Azure Weekly

Issue #143 - 24th September 2017

Welcome to the latest edition of the Azure Weekly Newsletter.

I was in a bit of a rush last Sunday as I was heading off on holiday, and I completely forgot to include a very big announcement from the API Management Team about the new API Versioning (and Revisions) feature that has just been released. On a related note, we created a presentation in July called "Unlocking your Digital Transformation with Azure API Management" and have recorded three video versions - a 5 minute exec summary, a more detailed 20 minute overview and a 50 minute deep dive. We're quite pleased with the content - let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback.

Our summer project of revamping endjin.com also went live on Friday; it contains plethora of new content covering our services, solutions, products, information about the industries we work in, and some detailed customer case studies. I'm really pleased to announce our Incubator, based on our work with Microsoft Accelerator and many other start-ups over the last few years, we will allow start-ups access all of our IP to jump start their development, hopefully reducing their need for seed funding. We're also launching the endjin Academy - an online training resource; the first course will be "Real World Data Science", based on all of our experience running and operationalizing Machine Learning and Data Science experiments.

Back to the world of Azure - there have been a number of annoucements ahead of this week's Ignite conference. Firstly Tom Keane Head of Global Infrastructure for Azure introduced Azure Availability Zones for resiliency and high availability, Dinesh Murthy announced larger, higher scale storage accounts, and Alex Simons announced a feature that will make all users of Azure rejoice - the new "Keep me signed in" experience for Azure AD.

Paul Batum showcases processing 100,000 Events Per Second on Azure Functions - we're pleased to see this blog post as we've been processing 200 million messages a day for the last 3 months using Azure Functions on top of our Modern Data Platform solution blueprint (blog post coming soon!). Azure Functions really is a game changer!

On the Azure blog this week, Corey Sanders has More and more fun with Terraform on Azure while Noa Kuperberg invites you to Ask anything about the new Azure Log Analytics language.

Erich Andersen walks through extending Microsoft Azure IP Advantage to China, and Justin Incarnato covers servicing Azure Stack using the Update resource provider.

Nicole Berdy explains how to Route IoT device messages to Azure Storage with Azure IoT Hub, and Andres Juarez discusses Azure's IoT Hub global expansion.

Finally from the Seattle Times, a fascinating article about Microsoft's experiments with Fuel Cell technology for reducing Azure Data Centre energy costs.