Last week in Azure: Securing Azure infrastructure from CPU vulnerability, and more

As we ushered in 2018, our industry was busy responding to an industry-wide, hardware-based security vulnerability related to CPU data cache timing. We updated the Azure infrastructure to address this vulnerability at the hypervisor level. You can get more details about the steps taken to address this vulnerability here: Securing Azure customers from CPU vulnerability.

As announced last month (Azure portal update for classic portal users), today is the official sunset date for the Azure classic portal, manage.windowsazure.com. The Azure portal (portal.azure.com), which launched in December 2015, is now the place to find all of our services and your resources.

Data

Azure Data Lake tools integrates with VSCode Data Lake Explorer and Azure Account – Learn about the Azure Data Lake Tools extension in VS Code, which provides a lightweight, cross-platform, authoring experience for U-SQL scripts.

Asynchronous refresh with the REST API for Azure Analysis Services – Introduces the REST API for Azure Analysis Services, which enables you to perform asynchronous data-refresh operations instead of using long-running HTTP connections from client applications.

Build richer apps with your time series data – Check out the new Time Series Insights (TSI) developer tools, which include an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template, API code samples, and developer docs.

Azure #CosmosDB: Recap of 2017 – Rimma Nehme, GPM for Azure Cosmos DB + Open Source Software Analytics, provides a look back on a year's worth of Azure Cosmos DB milestones.

Azure Analysis Services features on Azure Friday – Christian Wade stops by to chat with Scott Hanselman about how to use Azure Analysis Services diagnostic logging and query scale out. These features provide high scalability and monitoring for IT-owned “corporate BI” and are much easier to set up in Azure than on-premises.

Other Headlines

Migration checklist when moving to Azure App Service – If you're preparing to move your application to Azure PaaS services, especially Azure App Service, be sure to review this collection of items to consider. In addition, check out the Azure App Service Migration Assistant (available for both Windows and Linux sites).

Maximize your VM’s Performance with Accelerated Networking – now generally available for both Windows and Linux – Accelerated Networking (AN) is generally available (GA) and widely available for Windows and the latest distributions of Linux providing up to 30Gbps in networking throughput, free of charge.

New Content

Designing, building, and operating microservices on Azure – The AzureCAT patterns and practices team published new guidance about microservices titled, Designing, building, and operating microservices on Azure.

Whitepaper: Selecting the right secure hardware for your IoT deployment – The second white paper of the IoT Security Lifecycle series, The Right Secure Hardware for Your IoT Deployment, is now available for download.

Service updates

• Change the subscription directory in the Azure portal – Associate an existing subscription to your Azure Active Directory (AAD).
• Developer services available only in the Azure portal from January 8, 2018 – Developer services in the classic portal will be available only in the Azure portal.
• Expanded options for accessing Cloud Shell – Information about three new ways to access Azure Cloud Shell, including a standalone experience.

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