Azure Weekly

Issue #400 - 18th December 2022

Welcome to issue 400 of Azure Weekly 🎉 It's quite mind-boggling that we've reached this milestone. When I published the first issue on 2nd Nov 2014, I had no idea it would still be going 8 years and 400 issues later; at a rough calculation that's around 1200 hours (50 days) of effort! This is also going to be the last issue of 2022. I hope you all have a relaxing festive break. See you again in January 2023!

First up, there are a number of announcements around Text To Speech; this service has made some impressive improvements this year. The latest are: Azure Custom Neural Voice introduces new emotional styles to support brand voices, which is now going to be used for the use-case I was investigating (adding audio version of our blogs): Listen to your favorite Microsoft Tech Community Blog articles, powered by Azure Speech Services. I was also impressed by this Mechanics episode - it's worth watching for the demos: Use Natural Language & Prompts with AI Models Azure OpenAIService.

There are a few announcements around Analytics: Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.3 is now in Public Preview, and Security Model in Lake Database within Azure Synapse Analytics. If you use B2C logins, this might be useful: Introducing enhanced company branding for sign-in experiences in Azure AD.

Two other worthwhile reads: Introduction to Comprehensive End-to-End Testing in Azure (first in a series), and Use an Azure Event Grid Custom Topic as a Message Broker, which talks about multi-tenant use cases. IMHO the lack of thought leadership (and features) around multi-tenancy for building SaaS products on Azure is one of the platforms major weaknesses. Finally, there's a Forrester study which finds 228 percent ROI when modernizing applications on Azure PaaS. PaaS has always been our preferred flavour of cloud services. It generally requires more software engineering effort, but the commercial payoff is vast.