Azure Weekly

Issue #8 - 27th December 2014

This week, Jason Zander provides a root cause analysis of the outage which affected customers on the 18 November. In addition to the policy of incremental deployments across regions not being followed, a configuration change was incorrectly enabled for Azure blob storage front ends. The article also explains the secondary issues affecting some VMs - a small number of VMs were unable to recover automatically because of a disk mount timeout, because they were provisioned during the storage outage, or because of a network programming error. Preventative actions include an update to the team's deployment systems to enforce compliance with flighting and testing policies. There is also a commitment to improve VM resiliency, among other measures.

The outage is also analysed in the EdgeShow on Channel9, with Larry Larson and Azure's Mark Russinovich.

We're taking a break over the festive period, the next edition of Azure Weekly will hit your inbox on the 11th of January.

⚖️ Management and Governance

Rob Costello describes how to run scripts against Azure VMs without using PowerShell endpoint or PowerShell remoting, using Azure Automation's Custom Script Extension
Meanwhile, Joe Levy walks through authoring PowerShell 'Integration Modules' for Azure Automation
John Donnelly has written a Docker reading list
David Ebbo writes about automating Azure on a CI server using a Service Principal

🖥️ Compute

Haishi Bai, Boris Scholl and Saurabh Bhatia talk about diagnostic improvements in the Azure SDK on Channel 9, including custom Event Sources.
Stuart McKee blogs about Microsoft Azure Government's ability to meet Criminal Justice Services requirements

🌐 Networking

Keith Mayer describes how to diagnose Azure Virtual Network VPN connectivity issues with PowerShell

💡 Internet of Things

On Thursday, Donna Malayeri announced the general availability of an SDK for offline sync for mobile devices, enabling apps to cache server data locally, and end users to modify data without network access
Part 5 of Adarsha Datta's Azure Mobile Services series covers what you need to know about backend server scripting and scheduling
Martin Kearn describes how to try Visual Studio on an Azure VM
Part 4 of Michael Collier's series on Azure Cloud Service Diagnostics talks about custom logging components with NLog and Azure Diagnostics 3.1 changes

⚙️ Data and Analytics

Oliver Chiu writes about changes to HDInsight. 'Script Action' which lets users customise their HDInsight clusters by adding Hadoop projects using PowerShell is now generally available, and now includes a user interface for adding Script Actions. The post also announces new documentation with templates for Hadoop projects including Spark, R, Giraph and Solr
More updates in the data world - Gaurav Malhotra explains that Azure Data Factory now integrates with Azure Machine Learning. Models (created using Azure Machine Learning) can be run from within data factory pipelines
Lara Rubbelke follows up on the announcement of Cloudera Enterprise in the Azure Marketplace with a step by step guide to provisioning a cluster and logging into Cloudera Manager

📦 Storage

Giridhar Mosay announces Azure Backup's support for backups from Windows 7, 8 & 8.1 machines
A new series about setting up a DR site on Azure was released on Channel 9 this week. The series introduces Site Recovery Manager, talks through preparing a site recovery vault and on premises resources, configuring protection, creating a recovery orchestration plan, and testing a failover
On the Azure podcast Cale Teeter and Evan Basalik discuss premium storage and upcoming changes to the storage API

🎬 Media

Two interesting articles from September: Jason Suess describes how you can set up your own live webcast using Azure Media Services Live Streaming, while Cenk Dingiloglu provides a more detailed technical overview

⚙️ Hybrid Integration

Part 16 of the building your Azure cloud series covers migrating Applications to Microsoft Azure from Hyper-V, VMware, Amazon AWS & Physical Servers, with Keith Mayer and Chris Caldwell on Channel 9.
Max McCarty published the second part of his Everything You Need to Know About Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging series

⚙️ Identity and Access Management

Dan Wahlin writes part 2 of a series on Integrating AngularJS with Azure Active Directory and Office 365/SharePoint
The Active Directory Team announce that Azure Active Directory now supports Group Claims and Application Roles