Azure Weekly
Issue #4 - 29th November 2014
Azure news this week was dominated by a service outage affecting customers in all regions. Jason Zander of the Azure team explained that the downtime resulted from an performance update for Storage which caused an infinite loop in Blob Storage front ends, impacting other services. The outage was unfortunately marked by its wide reach - the result of deviation from the team's standard protocol of applying production changes in incremental batches.
Among the gloom, Brian Harry's blog about his team's response to the outage stands out as a great example of fast, effective action and the types of precautions and monitoring required when you build a service on top of Azure. The comments of both posts make for interesting reading.
Special thanks got to @AliceWaddicor for editing some of the content for this issue.
⚙️ Jobs
- endjin are looking for a new apprentice for 2015.
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- For more information see: http://endjin.com/join-us/
⚖️ Management and Governance
- Kundana Palagiri follows up on the TechEd announcement of the Visual Studio Release Management Extension with an overview of Visual Studio Release Management for Azure VMs
- The PowerShell team announced version 1.5 of the Azure DSC extension, which supports Windows Server 2012 in addition to Windows Server 2012 R2
- On the Visual Studio blog, Merwan Hade provides a walk-through of connecting to cloud services (Azure Mobile services, Azure storage, Office 365 and Salesforce) from Visual Studio.
- Eamon O'Reilly describes how to monitor Azure Services and external systems with Azure automation
- Ian Philpot talks about saving time and money with Azure Automation
- Gaurav Mantri digs into the diagnostics changes introduced in the recently announced Azure SDK 2.5, looking at what's been added, and removed
- Khalid Mouss announces a new Docker command line interface for Windows, which lets you manage containers running on Linux, directly from a Windows machine
- A new whitepaper has been released: Microsoft Azure Security and Audit Log Management
🖥️ Compute
- Part 5 of the Technet blog about Managing Azure Iaas with PowerShell provides a command by command guide to shutting down virtual machines.
- Alex Sutton gives an overview of Azure HPC and Azure Batch
- Azure Batch is also covered by the Programming Issues blog which began a series about the service with definitions of terms
- Hans Léautaud shows how to set up a Azure TeamCity buildagent with Chocolatey
- Bhushan Gawale explains how to enable Web Deploy for Azure Web Roles Without Visual Studio
- Project Orleans has released a refreshed preview to sync up with the Azure SDK 2.5 release.
🌐 Networking
- Russ Slaten provides a step by step guide to creating a multi-NIC (Network Interface Controller) VM with a public IP in Azure, using PowerShell
- Keith Mayer shares a quick tip for listing all static IP addresses on an Azure virtual network, using PowerShell
- Charley Wen describes how to enable multiple subscriptions to share one ExpressRoute Circuit
💡 Internet of Things
- Sandrino Di Mattia describes creating backend-less applications with Auth0 and Azure Table Storage, for cases where a data store is all that's needed
- Usman Ur Rehman Ahmed writes a short guide to getting started with Azure Mobile services
- Steve Spencer investigates Azure Websites slots and configuration
⚙️ Data and Analytics
- On Channel9, Scott Klein and Anand Subbaraj describe the Azure Data Factory
- John MacIntyre answers the question 'how do we store, retrieve and query using DateTime if the database doesn't support this type natively?' in his blog 'working with dates in Azure DocumentDB'
📦 Storage
- In a topical blog on Technet, Neerja Rewal provides a guide to architecting a disaster recovery plan for multi-tier web applications using Microsoft Azure Site Recovery
- Craig Landis describes how to recover an Azure VM by attaching the OS disk to another Azure VM
- In a post that may have been intended to tie in with the storage performance mentioned in Jason Zander's blog, Jeff Irwin announced an Azure Storage Performance Checklist on the Azure blog this week. The full 45 point checklist is available here
- Manu Aery announced new features for Azure StorSimple, including bandwidth templates, controller management, configuration of email addresses for alerts, and the availability of the service in Australia
- Sacha Barbs provides a beginners' introduction to blob storage and retrieval on his blog
- Max McCarthy writes about controlling data access in Azure Storage Services with Shared Access Signatures
- Pieter Vanhove explains how to remove SQL backup files from Azure Storage
🎬 Media
- Mingfei Yan announces Azure Media Services Live streaming with AES encryption
- William Zhang provides an end to end prototype of PlayReady protection with ACS (Access Control Service) authentication and ACS token authorization.
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
- On Channel 9, Keith Mayer and Andy Syrewicze talk about getting started with automating the hybrid cloud using PowerShell. This is part of a long running series on building a hybrid cloud.
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
- Samuel Devasahayam & Andreas Kjellman talk about creating one directory with Active Directory and Azure Active Directory
- Nasos Kladakis explains Microsoft Azure Active Directory
- Arieh Bibliowicz & Meir Mendelovich introduce Microsoft Azure Active Directory Application Proxy and Windows Server Web Application Proxy
- Eran Dvir takes an in depth look at Azure Active Directory Premium
- Vittorio Bertocci demonstrates building web and mobile apps using Microsoft Azure Active Directory for Identity Management
- Shawn Bishop & Nasos Kladakis do a deep dive session on Azure Multi-Factor Authentication
- Mike Branstein demonstrates how to use Azure Active Directory Sync to extend your Local AD into Azure