Azure Weekly

Issue #427 - 16th July 2023

The big announcement this week is that Azure AD is becoming Microsoft Entra ID. It's going to take a while to retrain the muscle memory from AAD to EID. A topic I've heard from a number of IT folks is the desire to unify some IT processes with HR processes, and there's a useful Microsoft Mechanics show that covers Automate onboarding & offboarding tasks with Microsoft Entra Identity Lifecycle Management.

On the AI front there are three noteworthy articles; Deploy and Orchestrate Large Foundation Models with Azure AI Studio a end-to-end guide to Building a Private ChatGPT Interface With Azure OpenAI - I spent an afternoon last week building something similar in an interactive notebook in Python using LangChain & Llama Index. My next experiment is going to be with Semantic Kernel, so this article looks particularly interesting: Create a Semantic Kernel service using minimal API.

I'm continually impressed by Azure Container Apps. This week we ported a worker service to use the new Jobs service, which will offer a considerable cost saving as we need to run a 5 minute job every hour, and we can do this using the new CRON based timer feature, rather than having and paying for a continually running container. There's a useful article showing how to Use Nginx as a reverse proxy in Azure Container App - we did a similar experiment last year, but using YARP.

Finally, we published the first episode in a new series called "Decision Maker's Guide" - a series of interviews with real-world Decision Makers (CTOs, CIOs, Heads of / Directors of Software Engineering, Data & Analytics) about how they manage their strategic roadmap and evaluate new technologies to simplify their portfolio, deliver better outcomes for stakeholders, or give them a competitive advantage. In a 3-part interview we talk to Tom Peplow, Senior Director Product Strategy at Milliman, about his assessment of Microsoft Fabric in Hedging your Fabric Bet.