Azure Weekly

Issue #326 - 30th May 2021

Microsoft BUILD 2021 occurred this week, so there are quite a few announcements (you might want to make a ☕). As ever the Book of News is a great summary, and you can view any of the session on demand. It's worth calling out the keynote "Application Development with Scott Hanselman & Friends" because a huge amount of effort has been put into creating differentiated conference content in an attempt to break away from the PowerPoint + an autocue script session which has become the mainstay of remote conferences during the pandemic. Congrats to Scott & co for creating something engaging, entertaining and self-aware.

Many of the announcements at BUILD focused around Azure Arc and the ability to run more Azure PaaS services on it. This opens a number of very interesting scenarios for orgs that want the benefit of cloud services, but on prem (or "disconnected" or cross-cloud). There are many announcements in the Containers section of the newsletter, but I'll highlight this article as a good overview: Running Azure PaaS anywhere using Azure application services with Azure Arc. Another high level article that dovetails into this strategy is: Gain flexibility to run open-source applications your way with Microsoft Azure.

I'm going to highlight some of the non-arc related announcements; first off the public preview of Azure Confidential Ledger (hopefully with a smaller carbon footprint than traditional blockchain implementations). Next, the excellent Azure Cognitive Search service has new indexers allow you to ingest data from many new data sources, including Cosmos DB Gremlin API, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, SharePoint Online. This opens up knowledge management scenarios across a number of silos.

In the data & analytics arena Delta Lake comes to Synapse: Query Delta Lake files using T-SQL in Azure Synapse Analytics public preview, Azure Storage Blob inventory (which allows you to understand the number of objects and their sizes etc) is in public preview available in all public regions. And Azure Cosmos DB role-based access control RBAC now in general availability.

In web technologies, native support for WebSocket APIs in Azure API Management is in public preview. There are New Storage Providers (SQL Server and Netherite) for Azure Durable Functions, App Service Managed Certificates now generally available, and an interesting article on Levelling Up Static Web Apps With the CLI.

Finally, there's an interesting article about using the Azure Percept Development Kit to build and run object recognition models