Azure Technical News (November 2017)

This blog post is conceived so that in a few minutes you can get an overview of what has been going on in Azure last month. My favorite this month is Azure Compute: Reserved Instances, new Nvidia-powered VMs, Azure Migrate, VMware on Azure... Yes, you read right. My finalists would be SQL DB with innovations such as Automatic Tuning, Cosmos DB new APIs and of course the GA of Managed Applications. Happy reading!

Azure generic

• Azure OpenDev 10.2017 Sessions available in Video
• Why Microsoft offers uncapped indemnification for open source in Azure
• Get notified when Azure service incidents impact your resources

Management

• Azure Analysis Services integration with Azure Diagnostic Logs
• Introducing Azure Automation watcher tasks public preview
• Improvements in Azure Advisor
• Public preview of new Azure Policy features
• Announcing general availability of Bash in Cloud Shell
• Monitor Azure services and applications using Grafana
• Managed Applications:
  • Managed Applications are now Generally Available in the Azure Marketplace
  • Azure Managed Application in Azure Marketplace: Under the hood
  • Azure Friday: Managed Applications (August 2017)

Azure Stack

• General availability of App Service and Functions on Azure Stack

IaaS

• Compute
  • Announcing General Availability of Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs)
  • Launching preview of Azure Migrate
  • Transforming your VMware environment with Microsoft Azure
  • Microsoft’s Project Olympus delivers cloud hardware innovation at scale
  • SAP HANA, Express Edition in the Azure Marketplace
  • New NVIDIA GPUs coming to Azure accelerate HPC and AI workloads: Tesla V100 and P40
  • Announcing automatic OS upgrades for Azure VM scale sets
• Networking
  • Monitoring of Azure ExpressRoute in preview
  • Azure DNS Updates – CAA Record Support and IPv6 Nameservers
  • Azure Networking updates for Fall 2017: new features in more regions, DPDK, Traffic Manager View and more
• Storage
  • Linux FUSE adapter for Blob Storage
  • Preview the new Azure Storage SDK for Go & Storage SDKs roadmap
  • Windows System State Backup to Azure with Azure Backup is generally available

Containers

• Jenkins on Azure update - ACI experiment and AKS support
• HPC containers with Azure Batch: Singularity Containers

Security and IAM

• Azure Virtual Data Center architecture
• Access Control Service being retired
• Detecting in-memory attacks with Sysmon and Azure Security Center

Apps

• Blockchain: R3 on Azure: Strengthening our partnership
• Announcing the general availability of Azure App Service diagnostics
• Azure DevOps Project public preview
• Announcing Azure Location Based Services public preview
• Announcing the public preview of Azure Media Clipper

Data

• SQL DB
  • Elastic Database Tools for Java
  • Automatic tuning will be a new default
  • Automatic tuning introduces Automatic plan correction and T-SQL management
  • Azure Friday on Automatic Tuning
  • Server aliases for Azure Analysis Services
  • Azure SQL Databases Disaster Recovery 101
  • New multi-tenant patterns for building SaaS applications on SQL Database
  • MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MySQL: more choices on Microsoft Azure
• Cosmos DB
  • Pre-announcing the general availability of Azure Cosmos DB Gremlin (Graph) API
  • What is new in Cosmos DB's API for MongoDB
  • Announcing the general availability of Azure Cosmos DB Table API
  • Apache Spark to Azure Cosmos DB Connector is now GA
  • Dear Cassandra Developers, welcome to Azure Cosmos DB!
  • Cosmos DB in Azure Storage Explorer – public preview
• Data Warehouse
  • Introducing query replica scale-out for Azure Analysis Services
  • Azure SQL DW cost savings with optimized for elasticity and Azure Functions – part 1
  • Azure SQL DW: Hub and Spoke series Integration with Azure Analysis Services
• Azure Data Lake
  • ADL Tools for Visual Studio Code support Python & R Programming
• Other
  • Microsoft announces the general availability of Azure Time Series Insights
  • Azure Data Bricks
  • Run your PySpark Interactive Query and batch job in Visual Studio Code
  • Technical reference implementation for enterprise BI and reporting

IoT

• Azure IoT Edge open for developers to build for the intelligent edge
• Azure Stream Analytics now available on IoT Edge
• Getting started with the new Azure IoT Suite Remote Monitoring preconfigured solution
• Device provisioning: A manufacturing timeline for TPM devices
• Device provisioning: Identity attestation with TPM

AI

• Expanding AI tools and resources for developers and data scientists on Azure
• Microsoft Cognitive Services updates for Microsoft Connect(): Bot Service and LUIS GA announcement, new languages for translator API, Custom Vision model export

Have fun!
Daniel