Azure Weekly

Issue #162 - 18th February 2018

The first thing I'll point out is if you are, or know of an AWS expert looking to transfer knowledge into the Azure platform, a helpful blog with plenty of linked resources has been posted: Azure for AWS Professionals. In this week's news referring to another tech giant, Microsoft has also highlighted its partnership with Citrix, giving us Six reasons you'll love Citrix Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

On the technical side, there are a few features that have reached GA this week: Application consistent backup for Linux VMs using Azure Backup, Building Go apps for Azure with the Go SDK, ExpressRoute monitoring with Network Performance Monitor NPM and Azure Redis Cache geo-replication.

There are a few other announcements: the long awaited ability to view Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage in Storage Explorer and the newLog Alerts feature for Application Insights have both gone into public preview, and Azure Site Recovery now has the ability to setup Disaster Recovery (DR) for IaaS VMs using managed disks.

If your interests lie with databases, there have been a number of new features in CosmosDB over the past few months, which are nicely summarized by Scott Hanselman and Kirill Gavrylyuk in this Channel 9 video. Barry Luijbregts has also provided a nice comparison of Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

If you're intrigued by the Data Science hype and want to get your hands dirty within your organization, Jen Stirrup has written an interesting article: How do you know if your org is ready for Data Science? Starting your journey with Azure Databricks. In the related space of AI, there is a fascinating use-case implemented by Ordnance Survey and Microsoft, using Microsoft AI technologies to classify the type of roof a house has, with the goal of saving people money on their insurance premiums.

Finally, have you ever found some incorrect or out-of-date info in the Azure docs? Sam Cogan reminds us that we can help improve the Azure Documentation.