Azure Weekly
Issue #34 - 11th July 2015
This week, the Azure story that caught out attention was the description of the 'Chaos Engineering' approach used by the Azure Search team. Heather Nakama from the Search team describes how a 'search chaos monkey' along the lines of Netflix's chaos monkey, is used to inject errors into a test environment, to help them develop a resilient system.
There was also a new version of the Docker VM Extension with Docker Hub integration, Docker Compose support and the ability to pass an arbitrary list of arguments to the Docker daemon. Other new features included the ability to make an Azure Web App require TLS client certificates to authenticate, and Elastic Database queries are now available in preview for Azure SQL Database Premium Tier, with the ability to query a set of databases at once and generate a unified result set.
⚖️ Management and Governance
On the Docker blog, Adam Herzog writes DockerCon 2015 Videos: Day 1 of Use Case and DockerCon 2015 Videos: Day 2 of Docker, Docker, Docker and Nathan Leclaire writes a Docker Machine 0.3.0 Deep Dive
On the Azure blog, Leon Welicki (@lwelicki) provides an update on Azure Preview Portal Improvements
- On the Kloud blog, Simon Waight covers setting Instance Level Public IPs on Azure VMs
On the Microsoft Openness site, Openness Team promote the Microsoft Virtual Academy course on Exploring Microservices in Docker and Microsoft Azure
In episode 83 of the Azure podcast, Cale and Sujit talk about the Azure Billing API
On the Azure blog, Ahmet Alp Balkan (@ahmetalpbalkan), Software Engineer - Azure Compute, announces a new version of the Docker VM Extension which has Docker Compose support and Docker Hub/Registry authentication support.
🖥️ Compute
Also on the Azure blog, Nicole Herskowitz blogs that Microsoft was named a leader in Gartner's Public Cloud Storage Services for Second Consecutive Year
On Channel 9's Tuesdays with Corey, Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management on the Windows Azure IaaS team meets up Jeffrey Snover and talks about Nano Server
Also on Channel 9, Chris Caldwell and Jessica DeVita discuss Microsoft and Open Source, covering Linux in Azure, micro-services and containerization tools, Chef, Puppet and other configuration management tools
- Mark J Brown (@markjbrown) discusses fixing Bad Address Errors Setting up Azure Service Fabric
On the Microsoft Openness site, Mark Hill showcases Dovecot's use of Azure to achive a price point of $1 per managed mailbox
On the TechKB blog, 'Mikecoutanche' explains how to reserve Public IP Addresses for Azure VMs and Cloud Services
On the Windows IT Pro site, John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) explains how to understand Automatic Updates for OS Settings in Azure and answers the question Why do I receive a deprecation error related to Switch-AzureMode use?
On MSDN, Anisha Pindoria covers Wouter De Kort's Visual Studio Online Extension for Folder Management
🌐 Networking
On the Windows IT Pro site, John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) answers the question can I VPN to Azure using the Point-to-Site from a non-Windows machine?
💡 Internet of Things
- On the Azure blog, Nazim Lala (@nazimlala), Software Engineer - Azure Websites, talks about enabling Client Certificate Authentication for an Azure Web App
On MSDN, Frank Boucher writes up the journey of an Azure SDK upgrade
Ruslan describes how to find out outbound IP addresses used by an Azure Web App
Donovan Brown explains how to securely store Azure connection information
⚙️ Data and Analytics
On the Azure blog, Heather Nakama describes how Azure Search uses 'Chaos Engineering' similar to Netflix's 'chaos monkey' to build a resilient system
Also on the Azure blog, Gaurav Malhotra, Program Manager - Azure Data Factory - explains how Azure got real time analytics for the 'how old' demo (which predicts your age) after it went viral, using Azure Data Factory and HDInsight
On the Revolution Analytics blog, Andrie De Vries writes up his RHadoop tutorial at the UseR2015 conference
- Also on the Revolution Analytics blog, David Smith (@revodavid) blogs about R at Microsoft
On Channel 9, Scott Hanselman and Seth Juarez give an intro to Azure Machine Learning
On the MSDev Show, Mat Velloso (@matvelloso) talks about Azure Machine Learning and Project Oxford
📦 Storage
On the Azure blog, Stuart Ozer announces that distributed query capability is now available in preview in Azure SQL Database, allowing applications to retrieve data from an entire collection of databases through a single connection
🎬 Media
On Channel 9, Manling Zhang talks to Scott Hanselman about recent updates to Azure CDN
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
On the Windows IT Pro site, Rod Trent writes that Microsoft brings on-premises and Cloud closer together for Monitoring, Automation and Data Protection
On the Kloud blog, Mark Southwell writes about Azure MFA Server International Deployment
On Channel 9, Chris Caldwell and Keith Mayer discuss Orchestrating Hybrid Cloud with Chef and Azure and Azure Key Vault, in parts 22 and 23 of the series Building your Hybrid Cloud
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
On Brisbane Cloud User Group blog, @aaronw2003 writes up his upgrade on an existing installation of Azure Active Directory Connect beta to GA
'Adminian' describes a console app for authenticating to the Azure Service Management API
On the Windows IT Pro site, John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) answers the questions I have DirSync installed to synchronize to Azure, is there an easy upgrade to Azure AD Connect? and Why am I receiving a missing-partition-for-run-step error in Synchronization Service Manager after deploying Azure AD Connect?