Azure Weekly

Issue #67 - 13th March 2016

This week there's aa new offering for Azure Blockchain as a Service. BlockAppsSTRATOprovides a single-node blockchain instance for testing Ethereum blockchain applications and offers a REST API for connecting apps to blockchains.AlphaPoint, a digital asset exchange platform, andIOTA, a Directed Acyclic Graph/ Tangle-based distributed ledger,will also provide offeringsfor BlockChain as a Service in the future.

Proactive notifications on Cloud Service issuesare now available. Application Insights will send an email including diagnostic information when a role experiences issuessuch as startup failures, crashes or hangs. This extends the integration between Application Insights & Application Diagnostics,which previously required you to check the portal.

There's a new, open-source Azure Event Hubs client for Java.

There's a newa new lower cost tier in preview for Azure Search. The Basic tier sits between the free tier and Standard S1 tier. It costs $75/month (or $37.50/month during the preview) per search unit and supports up to 1 million documents and 2GB storage.

In Hybrid news,the StorSimple Virtual Arrayis available,the SQL Server 2016 Release Candidate introduced this week has hybrid enhancements(SQL Server Stretch Database service, and transactional replication to Azure SQL Database)and aWindows Azure Pack Connectorhas been made available on GitHub.

There's are severalnew Azure Quickstart templates on Github this week; Concourse CI, Cloudera Cluster, Deploy Splunk Enterprise, Enable Encryption on a running Windows VM, Enable encryption on a running Linux VM, Create a new encrypted Windows VM from a gallery image, Web App with a SQL Database, DocumentDB and Azure Search, Deploy IOMAD cluster on Ubuntu, Provision a Mobile App with a SQL Database, Go Expanse on Ubuntu, Create an HPC cluster with Linux compute nodes, Jenkins on Ubuntu, Deploy an Ubuntu VM with Docker, Engine & Rancher, BOSH Setup, Azure Search service, Deploy VM Scale Set with Apache/PHP app (LAP) & AutoScale, Red Hat Enterprise Linux VM, Multi-tier VNet with NSGs and DMZ, VM Scale Set Configuration managed by Azure Automation, Configure a VM via DSC extension and Azure Automation DSC.