Azure Weekly
Issue #40 - 22nd August 2015
There were several new feature released in the last week; GeoSpatial support was added to DocumentDB, country filtering, compression & analytics were added to Azure CDN, an update to Azure Files was published, and new PowerShell cmdlets for Elastic Database Jobs were released in preview.
The biggest news of the week is that the converged programming model for Microsoft account and Azure AD Identities has been announced; this is the first step to merge Microsoft Account and Azure AD Cloud identity services; and there was much rejoicing.
Another interesting article published this week is from Herve Roggero, who shares some research performing a pricing comparison between Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, repeating an experiment he first carried out in 2013. He discovered that Amazon prices for his desired architecture have dropped by 48% while Microsoft have dropped by 38%; Microsoft being the overall cheaper platform.
Finally, we received a number of messages last week about issue #39 getting marked as spam by several email providers; we've been working with Campaign Monitor (the platform we use for this service) to try and diagnose why this seems to be affecting some users.
If you've experienced the newsletter either being marked as spam or being quarantined, please drop us an email and tell us which email provider you are using (outlook.com / gmail / Office 365) so that we can feed this information back to the Campaign Monitor team.
⚖️ Management and Governance
In the first of a 3 part series, John Matson and the team at DataDog explain How to monitor Microsoft Azure VMs
On the Docker blog, Michael Chiang announces Docker Toolbox, Diogo Mnica blogs about Introducing Docker Content Trust and Ben Firshman announces Docker 1.8: Content Trust, Toolbox, and Updates to Registry and Orchestration
On Channel 9, in episode 182 of the cloud cover show, Chris Risner talks to Moinak Bandyopadhyay about Usage and RateCard APIs used for obtaining useful information about your Azure Subscription.
Alexandre Brisebois (@Brisebois) discusses Azure Automation, Remote PowerShell and a Virtual Machine
Episode 89 of the Azure podcast covers Application Insights
On MSDN, Application Insights Service & Visual Studio Online Teams talks about Data Access Issue in Azure Portal on 8/15 and Issues with Alert emails from Application Insights 8/14
- Trond Hindenes (@trondhindenes) writes about Using Azure Resource Manager as an Ansible inventory source
Rajinder Singh (@rajsinghper) blogs the first in his Adventures with Azure Resource Manager
Trevor Sullivan (@pcgeek86) asks Resource Manager or Service Management
Ian Philpot covers Deploying Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines with Visual Studio for IT Pros
🖥️ Compute
On TechNet, Shannon Gowen provides a cloud tip of the day: Deploy Office Applications Using Azure RemoteApp
On Channel 9, Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) describes How the viral internet site HowOld.NET was created and scaled with Corom Thompson on Azure Friday
Mat Velloso (@matvelloso) explains how to run Bitnami tracks and Ruby/MySQL on Azure
🌐 Networking
Radu Vunvulea delives into Azure Load Balancer and Sticky Connections
💡 Internet of Things
On Channel 9, In the first of a three part series on Azure API Management, Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) talks to Vladimir Vinogradsky about Policy Expressions
On Code Project, Shahriar Hossain explains that KUDU is the secret door into Azure Web Apps
⚙️ Data and Analytics
On the Azure blog, Sonia Carlson announces that Azure Data Factory is generally available
On the Azure blog, Aravind Ramachandran announces Geospatial support in Azure DocumentDB, while Ryan Crawcour describes Azure DocumentDB bids fond farewell to SelfLinks and the Openness Team say that importing data to DocumentDB is faster and easier than ever
On MSDN, Lukasz Pawlowski highlights that the PowerBI visuals GitHub project is open for contributions
On the Revolution Analytics blog, David Smith (@revodavid) provides a roundup of things you may have missed in July
On the Hortonworks blog, Audrey Ng hosts a guest blog post by Microsoft's Oliver Chiu who highlights that Microsoft and Hortonworks Do Spark in the Cloud
📦 Storage
Radu Vunvulea provides a deep dive into Append Blob - a new type of Azure Storage Blob
On the Azure blog, Giridhar Mosay, Program Manager Cloud and Enterprise, announces that Azure Backup enables backup of large volumes, VMs, databases
Also on the Azure blog, Michael Curd covers the latest Azure Files Preview update
🎬 Media
- On the Azure blog, Manling Zhang, Program Manager - Azure Media Services, writes about New CDN features country filtering, compression and analytics
On the Azure blog, Amit Rajput announces an Azure Media Player update with multiaudio stream support, and Adarsh Solanki announces the Azure Media Indexer v1.3.2 update
Mingfei Yan (@mingfeiy), Program Manager - Azure Media Services, explains how client pass tokens to Azure Media Services Key delivery services
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
- None this week
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
Stuart Kwan makes the huge announcement of the Converged Microsoft Account and Azure Active Directory Programming Model (and developers everywhere weep with joy)
On the Azure blog, Tiander Turpijn describes PowerShell module for the Operations Management Suite (OMS) Search API
On MSDN, Ranjith Pallath provides a useful tip for anyone who experiences an error while trying to Deleting Azure AD due to Visual Studio Online association