Azure Weekly

Issue #341 - 19th September 2021

Another vulnerability was announced in the last week. 'OMIGOD' was discovered by Wiz (who also discovered the Cosmos DB / Jupyter Notebook vulnerability). For more details see the following article Microsoft Azure OMI Vulnerabilities, Dubbed 'OMIGOD,' Still Not Patched.

There are some interesting articles buried in the newsletter this week. A feature we've been waiting for all year is finally here: Azure Synapse Analytics RBAC roles are now Generally Available. We've been talking about CodeOps for a while now, and one of the items on our internal TODO list is gathering telemetry we can use for analytics. So I was very pleased to see the Introducing Azure DevOps Audit Stream post this week. In a similar vein OpenTelemetry + Azure Monitor is worth reading. I'm very happy to see this broad adoption; it's much needed.

There's some really interesting content in the AI space this week. First, the latest updates on Azure Neural TTS: new voices for casual conversations are quite impressive - I'd recommend taking a listen to the audio samples contained in this post. I particularly enjoyed Visualize AI events in real-time from Azure Video Analyzer using Power BI, it's a really compelling example of how you can extract signals from unstructured content which can then be fed into Machine Learning models for actionable insights. I'm fascinated by Natural Language Processing (we use a form of this this in Azure Weekly to do article classification), so this week's AI Show is particularly interesting as it covers custom NLP tasks with Verseagility, I'm looking forward to trying this out over the next week. Finally, Nitya Narasimhan shares A Visual Guide To: Azure Percept.