Azure Weekly
Issue #6 - 13th December 2014
This week RemoteApp heads towards GA, virtual network gateway improvements have been rolled out, and at NDC London it was announced that Project Orleans would be open sourced in the next few weeks.
Special thanks go to @AliceWaddicor for editing all of the content for this issue (as I have been suffering from a nasty bout of flu).
⚙️ Jobs
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- If you would like to advertise vacancies in this newsletter, please send an email to AzureWeekly@endjin.com
⚖️ Management and Governance
- Madhan Arumugam Ramakrishnan blogs about announcements from last week's DockerCon, describing how the new Docker orchestration APIs and Docker Hub Enterprise can support Azure developers
- Keith Mayer has written part two of his step by step guide to automated provisioning for Linux in the cloud with Azure, XPlat CLI, JSON and Node.js. Part 1 walks through installing the necessary tools.
🖥️ Compute
- Sung Hsueh of the Azure Compute VM team describes anti-malware options for protecting Azure VMs
- Information about RemoteApp preview pricing is now available
- More on a money theme - on Technet Courtenay Berrier walks through using the Microsoft Azure (IaaS) cost estimator tool
- Ashok Kirla describes how to install the Visual Studio Release Management extension for an Azure VM and use the VM in Release Management
- Marius Sandbu runs through some useful considerations to bear in mind when asking 'Can I run my workload in Azure?'
- And while we're looking at decision making tools, here's a guide by Chris McNulty to deciding between Office 365 and Azure for SharePoint
🌐 Networking
- On the Azure blog, Yu-Shun Wang writes about recent Azure Virtual Network Gateway improvements and Rajinder Singh takes them for a test drive
💡 Internet of Things
- Martin Hinshelwood provides a detailed demo of creating a release management pipeline for professional developers, with the Release Management Client for Visual Studio 2013
- On the Azure blog, Apurva Joshi announces new self-service and troubleshooting options in the Support Portal for Azure websites and describes recent updates to the Diagnostics as a Service site extension for Azure Websites
- The Vunvulearadu blog features an introduction to Event Hubs
- ... and a sample that caught our eye on the Windows Developer Program for IoT site: the C++ REST SDK (codename 'Casablanca')
⚙️ Data and Analytics
- Shahrokh Mortazavi of the Azure ML team announces that Python Tools for Visual Studio now integrates with Azure Machine learning, with full Python support coming soon
- Jen Underwood blogs about R visualisations in Reporting Services
- On the Azure blog, Oliver Chiu provides a how to guide to using Visual Studio to build applications that integrate with HDInsight/ Hadoop
- Following a switch from Azure managed cache to Azure Redis Cache, Harald Ulriksen has written a detailed guide to getting started with the Azure Redis Cache
- Haishi Bai, Cory Fowler and Saurabh Pant present a video on advanced Redis Cache on Channel 9
- John MacIntyre of the DocumentDB team writes about scaling a multi-tenant application with DocumentDB
- On the Vunvulearadu blog, an overview of DocumentDB
📦 Storage
- On Channel 9, Vamshidhar Kommineni and Rick Claus provide a deep dive into Azure storage blobs, disks, files, tables and queues
- Sanjay Nagamangalam of the Azure SQL Database team writes about changes which make it easier to create a sample Azure SQL Database and develop schema in Visual Studio
- Marcin Policht writes an introduction to Azure SQL database scalability for the Database Journal
- Brien Posey provides a step by step guide to using Azure Site Recovery
- An update is available on the Microsoft Support site to enable SQL Server Availability Listeners on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012-based Azure virtual machines
🎬 Media
- Sara Silver details some resources for client apps that use Azure Mobile Services
- The Azure blog announces updates to the Azure Media Indexer 1.1.6.7
- Ashish Chawla of the Media Services team provides an overview of how Media Services powers Office 365 video
- The azure media service samples GitHub repo now includes Windows 8/8.1 AES decryption Cache Plugin code from Mingfei Yan
- Another post from the Vunvulearadu blog, an overview of Azure CDN
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
- Thomas W Shinder provides a detailed reference guide to modern datacentre architecture patterns for hybrid environments
- Paolo Salvatori writes about how to create a ServiceBus namespace and EventHub using PowerShell, and also how to create ServiceBus queues, topics, and subscriptions using PowerShell
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
- Kristin L. Griffin blogs about creating a highly available Windows 2012 R2 RD gateway environment with Azure multi-factor authentication. This is a follow up to a previous blog, 'Step by step - using Windows Server 2012 R2 RD gateway with Azure multifactor authentication'
- David O'Brien shares a tip for recovering deleted users in Azure Active Directory using PowerShell
- French company Login People announce the launch of its Digital DNA trust authentication product on the Azure Marketplace
- Joseph Finney writes about Haven, a technology under development by Microsoft Research to let cloud users operate applications without the cloud provider being able to access their data or processes