Azure Weekly

Issue #66 - 6th March 2016

Microsoft confirmed its long-expected purchase of cross-platform mobile development tool Xamarin this week. The story was covered on Ars Technica among other sources. The partnership so far has led to collaborations such as Visual Studio integration, tutorials and code samples.

There are several new or updated Azure Quickstart templates on GitHub: Azure Container Service (Mesos), Azure Container Service (Swarm), Set up SQL Server Credentials using Azure Key Vault, Subnet-driven deployment, Secure VM password with Key Vault, Deploy a CoreOS cluster hosting Fleet, Deploy a VM Scale Set with Linux VMs behind an ILB, Deploy Shibboleth Identity Provider on Windows.

The Application Insights team have published a Powershell script for creating Release Annotations, opening annotations up to people who don't use Visual Studio Team Services.

There are several updates for Azure Security Center this week; new partners, expanded detection algorithms based on crash event data, centralised security management via Security Policies at Resource Group level, and PowerBI dashboard for Security Center.

Cloud Foundry on Azure now supports Diego and open source service brokers such as brokers for MySQL and MongoDB.

There's been an update to the Service Fabric SDK, introducing features including Windows 7 support for development, the ability to delete actors, the ability to query the set of actors in a partition and cancellation token suport for IService/IActor. The blog from the Service Fabric team also announced the adoption of VM Scale Sets in Azure-hosted clusters.

There's a new Azure IoT Hub extension for Visual Studio.

The DocumentDB team announced updates to Document Explorer and the Script Explorer in the portal, which enable filtering on JSON documents and executing stored procedures.

Finally, to mark FinTech week in the UK, endjin's @ythos and @HowardvRooijen wrote about regulatory compliance and Cloud Adoption, the 100 year Start Up - embracing disruption in financial services, and how Blockchain is revolutionising Financial Services. The topic is covered in more depth in the Financial Services and the Microsoft Cloud booklet.