Azure Weekly

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.

AI + Machine Learning

Covering: Anomaly detector, Azure Bot Service, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Open Datasets, Bing APIs, Cognitive Services, Computer Vision, Content moderator, Custom vision, Data Science Virtual Machines, Face, Form Recogniser, Immersive Reader, Ink Recogniser, Language Understanding (LUIS), Machine Learning Studio, Microsoft Genomics, ML.NET, Personaliser, Project Cortex, QnA Maker, Speaker Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Speech translation, Text Analytics, Text to Speech , Translator Speech, Translator Text

Analytics

Covering: Apache Spark for HDInsight, Apache Storm for HDInsight, Azure Analysis Services, Azure Data Explorer, Azure Data Share, Azure Databricks, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Synapse Analytics, Data Catalog, Data Factory, Data Lake Analytics, Event Hubs, HDInsight, .NET for Apache Spark, R Server for HDInsight, Azure Purview

Containers

Covering: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Red Hat OpenShift, CNAB, CNCF, Container Instances, Container Registry, Porter, WSL, Web App for Containers

Databases

Covering: Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for MariaDB, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Database Edge, Azure Cache for Redis, SQL Data Warehouse, SQL Server on virtual machines, SQL Server Stretch Database, Table storage

Developer Tools

Covering: App Configuration, Azure Lab Services, CLIs, Developer tool integrations, SDKs, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Online

DevOps

Covering: Azure Artifacts, Azure Boards, Azure DevOps, Azure Pipelines, Azure Repos, Azure Test Plans, Azure DevTest Labs, DevOps tool integrations

Hybrid + Multicloud

Covering: Azure Arc, Azure Stack

Internet of Things

Covering: Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Central, Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT solution accelerators, Azure Maps, Azure Sphere, Azure Time Series Insights, IoT DevKit, WildernessLabs, Windows 10 IoT Core Services

Learning

Covering: Microsoft Certifications, Azure Certifications, Microsoft Learning Paths, Certification Pathway Information

Management and Governance

Covering: Automation, Azure Advisor, Azure Backup, Azure Blueprints, Azure Lighthouse, Azure Managed Applications, Azure mobile app, Azure Monitor, Azure Policy, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Service Health, Azure Site Recovery, Cloud Shell, Cost Management, Microsoft Azure portal, Scheduler, Azure Purview

Media

Covering: Azure Media Player, Content Protection, Encoding, Live and On-Demand Streaming, Media Analytics, Media Services, Video Indexer

Migration

Covering: Azure Database Migration Service, Azure Migrate, Data Box

Mobile

Covering: App Service (Mobile), Mobile apps, Notification Hubs, Visual Studio App Centre, Xamarin

Networking

Covering: Application Gateway, Azure Bastion, Azure DNS, Azure ExpressRoute, Azure Firewall, Azure Firewall Manager, Azure Front Door, Azure Internet Analyzer, Azure Private Link, Content Delivery Network, Load Balancer, Network Watcher, Traffic Manager, Virtual Network, Virtual WAN, VPN Gateway, Web Application Firewall

Security

Covering: Azure DDoS Protection, Azure Information Protection, Azure Sentinel, Key Vault, Security Center

Storage

Covering: Archive Storage, Avere vFXT for Azure, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure FXT Edge Filer, Azure HPC Cache, Azure NetApp Files, Blob Storage, Disk Storage, File Storage, Managed Disks, Queue Storage, Storage Accounts, Storage Explorer, StorSimple

Web

Covering: API apps, API Management, App Service (Web), Azure Cognitive Search, Azure SignalR Service, Azure Spring Cloud, Web apps

Azure Virtual Desktop

Covering: Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Weekly Archive

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