Azure Weekly
Issue #12 - 7th February 2015
This week, Microsoft's second quarter profits were published, showing a 114% growth in commercial cloud revenue (Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online), which based on the quarter's figures, will account for $5.5 billion annualised revenue. The scale of organisational change to support a shift to cloud and services was visible in the form of $243 million of integration and restructuring expenses in Q2, absorbing a modest overall rise in revenue.
Takeshi Numoto announces the launch of a Microsoft Cloud Platform roadmap site, showing plans for Azure, Power BI and other services. The roadmap is available on the main Microsoft website.
The session catalogue for Microsoft Ignite (4th - 8th May in Chicago) has been published. The schedule includes 61 azure-related sessions.
On the Azure blog, Vibhor Kapoor summarises recent and pending updates to several services including SQL Server, where row level security is now in preview, Azure Active Directory, where conditional access policies for multi-factor authentication per app are in preview, and Azure Media Services, where Content Protection is now in General Availability.
Leon Welicki announces a set of improvements to the Azure preview portal, including the ability to open blades in new tabs and windows.
Special Thanks goes to Dave Donaldson for contributing an article to this issue. See the Storage & Backup section for more details.
⚖️ Management and Governance
- Diego Viso describes automating Azure VM deployment with Chef
- For those times when you have to rush off and don't have a chance to shut down VMs from your desktop, Martin Hinshelwood explains how to manage Azure VMs from your phone, using the Mobile Azure Manager
- Eamon O'Reilly shows how to schedule Azure Automation runbooks with Azure Scheduler
- On Channel9, Scott Hanselman talks to Kundana Palagiri about Linux VM managment, Chef and Puppet
Bruno Terkaly describes Installing And Configuring PowerShell To Build Out a Linux-based High Performance Storage Infrastructure in Azure
- Bo Song provides sample code to check whether an Azure instance is in a production or staging slot
🖥️ Compute
- Robert Smit writes about the G-Series VM, including sizing, pricing, and the process for setting up a cluster
On the Azure blog, Karan Batta announces the release of a set of samples for running a Blender workload on Azure Batch. (Blender is a 3D animation tool)
🌐 Networking
Ian Farr walks through using a refactored version of his script for building an Active Directory Forest in Azure. His script now merges existing Azure VN configuration with new required VN configuration
💡 Internet of Things
Martin Hinshelwood makes a detailed argument for moving to Visual Studio Online, examining features, missing features, data security and support
David Ebbo covers deploying an Azure website, project Kudu, Azure Web Jobs and Azure Website Extensions in the MS Dev Show
Bo Song provides a sample for uploading images from a Windows Phone to blob storage
Rion Williams describes how to set up a custom domain for an Azure Website
There's a new learning map for Azure Websites in the Azure documentation
Troy Hunt makes a detailed case for using Azure Web Jobs
Raj Singh has compiled a comprehensive list of Event Hub resources including docs, tools and community blogs
On Channel 9, Scott Hanselman talks to Elliot Hamai about the Deploy to Azure button for Git repositories
Christos Matskas writes about Azure Websites Testing in Production
Mike Lanzetta describes how to set up communication between a Node.js application and a .NET application using Event Hubs
⚙️ Data and Analytics
- Andreas De Ruiter explains how to load daily gold prices into Azure Machine Learning
- On the HortonWorks blog, an update about Apache Hadoop Yarn in the HortonWorks Data Platform 2.2. (HortonWorks is Microsoft's partner for the HDInsight service)
- A new preview version of PowerBI was launched this week, available for free for anyone with a US business email. This will be available as a free or low cost subscription-based Pro version on reaching general availability, and prices of the current PowerBI service have been lowered to $9.99 per user a month in anticipation of this change
- On the Azure blog, Stephen Baron writes part 2 of his series on performance tips for DocumentDB, with several tips on indexing policy, throughput and consistency levels
- Microsoft's presence at the National Retail Federation Expo 2015 was covered on MSDN. In related news, 'The ShiSh List' on MSDN provides a list of scenarios for the use of big data and machine learning in the retail industry
- Simon Lidberg highlights the availability of a new reference architecture for Stream Analytics
- Bluewater SQL's Chris provides an overview of Azure Data Factory on MSDN
- On the Just Azure blog, Mike Wood describes open source developments around Azure, including GitHub repo to use DocumentDB as the persistence store for Orleans
📦 Storage
- Dave Donaldson has written a blog post demonstrating how to upload and download files with Web API and Azure Blob Storage
- On the Azure blog, Corey Sanders announces support for automated backup and patching for SQL Server Azure VMs. This can be configured in the portal
- Perry Skountrianos provides a tutorial on troubleshooting Azure Storage with Message Analyzer, covering downloading logs using AzCopy, then importing them into Message Analyzer, and choosing the columns you want to analyse
- On the Azure blog, Sanjay Nagamangalam announces the availability of a free Azure SQL Database migration cook book for V12, written by Kathy Lu
- The MSDN documentation for Azure SQL Database row level security has been updated
Adarsha Datta writes about Azure table storage in the fourth of his series of blogs on Azure Data Services
Radu Vunvulea describes how to replicate Azure blobs
🎬 Media
Mingfei Yan announces the general availability of Azure Media Services Content Protection, which lets you secure media services with AES or Microsoft PlayReady
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
On the Azure Podcast, Marc van Eijk and Hans Vredevoort talk about Azure Pack for Windows Server, a set of Azure technologies which can be run in local datacentre
Simon Timms demonstrates how to send messages to Service Bus via the ReST interface
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
David O'Brien writes up his initial research about using PowerShell to deploy a new Active Directory Domain Services Server onto Azure
Sean Kearney walks through creating a demo Active Directory using an AD Premium trial, for anyone who wants to experiment with the service
On Channel 9, Anton Babadjano talks about delegating user authentication and product subscription to a 3rd party site
Robert Mitchell provides a tip for choosing the correct authentication mobile app for logging into services using multi-factor authentication