Azure Weekly

Issue #276 - 24th May 2020

As I'm sure most of you are aware, this week was the first virtual Microsoft Build! So, unsurprisingly, there have been a lot of exciting announcements and updates...

The first of these is around Azure Synapse Link. This is a cloud-native implementation of Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP), and is a game-changer as it provides a one-click, non-disruptive way to get real-time analytics from transactional data stored in operational databases. It is now available in Cosmos DB and will be added to other database types in the coming months!

Jess has written an excellent blog about why Azure Synapse Analytics should be on your roadmap, which is definitely worth a read if you want to learn more about this technology.

The updates team have also announced the Serverless pricing model for Azure Cosmos DB. This is an exciting step in bringing more cloud services towards a consumption-based pricing model!

Alongside this, Static Web Apps single page hosting in App Service is now in preview. Over the past few months we have begun to migrate a lot of our sites to single-page applications so this is something we'll definitely be making use of in the near future.

Also, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 PowerShell and CLI are now generally available, which is excellent news for being able to automate the management of secure data architectures on Azure.

And finally, here is a run through of the Build updates for Azure Cognitive Search, and an update on the Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2020 Q2.

For a full list of the updates this week, it is definitely worth having a skim through the Azure updates blog!