Azure.Source – Volume 51

A Microsoft Ignite 2018 retrospective

As you probably know by now, many thousands of people descended on Orlando, Florida last week for Microsoft Ignite 2018. In this volume of Azure.Source, I've gathered in one place the links you need to dig through all of the announcements we made. As you will read and see below, a LOT happened last week.

Microsoft Ignite 2018 – Vision keynote – Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, kicks off Ignite and Envision 2018 with this keynote that lays out the Microsoft vision that will empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

IT and developer success with Microsoft Azure – Microsoft Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy cloud native and hybrid applications on a massive, global cloud using your favorite tools and frameworks. Join Scott Guthrie, EVP Cloud + AI & Julia White, CVP Azure, as they demonstrate the latest advances.

Microsoft Ignite | The Tour – If you missed out on attending Ignite in Orlando, don't fret – Ignite may be coming to a city near you over the coming months. Join us at the place where developers and tech professionals continue learning alongside experts. Explore the latest developer tools and cloud technologies and learn how to put your skills to work in new areas. Connect with our community to gain practical insights and best practices on the future of cloud development, data, IT, and business intelligence.

Microsoft Ignite 2018 news and highlights – In September, we did some work on the Updates area of the Azure website to make it easier to track changes to Azure services and the roadmap showing what's in development. This section of Updates provides a concise directory of what we announced at Ignite.

Microsoft Learn – A new way to learn Azure by following guided learning paths to build practical job skills you can start using right away: Azure Fundamentals, Administer infrastructure resources in Azure, and more.

Infrastructure

A crazy amount of new Azure infrastructure announcements – Core Sanders, Corporate Vice President, Azure, covers a plethora of announcements in this blog post, which is a companion post to his general session at Ignite:

Get the details:

• Unlocking innovation with the new N-Series Azure Virtual Machines

• Introducing the new HB and HC Azure VM sizes for HPC

• Announcing public preview of Azure Front Door Services

• Introducing the public preview of larger Managed Disks sizes

• Announcing general availability of Standard SSD Disks for Azure Virtual Machine workloads

• Announcing Ultra SSD – the next generation of Azure Disks technology (preview)

• Expanding the Azure Data Box family

• New investments in Azure Stack extend Microsoft’s hybrid cloud leadership

• Strengthen your security posture and protect against threats with Azure Security Center

• Now is the time to migrate all your apps, data, and infrastructure to Azure

• Azure Database Migration Service and tool updates – Ignite 2018

• Get speed and control with new free Azure governance services

• Announcing the EA preview release of management group cost APIs

Data

Ignite 2018 – Making AI real for your business with Azure Data – Rohan Kumar, Corporate Vice President, Azure Data, shares how the confluence of Cloud, Data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is driving unprecedented change and is rapidly becoming foundational to innovation in every industry, which is a companion post to his general session at Ignite:

Get the details:

• Introducing Azure Data Explorer

• Azure Data Explorer Technology 101

• Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, General Purpose tier general availability

• Three reasons Azure SQL Database is best for SQL Server migrations

• Announcing Azure SQL Database Hyperscale public preview

• Performance updates and tuning best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL

• Latest updates to Open Source Database Services for Azure – Ignite 2018

• Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Database for PostgreSQL in preview

• Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Database for MySQL in preview

• Azure Databricks – Delta in preview, 9 regions added, and other exciting announcements

• Manage your SQL Information Protection policy in Azure Security Center

Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Redefine data analytics with Modern Data Warehouse on Azure – John Macintyre Partner Group Program Manager, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, demonstrates why thousands of customers are now using Azure SQL Data Warehouse to take advantage of the fast, flexible, and secure analytics platform to gain deeper insights and make better decisions.

See also:

• Near real-time analytics in Azure SQL Data Warehouse

• Seamless access to management insights for SQL Data Warehouse with Data Studio

• Azure SQL Data Warehouse now supports maintenance scheduling

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB – database for Intelligent Cloud – Intelligent Edge era – Rimma Nehme Product Manager and Architect, Azure Cosmos DB, announces new capabilities that serve as a crucial step towards enabling anyone to easily build globally distributed apps for the Intelligent-Cloud-Intelligent Edge era.

See also:

• Azure Cosmos DB: Pushing the frontier of globally distributed databases

• Announcing general availability of Azure Cosmos DB reserved capacity

• Azure Cosmos DB JavaScript SDK 2.0 now generally available

• Azure Cosmos DB Developer Experience updates

• Try Azure CosmosDB for 30 days free, no commitment or sign up

Azure HDInsight

Deep dive into Azure HDInsight 4.0 – Ashish Thapliyal Principal Program Manager, Azure HDInsight, announces HDInsight 4.0, which brings the latest Apache Hadoop 3.0 innovations representing over 5 years of work from the open source community and our partner Hortonworks across key Apache frameworks to solve ever-growing big data and advanced analytics challenges.

See also:

• Azure HDInsight brings next generation Apache Hadoop 3.0 and enterprise security to the cloud

• Azure HDInsight and Starburst bring Presto to Microsoft Azure customers

• New Azure HDInsight management SDK now in public preview

• Spark Debugging and Diagnosis Toolset for Azure HDInsight

• Eight new features in Azure Stream Analytics

Artificial Intelligence

Azure AI – Making AI real for business – Eric Boyd Corporate Vice President, Azure AI, announces a range of innovations across Machine Learning, Cognitive Services, and knowledge mining to make Azure the best place for AI. This blog post is a companion post to his general session at Ignite:

Get the details:

• What’s new in Azure Machine Learning service

• Experimentation using Azure Machine Learning

• Announcing automated ML capability in Azure Machine Learning

• Release models at pace using Microsoft’s automated machine learning!

• Microsoft’s new neural text-to-speech service helps machines speak like people

• Global scale AI with Azure Cognitive Services

• Build conversational experiences with Microsoft Bot Framework

Management

New full stack monitoring capabilities in Azure Monitor – Shiva Sivakumar, Director of Program Management, Azure Monitoring & Diagnostics, announces that Azure Log Analytics and Azure Application Insights are now available as integrated features within Azure Monitor, without any loss or compromise of any capability, and with the same pricing.

Get the details:

• Azure Monitor alerting just got better!

• Azure Monitor is providing a unified logs experience

• Rich insights for virtual machines from Azure Monitor

• A new way to send custom metrics to Azure Monitor

See also:

• Announcing Azure user experience improvements at Ignite 2018

• Azure Deployment Manager now in public preview

• Get notified when your Azure resources become unavailable

• Azure Advisor has new recommendations for you

Internet of Things

Microsoft Azure enables a new wave of edge computing. Here’s how. – Julia White, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure, shares how we’re building Azure cloud/edge capabilities aligned with these enduring principles while uniquely delivering consistency across the cloud and the edge.

Get the details:

• Announcing the general availability of Azure IoT Central

• Azure Sphere is here – public preview and dev kits now available

• Publish your Azure IoT Edge modules in Azure Marketplace

• Developer tooling improvements for Azure IoT Edge

• Extended offline operation with Azure IoT Edge

• Allego offers electric vehicle smart charging solutions powered by Azure Digital Twins

• A powerful and intuitive way to route device messages in Azure IoT Hub

• Happy anniversary: New IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service features out today

• Expanding the Azure Data Box family (Data Box Edge)

Networking

Azure Networking Fall 2018 update – Yousef Khalidi CVP, Azure Networking, announces 100 Gbps, fastest connectivity in public cloud and availability of branch connectivity, new cloud native security capabilities and application performance services.

Get the details:

• Announcing Alias records for Azure DNS

• Application Gateway Analytics via GoAccess

• Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network is now generally available

• DDoS Protection Attack Analytics and rapid response

The Azure Podcast

Now in preview

Azure Container Registry: Public preview of Helm Chart Repositories and more – As customers deploy multi-container applications, Helm has evolved as the defacto standard to describe Kubernetes-based applications. With Helm repositories, customers can push their Helm Charts to Azure Container Registry, providing a single source of truth for their images and deployment definitions running in Kubernetes.

Announcing the public preview of Shared Image Gallery – Shared Image Gallery provides an Azure-based solution to make the custom management of virtual machine (VM) images easier in Azure.

Announcing private preview of Azure VM Image Builder – Azure Virtual Machine (VM) Image Builder, now available in private preview, enables you to migrate your image building pipeline to Azure.

Azure Active Directory authentication for Azure Files SMB access now in public preview – Integration with Azure AD enables SMB access to Azure file shares using Azure AD credentials from Azure AD DS domain joined Windows VMs. In addition, Azure Files supports preserving, inheriting, and enforcing Microsoft file system NTFS ACLs on all folders and files in a file share.

Introducing Azure Premium Blob Storage (limited public preview) – Azure Premium Blob Storage complements the existing Hot, Cool, and Archive tiers by storing data on solid-state drives, which are known for lower latency and higher transactional rates compared to traditional hard drives.

Announcing Webapps Undelete (Preview) – Undelete a deleted web app to restore a site deleted in the past 30 days, including the content and configuration, and it will also restore the host name, if available.

Microsoft 365 adds modern desktop on Azure – A cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience, optimized for Office 365 ProPlus, and includes free Windows 7 Extended Security Updates.

A new era for Azure Files: Bigger, faster, better! – Get larger, low latency file shares with more IOPS, higher throughput, and Azure Active Directory integration. In addition, a new Azure File Sync agent is coming with significant improvements in the sync performance, tiering, and reporting.

Premium Files pushes Azure Files limits by 100x! – Azure Premium Files provides fully managed file services, optimized to deliver consistent performance at 100x improvement over the existing Azure Files. It is designed for IO intensive enterprise workloads that require high throughput and a single digit millisecond latency.

Announcing Bring your own Storage to App Service – A new feature to App Service on Linux and Web App for Containers that supports mounting Azure Blobs and Azure Files into your Azure App Service. You can configure up to five Azure storage accounts for a given App Service.

Now generally available

Azure SignalR Service now generally available – Get a fully-managed SignalR service that enables you to focus on building real-time web experiences without worrying about setting up, hosting, scaling, or load balancing your SignalR server.

General availability of Tomcat and Java SE on App Service on Linux – Using App Service on Linux, you can deploy your Java project to either Tomcat or your favorite Java SE platform, such as Spring.

Serial console for Azure VMs now generally available – Serial console for Azure VMs is now generally available in all public regions. New features include magic SysRq keys, non-maskable interrupts, and subscription-wide enable/disable.

Introducing Azure Functions 2.0 – In addition to UX updates, now you can use your cross-platform .NET Core assets within your Functions apps. At the core of the Azure Functions runtime is the function host, re-written to run in .NET Core 2.1. This not only brings significant performance improvements, but also allows Functions to be written and hosted locally on all major platforms—Windows, Mac, and Linux.

News and updates

Announcing the New App Service Diagnostics Experience – App Service Diagnostics is our intelligent and interactive experience to help you diagnose and troubleshoot issues with your app. You can use Genie to guide you through the different ways to troubleshoot a variety of potential issues, since sometimes bad things happen to good apps.

Data-driven styling and more in the latest Azure Maps Web SDK update – The latest update to the Azure Maps Web SDK is now available, which includes developer-focused API improvements, a spatial math library, and more.

SAP at Microsoft Ignite: Announcing SAP Data Custodian for Azure – SAP Data Custodian, a SaaS offering from SAP, will soon become available on Azure. SAP Data Custodian combines Azure’s built-in compliance controls and the deep expertise of SAP to provide customers end-to-end visibility of their SAP data on Azure and an easy to use set of data governance controls. This will help customers to fulfill their responsibility for data governance, segregation of oversight duties, and achieve independent verification.

Building with blockchain on Azure – Provides an update on companies building with blockchain on Azure and the Azure Blockchain Workbench, which simplifies development and eases experimentation with prebuilt networks and infrastructure.

Azure Pipelines is the CI/CD solution for any language, any platform, any cloud – Azure Pipelines is a CI/CD service that enables you to continuously build, test, and deploy to any platform or cloud. It has cloud-hosted agents for Linux, macOS, and Windows, powerful workflows with native container support, and flexible deployments to Kubernetes, VMs, and serverless environments. Azure Pipelines provides a great offer for Open Source Projects by providing unlimited build minutes and 10 free parallel jobs, and integrates well with GitHub repos

Go Cloud-native with Spring Cloud on Azure – To streamlined your efforts for running Spring apps in the cloud, we announced the Spring Cloud for Azure project. In addition, with the new Spring Boot Extension Pack in Visual Studio Code, you can have a lightweight development experience with your Spring Boot applications.

Manage Azure Monitor using Java – We released version 1.16 of the Azure Management Libraries for Java. Now you can programmatically manage Azure Monitor using Azure Management Libraries for Java.

Azure Quickstart Center update – Azure Quickstart Center helps you start your projects in Azure quickly with step-by-step guidance. New enhancements to the Azure Quickstart Center experience help you set up your Azure environment with best practices and guidance from Azure.

New features and enhancements released in Bing Custom Search V3 – We released additions and enhancements to the Bing Custom Search product to help developers and non-developers to harness the power of the web by enabling them to build an even more powerful and customizable search experience.

Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure Stack together for hybrid enterprise solutions – OpenShift and Azure Stack enable a consistent application experience across Azure, Azure Stack, bare-metal, Windows and RHEL bringing together Microsoft’s and Red Hat’s developer frameworks and partner ecosystems.

Move Managed Disks and VMs now available – Move Managed Disks and VMs across resource groups and subscriptions with a single click. This also enables you to move Managed Images and Snapshots.

Azure Service Fabric updates at Ignite 2018 – Service Fabric is a microservices platform to build, deploy, discover, and scale services with message routing, low-latency storage, and health monitoring. Announces an update of Service Fabric Mesh preview and the pending release of Service Fabric runtime version 6.4 with corresponding SDK and tooling updates.

Strengthen security with key Azure innovations – We announced new capabilities and services at Ignite that enable you to manage your identity without a password, added new layers to network protection, protecting data wherever it is to enable confidential computing, and more.

Microsoft Azure: The only consistent, comprehensive hybrid cloud – More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies trust their business on Azure today, and many of them take advantage of Azure hybrid capabilities to fuel innovation and deliver great business outcomes. Learn how customers are taking advantage of these capabilities and how we're supporting your hybrid needs with the ultimate consistent hybrid cloud.

The Azure DevOps Podcast

Technical content and training

The OWASP DevSlop Show – Learn about DevSecOps, which weaves security through DevOps on the OWASP DevSlop Show, which streams live every Sunday at 1:00 PM ET, on Mixer, Twitch, and YouTube, for approximately an hour. Past episodes are available on YouTube.

Azure Functions and Azure Storage: secure authentication with Managed Identities and without managing keys! – Learn about using Managed Identities for secure and convenient approach to authenticate to Azure services from Serverless Functions without managing or storing any access keys or credentials.

How to securely access cloud resources from Linux VMs on Azure – Learn how to significantly improve authentication process between cloud resources, reduce operational overhead and vulnerability of managing and storing authentication credentials.

Broadcast Real-time Updates from Cosmos DB with SignalR Service and Azure Functions – Learn how you can use Azure Functions and SignalR Service to broadcast real-time document changes in Cosmos DB to clients over WebSockets.

Azure tips & tricks

Events

What to expect in Spark + AI summit Europe – The Spark + AI summit Europe is in London this week where Microsoft and many of their customers using Azure Databricks are present during the Summit.

Customers and partners

Microsoft and Azul Systems bring free Java LTS support to Azure – Java developers on Azure and Azure Stack can build and run production Java applications using Azul Systems Zulu Enterprise builds of OpenJDK without incurring additional support costs. If you’re currently running Java apps on-premise or with other JDKs, consider moving it to Zulu on Azure for free support and maintenance.

Healthcare Cloud Security Stack now available on Azure Marketplace – Healthcare Cloud Security Stack which is now available on Azure Marketplace, uses Qualys Vulnerability Management and Cloud Agents, Trend Micro Deep Security, and XentIT Executive Dashboard as a unified cloud threat management solution. Qualys cloud agents continuously collect vulnerability information and are mapped to Trend Micro Deep Security IPS.

Azure ISVs expand the possibilities with Azure Stack – This post highlights some of our ISV partners that address common customer requirements for Azure Stack.

A Cloud Guru's Azure This Week