Azure Weekly

Issue #281 - 28th June 2020

Ian Griffiths has recorded a nice tutorial on creating Custom C# Spark Jobs in Azure Synapse. There are also a couple of interesting announcements this week; Apache Spark Connector for SQL Server and Azure SQL is now open source and the Azure SDKs June 2020 release is out.

Mark Russinovich has written an excellent post about simplifying declarative deployments in Azure. This covers the new "pre-deployment impact analysis", and how to manage groups/subscriptions at scale, along with some other useful tips! And, though this has been around for a little while now, James Serra has highlighted that you can now Upload files to ADLS Gen2 from the portal. As previously this had to be done via storage explorer, this is a great time saver!

Business Continuity has been a hot topic during the pandemic. Many organised only had Business Continuity plans drawn up to deal with a localised incident (a data centre outage, or a physical office being affected by a terrorism incident), but had no plans for having to allow all their employees to work from home during a pandemic. Endjin went remote in 2017 as part of our Business Continuity plans after one of the major train stations in London was closed for an entire month for engineering works meaning that most employees couldn't commute into the office. It worked so well, we never went back! Sarah Lean has created a short series of videos on the topic in Business Continuity With Azure. Well worth a watch.

Finally congratulations to Carmel Eve for passing her Azure AZ-204 exam this week! Gregor Suttie has some useful exam resources on his blog if getting certified is something you're interested in.