Azure Weekly
Issue #1 - 8th November 2014
Having been long time subscribers to both DevOps Weekly and Hadoop Weekly, we at endjin, were surprised that a similar community newsletter didn't exist for the Azure ecosystem; so we decided to create one!
⚖️ Management and Governance
- At the heart of the new (v3) Azure Management Portal is the Azure Resource Manager; a management service that allows not only the creation of resources, but enables deeper configuration of those resources. It also enables scenarios such as deploying an application as a unit of difference resources via a template that can also be used to deploy Dev/Test/Prod environments. Developers can create their own deployment projects in Visual Studio 2013 by downloading the Azure Resource Manager Tools Preview. Or the API can be executed via PowerShell. Full documentation for the Azure Resource Manager Template Language was also released this week.
- Azure Automation has graduated to general availablity. This services enables users to create PowerShell based "runbooks" (or use pre-canned templates in the Runbook Gallery) to automate many of the Azure services.
- Jamie Thomson blogs about "Passing credentials between Azure Automation runbooks".
- In "Cloud Automation in a Windows World", Matt Wrock (creator of Boxstarter & contributor to Chocolatey) describes how you can use many of the popular automation tools (Vagrant, Chef, Puppet, PowerShell DSC, Boxstarter, Chocolatey) and containers like Docker & Spoon.net across a hybrid cloud environment.
- Scott Hanselman & Chris Sanders dig into Azure Automation on Channel 9
- Dushyant Gill presents "Role-Based Access Control for Microsoft Azure Resources"
- Beth Cooper & Joe Levy provide an introduction to the New Microsoft Azure Automation Service.
🖥️ Compute
- "Big Compute in the Cloud with High Performance Computing on Azure" describes the different problem domains big compute tackles.
- Rohit Bakhshi has published a quick step-by-step guide to deploy the Hortonworks Data Platform on Microsoft Azure IaaS.
- Ross Gardler writes about "Docker Community Updates from Tech Ed and Docker Global Hack Day". This post contains some good information if you've heard about Docker & containers and want to know what all the fuss is about.
- Scott Field blogs about the availability of Microsoft Antimalware for Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Machines.
- Khalid Mouss digs a little deeper into the Azure VM Unique Id support recently added to IaaS.
- Kenaz Kwa describes how to "Migrate Azure Virtual Machines between Storage Accounts"
- Garvin Casimir explains how to run Elasticsearch In Azure PaaS, while endjin's own Richard Kerslake shares some gotchas when installing an Elasticsearch cluster on Azure IaaS.
- Tristan Scott & Thomas Willingham provide a useful "Introduction to Microsoft Azure RemoteApp".
- Narayan Annamalai & Ganesh Srinivasan talk about "Designing Hybrid Scenarios with Microsoft Azure".
- It may have been a while since you created a Cloud Service Worker Role from scratch, but the default template was updated in the Azure 2.4 SDK, to reflect updated guidance. It might be worthwhile updating existing code to take advantage of these suggestions.
- Craig Landis from the Azure Support Team, shares an interesting tip on how to use port pings instead of ICMP to test Azure VM connectivity.
🌐 Networking
- Following up the excellent overview "Integrate your Azure Website with an Azure Virtual Network", Chris Comby has written a more in-depth article about setting up an Azure VPN to connect an Azure Website to a database running in a VM or On Prem in "Using VNET integration and Hybrid connections with Azure Websites". Essential reading if you want to get started with this Azure Website feature.
- Narayan Annamalai makes an appearance on Cloud Cover to talk about Virtual Networks & Hybrid Connections.
⚙️ Web & Mobile
- Jaime Espinosa announces that WebJobs have gone into full production.
- Javier Lozano describes how to "Build Your Virtual Conference with Azure" using Azure Websites and Traffic Manager.
- endjin's Mike Larah describes how to restrict access to Azure Websites by whitelisting
- Ruslan Yakushev shows how to use Azure Website as a reverse proxy.
- Mini Xu highlights "Rich Push with Notification Hubs in iOS 8" using Mobile Services with a .NET backend.
- Carlos Figueira talks about new features available in Mobile Services: "Custom Login Scopes, Single Sign-On, new ASP.NET Web API – updates to the Azure Mobile Services .NET backend"
- Elio Damaggio celebrates Event Hubs going GA by dropping in on Cloud Cover to showcase some demo use cases.
- Todd Holmquist-Sutherland & Clemens Vasters demonstrate Telemetry and Data Flow at Hyper-Scale using Azure Event Hub.
- Sandrino Di Mattia has produced a useful tool for generating Shared Access Signatures for sending events to Service Bus Event Hubs from any device and provides a blog post demonstrating how to use it.
- Nazim Lala describes how to use Certificates in Azure Websites Applications.
- Azure Websites Hosting Plans are a relatively new concept, if you're not familiar with them, this in-depth overview is a handy guide.
- David Ebbo announced on twitter that SSL v3 has been globally disabled on Azure Websites. See this article by Nazim Lala for more info.
- Apurva Joshi shares interesting tips on creating "Auto-Healing Windows Azure Web Sites".
📦 Storage
- If you are used to using LINQ to query data sources, Azure Table Storage only support a subset of operators. "Query Operators Supported for the Table Service" is a valuable resource for learning its limitations.
- Ahmed El-Shim shows the Cloud Cover team what StorSimple, the hybrid-cloud storage device can do.
- Leonidas Rigas & Vinay Shah provide an overview of Microsoft Azure Storage.
- Many Azure Subscription limits have changed recently, so it's worth making sure you're up to date with the latest figures.