Azure Weekly

Issue #256 - 5th January 2020

Happy New Year to everyone, and welcome to the first edition of Azure Weekly in 2020! I'm still slightly shocked that this year will mark the 6th anniversary of this newsletter, and also endjin's 10th birthday. Time flies when you're having fun!

2019 felt, on the whole, like a stabilising year in the Azure ecosystem; there were a few big game changing announcements (Synapse being the big one IMHO), but mainly it felt like services were being refined & matured, SDK's expanded with idiomatic support for multiple popular languages, better Azure AD support was rolled out across many core services, and lots of developer productivity improvements were made. It was also the start of the third wave; a container-based reboot of Azure where services can be run in the cloud, on prem, on "the edge" (i.e. IoT devices), on local development machines or other cloud platforms. This is, of course, a quite complex strategy, and Azure Arc is a management wrapper around this approach.

There is no doubt that containers are going to play a significant part in the future, but I'm really hoping that they just become an implementation detail and enable higher level PaaS & Serverless models, rather than becoming the new IaaS; no-one wants to manage K8 clusters; modern organisations need more derive more value rather than perpetuating old models with new tech.

.NET Core 3.x is another landmark from 2019; this one felt like it was coming for ages; a mature & stable cross-platform release with many performance and productivity optimisations, and the final milestone before the one true unified, game changing .NET 5.x. I had the privilidge of being a tech reviewer for Ian Griffiths' Programming C# 8.0 Book for O'Reilly and we put some of the new zero allocation memory features to good use in the platform we delivered for OceanMind; we replaced a OSS IoT protocol decoder with a custom build C# Span<T> version - message processing went from several thousand to several million per second, which allowed us to migrate this compute from an always-on cluster into an Azure Function, saving tens of thousands of pounds per month in compute costs. .NET Core 3.x + Azure is an incredibly powerful combination. .NET Core deserves more love than it gets.

I'm personally very excited by Dapr, which feels like a distillation of the best ideas from Service Fabric (a very underrated and underappreciated stack), and Azure Functions, integrated with the OSS technologies that have gained traction (containers, gRPC etc), to deliver polyglot microservices. Again, this will really come into its own if it is offered via a serverless model on Azure. The last thing we did before the festive break was get Dapr running on a 4 node Raspberry Pi cluster, and it worked like a charm. Along with Dapr, The Open Application Model (OAM), Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB) and Porter are technologies worth keeping an eye on - more on these last two in the upcoming weeks.

Also in 2019, we span out all the Power BI content into a new Power BI Weekly newsletter, curated by Ed Freeman (who also happened to win "Cloud Apprentice of the Year" at the National Computing Awards), and we decided to publish the newsletter content to their own websites: https://azureweekly.info/ & https://powerbiweekly.info/ so people could subscribe via RSS as an alternative to a weekly email.

This issue is a festive bumper edition this week, so allocate a little more time to digest the backlog from our break.

Not many announcments since the last newsletter. There's now Better performance with bursting enhancement on Azure Disks, there are some New enhancements for Azure IoT Edge automatic deployments, and some New features in Azure Monitor Metrics Explorer based on your feedback.

In the last newsletter, we highlighted a number of submissions for the Azure Advent Calendar. In case you missed it, Carmel wrote/presented a wonderful piece on Building a secure data solution using Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 - do check it out. Elsewhere, towards the end of December, Ari Bornstein described Getting Started With AzureML Notebook VMs and Michael Coutanche wrote about the The power of Azure Lighthouse.