Azure Weekly
Issue #53 - 21st November 2015
Future Decoded took place in London this week.
During the event, Satya announced plans to offer commercial cloud services from the UK. There was a big focus on the intelligent cloud, particular Cortana Analytics Suite and IoT Suite. Summaries of the keynotes including Satya's keynote, and a session on the future of IoT and iOT security considerations are available on the Microsoft website. There's also a write up of Day 1 and Day 2 from Harry Eagles on Technet. Videos are not up on Channel 9 at the time of writing but should be soon.
Endjin presented a session on day 1 of Future Decoded and covered "embracing disruption in financial services" with their customer Hymans Robertson; the session covered Hymans Robertson's 3 year journey to the cloud and the regulatory, risk and compliance hurdles they had to overcome.
In other Azure news this week, Microsoft and ConsenSys are partnering to offer Ethereum Blockchain as a Service on Azure, curently consisting of Ether.Camp and BlockApps. Ethereum is a a cryptocurrency platform similar to BitCoin.
Following on from last week's announcement about the Red Hat/ Microsoft partnership, Red Hat subscriptions can now be migrated to Azure.
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets are in public preview. Scale Sets let you deploy and manage a collection of virtual machines as a set.
There's a new Application Insights Content Pack for Power BI which includes a map showing user locations by country/region, summary statistics and time-series of their activity.
Over to the world of data, and Azure Search now has full support for creating and monitoring indexers in the Azure Search Portal. The Azure DocumentDB Data Migration Tool now has geospatial support. Azure SQL Database Threat Detection is now in Public Preview.
Thanks to Daniel Örneling (@DanielOrneling) for submitting two articles this week - automatically create AD users with AD automation and OMS, and import new modules into Azure Automation.
⚖️ Management and Governance
On the Azure blog, Dale Koetke desribes how to use the new Application Insights Content Pack for Power BI
Also on the Azure blog, Tom Keane shares an update on Microsoft Azure's Cloud Security Attestations
Also on the Azure blog, Beckylin Orooji explains how to Create an Application Insights Web Test and Alert Programmatically
On Channel 9, Seth Juarez presents A Lap Around Azure with Scott Guthrie
On TechNet, 'Gkaleta' writes Azure Billing - create a quick, easy and detailed overview of what Azure services you are paying for.
Also on TechNet, Dan Plastina of the Key Vault team announces that Key Vault logging is now available
On the Daily Dot Net Tips blog, Abhijit Jana writes Get your Application Insights data in Power BI Faster than ever and Save and share your Application Insights results for quick access
On the Windows IT Pro site, John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) explains how to Use Azure Resource Manager policies and answers the question How many tags can an Azure resource have
🖥️ Compute
On the Azure blog, Mark Russinovich announces the public preview of Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
Also on the Azure blog, Marley Gray announces that Ethereum Blockchain as a Service is now available on Azure
Corey Sanders (@CoreySandersWA), Director of Program Management Azure, announces that Red Hat Cloud Access is now available on Azure
On MSDN, the Azure RemoteApp team write about October updates to Azure RemoteApp and describe how to Disable User Profile Disks UPDs in Azure RemoteApp
Also on MSDN, Ryan W. Battle describes how to Deploy the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Client as an Azure RemoteApp Program
On Channel 9, Tuesdays with Corey covers Red Hat and Microsoft Azure
- On the Microsoft site, Microsoft News Center writes Microsoft announces plans to offer cloud services from the UK
On the Venture Beat site, Paul Sawers writes that Microsoft confirms acquisition of Israel-based cyber security firm Secure Islands
🌐 Networking
On MSDN, Mahmoud Badran writes about Azure Site to Site VPN required Device configuration
Also on MSDN, Thomas W Shinder discusses Getting Started with Azure Security
💡 Internet of Things
On the Azure blog, Sam George introduces Azure IoT Suite, describing the anatomy of an Azure IoT solution
Also on the Azure blog, Mimi Xu, Program Manager, Azure Notification Hubs, talks about recent Updates from Notification Hubs: Independent NuGet, Installation model, PMT, and more
On MSDN, Henrik F Nielsen announces the release of Beta4 of the ASP.NET WebHooks Preview
Also on MSDN, 'Mertunan' writes How do I know if my Event Hubs Cloud Gateway is working
Also on MSDN, Lachezar Arabadzhiev writes a step by step guide to Azure Cloud Load Testing
Also on MSDN, Sergiy Baydachnyy writes Visual Studio Code for Mac developers: How to deploy your site to Microsoft Azure
- On the Perficient blog, Joe Crabtree writes Azure: Did You Know Mobile Engagement is Now Available
On Channel 9, Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) and Jeff Hollan discuss Automating Everything and Integrating IoT with Azure Logic Apps
Also on Channel 9, Kaitlin McKinnon, Katie Stone Perez and Nahilshark present an interview with Kalle Hiitola of Next Games about using Azure for mobile game development
⚙️ Data and Analytics
- Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) discusses Using Redis as a Service in Azure to speed up ASP.NET applications
- On the Azure blog, Lynn Gasch delves into Retraining and Updating Azure Machine Learning models with Azure Data Factory
Also on the Azure blog, Ron Matchoro writes that Azure SQL Database Threat Detection is now in Public Preview
Also on the Azure blog, Evan Boyle announces that full support for creating and monitoring indexers in the Azure Search Portal
On Channel 9, Scott Klein discusses Azure Search Enhancements in Data Exposed
Andrew Hoh announces that there's now geospatial support for the Azure DocumentDB Data Migration Tool
Also on the Azure blog, Alexander Sasha Nosov shares some new capabilities of Azure SQL Database geo-replication
Also on the Azure blog, Shantanu Kurhekar announces an upcoming Azure SQL Database Ask Me Anything session
Episode 102 of the Azure podcast, covers In-Memory OLTP & Real-Time Analytics in Azure SQL
On MSDN, 'Jennmar' shares her appearance on the Eat Sleep Code podcast on Azure Machine Learning
On TechNet, the Machine Learning Blog Team announces a Free Webinar on Using the Cortana Analytics Process to Build Intelligent Apps and writes 'Happy Sad Angry New Microsoft Tool Recognizes Emotions In Pictures'
On Forbes, Adrian Bridgwater writes 'Microsoft Azure Cloud Evolves For Intelligent Machine Learning'
📦 Storage
On the Journey to SQL Authority with Pinal Dave blog, Pinal Dave writes about dealing with a SQL Server - Backup to Azure Blob error - The remote server returned an error: 409 Conflict
Radu Vunvulea shares lessons learnt when logging on external storage
- Mike Lanzetta discusses Managing a Corpus of Images in Azure Blob Storage
On TechNet, Diane Golshan writes about Updates to Azure Site Recovery
🎬 Media
- On Brisbane Cloud User Group blog, Brisbane Cloud User Group walks through Using Microsoft Media Services, Azure Media Player and Azure CDN
On the Azure blog, Adarsh Solanki annonces Updates to the Azure Media Indexer, including full caption feature and a new SQL Server Add-on
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
None this week.
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
On the Azure blog, there's a link to a video showing how to Setup Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration for simplified resource sharing with external users
Also on TechNet, 'Meirm' writes 'Azure AD Application Proxy HTTP to HTTPS redirection'
Also on TechNet, Alex Simons of the AD team announces that Automated provisioning and SSO between Azure AD and Facebook at Work is now in general availability