Azure Weekly

Issue #501 - 2nd February 2025

First up, in AI: autogen & OpenAI Assistants API powered collaborative Report generation and Unlocking the Potential of Azure AI Agent Service with realtime web search. DeepSeek caused quite the stir last week and there are a number of posts about it. This is a nice guide to running DeepSeek-R1 on Azure Container Apps Serverless GPUs. I got DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-GGUF running on my Surface Studio Laptop 2 using LM Studio. You can also run it on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub.

It's always nice when you see a series of posts from across the community which share a common theme; What Happens When An Azure Region Is Destroyed and Automating the extraction of Azure Regions resiliency information, and How Microsoft Releases Changes to Azure - Safe Deployment Three interesting articles of note: SecretLess App Registrations in Entra ID and a nice deep dive into Building a TOTP Authenticator App on Azure Functions and Azure Key Vault, and Private Link reality bites: what's my source IP?

There's a great article about Wasm Spin and SpinKube's Rocky Road to CNCF Sandbox Status, which you can deploy and try now on Azure either by following this Microsoft Learn guide Deploy SpinKube to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to run serverless WebAssembly (Wasm) workloads or by using SpinKube on Azure Marketplace. Finally, there's an absolutely excellent article about Flatcar Linux - Why a Linux distro becoming a CNCF project matters by Mary Branscombe. I spent a couple of months last year researching Flatcar Linux - this article distils everything I found out and more. It requires free registration to read, but it's well worth it.