Azure Weekly
Issue #7 - 20th December 2014
There were several big Azure announcements this week, particularly for Azure Active Directory; general availability of the Azure Active Directory Application Proxy, password write-back to on premise directories, public preview of 'administrative units', the ability to manually add SaaS applications supporting password SSO to Active Directory tenants, and public preview of security questions. Also premium storage went into preview; this is targeted at high performance virtual machine; and provides up to 32 TB of storage @ 50,000 IOPS with less than 1ms read latency.
Scott Guthrie and Vibhor Kapoor have both written summaries of recent Azure updates this week.
Only one year remains for Azure Storage Service API versions earlier than 2012-02-12. The earliest version of the Azure SDK supporting this API is 2.1. Azure users were emailed a reminder to upgrade their applications before 9th December 2015. An Azure Team blog explains the changes and migration steps.
⚙️ Jobs
- endjin are looking for mid-level & senior developers for our London HQ, to help our customers make the most of Azure and to help endjin develop new IP, products & services. For more information about day to day life at endjin and the types of people we're looking for, see: http://endjin.com/join-us/
- If you would like to advertise vacancies in this newsletter, please send an email to AzureWeekly@endjin.com
⚖️ Management and Governance
- Vlad Vinogradsky presents getting started with Azure API Management REST API on Channel9
🖥️ Compute
- Project Orleans goes Open Source on CodePlex
- Brad Anderson announces the general availability of RemoteApp
- Kenaz Kwa and Sirius Kuttiyan announce the public preview of Premium SSD-based storage for Azure VMs with I/O intensive workloads
Tom Keane announces the general availability of Microsoft Azure Government, offering features such as infrastructure isolation and screened personnel
Ben Ridgeway provides an update on Azure's response to the POODLE vulnerability in SSL 3.0
Mark Scurrell presents a Channel9 introduction to Azure Batch
🌐 Networking
💡 Internet of Things
Adarsha Datta has written part 4 of his series on Azure Mobile Services, covering authentication and authorization
On Channel9, Larry Larsen and Gavin Gear interview Steve Teixeira, the Director of Program Management in the Windows, in the first episode of the Internet of Things Show
⚙️ Data and Analytics
- Neil Mackenzie provides an introduction to DocumentDB, and writes about permissions in DocumentDB
Scott Klein talks to Aravind Ramachandran, Senior PM on the Azure DocumentDB team about Querying DocumentDB
- Dattatrey Sindol writes about creating an HDInsight Cluster with Azure
- Matt Winkler also talks about getting started with Azure HDInsight, on Channel9
- Oliver Chui tempts website and web app customers to venture into using Hadoop with the announcement of HDInsight's built in integration with Azure Websites for web log analytics
- Hoong Fai Lai's 'Faister' blog covers using Azure Stream Analytics to tap into an Event Hub data stream
- On Pluralsight, Marco Shaw begins a series of blogs, 'Everything you need to know about machine learning'
- Latest SQL Database Update (V12) includes .NET CLR integration
📦 Storage
- Sujit D'Mello talks about Azure Backup on the Azure Podcast
Following the general availability of Azure Backup in Australia and China, Rajesh Goli blogs about using Azure Backup for branch office backups and long term retention
Tiffany Wissner announces a preview of the next generation of Azure SQL Database. The announcement is accompanied by a more detailed guide to what's new.
Eyal Carmel announces additional features for Auditing for Azure SQL Database, which was made generally available a few weeks ago
🎬 Media
Sudheer Sirivara announces the general availability of live channels for Azure Media Services. More information on live channels can be found on Jason Suess's post on getting started with Live Streaming using the Azure Management Portal
⚙️ Hybrid Integration
Max R McCarty has begun a series of blogs 'everything you need to know about Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging'
⚙️ Identity and Access Management
Nasos Kladkis announces a slew of updates for Azure Active Directory, including the General availability of the Azure Active Directory Application Proxy for both Basic & Premium, password write-back to on premise directories, public preview of 'administrative units', the ability to manually add SaaS applications supporting password SSO, and security questions in public preview.
What are 'administrative units'? There's a video on Channel9 to answer that question