Azure Weekly

Issue #525 - 27th July 2025

Mark Russinovich shared an update about Project Flash: Advancing Azure Virtual Machine availability monitoring - Microsoft's Project Flash has introduced significant enhancements to Azure VM availability monitoring, including a new dimension that distinguishes between platform-triggered and user-initiated disruptions, enabling more precise root cause analysis and faster response times. The update also features integration with Azure Monitor alerts through Event Grid, providing real-time notifications via SMS, email, and push notifications—capabilities. A boon for organizations looking to improve their VM reliability and performance.

Microsoft Sentinel has unveiled a fully managed data lake that enables security teams to cost-effectively store and analyse all their security data in one place, eliminating data silos whilst supporting retrospective threat hunting and forensics across 350+ data sources: Introducing Microsoft Sentinel data lake. The solution offers flexible pricing that separates data ingestion from analytics consumption, complemented by new tools including a Visual Studio Code extension for Python-based analysis and scheduled jobs—making advanced security analytics accessible without complex infrastructure management. See this post for more details: Microsoft Sentinel data lake: Unify signals, cut costs, and power agentic AI.

There's a useful post What models can I use for free while prototyping - Microsoft's AI Toolkit now provides developers with free access to GitHub-hosted models for prototyping AI agents, offering an ideal starting point despite rate limits, with a pay-as-you-go option available for scaling up. Alternatively, developers seeking unlimited usage can run local models through tools like Ollama or Foundary Local, with the AI Toolkit seamlessly supporting both options directly within Visual Studio Code for easy experimentation and agent building.

Important Changes to App Service Managed Certificates: Is Your Certificate Affected - Azure App Service Managed Certificates will require public site accessibility and specific Traffic Manager configurations starting July 28, 2025, due to new industry validation requirements, potentially affecting certificate renewals for sites with restricted access or using nested endpoints and *.trafficmanager.net domains.

Finally, a guide to Supercharge Your Dev Containers on Windows - cloning repositories directly into the WSL filesystem rather than mounting from Windows transforms Dev Container performance by eliminating the cross-OS network protocol bottleneck, turning sluggish I/O operations into near-native Linux speeds—a simple yet game-changing optimisation for Windows developers, and Writing structured data to SharePoint from Synapse Notebooks - this guide demonstrates how to overcome Synapse's lack of native SharePoint write support by using Python notebooks with Microsoft Graph API authentication to write various file types—from CSV data to matplotlib visualisations—directly to SharePoint, filling a critical gap in many data platform architectures.