Azure Weekly
Issue #14 - 21st February 2015
This week, in Forbes, Ben Kepes compares AWS and Azure in terms of reliability, concluding that AWS had greater reliability during 2014, due partly to the high profile Azure outages of that year, but also that both provide greater reliability than on-premise infrastructure. The article provides figures on service errors by quarter, region and service, showing a 22% reduction in total Azure errors since Q1and revealing SQL Databases as the service experiencing the highest volume of full service interuptions.
Google in collaboration with over 30 other cloud providers, including Microsoft, have released PerfKit Benchmarker a cross cloud platform performance benchmarking tool.
Paul Ballard provides a 'rosetta stone' for Azure and AWS, mapping the terminology used by each service.
In other general Azure news, Keith Mayer has written a very detailed study guide for the Microsoft Specialist Certification exam 70-534, Architecting Azure Solutions, and Maxine McDonald blogs about the benefits of being a Gold Competency Partner.
Microsoft Press have released a free ebook covering the Fundamentals of Azure by Michael S. Collier and Robin E. Shahan.
The Azure team have also made the ebook Data Science in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and R by Stephen F. Elston, free to download.
Finally, there were celebrations at endjin HQ this week, as we have just become a Microsoft Gold Partner for the Cloud Platform Competency. Yay!
⚖️ Management and Governance
Following on from his Bootstrapping Chef clients on Microsoft Azure blog post, Stuart Preston describes how to enable the Chef VM Extension on a Microsoft Azure VM using Powershell
In Redmond magazine, Jeffrey Schwartz writes about Docker Containers in Azure, linking to documentation about setting up a container
On Windows IT Pro, John Savill provides a sample PowerShell script to view Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) roles available in Azure through PowerShell
Dushyant Gill writes about keeping a tab on the access settings of your Azure subscriptions using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) PowerShell, describing how to find out who has access to your subscriptions, what access a specific user has, and who has gained access over a specific period
Yossi Dahan delves into reading metric data from Azure using the Azure Insights library
🖥️ Compute
The Edge Show on Channel 9 with Simon May covers Azure Remote App Edge describing a real world use case with QuickBooks 2015
Marius Sandbu also writes about what Azure RemoteApp is and what it isn't, describing use cases such as access to Office ProPlus
Alexandre Brisebois sets out a process for finding the closest Azure Data Center, using the Azure Speed Test and a community tool called Azure Site Ping
This week's Azure podcast with guest Dave Voyles covers gaming in Azure
Inderjeet Singh Jaggi provides a step by step guide for creating a lab environment for SharePoint on Azure IaaS.
Roopesh Nair demonstrates how to deploy an Azure Cloud Service using Release Management
🌐 Networking
In Redmond magazine, Jeffrey Schwartz writes about ExpressRoute, with a reminder that it's free to try out until the end of June
On Windows IT Pro, there's a Q&A from John Savill for the question If I create a virtual network in Azure with multiple address spaces will Azure automatically route between them? (spoiler - yes)
💡 Internet of Things
Bo Song provides a sample for for using Azure Mobile Services to operate Azure table from the Windows Store app
Scott Hanselman digs into how the release of the HttpPlatformHandler lets you run Ruby on Rails on IIS8
On the Azure blog, Pranav Rastogi describes how to investigate timeout exceptions in StackExchange.Redis for Azure Redis Cache, explaining error codes and steps determine what's causing the error
Two articles from Nick Randolph this week, who writes about creating services to carry out Mobile Services operations, and creating a complex synchronisation wrapper
Chris den Arend provides a quick intro to Microsoft's provisions for the Internet of Things
Sergiy Baydachnyy begins a series on the Internet of Things, describing how to create a simple web server
Kirk Evans describes using the Azure SDK for Java with Eclipse and Maven
Scott Hanselman and Daria Grigoriu talk about Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in Azure Websites
On Channel 9, Cory Fowler and Yochay Kiriaty show how to set up a scalable WordPress site on Azure
⚙️ Data and Analytics
On the PluralSight blog, Marco Shaw writes part 2 of the series Everything you need to know about machine learning, training and evaluating a model
On Channel 9, Scott Klein talks to Liam Cavanagh, a Senior Program Manager for Azure Search, about Azure Search Suggestions
On the Azure blog, Gaurav Malhotra announces new features for Azure Data Factory's Diagram View
On The Machine Learning Blog demonstrate how to get a Cloud-Based IoT Solution Running in 6 minutes using Azure Event Hubs, Stream Analytics & Machine Learning. They also show how to build Web Services with R and Azure ML
📦 Storage
In the SQL Database docs, an update on what's new in the latest SQL database update V12 (preview). Key highlights include easier management of large DBs, table partitioning, online indexing, support for key programmability functions, performance improvements, improved monitoring and troubleshooting, and a new perfomance level in the Standard tier
Michiel van Otegem delves into optimizing performance with Azure Premium Storage
Rochak Mittal describes how to replicate Azure Pack IaaS Workloads to Azure using Azure Site Recovery
🎬 Media
On Channel 9 a number of Azure Media Product Managers host a webinar covering Advanced Processing and Distribution with Azure Media Services which includes a number of real world customer examples.
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
Dan Field describes how to handling REST GET requests using a BizTalk Orchestration as a provider
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
Alex Simons announces that the future of Azure ACS is Azure Active Directory
On the Just Azure blog, Rick Rainey writes part 4 of a series on Azure Active Directory, covering using group claims to drive authorization
Dan Wahlin writes part 5 of his series on integrating AngularJS with Azure Active Directory Services and Office 365 SharePoint covering the process of communicating with Office 365 SharePoint APIs
Ariel Gordon discusses how to allow customers to land on their custom login page from within your app, using Azure Active Directory.