Azure Weekly
Issue #360 - 20th February 2022
A few years ago a number of high profile folks at Microsoft changed role to work on "a new big AI endeavour", very little public information was available, except for a recruitment site, which mentions phrases like "planet-scale supercomputer". This week a paper called Singularity: Planet-Scale, Preemptible and Elastic Scheduling of AI Workloads was published. It's a very interesting read.
Sticking with AI, Microsoft Azure's first Azure HPC + AI Day has been announced, and there's an interesting article delving into how the AI powered Visual Studio IntelliCode feature work, in: Typing Less, Coding More: How we delivered IntelliCode whole line completions with a transformer model.
Another interesting post about using Azure Container Apps and KEDA to create self-hosted scalable Azure DevOps Agents deployed using Azure DevOps and Azure CLI. and a new set of features have been announced that help with Advancing Azure Virtual Machine availability monitoring with Project Flash.
Two more announcements are Azure-SSIS Integration Runtime is available in Azure Synapse Analytics Public Preview and Windows Server Hotpatching is here.
⚙️ AI + Machine Learning
- Rimma Nehme (@rimmanehme) unveils Singularity: Planet-Scale, Preemptible and Elastic Scheduling of AI Workloads in this PDF of an academic paper.
- Garfield He blogs about Azure Cognitive Services releases new languages and voices for Neural Text-to-Speech
- Daniel Calbimonte describes How to get key phrases from Azure SQL using Artificial Intelligence
- Vinod Kurpad (@Kurpad) explains how to Analyze unstructured documents and see what's new in Azure Form Recognizer, preview
- The Azure Updates Team announces the Public preview: Azure Machine Learning February 2022 announcements
- The Azure Updates Team describes Public preview: OCR supports 164 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision
🔎 Analytics
- Fikrat Azizov blogs about Implementing Slowly Changing Dimensions on Lakehouse with Synapse Mapping Data Flow
- Andy Chan provides A Case Study in Leveraging Azure Analytics To Optimize on HPC/EDA Cloud Spending
- Chunhua Gu discusses Azure-SSIS Integration Runtime is available in Azure Synapse Analytics Public Preview
- Phani Raj writes about Basic Support Extension for Azure HDInsight 3.6 clusters
🖥️ Compute
- The Azure Updates Team announces the Generally available: Virtual Machine level disk bursting supports additional VM types, and the Public Preview of: Azure Tables extension for Azure Functions, and Azure Monitor predictive autoscale for Azure virtual machine scale sets and Cross region virtual machine restore points
- Ned Pyle announces Windows Server Hotpatching is here
🚢 Containers
- The Azure Updates Team announce the General Availability of: Azure tags support in AKS, and CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes and announce the Public preview: Kubernetes v1.23 support in AKS
- On the Azure Medium blog, Ala Raddaoui asks App Services, ACI, Container Apps, AKS which one is right for my app?
🗄️ Databases
- The Azure Updates Team announces the General Availability of: Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Hyperscale Citus additional regions available and Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Hyperscale Citus new certifications
- On episode 412 of The Azure Podcast, Cynthia Kreng Kendall Roden Cale Teeter Evan Basalik Russell Young And Sujit D'Mello talk with Prabhat Tripathi and Sunil Angarwal about Azure Database for Postgres
- On Tech Community blog, David Engel discusses ODBC Driver 18.0 for SQL Server Released
🛠️ Developer Tools
- Shengyu Fu writes about Typing Less, Coding More: How we delivered IntelliCode whole line completions with a transformer model
- On the Visual Studio blog, Jordan Matthiesen (@JMatthiesen) writes about Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview 6
- On the Visual Studio blog, Dominic Nahous (@DomsterFire) writes about Visual Studio 2022 17.1 is now available
- Abhijit Jana (@AbhijitJana) covers Using Temporary breakpoint in Visual Studio 2022
- Also on the Visual Studio blog, Taysser Gherfal (@taysser) describes Line-staging Interactive Staging of commits in Git.
- Lee Stott (@lee_stott) writes about Visual Studio Code + Java Feb 2022 updates
🔩 DevOps
⚙️ Hybrid + Multicloud
- On the Azure blog, David Dennis announces that Manage Linux anywhere with improved Azure Hybrid Benefit and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure
- Peter Bergen describes Measure your cloud carbon footprint with the Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365 Preview
🎭 Identity
- The Azure Updates Team announces Public preview: Azure Resource Graph configuration changes
💡 Internet of Things
- The Azure Updates Team announces the General availability: Azure Sphere version 22.02 expected on Feb 28, 2022
- On the Redmond magazine site, Kurt Mackie describes Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows Gets Continuous Release Update Branch
📚 Learning
- On the Azure blog, Rachel Pruitt announces Microsoft Azure's first Azure HPC + AI Day
- Deepak Kaushik (@ThinkForDeepak) presents Recording: Webinar: Boost Azure Analytics with Databricks and Deploying an AI model in Azure
- The Azure Updates Team announces the Generally available: New learning content on the Azure IoT Central homepage
⚖️ Management and Governance
- Mark Russinovich (@markrussinovich) presents Advancing Azure Virtual Machine availability monitoring with Project Flash
- The Azure Updates Team announces the Generally available of Alert processing rules in Azure Monitor
- The Ctrl+Alt+Azure Podcast by Tobias Zimmergren and Jussi Roine, chat about Cost Optimization in the Azure Well-Architected Framework
- Zachary Cavanell writes about the Microsoft Mechanics episode: App Architecture Improve Azure App Performance, Reliability, Security, Operations & Cost
- Alan Kinane (@Azure_Alan) blogs about MSP: The well-tempered Azure tenant – Part 3
🌐 Networking
- Sonia Cuff (@soniacuff) describes How to transfer files to your Azure VM with no public open RDP port
- Thorsten Hans covers Custom health probes with Application Gateway Ingress Controller
🔐 Security
- Shoham Dasgupta explains how to Enable Azure Key Vault Purge Protection for TDE BYOK in Azure SQL DB and MI
📦 Storage
- Charbel Nemnom (@charbelnemnom) covers Move Files Between Azure File Share Tiers
- Shruti Pathak describes Azure Cache for Redis TLS: Upcoming migration to DigiCert Global G2 CA Root
🔗 Web
- Julia Liuson announces that Azure Spring Cloud Enterprise is now available in preview
- The Azure Updates Team announces the Public preview: App Service Environment v3 Migration Feature
- Yixuan Wang writes Understand why App Insight cannot resolve internal API Managements request client IP Geo Location
- On episode 180 of The Azure DevOps podcast, Jeffrey Palermo (@jeffreypalermo) discusses Next-gen web services with Shawn Wildermuth