Azure Weekly

Issue #376 - 26th June 2022

Quite a busy edition this week, with a mixed bag of updates. Firstly Microsoft has announced some Responsible AI investments and safeguards for facial recognition. John Reilly continues to blog his journey exploring ACA and Dapr in Azure Container Apps: dapr pubsub.

There are two interesting posts around Identity worth highlighting: 8 Best Practices for Azure AD Roles and How are you faring in your Zero-Trust Journey A look at Zero Trust assessment tools.

Two interesting IoT posts: How FPGA and cloud technology can reduce our climate impact, and a nice addition that may make adoption simpler for those who don't want to use C/C++ Previewing Rust on Azure Sphere.

There are two useful tips blog posts about Azure API Management: My 10 favorite Azure API Management Tips and Tricks and Use different rate-limiting options in Azure API Management for business and non-business hours. And Azure Static Web Apps gains new New API backend options in Azure Static Web Apps, including Azure Container Apps, APIM and App Service!

Finally an excellent real-world example from Tom Peplow,  Principal & Director of Product Development at Milliman (note: they were one of endjin's first customers), of how something as minor as changing a Virtual Machine SKU in Azure can have a million dollar impact, and why robust DevOps processes are so important:

"We found that our results changed when we moved to a different virtual machine (VM) type due to the non-associative nature of floating-point arithmetic. This change was a controlled change. We found the difference in a test run of our model. We knew precisely what changed, so we dug in and found that the new architecture of the Gen 4 Haswell processor used FMA3. This caused a difference in the tail of the double precision floating point, but the number was big and thus the change was material (millions of dollars). Thankfully, once we understood this, the impact of the processor architecture, we flipped the _set_FMA_enable(0) switch. This fixed the change in results (at a small performance penalty), and the issue went away. While we did all this investigation, and it was not an insignificant lift, our customers were quite safely using the trusted legacy machines."