Azure Weekly

Your weekly Azure news fix

Azure Weekly is a summary of the week's top news to help you build on the Microsoft Azure Platform.

From AI to Availability Zones, it aims to keep you on top of the latest Azure developments.

Issue 438: 1st October 2023

An end of month issue, means there are quite a few product announcements. I'm quite excited by the announcement that Azure Functions extension for Dapr is in public preview. There's also an interesting post about Infrastructure as Code Testing with Azure Policy.

In Analytics: Sending data to Synapse Real-Time Analytics in Fabric from Apache Kafka Ecosystems using Java and Parameterize your Databricks notebooks with widgets, and Azure Databricks Tables - Delta Lake, Hive Metastore, TempViews, Managed, External.

In the AI space highlights include: Azure Open AI: generate article metadata with TypeScript (I did something similar with the endjin blogs last month!), Using Azure Database for PostgreSQL as a vector store, and finally a particularly interesting use case: Revolutionizing Requirement Gathering: Azure DevOps Meets Azure OpenAI using Semantic kernel.

Issue 435: 10th September 2023

To start off, two conference reminders; Microsoft Ignite is on from the 14th - 17th November in Seattle and Online, and Microsoft Data & AI Conference in Las Vegas 10-15th December. Sticking with Data & AI, if you keep hearing about embeddings and vectors but don't know what they are, Episode 472 of the Azure Podcast covers Azure Vector Search Unveiled, and there's also a Step-by-Step Guide for Bringing your own Data to Azure OpenAI.

Two AKS posts of interest: AKS: Login with Azure CLI and Workload Identity, and How to install an AKS cluster with Azure Managed Prometheus and Azure Managed Grafana via Bicep.

Three other articles of interest Intrusion Detection and Prevention System IDPS Based on Signatures, a very useful tool: AzSaveMoney - Clean-up unused resources and save money and energy in your Azure environment. and a dive into Upgrading to container app environment workload profiles - or not?

Finally, a few weeks ago I mentioned The Green Software Foundation and that code = energy (= carbon) = cost. The more efficient the code, the less energy it uses, the less carbon it emits, and the less it costs to run. Jon George has written a series of blog post looking at Optimising .NET code (using an Advent of Code challenge as an example): Introduction, Hunting for allocations, Let's blame LINQ, and Avoiding allocations using Span<T>.

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