Azure Weekly

Issue #272 - 26th April 2020

This week, on the Azure blog, James Baker has written a post about how we can Optimize cost and performance with Query Acceleration for Azure Data Lake Storage. We've not had a chance to try this out yet, but it's definitely something we'll be looking into!

The updates team have also announced that the Azure Support API is generally available. This means that there is now an easy way to automate the mnanaging of Azure Support tickets.

And, on Azure Tips and Tricks, Michael Crump has explained how you can Use Azure Functions Premium Plan to avoid cold-starts. Not only this but, as we recently found out when carrying out a performance investigation, upgrading to premium can have a huge effect on performance due to the improved hardware and removal of limits on connections. It's definitely an idea to keep this option in mind when investigating how to improve the performance of a serverless system!

There have also been a couple of great DevOps related posts: Martin Brandl has provided an easy-to-follow walkthrough on How to deploy Azure Resource Manager ARM templates with GitHub Actions. And Mahendar Madhavaram and Eduardo Bottcher have provided an example of How to retrieve all work items associated with a release pipeline using Azure DevOps API.

We've been quite DevOps focused here at endjin over the past few weeks, with the exciting addition of James Dawson to our team. We're excited to see how we can improve our own CI/CD processes using his expertise! And, on our blog, Carmel has highlighted that the Recording of her and Jess' Azure Oxford talk: Combatting illegal fishing with Azure for less than £10/month is now available. Definitely worth a watch if you have the time!

And now something aimed at the UK Tech Sector...

Bytes For Heroes are looking for UK technology companies to help us with a COVID-19 based charity initiative that we launched last week; they're on a mission to provide hot meals to 1,000,000 NHS front line workers that are putting their lives on the line to save others.

By partnering with local catering firms, they're funding them to provide hot meals, and make a tangible difference to the lives of those who are doing what we can't do.

They kicked off with a pilot programme in Bristol at Southmeads Hospital, and have provided over 2000 NHS heroes with hearty meal, which went down really well! But they've got such a long way to go.

They've signed up Amazon AWS and UKCloud among a number of other technology companies that want to know they're making a difference.

Since launching, they've received some great press, including an article on Tuesday in The Register.

If you want to make a real difference and can get on board with their cause, they're looking for help in a number of ways:

• Funding of meals - You can choose to either support the national effort, or support your local hospital directly. Meals are ranging between £2 and £5 per meal dependent on location.
• Helping to raise awareness - Publicly supporting the cause via your social media channels and sales teams.
• Lending a hand - If any of your teams want to volunteer to support our cause, and can help with PR, marketing, fund raising or want to be involved in the front line logistics, they'll help to make that happen.

How they can help you:

• Your logo on our website with a link back to your website. This will be in "Our Supporters" section.
• Social media highlighting your company as a supporter and thanking you.
• Statistics from our app (Launching Friday 24th April) which will give you data on how many people the overall effort is supporting and how many NHS Heroes your donations have specifically provided.

They're not stopping there!

The next version of the app will allow you to provide a personalised message back to the NHS hero that redeems their meal voucher. Allowing you to say a special thankyou from your business for the work that they're doing.

And don't worry!

The team at Bytes for Heroes is 100% volunteer driven and 100% of all donations go straight to catering teams who are delivering these services at cost! Your money will go straight to feeding those who they want to support.

Get in touch now at https://www.bytesforheroes.com