Azure Weekly

Issue #43 - 12th September 2015

This week, cloud technologists the world over shared a cautionary tale told by a South African developer who got a huge AWS bill as a result of a bug in the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015. The bug made a repo which should have been private public. Scary stuff. Within minutes, nefarious Bitcoin miners who scan GitHub for AWS credentials had begun to exploit his account, eventually generating a bill of $6,500.

The story highlights the need to store configuration details outside of source control, preferably in a secure store such as Azure Key Vault.

Back in the world of Azure, there were a number of announcements this week.

The GS-Series VM has arrived, combining G-Series compute power with Premium Storage. The largest GS has 32 cores and 448 GB memory, up to 80,000 disk IOPS and 2,000 MB disk bandwidth per second, alongside 6.59 TB of local SSD-based storage. There are also price cuts to D-Series and DS-Series machines.

The compute team also announced new boot diagnostics features - console output and screenshot support.

Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging was introduced. Premium Messaging is intended to offer greater predicability and performance, using reserved processing and memory per Service Bus messaging namespace. The premium service is charged at a flat daily rate per Messaging Unit.

There were updates to the Azure WebJobs SDK, providing more extension triggers and binders and a Singleton feature for restricting the number of instances running a particular job function to one.

DocumentDB was also moving this week, with general availability in Australia, and better LINQ support.

Microsoft have created some architectural patterns & practices blueprints for Azure that are well worth taking a look at.

Aaron Lightle has written a useful post sharing the learning materials he used to pass Exam 70-534: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions

For people coming back from holiday who may have missed the announcement over the last few weeks; Microsoft is holding a free, virtual, 1-day AzureCon on September 29th.

⚖️ Management and Governance

🖥️ Compute

🌐 Networking

💡 Internet of Things

⚙️ Data and Analytics

📦 Storage

🎬 Media

  • None this week

⚙️ Hybrid Integration

⚙️ Identity and Access Management

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