Azure Weekly
Issue #42 - 5th September 2015
Premium Storage, which provides SSD storage to enhance VM performance, is to be rolled out to Central US, East US, North Europe and East Asia in Q4 2015.
The DocumentDB team have released an Azure DocumentDB SQL cheat sheet for the service.
There were new features for Azure Backup for Azure VMs including support for backup with up to 16 data disks as well as the OS disk, a more predictable backup time, support for retention of up to 100 years, better monitoring and reporting, offline VM backup, job cancellation, and the ability to restore to any storage account.
There are two interesting items that don't really fit into any of the newsletters existing categories; episode 91 of the Azure Podcast examines the life of an Azure Architect and on the PluralSight blog, Vishwas Lele takes a useful high-level look at the various building blocks in Azure.
And finally, Matt Dickens from Redgate announced this week that Just Azure is becoming part of SimpleTalk.
⚖️ Management and Governance
On MSDN, Steve Lasker talks about deploying to Linux & Windows Docker Containers and asks if you can help improve Docker Container Tooling
Episode 90 of the Azure podcast covers Azure Resource Manager
Rik Hepworth published a great series of articles about setting up a complex Azure Template to replace PowerShell scripts for provisioning an environment; The Environment, an Introduction To Azure Resource Templates, and using the customScriptExtension
On the Perficient blog, Chris Pietschmann provides a high level overview of Azure PowerShell Automation
🖥️ Compute
Samuel Betts covers Virtual Machine Snapshots for SharePoint and Bill Baer announces that SharePoint Server 2016 Preview Image is available in the Windows Azure Platform Gallery
On the PaaS Mag site, Trinadh Kotturu highlights the new Azure Backup features for IaaS Virtual Machine backup support
Also on TechNet, Rob Waggoner answers the question how do I get the SLA on Azure Virtual Machines and writes about Azure VM Drive attachment limits
🌐 Networking
- On the Kloud blog, Andreas Wasita writes about Secure Azure Virtual Network Defense In Depth using Network Security Groups, User Defined Routes and Barracuda NG Firewall
On the WindowsITPro site, John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) answers a question about experiecing no access to Internet from Azure with new Azure DC
💡 Internet of Things
- On MSDN, Prashanth Madi walks through finding Memory Leaks and CPU Usage in Azure Node.js Web App
- Also on MSDN, Ali Mazaheri talks about Azure Logic Apps, Azure SQL and OpenAPS Better Together
Also on MSDN, the Visual Studio Blog describes Top Azure News for Visual Studio Developers August 2015, and in a video on on Channel 9, Robert Green talks to Brady Gaster and Mike Morton about the Azure SDK 2.7 Visual Studio Toolbox
⚙️ Data and Analytics
Jack Richins announces the public preview refresh of SQL Server Connector for Microsoft Azure Key Vault
On the Redmond magazine site, Jeffrey Schwartz says Microsoft's Cloud SQL Database Gets Row Level Security
The SQL Server Team announces new Azure SQL Database offerings add capabilities to scale data up and out
On the Steam Analytics Team Blog, Janet Yeilding provides a query pattern of the week: find the duration of a condition
The Power BI Team provide two great real world examples of Power BI in Action
On the PaaS Mag site, Aravind Ramachandran provides a DocumentDB SQL query cheat sheet
📦 Storage
On MSDN, Jef King provides a series of short videos covering Queues in Azure
Theo Browning delves into the new Azure Blob append feature
Pradnya Khadapkar highlights that Azure Premium Storage expanding in more regions
On TechNet, Kevin Remde writes about more updates to Azure Backup and Mike Coutanche covers the August Updates to Azure Backup
🎬 Media
Mingfei Yan (@mingfeiy), Program Manager - Azure Media Services, announces that the Azure Media Services Java SDK adds support for Content Protection
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
The StorSimple Team announce that a critial update for StorSimple 5000/7000 Series is now available
Tamer Sherif Mahmoud blogs how to do bulk creation of StorSimple volumes
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
Vesa Juvonen provides a very useful script that will automatically signout from Office 365 and Azure which helps when working with multiple tenants
On TechNet, Shannon Gowen provides several useful cloud tips of the day: AAD features included with Office 365, How to perform full password sync with AAD Sync and Azure AD Conditional Access for Apps
- Also on TechNet, Anshuman Mansingh covers PowerShell: Enable/Enforce Multifactor Authentication for All Bulk Users in Office 365
Shai Kariv highlights a short video which covers Azure AD Privileged Identity Management: Security Wizard, Alerts, Reviews & more