Azure Weekly
Issue #11 - 31st January 2015
The big news for this week was generated by the Windows 10 press conference, with the HoloLens stealing the limelight, but one of the underlying messages was that cloud would be the channel that enables experiences to be shared seamlessly across a users multitude of devices running Windows 10.
The other big news of the week was the announcement that Microsoft had acquired Revolution Analytics - the leading commercial provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. If you look at this acquisition through the lens of Microsoft's existing investments in big Data (HDInsight, Azure Data Factory, Stream Analytics and Power BI) - it's a very exciting move.
One of our favourite discoveries this week were the slides from Bart De Smet's slides from his talk "Cloud-scale Event Processing using Rx" which shows the evolution from Project Volta, through Rx to Reactive Programming across devices and cloud that powers Cortana. Jaw dropping stuff (I particularly like the mentions to Calabi-Yau manifolds).
We've been extending our tentacles further into the Azure community blogosphere, and hope you enjoy this bumper issue - and others to come.
⚖️ Management and Governance
- A four part series on Application Performance Monitoring on Channel 9 / Microsoft Virtual Academy includes a session on Application Insights
- Troy Hunt describes automating web hosting creation in Azure with PowerShell
- David Ebbo writes about using command line tool ARMClient to send HTTP requests to the Azure Resource Manager REST API
- Laura Cruz blogs about installing and connecting an agent to Operational Insights, a process which no longer requires Operations Manager
🖥️ Compute
Kenaz Kwa announces the extension of G-Series VMs to US East 2 (the existing region is US West)
Ugo Lattanzi provides a guide to speeding up Web API on Azure by using a Worker Role rather than IIS
Sascha Corti writes about using the Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2015 by using the ready made VS 2015 VM available through the Azure portal
Tanzim Saqib describes how to set a MongoDB backend on Azure
Kirk Evans describes creating an Eclipse development environment on Azure, with the tools necessary to deploy Java code to an Azure worker role
Edwin Sarmiento writes part 2 of his introduction to Azure PowerShell Modules for SQL Server DBA, exploring how to create Azure VMs that run SQL Server instances
Mike Wood provides a roundup of recent Azure news on the Just Azure blog
Tim Tetrick replies to recent questions about the rights of governments to access data in Azure
On MSDN, a new code sample to help people migrating a legacy application to Azure who need to register a COM component in a Cloud Service start up task
Richard Astbury describes how to implement Optimistic Concurrency in Orleans.
Mike Hacker describes using Windows Server Storage Spaces in Azure VMs for increased storage performance
🌐 Networking
- A video from Rob Waggoner walks through creating a Virtual Network in Azure
- Rob also provides a guide to configuring a site to site VPN between an Azure virtual network and on-premises infrastructure
💡 Internet of Things
Sara Silva describes how to avoid package issues when updating a .NET backend project from Azure Mobile Services
Also from Sara Silva, a how to guide to viewing the web.config file published in Azure Mobile Services, and a similar guide to viewing Mobile Services log files
Cory Fowler writes about his site extension to install WordPress CLI into an Azure Website. WordPress CLI is a command line interface for managing a WP site
Felix Rieseberg provides a deployment script for deploying io.js on an Azure Website
Bertrand Le Roy explains how to deploy multiple repositories to Azure Websites
Dan Rosanova writes part 2 of his series on Event Processor Host best practices, covering lease management and EventProcessorHost options
In a post from December, Nino Crudele shares his thoughts on Event Hubs
⚙️ Data and Analytics
Liam Cavanagh describes some enhancements to Azure Search suggestions: a completely new implementation which carries out 'infix matching' (search term doesn't need to match start of the field) and fuzzy matching (more flexibility for spelling mistakes).
Liam also writes about Azure Search suggestions, providing a step by step guide to enabling suggestions on a search application
Stephen Baron writes part 1 of a 2 part series on performance tips for DocumentDB, describing the networking and SDK configuration options in DocumentDb
In the Cloud Cover show on Channel9, Haishi Bai, Chris Risner and Anand Subbaraj talk about Azure Data Factory, including an overview of the service and its future directions
The winners of the Azure for Research Awards for Machine Learning have been announced, with projects from health to water metering, to biodiversity monitoring and weather receiving awards which grant access to Azure ML. The next deadline is February 15th 2015
Mike Lanzetta writes about data cleansing dates with Azure Machine Learning and R
Nishant Thacker provides a resources list for HDInsight
📦 Storage
Akshay Hedge writes about best practices for process server deployment when protecting VMware and physical workloads with Azure Site Recovery
Part 3 of Adarsha Datta's series on Azure Data Services introduces the blob
CloudCellar blog about the Beta launch of their Azure Storage Backups service in December, and provide a how to guide
On the Azure Podcast, Jeff Irwin provides advice on getting the best performance from Azure storage, referencing the Azure Storage Performance and Scalability checklist
Pierre Roman provides a step by step guide to restoring PC data from Azure
🎬 Media
Scott Hanselman and Yochay Kiriaty discuss CDN support for azure websites, which now lets you sync an Azure website's static files directly to the CDN
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
Mahesh Sabnis describes how to use Service Bus for communication across two ASP.NET MVC applications
From Max McCarty on Code Project, part 3 of a series on Service Bus brokered messaging, covering batch processing, prefetching, transactions, dead lettering, auto-forwarding, security and best practices
Rob Waggoner describes how to promote a VM in Azure to a domain controller that synchronises with a domain controller of an on-premises network,
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
Prateek Sharma provides some recommendations for setting up Active Directory for a disaster recovery environment, to make sure that applications carry on working if there's a failover event
On Azure Friday on Channel9, Scott Hanselman and Chris Gillum discuss Easy authentication and authorisation for Azure Websites - a feature which lets you set up authentication and authorisation simply via the Configure tab on the Azure portal
On the Xamarin blog, Mayur Tendulkar describes how to authenticate Xamarin mobile apps using Azure Active Directory
On the Nick's .NET Travels blog, a post about adding a WPF client with Azure Active Directory authentication and Azure Mobile Service. Nick also writes about adding Azure Active Directory authentication to an Android Xamarin.Forms project
On MSDN, an article showing how to use Live ID as a web identity for an Azure-based service
Kirk Evans writes about installing an Active Directory forest on an Azure Virtual Network