Azure Weekly

Issue #420 - 28th May 2023

It's an absolute beast this week. Microsoft BUILD was as epic as expected. As usual a great condensed summary of announcements can be found in the Book of News, and I'd recommend it as your first stop.

The big keynote announcements were all focused on OpenAI and Copilot, and how they are being integrated into every aspect of the Microsoft Product Portfolio. Prompt Engineering was getting a lot of love, and Prompt Flow looks very interesting. Microsoft Fabric, a unification of data products and an evolution of Azure Synapse; it was also unveiled as "data is the fuel that powers AI", and Fabric lower the barrier to entry and time to value. Fabric is an important foundational element as many organisations can only dream of harnessing AI once they've sorted out the chaos that is their data estate.

There's too much to cover for an editorial, so I'm going to highlight two session that I found really interesting; Azure Innovations with Mark Russinovitch, there's so much goodness in this session from Project Forge (formerly Singularity) to Hyperlight a new MicroVM technology like Firecracker. I also enjoyed Building AI solutions with Semantic Kernel, and this is top of my list of things I want to play with. The new Semantic Kernel VS Code extensions look useful.

There's 6 hours of Microsoft Fabric content split across two days in the launch event; Day 1 and Day 2. If that's too much of a time commitment for you, we've been on the private preview of Microsoft Fabric for the last 6 months and have published some useful content to share our insights; A landing page linking all our content, a Azure Radar page giving a high-level overview including Pros & Cons, a 20 minute perspectives on Microsoft Fabric discussion, a 10 minute Tour around Microsoft Fabric, and then several blog posts: An Introduction to Fabric, a detailed Azure Synapse Analytics versus Microsoft Fabric: A Side by Side Comparison, and a view on one of the killer features: What is OneLake?. I'm hoping that this is the last "new" data platform announcement for at least 5 years, as organisations tend to move slowly, and operate on roadmaps that are in the 5-10 year span, want to invest in a platform and then build value on top of it, rather than constantly having to re-invest in upgrading / migrating.

I've picked a few highlights from this edition: Generative AI for Developers: Exploring New Tools and APIs in Azure OpenAI Service, a fascinating insight into What runs ChatGPT Inside Microsoft's AI supercomputer Featuring Mark Russinovich, a feature I've been waiting for: Introducing jobs for Azure Container Apps, and an impressive announcement that seems to have slipped under the radar: Introducing the Azure Linux container host for AKS.

I'd like to thank Liam Mooney for the help putting together this epic edition.