Azure Weekly

Issue #459 - 24th March 2024

This week there are a number of retirement notices, which are worth being aware of. Highlights from this issue, starting with AI: Getting Started with OpenAI Whisper on Azure, agents are the current hot topic in AI and there are two interesting articles: Building a multimodal multi-agent framework with Azure Assistant API, and Introducing TaskWeaver.

In Analytics and Identity: Protect PII information in your Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse with Responsible AI and Introduction to Conditional Access.

Around DevOps and Management: Combine FinOps best practices and Microsoft tools to streamline and optimize your workloads, a nice approach for creating a Azure Service Health Workbook, Introducing database watcher for Azure SQL and announcing Microsoft open sources Retina: A cloud-native container networking observability platform

An interesting reflection: Thoughts about gaining the Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification, and a comparison of the three major cloud platforms: All you need to know about Azure, AWS, or GCP SLA.

Finally, a big thank-you to the organisers, volunteers, speakers and sponsors of SQLBits 2024. As someone who comes from the Software Engineering space, I found it particularly fascinating to see how people within the data ecosystem think about their domain. My takeaway is many of the "new" topics I saw being discussed, covering patterns, practices, processes, and value, were hot topics 20 years ago in Application Development. If this is a similar tipping point for the data community, the next decade is going to be a very exciting, and transformative time.