Azure Weekly

Issue #9 - 17th January 2015

Welcome to issue #9 of Azure Weekly

Firstly, welcome back, and happy new year!

2015 has started with a bang in the world of Azure compute, where the ultra-large G-series VM has been launched, and critical application workload tests for D-series machines demonstrated performance gains compared to previous series. A D13 VM was capable of roughly 4.5 times the throughput of an A7 VM with attached data disks, and a D14 VMs with 32 attached disks able to provide 85% more write IOPS and bandwidth compared to an A7 VM with 16 attached disks. An accompanying white paper provides the details and suggestions for improving application performance. A VM complete with a pre-installed Docker engine is now available in the Azure Marketplace

⚖️ Management and Governance

The Brisbane Cloud User Group publish a two part guide to managing Azure VMs through Azure Automation. Part 1, Reducing your monthly Azure spend describes how to use automated tasks to turn off VMs at night. Part 2 describes how to ignore certain VMs
A handy tip from John Savill on Windows IT Pro - 'How can I connect to Azure using Add-AzureAccount without having to interact with the browser window?'
Yung Chou, Charles Joy and Tiander Turpijn present part 2 of a series on Automation on Channel 9, featuring a discussion and demo of Service Management Automation and Azure Automation
David Ebbo shares a great tip on how to use the new Azure Resource Manager, Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Azure Active Directory to enable automating Azure on your CI server using a Service Principal.

🖥️ Compute

On the Azure blog, Drew McDaniel announces the release of the 'G-series' VMs, which are the largest VMs available with up to 32 vCPUs, 448GB of memory, and 6.59 TB of local SSD space
Still in the large range, a blog from Silvano Coriani describes the results of experiments running critical workloads with D-series VMs, which provide temporary local SSD storage and an increased number of atached data discs. This is particularly relevant for SQL Server-based applications
Fabien Dibot describes how to build an Azure lab with PowerShell DSC (desired state configuration)
An interesting post from 2014 - Chris Risner describes how to get SignalR to work with Azure and Orleans
On the Azure blog, Khalid Mouss announces the release of a VM with Docker engine pre-installed in the Azure Marketplace
Docker is also the subject of Friday's edition of the Cloud Cover show on Channel9, where Chris Risner, Haishi Bai and Jeff Mendoza talk about what Docker is and Microsoft's support for Docker in Azure
Corey Sanders announces the public preview of Azure Key Vault, which provides HSM in the cloud. The blog also describes the launch of the G-series and the Docker image on the Azure Marketplace

🌐 Networking

Chris Compy talks about connecting your Azure Website to a VNET with Scott Hanselman on Azure Friday.

💡 Internet of Things

On the MS Open Technologies blog Eric Mitt announces the availability of an open source tool for using Angular with various cloud data providers, including Azure Mobile Services (stable), and Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Ordrin and Nitrogen (experimental providers)
On the Azure blog, Roger Best of the Cloud Platform Tools team demonstrates how to provision and deploy multiple websites from a cloud deployment project in Visual Studio
On Channel 9, Cory Fowler and Jaime Espinosa from the Azure Websites team discuss recent improvements to and the roadmap for the Testing in Production feature
Sam Stokes and Chris Caldwell talk about exploring an environment (the seashore in his example) using an Arduino device. Despite the initial slide, the video does not describe how to connect an Arduino to an octopus. Parts 1, 2, and 3 are available on Channel 9
Vesa Juvonen demonstrates how to customise OneDrive for Business sites automatically using a hidden app part model

⚙️ Data and Analytics

The Power User blog describes how to get API results from Azure Machine Learning into PowerQuery, by using PowerQuery to access a Machine Learning web service endpoint

📦 Storage

John MacIntyre of the SQL-DocumentDB team announces the release of the Azure DocumentDB Java SDK. The source for the SDK is available on GitHub
Sanjay Nagamangalam announces client tooling updates for Azure SQL Database, to support the preview version of Azure SQL Database
On Channel 9, Joseph Idziorek talks about managing Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database including moving partitions between shards

🎬 Media

On the Azure blog, Mingfei Yan announces the introduction of PlayReady encryption for Azure Media Services Live Streaming. This follows on from the recent announcement of AES encryption for the service

⚙️ Hybrid Integration

Sharad Cornejo Altuzar points to The Proton Project, a AMQP library for Android.
In the third and final part of his series, Max McCarty shares everything you need to know about Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging, covering batches, dead lettering, prefetching, auto-forwarding and security.
Chris den Arend shares how to use AMQP to communicate with Azure Service Bus from Linux.
Tom Kerkhove explains how to automatically dead-letter expired messages in Azure Service Bus & delves into how it works.

⚙️ Identity and Access Management

Alex Simons of the Active Directory team writes about the new client libraries for .NET, Android and iOS, and the Azure Active Directory Graph REST API version 1.5. The API update is described in more detail in December's original announcement
Daria Grigoriu describes how to use the new Role Based Access Control to manage content publishing contributions for Azure Websites