Azure Weekly

Issue #373 - 29th May 2022

A bumper edition this week (about 2x the normal size!), covering all the announcements from BUILD 2022. Jumping straight in, the biggest announcement IMHO is that Azure Container Apps has reached General Availability; this took me by surprise, as I thought it was at least another 6 months out, but I couldn't be happier. From my own perspective, we finally have a flexible serverless, consumption based Azure PaaS service for hosting different .NET workloads; and feels like a spiritual successor to Cloud Web and Worker Roles, with higher compute density and many other bells and whistles. Although we span out Power BI content into the Power BI Weekly Newsletter - this feature is such an important one, that I decided to include it here; Announcing the public preview of Datamarts in Power BI, which is also covered in more detail on Microsoft Mechanics: Add Data at Scale Datamarts in PowerBI. Many of our customers struggle with the "last mile" of self-service (BI or Semantic Models), and this will go along way to solving that problem.

Another service announcement that took me by surprise was "Service Connector": Connecting services has never been so easy with Service Connector – now Generally Available. I'm also exceedingly excited to hear about the private preview of port tunneling in Visual Studio for ASP.NET Core projects; over the last decade whenever I've been working on projects involving 3rd party services such as Twilio, or IOT projects, I've had to use a paid-for 3rd Party Service in order to enable a local development experience. I'm so glad this is going to be built into Visual Studio, initially to enable PowerPlatform debugging.

Two interesting announcements in the Developer Tools space are: Introducing Azure Deployment Environments and Introducing Microsoft Dev Box - which is a new dedicated service for development workstations in Azure, with "lab management" type features for managing these resources at scale within an org.

Improvements to AAD were also announced: Review and remove AAD inactive users in Public Preview, and while Azure Container Apps stole the limelight, significant investments into AKS have also been made, some of the most interesting ones are highlighted in this post: Dapr, ML, GitOps Extensions GA on AKS.

Lots has been happening with SQL Server: Ledger now generally available in Azure SQL Database (who needs blockchain?), the Public preview of Azure Synapse Link for SQL mean you can now connect your transactional workloads to your analytical store; and the Azure SQL Database External REST Endpoints Integration Early Adoption Program was also announced.

There are so many other announcements, but I'll leave you to review the relevant categories below. But there were two other articles that I thought were particularly interesting, and I wanted to highlight them in case they were drowned out by all the other BUILD announcements. Generating and Visualizing H3 (Geospatial) Indexed Data with Kusto and Python, and because we've also been building out our own Backstage infrastructure at endjin, this was a particularly timely article: An Introduction to Running and Deploying Backstage on Azure.