Azure Weekly
Issue #502 - 9th February 2025
Agents! Agents! Agents! The exciting phase of the GenAI wave is in full swing and Agentic features are being added into many products. There's a useful Developers Guide to Azure AI Agents which explains all the concepts, a walkthrough of Enterprise-Grade Streaming AI Agents with Azure AI Agent Service, and a big announcement GitHub Copilot: The agent awakens.
Also in AI, there's a post Introducing the GPT-4o-Mini Audio Models: Adding More Choice to Audio-Enhanced AI Interaction, a interesting article explaining How Reasoning Models are transforming Logical AI thinking and a useful tutorial about using JSON Mode in Azure OpenAI & Semantic Kernel.
Finally, other highlights include, Azure Kubernetes Service – A friendly guide for Startups, the announcement of Azure Data Studio Retirement (to be replaced by VS Code), and the final post in the series about Spark dev containers: packaging code for testability.
⚙️ AI + Machine Learning
- Matthew Bolanos describes Unlocking AI-Powered Automation with Azure AI Agent Service
- On the Azure Developer Community Blog, Lee Stott explains how to Join Microsoft AI Product Group AMA on Azure AI Agent Service
- On The New Stack, Janakiram MSV provides A Developers Guide to Azure AI Agents
- Vinayak Hegde explains How Reasoning Models are transforming Logical AI thinking
- Minseok Song walks through Building a Basic Chatbot with Azure OpenAI
- Rashaud Savage covers Fine Tune Mistral Models on Azure AI Foundry
- Carlotta Castelluccio explains how to Build AI Solutions with Azure AI Foundry
- Dieter Gobeyn explains how to Accelerate AI with JSON Mode in Azure OpenAI & Semantic Kernel
- Allan Carranza walks through Introducing the GPT-4o-Mini Audio Models: Adding More Choice to Audio-Enhanced AI Interaction
- jmachado23 discusses Exploring Azure AI Content Understanding: Insights from the Partner Council Session
- Manoranjan Rajguru discusses Voice Bot: GPT-4o-Realtime Best Practices - A learning from customer journey
- Nitya Narasimhan covers The Future Of AI: Deconstructing Contoso Chat - Learning GenAIOps in practice
- Sudarsan Lakshminarayanan explains how to Customize AOAI Embeddings with contrastive learning
- Alberto Santamaria-Pang presents Image Search Series Part 1: Chest X-ray lookup with MedImageInsight
- Nick Brady presents a walkthrough of Enterprise-Grade Streaming AI Agents with Azure AI Agent Service
🔎 Analytics
- On Microsoft Fabric Blog, Varun Jain talks about Introducing template dashboards for Workspace Monitoring and Raj Rikhy blogs about Introducing enhanced conversation with Microsoft Fabric Copilot Preview
- On the endjin blog, Ian Griffiths (@idg10) delves into Spark dev containers: packaging code for testability
- On Microsoft Fabric Blog, Ulrich Christ writes about Open Mirroring for SAP sources &8211 dab and Simplement
- Jon Fletcher describes How to Effectively Restore a Table in a Fabric Warehouse
- Hanza Parayil Salim writes about An Effective Approach for High Volume Data in Azure Synapse
- The Azure Updates Team announces Launched Generally Available: Introducing Azure Databricks Clean Rooms
🚢 Containers
- The Azure Updates Team announces In preview Public Preview: Introducing the New AKS Monitoring Experience - Unified Insights at Your Fingertips
- Carlos Mendible (@cmendibl3) walks through Installing Azure Service Operator on AKS with Terraform
- Ricardo Martins (@ricmmartins) talks about Azure Kubernetes Service – A friendly guide for Startups
- Simon Jakesch walks through Enhancing Security for Azure Container Apps with Aqua Security
- On Diagrid Blog, Zoey Morck writes about Enterprise-Ready Dapr: How Diagrids Expert Support Accelerates Adoption & Operations
- Levi Masonde blogs about Building a Microservices Application with Azure Container Apps and Dapr
- Daniel Neumann (@neumanndaniel) walks through Using Cilium Hubble Exporter to log blocked egress traffic on Azure Kubernetes Service
- Ayobami Ayodeji says Secure your Kubernetes workloads with Cloud NGFW AKS Landing Zone
🗄️ Databases
- Varun Dhawan blogs about January 2025 Recap: Azure Postgres Flexible Server
- The Azure Updates Team announces Launched Generally Available: Azure SQL Database free offer
- Amar Digamber Patil blogs about Introducing the Enhanced Azure SQL Database Free Offer: Now Generally Available
- Jose M Jurado (@jmjuradodiaz) describes Lesson Learned 518: Configuring Database Watcher
- On episode 13 of the Cosmos Down Under show, Greg Low (@greglow) is joined by Rakhi Thejraj to discuss auto-scaling in Cosmos DB is released
- Abe Omorogbe writes about Scalable Vector Search with DiskANN - Available to all Azure Database for PostgreSQL
- Kevin Gatimu (@_kevincomba) delves into Full-Text Search in Azure Cosmos DB, and writes about choosing the right data storage source for Azure AI Search in Part 1 – Generally Available Data Sources and Part 2 – Public Preview Data Sources
🛠️ Developer Tools
- On the GitHub blog, Thomas Dohmke writes GitHub Copilot: The agent awakens
- On Visual Studio Magazine - Blogs, David Ramel (@dramel) discusses GitHub Previews Agentic AI in VS Code Copilot
- On the Visual Studio blog, Mark Downie (@poppastring) writes about Your fonts are now preserved when changing theme
- Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi talks about HTTP File updates for Request Variables and more
- Carlos Robles (@dbamastery) highlights the Azure Data Studio Retirement
- The Azure Updates Team announces Retirement: Transition from Azure Data Studio to Visual Studio Code
- On the Visual Studio blog, Jessie Houghton explains how to Customize your AI-generated git commit messages
- Prashant Chahar blogs about Building Drivers for Previous OS Releases Using the Latest Windows Driver Kit WDK
- Tim Deschryver explains how to Gain control over commit messages generated by GitHub Copilot
🔩 DevOps
- On the Microsoft DevOps blog, Angel Wong writes about Full web support for conditional access policies across Azure DevOps and partner web properties
- Soo Stahl explains how to Update to Azure DevOps Allowed IP addresses
- Saloni Agrawal walks through Introducing Support for Multiple JMeter Files and Fragments in Azure Load Testing
- Joji Varghese discusses Enhancing Azure DevOps Traceability: Tracking Pipeline-Driven Resource Changes
- Sarah Lean (@TechieLass) discusses Using Azure Workload Identity Federation OIDC with Azure DevOps to deploy Terraform
- David Wright explains How to automate encryption and secure data for your AI applications on Microsoft Azure
- Roy Kim (@roykimyyz) presents an Azure Terraform Starter Project Example
⚙️ Hybrid + Multicloud
🎭 Identity
- Ravit Aviv describes The future of CIAM: How Transmit Security and Microsoft are reshaping passkey adoption and security
- Farooque Mohammad blogs about Leveraging Custom Security Attributes in Conditional Access Policies
🔌 Integration
- Kalen Shaw blogs about Kalen's Corner: An Introduction to Azure PlayFab for Nonprofit Organizations
- Wagner Silveira covers Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - February 2025
💡 Internet of Things
- The Azure Sphere Team announces Azure Sphere – Certificate store update
📚 Learning
- Michael Kophs explains how to Validate critical information security skills with our new Certification
- On epsiode 335 of the Azure DevOps podcast, Jeffrey Palermo (@jeffreypalermo) is joined by Chris Ayers to talk about .NET Aspire and AI
- Matt Graven explains how to Do more with Copilot and agents
⚖️ Management and Governance
- Noya Blanga covers Log Analytics Simple Mode is Now Generally Available
- Ren Woods describes Purview Community Engagement Survey - How can we help you?
- Heather Joslyn covers OpenTelemetry: What's New With the Second-Biggest CNCF Project?
- Stanislav Zhelyazkov (@StanZhelyazkov) walks through Using Optional parameter if not configured in Azure Monitor workbooks with KQL query
- On episode 512 of The Azure Podcast, the podcast team (@AzurePodcast) are joined by Senthuran Sivananthan to talk about WAF and WARA
- Michael Flanakin blogs about Learning FOCUS: Resource columns
- Vibhor Grover walks through Optimizing OneDrive Retention Policies with Administrative Units and Adaptive Scopes
- Cary Sun (@SifuSun) explains How to Restore On-Premises VMS to Microsoft Azure, describes How to Create Cache Repositories Locally to Backup Microsoft Azure Entra ID, explains How to Create a Backup Copy Job offloads backups to Azure Blob Storage, and describes How to Create Log Backup Repositories with Microsoft Azure Blob Storage to Backup Azure Entra ID
- Sander van de Velde (@svelde) discusses Using Azure Runbooks to pause resources and save money
🎬 Media
- Alex Pereira writes about New tools make it easier to build with Azure Communication Services
- On the Twilio blog, Eman Hassan covers Sensitive PII Information Detection in Email Sends using Azure AI, .NET and Twilio SendGrid
🚌 Migration
- Mohamed Samaha blogs about Exploring the Use Cases of ADxS Services
🌐 Networking
🔐 Security
- Heike Ritter writes about Microsoft Defender XDR Monthly news - February 2025
- Shahar Aviv discusses Introducing the Unified Device Timeline Experience in Microsoft SIEM + XDR
- Ed Burns writes about Open Standard Enterprise Java and our Secure Future Initiative
- Hesham Abdelaal writes about Accelerating the Anomalous Sign-Ins detection with Microsoft Entra ID and Security Copilot
- On episode 276 of the Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast, Tobias Zimmergren and Jussi Roine (@CtrlAltAzure) discuss The State of Zero Trust in 2025
- Aditya Sindhu talks about Microsoft Security in Action: Zero Trust Deployment Essentials for Digital Security
- Alex Hudish covers Diagnose Safe/Blocked Senders Issues in Microsoft 365
📦 Storage
- Jerry Zhang explains How to configure directory level permission for SFTP local user
🔗 Web
- Justin Yoo (@justinchronicle) delves into Giving Granular Controls to Azure EasyAuth
- Ben Briggs delves into Understanding Azure App Service Authentication Challenges with Path-Based Routing