Azure Weekly

Issue #2 - 15th November 2014

Firstly, thanks to everyone who has subscribed to Azure Weekly in the last week and to those who have provided feedback; one thing you should notice is that the hyperlink colour in the newsletter has been changed to a much more muted grey, which hopefully makes it more readable for everyone.

There were a number of interesting articles / announcements this week; Azure's growing momentum over competing cloud platforms, the launch of Microsoft Band, Microsoft's technical partnership with the Special Olympics, the fascinating case study of building Age of Ascent on Azure, the SQL Azure announcements at PASS summit, and quite a lot of buzz around Azure Operational Insights.

⚖️ Management and Governance

Azure Operational Insights is in preview and a new MSDN forum has been launched.
Daniele Muscetta published the a series about Operational Insights: how to filter big data, more on filtering, using boolean operators, the time dimension, numbers and ranges, manipulating results: the pipeline "|" and search commands, introducing the measure command, max() and min() statistical functions with measure command and measure avg(), and an exploration of type=perfhourly
Stefan Roth has produced an Operational Insights Search Data Explorer Cheat Sheet.
Shad Phillips demonstrates how to change Azure Hosting Plans with PowerShell.
George Wallace demonstrates how to shut down an Azure VM with Azure Automation.
Michael Washam's new book "Automating Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services" is available.
endjin are big fans of New Relic, so are pleased to hear that "New Relic APM Debuts on New Microsoft Azure Marketplace"
Ilya Grebnov & Kevin Lam TechEd Europe sesson on Exploring Microsoft Azure Scheduler and Azure WebJobs is available on Channel 9.
Mobile Azure Manager is a free app for Windows Phone which allows limited management of VMs & Cloud Services.
Keith Mayer shows how to automate Health Monitoring Alert Rules with PowerShell and the Azure Service Management REST API.

🖥️ Compute

Brad Anderson announces support for running IE on Mac, iOS and, Android devices via RemoteApp.
Dan Lepow answers the question "What are my options for running high performance computing (HPC) applications in Windows Azure?"
Benedict Berger highlights the Microsoft Virtual Academy 4 day "Azure IaaS for IT Pros" course with Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, running from 1st – 4th December.
Robert Smit covers how to configure a cloud witness quorum Windows Server Cluster using Azure Files.
JetBrains have announced that TeamCity now supports dynamic Build Agents on Azure. I'm personally excited about this as I pushed for this feature at the JetBrains Partner Summit earlier in the year.
The "Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Optimization Assessment" tool has been made available. It automatically inspect your Virtual Machines running in Microsoft Azure and then provide prioritized recommendations.
Pierre Roman explains how to create a VM with multiple NICs in Azure.
The Microsoft Azure Support Team write about configuring Azure Virtual Machines for Optimal Storage Performance.

🌐 Networking

Simon Jäger has blogged about getting to know the Azure Traffic Manager.
Trond Hindenes writes about Azure Network Security Groups in practice.
Yves Pitsch explains that the Azure Load Balancer new distribution mode.
A new "Azure Network Security" whitepaper is available.

💡 Internet of Things

The Openness Team blog about running all of Microsoft's blogs on Wordpress on Azure Websites.
Shawn Cicoria highlights the Azure Website Migration Assistant tool.
Scott Hanselman has written a post to help people configure Azure Website for SSL, Node.js and Sockets.io.
Mary Jo Foley has written an interesting article about the broader Microsoft Health Platform that supports the new Microsoft Band Device, including a list of Azure Services it consumes.
Site Extensions are another one of those great features of Azure Websites that most people are unaware of. Elliott Hamai has produced a guide for creating site extensions.
Mike Lanzetta writes about Talking to EventHub with AMQP 1.0.
Stuart Leeks provides an introduction to Azure API Management.
Mat Velloso explains how to assemble Azure, Office 365, and Web Services into a real app.
Ben Foster writes about creating a high performance image processing with Image Resizer and Azure, which also covers using Azure CDN.
Tim Anderson digs a little deeper into how Azure Websites actually work.
Filip Ekberg highlights that his TechEd talk "Exploring Mobile Services .NET Backends, Offline Data support and alternative data stores" is available.
Kevin Sullivan explains how "IoT Security Does Not Have to be an Oxymoron".
A new wiki page on the Amqp.Net Lite project site demonstrates using Amqp.Net Lite with Azure Server Bus Event Hubs.
Gunnar Peipman shows how to get ASP.NET MVC 6 running on Azure Websites.
Vlad Vinogradsky appears on Cloud Cover to talk about new API Management Features.

⚙️ Data and Analytics

Liam Cavanagh announces updates to the Azure Search Service, including support for 27 new languages, availability in the North Central US & South Central US regions and portal improvements.
David Smith highlights a short video demonstrating how to deploy R code into Machine Learning.
Danielle Dean is running a "Operationalizing R as a Web Service" webinar on Friday, November 14th, 2014.
T.K. Ranga Rengarajan announces significant updates to Azure SQL Database.
Mike Hacker writes about the SQL Server (PASS) Summit announcement that anyone can try Machine Learning for Free and highlights some examples.
George Huey highlights a new TechNet Virtual Lab for Migrating a SQL Server Database to Microsoft Azure SQL Database.
Richard Conway writes about the emergence of a cohesive data platform in Azure.
A new video has been published to the Microsoft Cloud Platform YouTube channel covering how to configure Geo-Replication on SQL Azure Database.
The SQL Server Team announce the preview release of the SQL Server PHP Driver.
Radu Vunvulea asks "I need a cache system, what service from Azure should I use? "
James van den Berg highlights the Microsoft Data Management Gateway, which enables cloud access for on-premises data sources within an organization and exposes data from on-premises data sources as OData feeds.
A new Microsoft whitepaper entitled "protecting data in Azure" is available for download.
John Macintyre shows new enhancements to the DocumentDb management portal that allow you to edit and query documents.

📦 Storage

Microsoft have produced updated documentation covering getting started with the AzCopy command-line utility, which covers AzCopy v4
Rochak Mittal writes about new PowerShell support for Azure Site Recovery.
Synology announce support for OneDrive and Azure backup options, we at endjin are excited about this as existing Glacier support ended up being eye-wateringly expensive.
Chris Woodruff points to some useful documentation providing advice for managing concurrency in Microsoft Azure Storage.

🎬 Media

Mingfei Yan has been busy this week with posts explaining how to configure ACS with Media Services key services, how to configure AES encryption for live streaming using Azure Media Services, producing a Q&A about AES and PlayReady License service and getting started with Live Streaming using the Media Services SDK.
Adarsh Solanki produced a guide for using AIB Files with Azure Media Indexer and SQL Server.

⚙️ Hybrid Integration

Cesar Cordero blogs about Service Bus Authentication and Authorization covering some of the recent security changes.
Dan Rosanova provides a lap around ServiceBus in two Azure Friday episodes; the first covers topics, queues and relays, the second covers dead letter messaging and PubSub.

⚙️ Identity and Access Management

Clemens Reijnen has written a great step by step guide showing how to add an existing Office 365 Azure Active Directory to your Azure Subscription.
The Azure AD Team have created a very useful sample that shows how to use OAuth 2.0 to call an Azure AD protected web API (in this case the Graph API) with the user's identity.