Azure Weekly

Issue #178 - 10th June 2018

Unless you've been living under a rock last week, you'll know that Microsoft is to acquire Github for $7.5 billion. Huge news. Here's what Lori Lamkin from the VSTS team had to say about it.

Numerous announcements/updates this week, so let's take a look at those:

New VM capabilities
Disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines general availability
Azure Backup for SQL Server on Azure now in public preview
New VM Run command

On the Azure blog, Rohan Kumar points out why Azure is the best place for analytics. Elsewhere, Aidan Finn writes an interesting aritcle about the Azure Traffic Manager: Geography Versus Latency, and our very own Ed Freeman highlights some key differences between the CALENDAR and CALENDARAUTO functions in Power BI.

Finally, if you attended Azure Saturday a couple of weeks ago, Thomas Janetscheck has posted all of the slide decks from the sessions for you to check out.

⚙️ AI + Machine Learning

On the Azure blog, Grace Sturman writes that Speech services now in preview
On the Kloud blog, Darren Robinson (@darrenjrobinson) describes Utilising Azure Text to Speech Cognitive Services with PowerShell and Darren Doc Robinson describes Utilising Azure Speech to Text Cognitive Services with PowerShell
On Channel 9, Seth Juarez (@sethjuarez) talks about Image and Text Moderation with Content Moderator with Greg Clark and talks about Video Moderation with Content Moderator with Sanjeev Jagtap
On the .NET Curry blog, Gerald Versluis talks about Content Moderation using Azure Custom Vision and Xamarin
On MSDN, Sheri Gilley explains how to Build Your Own Image Similarity Model
On Code Project, Marius Bancila (@mariusbancila) describes Using Cognitive Services to identify persons
Michael Crump (@mbcrump) writes Azure Tips and Tricks Part 129 - Using OCR to extract text from images from the Azure Portal
Also on MSDN, Martin Kearn (@MartinKearn) describes the Bot Framework triage between Luis and QnA Maker with Toby Bradshaw
Also on Channel 9, John Papa and Brian Clark present Episode 18: Five Things About Bots Five Things
On the Revolution Analytics blog, David Smith (@revodavid) describes What's new in Azure for Machine Learning and AI

🔎 Analytics

On the Azure blog, Rohan Kumar writes that 'Azure is the best place for analytics'
Also on the Azure blog, Michael Rys (@MikeDoesBigData) writes Process more files than ever and use Parquet with Azure Data Lake Analytics
Also on the Azure blog, Sid Ramadoss writes 8 reasons to choose Azure Stream Analytics for real-time data processing
Vincent-Philippe Lauzon (@vplauzon) talks about Event Hubs ingestion performance and throughput
Dan Rosanova (@DanRosanova) discusses Serverless Big Data
On the Power BI blog, Nimrod Shalit covers Power BI Developer community May update, Christopher Finlan explains how to Subscribe others to email subscriptions in Power BI, Amanda Cofsky covers Power BI Desktop June Feature Summary and Nikhil Gaekwad describes the Power BI Service and Mobile May Feature Summary
On the endjin blog, Ed Freeman (@edfreeman_) blogs about Using CALENDAR vs CALENDARAUTO to generate Date table for year-on-year comparisons
Chris Webb (@cwebb_bi) blogs about Using Email Attachments As A Data Source In Power BI
Devin Knight (@knight_devin) covers Power BI Custom Visuals Class Module 106 – Ring Chart MAQ Software and provides the Power BI Monthly Digest – June 2018 with Manuel Quintana
On MSDN, Charles Sterling (@chass) points to Various Power BI, PowerApps and Flow Conferences and Events around the world

🖥️ Compute

On the Azure blog, Corey Sanders (@CoreySandersWA) writes about Why you should bet on Azure for your infrastructure needs, today and in the future
Also on the Azure blog, Anurag Mehrotra writes that Azure Backup for SQL Server on Azure now in public preview
On the Azure podcast, the Azure podcast team presents Episode 231 - IaaS VM options
On MSDN, Dave Glover talks about Ubuntu desktop setup for Azure Developers
On Code Project, Gunnar Siréus blogs about Using NServiceBus in Azure Service Fabric
Also on MSDN, Lukas Steindl explains how to Submit a simple Job to Azure Batch with Node js minimal example, describes How to get the status of an Azure Batch Job with Node.js and explains how to Remove all Jobs from an Azure Batch Account with Powershell
On Channel 9, Corey Sanders (@CoreySandersWA) describes how to Combine Azure scheduled events with Event Grid with Ziv Rafalovich
Also on Code Project, Brandon H (@bc3tech) explains how to Make Serverless Music – Orchestrate your workflow with Azure Part 4 – Durable Functions
Also on MSDN, Jeff Sanders (@jsandersrocks) writes Failed to update web app settings: The storage URI is invalid
Also on Code Project, Akhil Mittal discusses Setting up Ethereum Blockchain on Azure

🚢 Containers

On MSDN, Michael S. Hansen writes about Private Kubernetes Cluster in Azure Government

🗄️ Databases

The Azure updates team writes that PostgreSQL 10.3 released on Azure Database for PostgreSQL and writes about the SQL Data Warehouse PolyBase support for Azure Storage Encryption using customer-managed keys
On MSDN, Tim Salch writes that Azure SQL Data Warehouse SQL Operations Studio Extension Available
On the Database Journal site, Marcin Policht blogs about Azure SQL Database and GDPR Compliance
On MSDN, Nick Lopez blogs about Providing the server name explicitly in user names Part 2: DNS alias for Azure SQL Database
On Channel 9, Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) talks about Horizontal Partitioning in Azure Cosmos DB with Carey MacDonald and provides some Tips for using the Gremlin API with Azure Cosmos DB with Jayanta Mondal

🛠️ Developer Tools

On the Azure blog, Jenny Jiang announces that Azure Data Lake Tools for VSCode supports Azure blob storage integration
The Azure updates team writes about Cognitive Services Speech SDK June 2018 update
On the Visual Studio blog, John Montgomery (@JohnMont) discusses What's Next for Visual Studio
On MSDN, Robert Green talks about The Present and Not-too-distant Future of Visual Studio Part 2 with Amanda Silver, Kendra Havens and Anthony Cangelosi
On the Kloud blog, Nivlesh Chandra talks about Enabling Source Control for locally stored code using Git, Visual Studio Code and Sourcetree
On the Daily Dot Net Tips blog, Abhijit Jana (@AbhijitJana) explains how to Disable local Application Insights for Asp.Net Core Projects
On the Azure podcast, the Azure podcast team and guest Asir Selvasingh (@AzurePodcast) presents Episode 232 - Java on Azure
Thomas Janetscheck highlights all the Azure Saturday 2018 – Slide decks
Michael Crump (@mbcrump) writes Azure Tips and Tricks Part 128 - Download all Azure Documentation for offline viewing

🔩 DevOps

On MSDN, Lori Lamkin talks about VSTS and GitHub
Also on MSDN, Edward Thomson lists the Top stories from the VSTS community – 2018.06.01
Also on MSDN, Deepak Khare describes Migrating a large collection from on premise TFS to Azure hosted service (VSTS)
On Code Project, Habibur Rony covers Building a DevOps CI/CD Pipeline for ASP.NET Core with VSTS
James van Den Berg writes about Microsoft Azure DevOps Projects and Infrastructure as Code
On the Daily Dot Net Tips blog, Abhijit Jana (@AbhijitJana) writes about the Azure DevOps Integration Tutorial Reference

🎭 Identity

On Microsoft Cloud Blogs, Alex Simons (@Alex_A_Simons) writes that Azure AD Conditional Access support for blocking legacy auth is in Public Preview
On MSDN, Frank Hu writes about the GUID Table for Windows Azure Active Directory Permissions
Also on MSDN, Mike Duddington (@Dudders1) discusses Blocking Legacy Clients with Azure AD Conditional Access
Also on MSDN, Anuj Chaudhary describes PowerShell sample for Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for Azure AD Roles

🔌 Integration

On the Azure blog, Barry Luijbregts (@azurebarry) describes How I choose which services to use in Azure
Roy Kim (@roykimyyz) covers Azure Logic Apps for Document Content Approval
On the Daily Dot Net Tips blog, Abhijit Jana (@AbhijitJana) delves into Cloning Azure Logic App to create a new one and describes how to Quickly rollback Azure Logic Apps to the Previous Version
On TechNet, Senthilkumar Pandurangan writes about Intune: Bulk Enroll Surface Hubs to Microsoft Intune

💡 Internet of Things

On the Azure blog, Chris Pendleton writes Regenerative Maps alive on the Edge
On Channel 9, Olivier Bloch (@obloch) talks about Azure IoT Hub device SDK for Python with Zoltan Varga and talks about the STMicroelectronics Starter kits for Azure IoT with Manuel Cantone

⚖️ Management and Governance

On the Azure blog, John Kemnetz writes Use Azure Monitor to integrate with SIEM tools
The Azure updates team writes about the General availability: Azure mobile app for Android and iOS
Stanislav Zhelyazkov (@StanZhelyazkov) explains how to Aggregate on More Than One Column for Azure Log Search Alerts
On the Catapult Systems blog, Cameron Fuller discusses Updating the Azure Automation Solution for Log Analytics to the new query language
On TechNet, Anthony Watherston describes how to Export / Import Variables to Azure Automation
On the Daily Dot Net Tips blog, Abhijit Jana (@AbhijitJana) explains How to instantly check the health of your Azure services, describes how to Tag multiple Azure Resources from Azure Portal and explains how to Locate Azure resources tags easily in Azure Portal
Aidan Finn (@joe_elway) writes about This Subscription Is Not Registered With The Microsoft.Insights Resource Provider
On MSDN, Srikantan Sankaran describes how to Use Azure policy Service to manage Azure Resources and stay compliant with corporate standards

⚙️ Microsoft Azure Stack

On the Azure blog, Talal Alqinawi writes that Microsoft Azure Stack expands availability to 92 countries
On Cloudify Blog, Jeremy Hess discusses The Cloudify Azure Plugin with Azure Stack Support

🚌 Migration

On MSDN, Jim Toland writes about the Seamless migration of PostgreSQL apps to Azure Database for PostgreSQL with minimum downtime and the Seamless migration of MySQL apps to Azure Database for MySQL with minimum downtime

📱 Mobile

On the Azure blog, Tareq Aljaber talks about Empowering developers to ship iOS apps that scale
On the Xamarin blog, Jayme Singleton writes about the Xamarin and .NET Developer Events this June
Also on the Xamarin blog, Tom Opgenorth writes about the Xamarin.Android Firebase Job Dispatcher: Background Scheduling for all Android Devices
On the Trailhead blog, Valeriy Kovalenko writes about the Expandable UITableView with XamariniOS
On Visual Studio Magazine - Columns, Peter Vogel walks through Choosing a Xamarin Strategy
On the Xamarin blog, David Ortinau writes Build 2018: Conference Vision Demo App
On Code Project, Sid Sharma explains how to Add Video Calling in Xamarin apps using Agora.io
On Channel 9, James Montemagno (@JamesMontemagno) talks about Mobile Chest X-Ray Analysis, a Microsoft Garage Project with Robert, Jacky and Noah

🌐 Networking

Aidan Finn (@joe_elway) writes about the Azure Traffic Manager: Geography Versus Latency
On the Azure blog, Ben Cotton writes that Mellanox uses Azure to accelerate network design
On MSDN, David Sanchez covers Site-to-Site VPN between pfSense Firewall and Azure using BGP

🔐 Security

On the Azure blog, John Booth blogs about Detecting script-based attacks on Linux

📦 Storage

On the Azure blog, Sirius Kuttiyan writes about the (Preview) Standard SSD Disks for Azure Virtual machine workloads
Aidan Finn (@joe_elway) writes about the Azure Preview – Standard SSD Disks
The Azure updates team writes about the Public preview: Storage Explorer in the Azure portal
Nicolas Bonnet describes Azure File Sync

🔗 Web

On the Azure blog, Liam Cavanagh (@liamca) writes that Azure Search is now certified for several levels of compliance
On MSDN, Byron Tardif (@bktv99) writes about the App Service Deployment Center Preview
Also on MSDN, 'PuneetG' blogs about App Service Diagnostics – Profiling an ASP.NET Web App on Azure App Service
Also on MSDN, Ben Perkins (@csharpguitar) talks about Web Deploy ERROR_DESTINATION_NOT_REACHABLE Azure Web App
Also on MSDN, Mariusz Kolodziej (@mariuszdotnet) writes about the Enterprise Deployment of an Internal Load Balancer with an App Service Environment v2
Also on MSDN, Madhura Bharadwaj talks about Azure App Services: Understanding URL Re-write