Azure Weekly

Issue #467 - 19th May 2024

Microsoft have been quick off the mark with the latest OpenAI model; Introducing GPT-4o: OpenAIs new flagship multimodal model now in preview on Azure. Three other interesting AI articles: Large Language Models with Azure AI Search and Python for OpenAI RAG, this is particularly fascinating if you've ever wondered "why is this taken so long?" The LLM Latency Guidebook: Optimizing Response Times for GenAI Applications. I've spent quite a bit of time this week learning how to fine tune Phi3 locally on my Surface Studio Laptop 2, and have plenty of thoughts about how immature this space is right now, but I found this blog post an interesting read: Evaluate Small Language Models for RAG using Azure Prompt Flow LLama3 vs Phi3.

I'm very pleased that the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference Europe has been announced. We wanted to attend the recent event in Las Vegas, but we decided it would generate too big a carbon footprint from the UK... and any excuse to visit Stockholm. In other Fabric news: Microsoft Fabric Monitoring with Metrics App and Data Activator, and the public preview of task flows in Microsoft Fabric - including a quote from endjin's own Ed Freeman!

Finally some other impactful announcements: Microsoft will require MFA for all Azure users, and guide demonstrating how to Secure your Container Apps with Key Vault Certificates and possibly one of the most important new service announcments I've seen in the last few years. This looks like a game changer for secure, multi-tenant or untrusted workloads. I'm very much looking forward to creating some proof of concepts using this: New: Secure Sandboxes at Scale with Azure Container Apps Dynamic Sessions.