Azure Weekly
Issue #19 - 28th March 2015
At this week's Microsoft Convergence event, Satya Nadella announced plans for Azure IoT suite, an integrated set of tools for IoT, building on existing services such as Stream Analytics, Event Hubs, Notification Hubs, DocumentDB, HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning and Power BI. This comes alongside investment in Windows 10 for IoT devices.
Other announcements this week include Azure Media Services integration with Azure Content Delivery Network, new Azure PowerShell DSC extension features, new Cmdlets for monitoring Azure Batch, the availability of Spark 1.2 for HDInsight, and the immanent launch of ExpressRoute for Office 365
On the Azure blog, there's an invite to the Ignite conference, which takes place from 4-8 May in Chicago. While we're on an events theme, a reminder that the Global Azure Bootcamp is coming up on Saturday 25 April!
endjin have just published an updated version of their Azure Technology Selector poster, this time in a more print friendly A2 poster format.
endjin are also hiring a senior developer in London. If you like the idea of working on some of the largest and most interesting Microsoft Azure projects including PaaS, Big Data & Machine Learning solutions, with access to technologies that have not been publicly announced, or know someone who might, please have a look at our ad.
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⚖️ Management and Governance
Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) describes the steps to getting admin by adding a new user to sudoers when you're locked out of an Azure Linux VM using the CustomScriptForLinux VM Extension
On the Azure blog, Kundana Palagiri writes about new additions to the Azure VM PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) Extension, including a Cmdlet to retrieve DSC configuration state from an Azure VM
Alexandre Brisebois (@Brisebois) blogs about Scaling Azure Cloud Services to zero using Azure Automation
On the Azure blog, Karan Batta (@Karan_Batta) writes about basic Monitoring of Azure Batch with PowerShell, using four new Cmdlets released with the PowerShell SDK 0.8.15: Get-AzureBatchPool, Get-AzureBatchWorkItem, Get-AzureBatchJob and Get-AzureBatchTask
On the WindowsITPro site, John Savill explains how to communicate to Azure via REST from PowerShell
On the Docker blog, John Willis writes about why I Love Docker and Why You'll Love it Too, and part 1 of a Docker tutorial series, covering installing Docker
🖥️ Compute
On the endjin blog, Richard Kerslake (@kerslakerichard) describes how to set a different New Relic application name per environment with Azure Cloud Services, using a startup script that gets the New Relic app name from cloud configuration, and appends this to the appsettings in the app configuration file
On Code Project, Sacha Barber blogs about Azure Cloud Services : Inter-role communications
Marius Sandbu (@msandbu) covers how to create a custom RemoteApp image in Microsoft Azure
On the Azure blog, Lichun Li explains some of the common causes of allocation failures for Azure VMs and suggests fixes
On the Azure blog, Scott Field, Partner Architect, Security & Compliance R&D, writes about Azure's use of Error-Correcting Code (ECC) memory for enhanced reliability and security
On the WindowsITPro site, Rod Trent lists the PowerShell Cmdlets for Azure RemoteApp
On the Microsoft Openness site, there's a profile of the use of Azure for the Tunisian election results website
🌐 Networking
On the Azure blog, Mike Schutz announces that it will soon be possible to access Office 365 via ExpressRoute
On the WindowsITPro site, John Savill explains how to restrict Azure connections to a specific virtual subnet
💡 Internet of Things
On MSDN, Jonathan Rozenblit describes how to store sensitive configuration details in Azure Websites App Settings, rather than including them in web.config files
On Code Project, Chris Gannon provides code samples and a step by step guide to 'CloudCooker' - an IoT Temperature Controller
On the Microsoft Openness site, there's a video from the Openness Team showing how to create a simple html/ JavaScript app, host it in Azure Websites, and use Office.js to interact with an Outlook mailbox in an Office 365 tenant
On the Just Azure blog, Rick Garibay writes part 1 and part 2 of his series 'Pragmatic IoT on Azure'
Sara Silva (@saramgsilva) writes Azure Mobile Services: How to change the database, and a Q&A and Tips for the Azure Mobile Services .Net Backend
⚙️ Data and Analytics
Mike Lanzetta describes Time-Series Processing in Azure ML Using Python, making use of the new 'Execute Python Script' module
Simon Timms (@stimms) reflects on how a recent support issue for database backups was handled and asks, how is Azure Support?
On the Azure blog, Maxim Lukiyanov, Senior Program Manager - Big Data, announces that Spark 1.2 is now supported by HDInsight 3.2, and describes how to install it using HDInsight's custom script action feature
On the Hortonworks blog, Saptak Sen blogs the availability of HortonWorks Sandbox on Azure. The environment is available via the Marketplace, and lets you follow tutorials and experiment with the latest Hadoop 2.2 features
On Channel 9, Scott Klein talks to Andrew Liu, a Program Manager on the DocumentDB team, about the Java SDK for DocumentDB
On the Revolution Analytics blog, David Smith (@revodavid) writes about how to connect R to other applications with DeployR
📦 Storage
- On the Azure blog, Sivaprakash Saripalli, Program Manager - Azure Site Recovery, writes about protecting large data disks using Azure Site Recovery
🎬 Media
On the Azure blog, Adarsh Solanki announces Media Services in Azure Government Datacenters
Also on the Azure blog, Manling Zhang, Program Manager - Azure Media Services, announces Azure Media Services integration with Azure Content Delivery Network. Azure CDN can be enabled for an Azure Media Services endpoint via the Media Services REST API 2.9 or the .NET SDK 3.1.0.2
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
Radu Vunvulea follows on from last week's post about setting up an active-passive failover mechanism over Azure Service Bus, this week describng how to set up an active-active failover mechanism over Azure Service Bus
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
On TechNet, Matt Shadbolt describes associating your Intune DirSync Directory with your Azure tenant
Marius Sandbu (@msandbu) writes about Azure Active Directory features and possibilities, and describes how to show users their applications from the Office365 dashboard
On the WindowsITPro site, John Savill answsers the question, If I enable password synchronization from AD to Azure AD how often do the passwords synchronize?