Azure Weekly

Issue #500 - 26th January 2025

500 Issues! That is an awful lot of early Sunday mornings! Anyhow onto the news from this week; In AI, Introducing the GPT-4o-Audio-Preview: A New Era of Audio-Enhanced AI Interaction and a nice move to use small language models (which are more efficient) Exciting Update: Abstractive Summarization in Azure AI Language Now Powered by Phi-3.5-mini.

In Data: DocumentDB: Open-Source Announcement, and Faster data processing with Native Execution Engines in Microsoft Fabric Runtime 1.3: efficient memory management explained, and Ian Griffiths continues his series on a better inner dev loop for data engineering with Spark dev containers: writing tests.

How you buy Azure has been changing over the last year, and there's a useful guide on Moving to a Microsoft Customer Agreement MCA from an Enterprise Agreement EA. Some other articles of note include: Automatically select the right Microsoft Entra tenant, an interesting perspective that Private endpoints are an illusion, and a deep dive guide into Nested virtualization on Azure.

Finally, Managing Environment Variables in Azure Static Web Apps with Azure Developer CLI and an interesting article explaining Why I Switched from WordPress to Astro: Faster, Cheaper, and Greener - we made a similar move a few years ago - endjin.com, Azure Weekly and Power BI Weekly are all now hosted on Azure Static Web Apps for similar reasons.