Issue 398: 4th December 2022
There's a bit of a melting pot of news and articles this week. Items of note around identity: there's a new Admin Center Unifies Azure AD with Other Identity and Access Products, and an interesting post introducing Machine Learning based recommendations in Azure AD Access reviews, and a worthwhile read about sharing Microsoft Graph permissions and solution Azure App Registrations.
There's a great primer about Confidential Compute on Azure with Kubernetes, a useful new feature in Public Preview: Inbound IP restrictions support in Azure Container Apps and new language support: Public preview: Go language support on Azure App Service.
Finally, in the analytics space: Start your metadata driven adventure in Azure Data Factory Data Exposed: MVP Edition, a useful guide for Configuring your Windows development machine for data science, and from endjin, two talks about accessible data storytelling: Data Storytelling with Power BI: The World Bank World Health and Wealth Report, and Accessible Data Storytelling with Power BI: Design Concepts and Accessible Colours.
Issue 397: 27th November 2022
A relatively quiet week, which is no surprise given that it's holiday season in the US., but there are still a number of great articles this week. Firstly there's a very useful new set of features in Public Preview: Cross Subscription Restore for Azure Virtual Machines. There are three interesting articles about improving your PaaS security posture, and identity improvements: Securing PaaS services with virtual networks and restricting public access, and AKS Workload Identity Revisited, and Introducing a better way to integrate Azure AD with API Management.
On the developer tools front, there's a great post talking about the new Dev Tunnels feature (if you've ever had to use ngrok): Use dev tunnels in Visual Studio to debug your web APIs, a nice guide to publishing docker images to GitHub Container Registry ghcr, and a treatise from Ian Griffith: In Defence of Squash Commits.
Finally, we've published Accessible Data Storytelling: World Bank Heath and Wealth Report to the Power BI Data Storytelling Gallery, which has been an internal project to highlight how to create compelling data stories with an accessible colour palette to assist users Colour Vision Deficiency. If you're creating a Power BI report that has an audience larger than 12 people, statistically you need to take into account Colour Vision Deficiency. We've also produced two videos which provide A walkthrough of the World Health and Wealth Data Story and Custom Report Design: An Array of Design Concepts and Accessible Colours for Power BI.
Issue 396: 20th November 2022
Apologies for the late delivery this week; birthday festivities, and a larger than usual edition meant I didn't quite have the bandwidth to get everything done in time... SQL Server 2022 GA'd this week, and there are a number of SQL related announcements too: SQL Server 2022 is now Generally Available, Generally available: Azure Synapse Link for SQL, Public preview: Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions
There's an interesting blog post about using Use GitHub Codespaces for Azure PowerShell Function apps and an announcement Introducing more ways to deploy Azure Container Apps, and the Public preview of dev tunnels in Visual Studio for ASP.NET Core projects, and a nice guide to Getting started with Open Telemetry and Azure Data Explorer.
There are two good posts around identities: Utilizing Zero Trust architecture principles for External Identities, and Azure AD Claims with Static Web Apps and Azure Functions. Finally, the following article gave me a TIL. I didn't realise that Azure Communication Services had grown to encompass email sending functionality: Build your own Azure retirements email alerts service using Java, Azure Functions and Communication Services.
Issue 395: 13th November 2022
This week saw the release of .NET 7.0 and day zero support across Azure PaaS services, including App Service, Azure Functions, Static Web Apps and Azure Container Apps. .NET 7.0 is a Standard Term Support (STS) release that will be supported for 18 months. If you want to catch up on more information about the .NET 7 release, you can watch the dotnetconf 2022 session on demand.
There are two posts about password / key rotations this week: Automated Key Rotation Generally Available on Azure Key Vault Managed HSM and Automatically rotate the password of a service principal.
There's a significant performance upgrade: Generally available: Increasing Azure Synapse Analytics Spark performance up to 77% and an interesting article about Synapse Spark Delta Time Travel.
In the DevOps space, two blogs about Azure Monitor Workspace, Managed Prometheus and Prometheus via Bicep and Find an item in an array of objects in Azure bicep.
From endjin folks there is Adventures in Dapr: Episode 4 - Containerising with Visual Studio - this has got a lot of useful information about containerisation, and in part 5 of Bye bye Azure Functions, Hello Azure Container Apps: Migration of the existing test environment there's a really great demonstrating of using Polyglot Notebooks as a runbook for managing the migrations; we're using this approach more and more for initial deployments and migrations. And finally, Ian Griffiths and Ed Freeman at are VS Live! in Orlando this week, giving a talk about Cosmos DB: Performance and Consistency at Global Scale and a workshop on Modern Data DevOps in the Azure Cloud.
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