Azure Weekly

Issue #191 - 9th September 2018

Here are this week's announcements and updates:

• General availability: Event Hubs for Python
• General availability: Virtual network service endpoints for Azure Key Vault
• General availability of Azure IoT Hub integration with Azure Event Grid
• SQL Data Warehouse now available in Government Cloud
• Avere vFXT for Microsoft Azure now in public preview
• Public preview: Data Box Disk now available in Australia and Canada
• Public Preview for Azure Active Directory Integration with Azure Files
• Azure Cosmos DB Emulator build task for Azure DevOps now in preview
• BulkExecutor for Azure Cosmos DB Gremlin API now available
• Azure Security Center update August 29
• Python in Visual Studio Code – August 2018 Release
• Azure IoT Toolkit supports C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python and Ruby to develop Azure IoT application in VS Code
• Azure Data Box: Expanded availability, plus support for NFS and RBAC
• Exciting new capabilities on Azure HDInsight
• Powerful Debugging Tools for Spark for Azure HDInsight
• Azure Database Migration Service: PostgreSQL to Azure DB for PostgreSQL migrations support
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse enables streaming solutions with Azure Databricks

Of the above links I'm most excited about the Cosmos DB emulator for VSTS; running large amounts of integration tests against Cosmos in your CI/CD environment can become very expensive, as you tend to need to increase your RU/s to run your tests quickly and in parallel! 

In other interesting content this week; I love how the Azure Event Hubs team are integrating popular open source technologies / protocols with proprietary Azure services (I wish more of the Azure product groups would take this approach; enriching rather than either / or) - see Azure Event Hubs with Kafka coolness with Dan Rosanova, A powerful cloud service from Microsoft has been rolled out to another UK region, a very interesting post about Connected Arms – Can AI Revolutionize Prosthetic Devices & Make them More Affordable and finally two really good articles about Azure (Durable) Functions: an Introduction to Azure Durable Functions and Correlated Structured Logging on Azure Functions

It's also time to get our monthly round-up of all the Microsoft Azure Industry Experiences team's content:

Firstly there's a nice overview of how to drive industry transformation with Azure – Getting started – Edition 1

Retail

• Current use cases for machine learning in retail and consumer goods
• Delivering innovation in retail with the flexible and productive Microsoft AI platform
• Keeping shelves stocked and consumers happy (and shopping!)

Manufacturing

• Extracting actionable insights from IoT data to drive more efficient manufacturing
• Describe, diagnose, and predict with IoT Analytics
• Where is the market opportunity for developers of IoT solutions?

Health & Life Sciences

• Four trends powering healthcare AI, and what you can do about it
• Accelerate healthcare initiatives with Azure UK NHS blueprints
• Accelerating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare using Microsoft Azure blueprints

Banking

• Two seconds to take a bite out of mobile bank fraud with Artificial Intelligence
• Anti-money laundering – Microsoft Azure helping banks reduce false positives

Insurance

• Finish your insurance actuarial modeling in hours, not days
• Reduce costs by optimizing actuarial risk compute on Azure
• Save money on actuarial compute by retiring your on-premises HPC grids

Finally, it was an important week at endjin as we announced that Ian Griffiths has join as our first Technical Fellow. We took the opportunity to write a 5 part Q&A with Ian. The two topics that may be of interest to subscribers of this newsletter are part 2 - The .NET Ecosystem & The Cloud, and part 3 - Data & AI, although I'd highly recommend reading all 5 parts!