Azure Weekly

Issue #289 - 30th August 2020

Welcome to Issue 289 of Azure Weekly - Bumper Edition! Firstly, I know that many of you noticed the lack of newsletter last week - apologies! I was having some pretty major rennovations work done to my house (upgrading the power line) and just ran out of time. Sorry! To make up for it, this week we have a bumper edition containing the last two weeks of content, just in time for the UK bank holiday weekend!

The Serverless offer for Azure Cosmos DB now in preview, which provides a much lower, consumption based, entry price for consumers. This is very exciting for those of us operating with small-to-medium workloads! I'm currently working on an update to the tool I used to create this newsletter and this announcment couldn't have come at a better time.

Also, an update to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 access control list recursive update is in public preview. You can now recursively apply ACLs to child folders after creation, which will make permissions management in existing Data Lakes significantly easier.

The Log Analytics REST API is now general availability, and Immersive Reader is now generally available, Mark Russinovich has written an excellent post covering automation, communication, and transparency after an outage, and Anand Raman discusses Empowering remote learning with Azure Cognitive Services.

And, on the Microsoft blog, Shengyu Fu has written a really interesting article on the making of Visual Studio IntelliCode's first deep learning model. Elsewhere, on the Azure Academy YouTube channel, Phil Gibson has provided an Open Service Mesh (OSM) demo, along with a GitHub repo of the code.

Nadeem Ahamed has summarised the Azure Functions Live session from August 2020. Elle Crosby discusses some Azure cost best practices and the resources that can cause surprises in your Azure bill. Mauro Minella discusses Responsible AI in action, locally and on Azure Machine Learning, providing some excellent theory and examples.