Azure Weekly

Issue #409 - 12th March 2023

The big announcement this week is that ChatGPT is now available in Azure OpenAI Service. There are number of posts exploring this announcement with some example use cases, for example, Revolutionize your Enterprise Data with ChatGPT: Next-gen Apps w/ Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Search. Another article in this area is about a renaissance in computer vision AI with Microsoft's Florence foundation model.

Two other noteworthy announcements this week: Cost saving with Standard SSD Billing Caps which limits the number of transactions you're charged for, per hour, and the General Availability of Azure Virtual Desktop Insights at Scale. Sam Cogan delves deeper into an announcement I highlighted last week in 'WTH is Pod Sandboxing for AKS?'.

Two interesting posts from endjin folks this week; the first providing scripts to show How to setup Python, PyEnv & Poetry on Windows as a non-system-wide installation. This is an often painful and error prone process for anyone developing local Python code to be packaged / pushed up into Azure. There's also a deep dive into Data validation in Python: a look into Pandera and Great Expectations.

One of my focuses over the last 6 months has been working with the .NET Foundation to enable endjin to become the core maintainer of System.Reactive AKA Rx AKA Reactive Extensions, as the open source project has become moribund (as the previous maintainers either lack time to invest in the project, or have moved out of the .NET Ecosystem) and the last release was ~2.5 years ago. Thanks to the .NET Foundation's project continuity processes, we were made maintainers in January and since then we've created a high level roadmap and have been delivering against it. This week we published the first preview of v6 on NuGet and we'd appreciate if anyone in the community who uses System.Reactive as part of their cloud application stack, test out the preview and report any issues. Thanks!