Azure Weekly
Issue #3 - 22nd November 2014
It was quite a momentous week in the Microsoft ecosystem; three big events in Future Decoded, DEVintersection & Connect.
Some very interesting stats were highlighted in Scott Guthrie's keynote:
- Azure is available in 19 regions (AWS has 11, Google has 3), with up to 600,000 servers per region
- 10,000 new Azure customers per week, > 60% are using higher level services
- 1,200,000 SQL databases
- 30 trillion storage objects
- 350 million Azure Active Directory users with over 18 billion Azure Active Directory authentications every week
- 2 million developers registered with Visual Studio Online
- On launch day of Titanfall, 300,000 virtual machines were spun up
- New functionality is delivered, on average, every 36 hours... oh and the .NET Framework has been open sourced with official distributions for Linux and Mac. No biggie.
⚙️ Jobs
- endjin are looking for a new apprentice for 2015.
- Are you a recent graduate, like Mike Larah, or do you want to change direction in your career, like Alice Waddicor?
- Endjin apprentices can come from any kind of background, but they all share a love of learning, solving technological puzzles, and making things work well. If this sounds like you, or the career you'd like to have, they'd love to talk to you.
- For more information see: http://endjin.com/join-us/
⚖️ Management and Governance
- Ahmet Alp Balkan blogs about deploying your own private Docker Registry on Azure
- Kundana Palagiri describes how to set up an Octopus server and deploy Octopus's 'Tentacle Agents' on Azure
- Maarten Balliauw of JetBrains blogs about running builds on Azure with TeamCity and the Azure SDK for Java
- Trevor Sullivan demonstrates how to clean up unused Azure VHD Disks
- Davide Benvegnù blogs about adding Azure Application Insights to a Web Site
- Mary Branscombe takes a closer look at Microsoft's new Azure Marketplace
🖥️ Compute
- The Azure SDK 2.5 release has been announced and there are a few breaking changes around the diagnostics API
- Mary Jo Foley talks to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and asks "What's next for Microsoft's platform as a service?". The answer mentioned Microservices
- Sung Hsueh begins a series of blogs about security extensions announced as part of TechEd Europe. Part 1 looks at Encrypting Azure Virtual Machines with CloudLink SecureVM
- Boris Scholl presented a Connect() session on Visual Studio Virtual Machines on Azure for MSDN Subscribers
🌐 Networking
- Steve Plank asks What country is your Azure IP address in? And points to this Microsoft Azure Datacenter IP Ranges document.
💡 Internet of Things
- Elliott Hamai provides a short but sweet guide to using the Deploy to Azure Button for Azure Websites
- Mark Brown announces the Azure Websites Authentication / Authorization preview release
- Scott Hanselman presented a Connect() session on Cloud development with Azure and Visual Studio
- Paul Yuknewicz gave a presentation "What’s New For Azure Developers"
- Azure mobile services were highlighted at Connect() by Kirill Gavrylyuk, who spoke about Cross Platform Enterprise Apps With Azure Mobile Services. Kirill also gave a talk about High Scale Cross Platform Push Notifications With Microsoft Azure
- Nir Mashkowski provided an overview of Azure websites at Connect()
- Lance Olson, Mat Velloso, Paul Yuknewicz (MSFT) spoke about Microsoft Azure Platform & Tools at Connect()
- Taswar Bhatti explains what you need to know to get started with Notification Hub
- Brady Gaster blogs about New Developer and Debugging Features for Azure WebJobs in Visual Studio
⚙️ Data and Analytics
- Liam Cavanagh presented a Connect() session on Azure Search and also describes how to sync SQL Server Data with Azure Search
- Ryan CrawCour gave an introduction to Azure DocumentDB at Connect()
- Radu Vunvulea highlights elastic scale for Azure SQL Database as a perfect solution for sharding
- Rod Trent writes that SQL Database auditing is now out of preview and into general release
- John MacIntyre provides an update on on DocumentDB's Bulk Add Documents functionality and Query Syntax Highlighting
- Emily Chen blogs about MS Open Tech China's introduction of an Azure-Based Open Data Solution Using CKAN and OData
- Pietro Brambati talks about Redis Cache "internals" on Channel 9
- Matt Winkler spoke at Connect() about HDInsight Tools for Visual Studio
- Arnaud Cleret blogged about processing IIS ETW events using Azure Stream Analytics
- Ryan Swanstrom writes about creating an end-to-end Predictive Model in AzureML using Linear Regression
- Azure Machine Learning now supports web service parameters
- Venture Beat reports taht Microsoft are to give researchers grants for its Azure Machine Learning service
- Adnan Hashmi highlights how Pier 1 is using the Azure Machine Learning to build a better relationship with their customers
- The SQL Server team blog that AlwaysOn Availability Groups Now Support Internal Listeners on Azure Virtual Machines and show how to predict what's next with Machine Learning.
- Nick Trogh points out that you can run Hive queries against your Azure HDInsight cluster straight from Visual Studio
- Tillmann Eitelberg, Oliver Engels and Niko Neugebauer talk about using SQL Server Integration Services to control the power of Azure HDInsight
- Some FAQs about Azure Data Factory have been published
- Ken Ross has produced an Azure Stream Analytics Proof-Of-Concept
- Cihan Biyikoglu talks about running Couchbase Server on Microsoft Azure
- Peter Gothard has written an article entitled "Big Giving: How Microsoft Azure helps JustGiving make charity agile"
📦 Storage
- Anish Gangwar provides further information about the new Azure Site Recovery capabilities announced a few weeks ago
- Sandrino Di Mattia blogs about mounting your Azure File Shares on-premises through WebDAV
- On the Azure blog, Herman Daeubler writes about High Availability for a file share using WSFC, ILB and 3rd-party Software SIOS Datakeeper
- Abhishek Hemrajani writes about synchronous storage replication and Disaster Recovery to the Cloud w/ Azure Site Recovery, EMC and NetApp
- Ben Di Qual highlights a Webinar on Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) with Azure Site Recovery and InMage Scout
- Neerja Rewal blogs "Agent install and configuration for Hyper-V hosts when using Microsoft Azure Site Recovery for disaster recovery to Azure"
🎬 Media
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
- Sharad Cornejo Altuzar blogs about Azure Service Bus Performance - Http Batch send
- Brad Anderson on why Hybrid Cloud & How to Start Implementing