Azure Weekly

Issue #151 - 19th November 2017

Last week saw the Microsoft Connect() 2017 conference, which means there were LOTS of announcements (which in addition to all the announcements made at Ignite 2017 at the end of September gives you a clue as to the rate of innovation on Azure). A key theme of the conference was Data & AI.

One of the big announcement was around Azure Databrick, a "big data / data science in a box" offering based on an Apache Spark foundation. Another was the introduction of Azure DevOps Project - which helps create a full DevOps CI/CD environment for Azure App Service. General availability of Azure CosmosDB Table API was also announced, which means you can now have a premium table experience and secondary indexes all powered by Cosmos DB. Support for MongoDB aggregation pipeline and unique indexes were also added to Cosmos DB.

Azure Time Series Insights also reached general availability, as did Reserved VM Instances. Reserved Instances (RIs) enable you to reserve Virtual Machines on a one or three-year term, and provide up to 72% cost savings versus pay-as-you-go prices. The preview of Azure Stream Analytics on IoT Edge (i.e. it can run in a Docker container on the IOT device) was also announced. Two other services reached GA: Windows System State Backup from On-Prem to Azure and Azure App Service diagnostics.

In other news, a preview the new Azure Storage SDK for Go was released, and updates to the Azure DNS service CAA Record Support and IPv6 Nameservers, and an interesting video of build a Virtual Data Centre in Azure.

Other community articles of interest are: a script for exporting transactionally consistent bacpac from Azure SQL Database, understanding the Azure B (burstable) Series and CPU credits, find if you Are using only TLS 1.2 Protocol with Log Analytics, and Unattended authentication against the Microsoft Graph API from PowerShell