Azure Weekly
Issue #59 - 17th January 2016
Welcome back! We wish our readers a happy new year, and hope those of you who had holidays had a good break.
Here's a round up of the Azure news in the last two weeks.
A new version of the open source Azure Storage Data Movement Library is available. Version 0.2.0 includes the ability to download, upload & copy directories, transfer directories in recursive mode or flat mode, specify a search pattern when copying, and download Snapshots under directories. The Azure Storage Data Movement Library was recently introduced in response to requests for programatic access to AzCopy.
Azure Blockchain as a Service has been accumulating new partners: BitPay, Manifold Technology, LibraTaz and Emercoin. There are also new resources: a C++ Ethereum client and CryptoSwap demo from ConsenSys and the the OpenChain implementation by CoinPrism.
There's been a update for Azure Batch, which now offers multi-instance task support, the ability to take a node offline without deleting it and the ability to change the autoscale formula evaluation interval.
A new ARM template is available for WordPress on Azure App Service backed by MySQL Virtual Machines.
Azure API Management has introduced some new caching and throttling policies to support fragment caching, transparent API versioning, tenant isolation, user identity throttling and client-application driven throttling.
The configuration experience for SQL Server in Azure VMs has been simplified.
Finally, the hardware requirements for the Azure Stack preview release were made available.
🔎 Analytics
On the Xamarin blog, Mike James blogs about adding Suggestions to Mobile Search with Azure Search
On MSDN, Lee Stott writes that Microsoft R Server is now available for Academics and Students via DreamSpark and blogs about Project Oxford– Artificial Intelligence based vision, speech and language API
Also on MSDN, Alexander Turetsky writes part 3 of his series on Event Hubs / Stream Analytics / AzureML / PowerBI, covering enhancement and visualization
Also on MSDN, Mustafa Kasap covers Machine Learning and the Azure Machine Learning Service, writes 'which version of R and R Packages running on Azure Machine Learning Service' and describes how to develop and consume an Azure ML Experiment as a Web Service
Also on MSDN, Jovan Popovic talks about Loading GeoJSON data into SQL Server and writes part 2 of 4 in a series about JSON in SQL Server 2016
Also on MSDN, 'Pranab-MSFT' discusses Sizing Elasticsearch on Azure IaaS
Also on MSDN, Niall Moran - Ireland covers Getting Started with IoT Solutions on Microsoft Azure - The Easy Way
On TechNet, the ML Blog Team lists their Top 10 Most Popular Posts of 2015
Also on TechNet, Mark O'Shea discusses Planning For SQL Server 2005 End Of Support Part 3 and Part 4
Tom Kerkhove (@TomKerkhove) covers analyzing StackExchange data with Azure Data Lake - Storing the data
On the Journey to SQL Authority blog, Pinal Dave writes 'Someone was trying to hack my SQL Server Logins in Azure'
Harald Schult Ulriksen (@hsulriksen) introduces DoubleCache, his OS implementation of a layered distributed cache, building on Redis Cache
On Channel 9, Greg Duncan talks about Face it... Windows 10 Vision and Face Detection Round-up
🖥️ Compute
On the Azure blog, Ninar Nuemah introduces a simplified configuration experience for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines
Also on the Azure blog, Marley Gray blogs about Azure Blockchain as a Service Update 3
Also on the Azure blog, Scott Zhang describes running Debian in Azure
On TechNet, Yiding Zhou discusses the Azure Batch Service Update of Dec 2015 and provides more details about the availability of MPI support on Azure Batch
On MSDN, the Service Fabric Team share the Microsoft Virtual Academy course Building Microservices with Azure Service Fabric and answer some common questions about Service Fabric
Also on MSDN, Arsen Vladimirskiy blogs about Linux Azure VM Scale Sets with shared storage using Lustre
On TechNet, Mark O'Shea blogs about the Microsoft Virtual Academy course A Deep Dive Into Nano Server, which has been updated with Technical Preview 4 information
On MSDN, Thomas W Shinder talks about Antimalware for Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Machines
James van Den Berg talks about the newly released Microsoft Azure Stack Hardware requirements
Marius Sandbu (@msandbu) covers setting up XenDesktop 7.7 against Microsoft Azure
On the Catapult Systems blog, Cameron Fuller shares Full, Nano and Core memory stats in Windows Server 2016 TP4
On TechNet, Ken Lince covers Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics Lab Setup and Demo
🎭 Identity
On MSDN, Thomas W Shinder covers Azure Security Information – What We've Done, Where We're Going
Also on MSDN, Katrien DG talks about using the Azure API Management REST API as workaround to RBAC functionality
Also on MSDN, Paige Liu walks through Integrating Cloudera cluster with Active Directory - part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
Also on MSDN, Trevor Hancock blogs about Issues with Azure Active Directory GUEST users in AAD-backed Visual Studio Team Services accounts
On TechNet, Alex Simons (@Alex_A_Simons), Director of Program Management Microsoft Identity Division, shares Azure AD Mailbag: PowerShell tips and tricks
Also on TechNet, Jan Hentschel (@Horizon_Net) describes how to automatically create AD users with Azure Automation and OMS
Also on TechNet, Ken Lince - describes creating Your Own SSO Application with Azure Active Directory
On the Falafel blog, Adam Anderson blogs about how to set up a Microsoft Account as an Identity Provider for Azure B2C
On Channel 9, Zachary Cavanell talks about Azure AD B2C: How to enable consumer logins and access management for your B2C apps Microsoft Mechanics
On Code Project, Paul James Nichols blogs about Azure AD: Securing Your API with Zero Code
Also on Code Project, Snorri Kristjansson writes about Active Directory change tracking
🔌 Integration
On the Azure blog, Azure talks about Microsoft Azure Stack: Hardware requirements for preview release
Scott Banwart shares some thoughts on the Microsoft Integration Roadmap
On MSDN, Naveen Baliga shares their Windows Azure Pack Troubleshooter Series
Also on MSDN, Ayesha Mascarenhas writes about recent updates to the Remote Desktop Client Preview for Mac
James van Den Berg discusses Hybrid Infrastructure Automation with Azure Resource Manager Templates
⚖️ Management and Governance
On the Azure blog, Chris Sanders describes Azure Automation's Graphical and textual runbook authoring
On MSDN, Greg Oliver writes 'the shortest path to Azure Automation DSC + Chocolatey VM'
On the Kloud blog, Simon Waight writes about easy debugging of PowerShell DSC for Azure Virtual Machines
On the Catapult Systems blog, Cameron Fuller blogs about visualizing usage for multiple Azure subscriptions using the new portal
On MSDN, Craig Landis explains that the Microsoft Antimalware extension (IaaSAntimalware) requires a minimum configuration when installed, otherwise its status will be NotReady, and provides PowerShell samples for checking the status of this extension.
On TechNet, Keith Mayer (@KeithMayer) shares a quick tip on using Azure PowerShell with Web Proxy and Fiddler
Sandrino Di Mattia talks about using ADAL and the Azure Resource Manager REST API from within a Webtask
Trond Hindenes (@trondhindenes) introduces Blue, his alternative to PowerShell for interacting with ARM
John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) explains how to make an uploaded VHD an OS disk with the new portal and how to change subscription with AzureRM PowerShell cmdlets
James van den Berg talks about the Microsoft Operations Management Suite OMS sizing calculator
🌐 Networking
On the Azure blog, Muntazir Mehdi talks about Cloud factory: The synchronized optimization framework behind Azure cloud network growth
On TechNet, J.C. Hornbeck blogs about deploying Network Controller using Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager 2016 Technical Preview 4
Also on TechNet, Keith Mayer (@KeithMayer) shares 7 Steps to Building Site-to-Site VPN Connections for V2 VNETs using Azure Resource Manager in the new Azure Portal
Also on TechNet, Rob Waggoner points out some updated Azure Virtual Networking documentation
📦 Storage
On the Azure blog, Michael Curd announces Azure Storage Data Movement Library version 0.2.0
On MSDN, Bruno Terkaly discusses programming Azure Blobs with Java
On MSDN, Mustafa Kasap blogs about Azure WebJobs with Storage Queue and Exceptions
Also on MSDN, Wriju Ghosh explains how to create Shared Access Signature SAS for Blob and Container
John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) describes Azure Backup Server
On Code Project, Mukesh Kumar blogs about Azure Blob Storage with ASP.NET MVC
On Code Project, Duncan Edwards Jones writes CQRS on Windows Azure - Event sourcing and Event streams on Windows Azure: Choosing the storage type
🔗 Web
On the Azure blog, Spyros Sakellariadis discusses notifying users of data received from sensors or other systems
Also on the Azure blog, Sunitha Muthukrishna announces a new ARM template for WordPress on Azure App Service, backed by MySQL Virtual Machines
On MSDN, Henrik F Nielsen writes about New Year Updates to ASP.NET WebHooks Preview. In addition to sending events in the form of WebHooks to individual users, it is now possible to send WebHooks to all users who have registered for a particular event, and there's a new IWebookSender abstraction which allows you to scale-out and load-balance the act of sending out WebHooks.
Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) writes about Best practices for private config data and connection strings in configuration in ASP.NET and Azure
On TechNet, Israel Ogbole writes Streaming IoT Telemetry to Azure Event Hub for dummies - part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
On MSDN, Laurent Ellerbach describes how to connect Lego Mindstorms NXT ev3 to Azure IoT Hub using node.js
Also on MSDN, Srikanth Sureddy covers Running a Java jar file to serve http requests on Azure App Service Web Apps
Also on MSDN, the APGC DSI Team describe using the CrashDiag Site Extension to Capture Dump for Intermittent Exception issues on Microsoft Azure Web App
Joshua Drew (@jdruid) explains how to remove The Spending Limit in Azure to use the Azure Marketplace
John Savill (@NTFAQGuy) lists the Top Ten FAQs About the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite and the Cortana Analytics Suite