Azure Weekly

Issue #39 - 15th August 2015

Probably the biggest Azure announcement this week for anyone based in Europe is that Azure Data Factory is now available in the North Europe region; great news for anyone who was looking to automate their data production pipeline, but couldn't because of data sovereignty concerns.

A great post by Tom Kerkhove escaped our notice a few weeks ago; it's called "securing sensitive data with Azure Key Vault" and is well worth checking out.

One hidden gem we stumbled across this week is the Microsoft Press Guided Tours Windows Store App, which contains enriched and interactive versions of "Building cloud apps with Microsoft Azure" by Scott Guthrie & Mark Simms, "Using Microsoft Azure HDInsight" by Avkash Chauhan and "Azure Machine Learning" by Jeff Barnes.

Stephane Frechette has written a fascinating post about modelling Azure Cloud Services with Neo4j

For people looking to get started with Azure, a couple of interesting articles were published this week: six different ways you can try out Azure, while the Student Developer Evangelism Team describes how students can get access Azure.

These were of particular interest at endjin HQ as we had a young student work shadowing the team to see if software development might be something he would like to study at university. He spent two days shadowing various endjin-eers and also built and published a website to Azure. We even wrote an email to his headmaster asking if his school could enroll in Dreamspark!

⚖️ Management and Governance

On the Azure blog, Corey Sanders (@CoreySandersWA), Director of Program Management Azure, announces that Azure and Scalr come together to offer topnotch Cloud Management on Azure
On the Docker blog, Jeff Morgan writes about reactive containers: how Kitematic works hand in hand with the Docker CLI, and Adam Herzog elaborates how Docker loves Oracle Solaris Zones
On the Venture Beat site, Stephanie Tayengco of Logicworks explains how companies will actually use Docker
On the Azure blog, Dale Koetke describes transitioning Application Insights from the VSO Portal to the Azure Portal, while the Application Insights Service Team blogs about Application Insights Planned Maintenance 8/8
On the Kloud blog, Has Altaiar discusses Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS
Also on the Azure blog, Christopher Mank writes about Scheduling Azure Automation Runbooks with Azure Scheduler

🖥️ Compute

Donovan Brown writes about where is my FQDN for my V2 IaaS VM
On Channel 9, Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) writes about Monitoring Linux Compute workloads within an Azure Infrastructure Azure Friday

🌐 Networking

On Channel 9, Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) discusses securing your Azure Virtual Network using Network ACLs with Narayan Annamalai on Azure Friday
On the TechKB blog, Mike Coutanche (@mum3le5) writes about using Network Security Groups in Azure to create a DMZ
Yung Chou (@yungchou) explains how to configure a Point-to-Site VPN Connection to a Virtual Network in a 3 part video series

💡 Internet of Things

On the Azure podcast, episode 88 covers SDK and Web Apps Enhancements
On the Azure blog, Hamid Safi writes about remote Profiling support in Azure App Service
Sara Silva (@saramgsilva) writes an introduction to Azure App Service

⚙️ Data and Analytics

On the Azure blog, Gaurav Malhotra highlights that Azure Data Factory is Live in North Europe
On the Microsoft Openness site, Openness Team discusses Microsoft Virtual Academy: Big data analytics with HDInsight
On Channel 9, Haishi Bai and Chris Risner talk about Azure Data Factory and Big Legacy Data with Shweta Gupta in episode 181 of the Cloud Cover show
Also on the Azure blog, Aravind Ramachandran explains how to update your DocumentDB indexing policies online
Also on Channel 9, in the latest episode of Data Exposed, Scott Klein covers Azure SQL DB Index Advisor with Vladimir Ivanovic