Azure Weekly
Issue #35 - 18th July 2015
The big news this week is that Azure Batch is now generally available; with an exciting alteration to the pricing plan - the resource management and job scheduling capabilities will be free, you will just pay the charges for compute, storage and networking resources that your application uses.
We at endjin are particularly enamoured with Azure Batch; we’re currently helping a number of customers adopt it, and we were fortunate enough to have two members of the Batch team spend the day at endjin HQ a few weeks ago where we showed them a proof of concept counterfeit image detection application we have built on top of it. It’s a great service for anyone who has computational workloads that they need to run at scale. Look out for a series of blog posts about Azure Batch on the endjin blogs soon!
In other news Power BI General Availability is scheduled for July 24th. If you combine Azure Data Factory, Azure Batch and Power BI – you have an incredibly powerful and compelling data production pipeline, computational engine and reporting platform.
A public preview of the Azure Data Catalog was also announced this week by the Machine Learning Team; the Azure Data Catalog is an enterprise metadata portal for the self-service discovery of data sources and will be available from the 13th of July.
⚖️ Management and Governance
On the Azure blog, Christopher Mank describes how to start Automation Runbooks in Response to Events in Visual Studio Online
On the Docker blog, Steve Francia blogs a recap of the Contributor Summit DockerCon 2015, while John Willis shares Docker Tutorial 13 - Getting Started with the New Experimental Docker Networking
- Mike Hacker (@mphacker) describes getting Started with PowerShell for Azure Government Update
On TechNet, Rasmus Hald blogs about converting certificate format to BASE 64 string using PowerShell
The Insider Technologies blog features a post on Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 and how to manage Azure IaaS VMs
🖥️ Compute
On the Azure blog, Alex Sutton announces Azure Batch Generally Available
Also on the Azure blog, Tejas Karmarkar announces that availability of Linux RDMA on Microsoft Azure while Guang Hu announces that update 2 for HPC Pack 2012 R2 is now available
On the New Relic blog, Nick Floyd writes that Naming Your .NET Stuff a Whole Lot Easier in New Relic
On MSDN, Michael Lee describes DevOps for Azure Cloud Services
In the latest "Tuesdays with Corey" episode Corey talks DSC and ARM templates with Jeffrey Snover
- Rajinder Singh (@rajsinghper) blogs about installing Java Runtime in Azure Cloud Services with Chocolatey and discusses installing Splunk Forwarder in Azure Web/Worker Roles with a Startup Task
- On the Windows IT Pro site, John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) writes about smallest subnet possible in Azure and explains how to Resize Azure data disk error when not between 20 and 1023 GB
🌐 Networking
- Filip Ekberg (@fekberg) covers Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager
💡 Internet of Things
On Channel 9, Byron Tardif discusses documenting your APIs with Swagger
On the Azure blog, Piyush Joshi announces that announcing the release of Cordova plugin for Azure Mobile Engagement
"Faister" blogs about Azure API App FTP Connector - how to solve 227 entering passive mode error
⚙️ Data and Analytics
On MSDN, Power BI Team announces Power BI General Availability is coming on July 24th
Also on TechNet, ML Blog Team announces the Public Preview of Azure Data Catalog
- On the Azure blog, Oliver Chiu announces that Microsoft delivers interactive analytics on Big Data with the release of Spark for Azure HDInsight
- On C# Corner, Narasimha Reddy Chennupalli describes connecting to SQL Azure via the SQL Server Management Studio
- Also on the Azure blog, Stephen Baron writes about New DocumentDB ORDER BY Features in the Azure Preview Portal
On the Revolution Analytics blog, David Smith (@revodavid) provides a June 2015 roundup of news
📦 Storage
On the Windows IT Pro site, John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) describes how to check actual size of data in Azure storage account or container
On the Azure blog, Gaurav Daga announces the GA of Disaster Recovery for VMware Virtual Machines and Physical Machines to Azure using ASR
🎬 Media
On the Azure blog, Amit Rajput explains how to create live realtime captions with Azure Media Services and Player
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
- On the Windows IT Pro site, John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) covers AWS to Azure Migrations Included in Today's Hybrid Cloud Updates from Microsoft
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
On the Azure podcast, episode 84 covers Azure AD
- Freek Berson (@fberson) writes about adding Conditional Access & MFA to Azure RemoteApp