Azure Weekly

Issue #424 - 25th June 2023

A mixed bag this week. There are a number of interesting AI related articles: Introducing Azure OpenAI Service On Your Data in Public Preview and a potential time saver Azure OpenAI GPT model to review Pull Requests for Azure DevOps and some early guidance on how to prepare for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

An interesting addition: Introducing Snakemake for Azure Batch, which is a Python based workflow management system for reproducible and scalable data analysis. In what seems to be a big announcement by the Logic Apps Team: Introducing .NET Framework Custom Code for Azure Logic Apps Standard - Preview, which seems to be aimed at orgs looking to migrate off BizTalk.

Ed Freeman (@edfreeman_) shares the first in a series deep diving into Microsoft Fabric via an end-to-demo. Part 1 covers Lakehouse & Medallion Architecture and Ian Griffiths (Technical Fellow at endjin) makes an appearance on the Adventures in .NET podcast (also available on Spotify) to talk about new C# features and how they can make a big impact on computational processing and your cloud spend. It's well worth an hour of your time if you're interested in writing high performance code.

Finally, I published a little tool I've been working on for the last few years. dotnet-adr is a cross platform .NET Global Tool for creating and managing Architectural Decision Records (ADR), which are simple Markdown based text documents used to record the context, assumptions, options, rationale, decision, and consequences of technical decisions. We find ADRs to be an invaluable approach for building cloud, data, analytics and AI solutions as there are often multiple ways to achieve your goals, but you need to consider many tradeoffs, including performance targets, price-points, and feature sets. As the context or constraints often change due to the fast innovation of cloud platforms, it's become increasingly important to record these descisions in a way they can be easily re-evalutated to understand if any of the context which drove a particular decision path has changed.

In this push to get the tool to v1.0 I've added getting started, background, and extensibility documentation, updated the available ADR templates, and provided links to a number of real world ADR examples from our OSS projects. I hope you find the tool as useful as we do. Please raise an issue if you have any problems.