Azure Weekly

Issue #293 - 27th September 2020

Welcome to issue 293 of Azure Weekly, and it's all about Microsoft Ignite 2020 this week! So many announcements, I can't really even cover them all in the editorial, so I'll pull out the items I think are most interesting and leave you to scan the categories that are relevant or you can read the Ignite Book of News, watch the highlights here, and all of the sessions are available on the Ignite site. One interesting observation is that although a few new services were unveiled, feature announcements happen every week and don't really seem to be batched up for events like Build or Ignite anymore.

New services include Azure Automanage (automate daily management tasks), Azure Resource Mover (move resources between regions), Backup Center (unified management experience), Azure Orbital (Ground Station as a Service), and finally Azure Communication Service which seems to be a direct competitor to (the excellent) Twilio. I was most interested to see some of the announcements in the data & analytics space - particularly around Azure Synapse (see the Analytics section).

There is also quite a bit of content around identity this week, first we've been building out a SaaS platform, and published an article about our learnings: a simple invite user flow for AAD B2C without custom policies. There are also updates for Azure AD authentication features for Azure SQL DB, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure SQL Managed Instance, and a hot topic with our customers: Identity at Microsoft Ignite: Rising to the challenges of secure remote access and employee productivity. Many orgs need to re-evaluate their identity & security defaults; requiring a VPN connection before you can authenticate is a huge barrier to remote access, productivity, and services like Autopilot.

Other highlights of interest include What's new in Azure SQL Managed Instance at Ignite 2020, and new maintenance control features for performance sensitive workloads.

From a skills and learning perspective, there's a new IoT Event Learning Path, and you can Join the Microsoft Ignite Cloud Skills Challenge 2020.