACI under the hood.

And, on the Azure blog, Chaitanya Bangur discusses Accelerating genomics workflows and data analysis on Azure and the updates team provides courses on how to manage and optimize your Azure costs.

We've had an exciting week here at endjin, with some of our endjineers presenting at SQLBits, keep an eye out for the recordings of their talks, as we're planning to publish them over the next few weeks. It's also quite unusual for me to have time to write a blog post, but this week I managed to write about something that's been on my mind for a while: How to use SQL Notebooks to access Azure Synapse SQL Pools & SQL on demand. I'm a huge fan of interactive notebooks, and use them as my goto tool for doing data exploration, or performance benchmarking.

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