Azure Weekly
Issue #65 - 28th February 2016
This week, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2 instances were made available in the Azure Marketplace, for all regions, except China and US Government.
The Azure Container Service Preview has been made fully available. The service lets users provision clusters of Azure VMs on which containerized applications can be managed using Mesos, Mesosphere's Marathon or Docker Swarm.
In other container news, version 0.10 of Docker Tools for Visual Studio was released.
An Annotations detail blade is now available in Application Insights.
The SQL Server AlwaysOn Cluster Template has been updated to improve security, availability and performance. The template now uses an Internal Load Balancer as a listener endpoint. Data disks no longer need to be manually attached and configured, and users can now chose the SQL Server version for replica VMs, and make use of automated patching.
Azure Backup is now available across Azure China. In addition, Azure Backup Server has been enabled for critical applications on-premises to Azure for all Azure China customers.
In events news, the DevIntersection conference takes place from April 16 - 22 in Orlando, Florida. The conference deals with the intersection of tools and technologies, including Azure, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, SQL, Office and SharePoint.
If you have any content you'd like to contribute to the newsletter, please tweet @AzureWeekly or ping an email to AzureWeekly@endjin.com.
🔎 Analytics
On the Azure blog, Liam Cavanagh, SR Program Manager Azure Search, describes how to leverage Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to full text search images within Azure Search
Also on the Azure blog, Ninar Nuemah, Program Manager - SQL Azure, announces that the SQL Server AlwaysOn Cluster template has been updated with internal listeners and optimized performance
On Code Project, Craig Pickles covers Row-Level Security in Azure SQL, with Entity Framework
Episode 115 of the Azure podcast deals with Azure SQL Data Warehouse, with Matt Usher, a Senior PM in the Azure team, on the Azure SQL Data Warehouse
On MSDN, Siddhika Nevrekar blogs about pulling data from either public or private sources to Azure Event Hub where the data is exposed as a web service or feed
On the Falafel blog, Kris Lankford writes an introduction to using Azure Stream Analytics
On MSDN, Jennifer Marsman shares a two part video series on using Azure Machine Learning to predict who will survive the Titanic
Also on MSDN, 'carrollwp' describes how to call a Azure Machine Learning Web Service from NodeJS
Also on MSDN, Susan Ibach writes a step by step guide to predict the future with Azure Machine Learning
On the Falafel blog, Kris Lankford blogs about Azure EventHub – getting your device data to the cloud
On Channel 9, Andrew Moll and Karan Gulati talk about Halo, Minecraft, and more - how Microsoft Studios processes Gaming Event Data
🖥️ Compute
On the Microsoft Openness site, the Openness Team writes the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the Azure Marketplace
Alexandre Brisebois (@Brisebois) describes deploying Nano Server to Microsoft Azure
On Computing.co.uk, Daniel Robinson covers last week's announcement of free-to-use SQL Server Express on Azure
On MSDN, the Onecode Team shares a sample showing how to send SMTP Mail within Azure worker role
On TechNet, Shannon Gowen shares a sample for setting up a 5 minute setting up a 5 Minute Warning for when Azure is about to reboot a VM
Also on TechNet, there's a case study of BizSpark member Badge Keeper who use Azure to run a motivational service
🎭 Identity
On the MSSQL Tips site, Douglas Correa writes about using PowerShell to export Active Directory information
On the Falafel blog, Adam Anderson explains how to improve security with Azure B2C and multi-factor authentication
On the Kloud blog, Simon Waight describes using Active Directory Security Groups to Grant Permissions to Azure Resources
On TechNet, Garrett Bundy writes that Azure AD Connect 1.1 is now GA providing faster sync times, automatic upgrades and built in filtering options and more
On the Kemp Technologies blog, Kurt Jung covers pre-authentication with AAD Domain Services in Azure
🔌 Integration
On Channel 9, David Tesar, Simon May and Oguz Pastirmaci talk about Azure Stack and other topics on the Ops Team show
James van Den Berg writes part one of a series on an Azure Stack proof of concept deployment
⚖️ Management and Governance
On the Azure blog, Mike Gresley announces that an annotations detail blade is now available in Application Insights
Also on the Azure blog, Corey Sanders (@CoreySandersWA), Director of Program Management Azure, announces Red Hat Linux in the Azure Marketplace and the full availalability of the Azure Container Service Preview
On the Forbes site, Janakiram MSV covers the release of the Azure Container Service in an article entitled 'Containers as a Service trend picks up Momentum with the Availability of Azure Container Service'
On MSDN, Steve Lasker announces version 0.10 of Docker Tools for Visual Studio and talks about developing ASP.NET Apps in Docker Containers using these tools
Also on MSDN, Thomas W Shinder announces an update to the Azure Disk Encryption White Paper, gives an introduction and demo of Azure Security Centre and asks for feedback on ways to improve the Azure Security Centre
Ravikanth Chaganti (@ravikanth) talks about building Azure Resource Manager Templates – Forcing the DSC Extension to use WMF 4.0
On TechNet, Keith Mayer (@KeithMayer) and Andy Syrewicze talk about delegating management in the Azure Cloud with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) on TechNet radio, as part of a series on building a hybrid cloud
Rick Rainey blogs about how to author an Azure Resource Manager Template using Visual Studio
On Channel 9, Haishi Bai, Chris Risner and Brian Moore, Program Manager on the Azure Tools for Visual Studio team, talk about Azure Resource Manager Tooling
Stefan Roth (@stefanroth_net) describes a scenario using Azure Automation + Twitter + IFTTT to trigger a webhook / runbook, when someone tweets about a particular topic
On TechNet, Ian Farr writes part 2 of his series on configuring an Azure Automation account, explaining Credentials and Variables
🌐 Networking
On TechNet, Joe Davies provides a link to an updated version of the Microsoft Cloud Networking for Enterprise Architects poster
Thomas Maurer (@thomasmaurer) shares a basic networking PowerShell cmdlets cheatsheet to replace netsh, ipconfig, nslookup and more
📦 Storage
On the Azure blog, Hans Krijger, Senior Software Engineer - Azure Linux, explains how to use the updated Elasticsearch template to create an pre-configured cluster with Azure File Storage
Also on the Azure blog, Pallavi Joshi announces that Azure Backup is now available across Azure China
Alexandre Brisebois (@Brisebois) describes how to upload a VHD to Azure Storage using AzCopy and how to get the last sync time for Read-Access Geo-Redundant Azure Storage
Also on the Falafel blog, Kevin Babcock discusses the Many Faces of Azure Storage
🔗 Web
On the Azure blog, Brady Gaster (@bradygaster) explains how to build an Azure App Service to record Raspberry Pi Sensor Data
On Code Project, there's an article from Intel about Azure connectivity with Edison and controlling it by an Windows Phone app
On Channel 9, Greg Duncan writes about a 'Beer IoT' solution, using IoT to help with brewing
On MSDN, Jeff Hollan writes about dealing with long running tasks in Logic Apps
On the Falafel blog, Josh Eastburn writes about creating scalable APIs with Azure API Apps and using Azure API Management to secure, document, monitor APIs
On MSDN, Jeff Sanders describes how to remove the notification hub and get the wizard back for Azure Mobile Apps
On TechNet, Julien Corioland (@jcorioland) talks about deployment slots and tests in production with Azure App Service, as part of a series on VorlonJS - a Journey to DevOps