Azure Weekly

Issue #320 - 18th April 2021

I wanted to start this week with a big congratulations to Carmel Eve, who has just published her first LinkedIn Learning Course Exam Tips AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure based on her blog post of the same subject.

There's a particularly fascinating article about text analytics (which has been an area of interest at endjin for a few years), but this post shows the insights that can be mined from unstructured data: Analyzing COVID Medical Papers with Azure and Text Analytics for Health. Next there's an interesting case study about how Royal Bank of Canada are using Always Encrypted with secure enclaves If you are doing anything with analytics, data lake and Power BI, this "Importing Data From ADLSgen2 Into Power BI" blog series is a must read, and a good place to start is Summary Of Findings.

Two product updates of note this week: Azure Blob storage supports objects up to 200 TB in size and Azure API Management support for Availability Zones are both GA.

And to finish off this issues, some developer related items. Microsoft have just released Managed Memory Dump Analyzers, which will be hugely helpful for troubleshooting issues that only happenin production. I'm a huge fan of Notebook-based development, so was pleased to see this article: Using Notebooks more with Azure Data Engineering services. We've been doing some work with Bicep over the last few weeks and it's a great improvement over ARM from a productivity perspective: Deploying Azure Bicep using GitHub Actions. Another interesting post this week: Stop typing PowerShell credentials in demos using PowerShell SecretManagement. Microsoft Graph is one most powerful, yet often overlooked Microsoft services, but you can get started with Developer's guide to Microsoft Graph Learn Together: Building Apps with Microsoft Graph

Finally, a fascinating post about Microsoft's efforts to implement Quic. Other than the big perf gains, I absolutely love that they have integrated performance benchmarks into the DevOps pipeline. This is a good approach for any NFRs you need to track: Making MsQuic Blazing Fast.