Azure Weekly

Azure Weekly Issue 206: 6th January 2019

Happy New Year to all Azure Weekly Subscribers! After a short break over the festive, period we're back and ready to take on 2019!

In 2018 we published 49 issues and the readership grew by 30%. The amount of content being produced on a weekly basis shows that Azure has gained widespread adoption and the momentum from Microsoft has increased to an eye watering level. 

It was also an amazing year for endjin; we grew the team by 60% and doubled revenues. We built a number of modern data platforms using everything from Data Lake, to Cosmos DB, Azure Analysis Services, Data Science Virtual Machines and ML.NET. We finally had a Microsoft case study published about the fascinating work we did to help TalkTalk in their  journey to Azure including the Machine Learning powered Anomaly Detection platform and Data Lake reference archictecture we created. More on these topics soon! We've built a Data Governance Platform to help organisations manage their Data Lakes, which we hope to launch early in 2019, and we created an OpenAPI framework built on top of Azure Functions v2 for easy development of low cost, highly scalable Restful APIs, which we're hoping to open source soon. Amazingly, this only scratches the surface... In short, I really need to start blogging more in 2019!

We wanted to give back to the community in 2018 and sponsored "free to attend events" including dev:east, SQLGLA, SQL Saturday, dotnetsheff, DDD Scotland, DDD Wales, DDD South West, DDD East Anglia and DDD Reading, we also did talks at many of these events as well as .NET User Groups around the UK. We're hoping to do more of this in 2019 too.

I've spent a lot of the last 18 months researching large scale event processing from both a technology and an (water & telco) industry perspective. High-density reactive processing of events is going to be huge in this area; so I was suprised that the announcement that Microsoft open sourced Trill to deliver insights on a trillion events a day seemed to go unnoticed in the lull before Christmas. It is a fascinating example of how Microsoft is converting investments in pure research into innovative new cloud services.

Here are the (rather numerous) announcements and updates since our last issue:

The new year is a time for reflection, and there's a lot of 2018 to reflect upon! Here are a few blogs which showcase the highlights of the past year:

But it is also a time to look forward, so here's to another year of innovation in all things Azure... We're excited to discover what this year may bring!

AI + Machine Learning

Covering: Azure Batch AI, Azure Bot Service, Microsoft Genomics, Machine Learning services, Machine Learning Studio, Cognitive Services, Bing APIs, Computer Vision API, Content moderator, Custom Services, Emotion API, Face API, Language Understanding (LUIS), Linguistic Analysis API, QnA Maker API, Speaker Recognition API, Text Analytics API, Translator Speech API, Translator Text API, Web Language Model API

Analytics

Covering: Azure Databricks, HDInsight, Data Factory, Stream Analytics, Data Lake Analytics, Event Hubs, Power BI, Azure Analysis Services, Apache Spark for HDInsight, Apache Storm for HDInsight, R Server for HDInsight, Data Catalog

Compute

Covering: Virtual Machines, Functions, Batch, Service Fabric, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Cloud Services, Linux Virtual Machines, SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances

Containers

Covering: Container Registry, Container Instances, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Web App for Containers

Databases

Covering: Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, SQL Data Warehouse, Redis Cache, SQL Server Stretch Database, SQL Server on virtual machines, Table storage, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MySQL

Developer Tools

Covering: Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, SDKs, Developer tool integrations, CLIs, Blockchain Workbench

DevOps

Covering: Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Azure DevTest Labs, DevOps tool integrations, Azure DevOps Projects, Azure Lab Services

Identity

Covering: Azure Active Directory, Multi-factor Authentication, Azure Active Directory Domain Services, Azure Active Directory B2C

Integration

Covering: Service Bus, Logic Apps, Event Grid

Internet of Things

Covering: IoT Hub, IoT Suite, IoT Edge, IoT Central, IoT solution accelerators, Time Series Insights, Azure Maps, Azure Sphere

Management and Governance

Covering: Backup, Site Recovery, App Insights, Azure Advisor, Sceduler, Automation, Log Analytics, Azure Monitor, Security & Compliance, Protection & Recovery, Automation & Control, Insight & Analytics, Azure Service Health, Microsoft Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager, Cloud Shell, the Azure mobile app, Azure Policy, Cost Management, Azure Managed Applications

Media

Covering: Media services, Encoding, Live and On-Demand Streaming, Azure Media Player, Content Protection, Media Analytics, Video Indexer

Migration

Covering: Azure Database Migration Service, Azure Migrate, Data Box

Mobile

Covering: App Service (Mobile), Notification Hubs, Mobile apps, API apps, Visual Studio App Centre, Xamarin

Networking

Covering: ExpressRoute, Azure DNS, Virtual Network, Traffic Manager, Load Balancer, VPN Gateway, Application Gateway, Network Watcher

Security

Covering: Azure Information Protection, Key Vault, Security Center, Azure DDoS Protection, Azure Advanced Threat Protection

Storage

Covering: Storage, StorSimple, Data Lake Store, Blob Storage, Disk Storage, Managed Disks, Queue Storage, File Storage, Storage Explorer, Archive Storage

Web

Covering: App Service (Web), API Management, Content Delivery Network, Azure Search, Web apps, Azure SignalR Service

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