Azure Weekly

Issue #69 - 27th March 2016

This week, Azure Blockchain as a Service Update 6 has introduced some new partners: Augur, Lisk, BitShares, Syscoin and Slock.it.

There's a new Stream Analytics integration with Azure Data Lake Store - Stream Analytics can now output to Azure Data Lake Store, a hyper-scale repository for big data analytics workloads.

An Azure Data Factory Copy Wizard is available in preview for moving data between Azure BlobStorage, Azure SQL, Azure SQL DW, Azure Data Lake and On-Premises SQL Server using a code-free wizard.

A new open source Docker Volume Plugin for Azure File Storage was announced. The plugin allows Docker containers to have data volumes stored outside the Virtual Machine.

There are some significant changes coming for Service Bus and Event Hubs. Azure Service Bus Messaging Broker, the Service Bus Relay, and the Azure Event Hubs service, which currently share a Gateway, will be split out to each have their own in future.

Version 2.0 of the Application Insights SDK for web applications was released. Breaking changes include a migration of devices support from Application Insights SDK to HockeyApp SDK (happening on April 15th), and the removal of the IContextInitializer. Other changes include adaptive sampling of telemetry (sampling which ensures statistically correct data), native support of filtering, and telemetry correlation improvements.

There are several new QuickStart templates available: Create a Service Bus Premium Namespace and Authorization Rule, Create a two VM SQL Server Reporting Services Deployment, JMeter environment for Elasticsearch, RDS deployment using existing active directory, RDS deployment existing AD & custom image for RDSH machines, Manifold Platform Endpoint on CentOS, Influx Blockchain on Ubuntu, Monero Full Node on Ubuntu, Shadow Public Blockchain Node, and Syscoin on Ubuntu.

There was a lot of build up about an upcoming Build announcement on Windows 10. Scott Hanselman tweeted that "These features (I know what this is because I'm helping) are going to CHANGE EVERYTHING. No joke." Do they relate to Azure? We'll let you know.

Finally, in events news, there's a new, business-focused conference .'Envision' launching in New Orleans on April 4th - 6th.