Azure Weekly

Issue #336 - 15th August 2021

This week, the updates team have announced global disaster recovery via Azure Site Recovery. Deborah Chen has announced that partition keys are now available in private preview for the Azure Cosmos DB Core (SQL) API, which means scaling for SaaS applications just got much easier. Tobi Otolorin announces that Azure Firewall Premium is now in general availability!

Anna Hoffman provides a summary of all Azure SQL, including product updates, videos & blogs. Goran Vuksic runs through detecting room occupancy with Azure Percept. Daniela Encarnacion Holguin dicusses anchoring with Azure Spatial Anchors and Azure Object Anchors. There are two good Dapr related blog posts; the first asks Why do we need Dapr? and the second highlights a better developer experience with the Dapr Visual Studio Code extension. AzureFunBytes covers an ntro to BicepLang with Alex Frankel. Well worth a watch - Bicep is a significant productivity improvement over ARM templates for Infrastructure as Code.

And finally, I wanted to end this issue by bidding a very fond farewell to Carmel Eve. Carmel first joined endjin in 2016 as an intern, and joined our apprenticeship programme two years later after graduating and taking a year out to travel. In 2019 she won Apprentice Engineer of the Year at the Rising Star awards, and she also became a STEM ambassador, with the aim of promoting and supporting women entering the technology industry in her local area. To top the year off, she trained for, and then climbed to Everest Base Camp (using Azure to help her train of course!). Within a year of going to NDC as an attendee she was on stage at NDC London giving a talk about Combatting illegal fishing with Machine Learning and Azure, sharing her thoughts on what makes a good API as API Specification Conference and showed how to build a secure data solution using Azure Data Lake Store at SQLBits. Carmel shared 5 ways to prepare for public speaking to help others following in her footsteps. During the pandemic Carmel shared her own tips on managing mental health and remote working and effectively managing mental capacity, these blogs were incredibly popular and highlighted common mental health issues in our industry. This year she became a LinkedIn Learning Instructor and published her first course Exam Tips AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure. She helped launch Reaqtor, by creating a 101 video demonstrating how Reaqtor combines reactivity with reliable data processing. It's been thoroughly joyful to watch Carmel grow from a graduate to a seasoned professional over the last 5 years. We wish her the best of luck with her travels through Europe and South America over the next few years, and hope to cross paths again in the future!