Azure Weekly

Issue 312: 21st February 2021

This week, the updates team announces that Application Insights work item integration for Azure DevOps & GitHub is in public preview. That Azure role-based access control RBAC for Azure Key Vault data plane authorization is now GA, and that API Management Diagnostics is now available in public preview.

Anuj Chaudhary provides a PowerShell sample for Privileged Identity Management (PIM). Leo Li runs through how to analyze root cause and impact using ADF ETL lineage in Azure Purview. Zeinab Mokhtarian Koorabbasloo describes how to apply M365 Sensitivity Labels across your data assets in Azure Purview.

After two years of open source development Dapr has reached v1.0 - congratulations to the team & contributors 👏👏👏

Finally, we end with an interesting open source project called Bellhop, to easily "turn down" Managed services in Dev/Test environments, particularly when referring to scaling between the available service tiers. It's serverless and built using Azure Functions.

Issue 311: 14th February 2021

Let's start the week with a really interesting case study of how to use various Azure Services (Storage, Functions, APIM, Cosmos DB) to Build Low-latency Microsoft Sport experiences. A great read. Barry Smart writes a very interesting piece about how AI, ML & Automation could impact farming, after a session working on the family farm scanning pregnant sheep. I also enjoyed Adam Marczak's The core tenets of Security, Privacy, and Compliance video.

This week, on the Microsoft Developer blog, Damian Brady highlights the Azure DevOps demo generator, elsewhere, Buck Woody continues a great series on DevOps for data science, this week covering infrastructure as code. Drew Wilkinson provides a review of the Microsoft 2020 Environmental Sustainability Report. And Valon Kolica highlights a series of Security Community Webinars, which will be running over the next few months.

Finally, Jen Looper highlights the next Azure Coding Challenge: The Azure Space Mystery!

Issue 310: 7th February 2021

Welcome to issue 310 of Azure Weekly. You may have noticed we've had a bit of a long overdue makeover. If you experience any problems with the new design in your email client, please let us know!

To start off with there are two great articles from us this week; first Jonathan George kicks off his series about Configuration in Azure Functions - What's in the box? and Ed Freeman (curator of Power BI Weekly) shares a recent discovery in How to safely reference a nullable activity output in Azure Synapse Pipelines and Azure Data Factory.

A number of interesting articles in the AI / ML arena; first Build a natural custom voice for your brand using the Custom Neural Voice Text-to-Speech (TTS) feature of Speech in Azure Cognitive Services, Responsible ML updates in Azure Machine Learning is in public preview, and if you are interested in Knowledge Mining, creating QnA functionality with Azure Cognitive Search is very neat.

Finally, a service I've been following closely as a successor to Service Fabric is Dapr, and Mark Fussell provides a great intro to dapr. Check out the GitHub Org, there's a huge amount of community activity.

Issue 309: 31st January 2021

This week there have been a few exciting announcements!

Firstly, ARM Template Specs is now Public Preview, which provides a way to centrally manage and test your ARM deployments. We'll definitely be putting this to use here at endjin!

The updates team has also announced that Azure Machine Learning Output Datasets are generally available. This provides a way to read cloud data securely, and with full versioning and audit management in your machine learning scenarios.

On the Azure blog, Michael Flanakin runs through the Azure Cost Management and Billing updates for January 2021.

And on the Microsoft Security blog, Joy Chik highlights some of the Azure AD app gallery apps that made the most impact in 2020. With 2020 being the year of all-things-remote, the ability to for users to securely connect has been vital - and these apps have helped that happen!

On Channel 9, Olivier Bloch and Mike Hall discuss ML at the edge and in the Cloud with Azure Sphere.

And, looking forward, Jeffrey Palermo shares his top list of architectures for 2021 and Beyond!

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