Last week in Azure: NPM’s Service Endpoint Monitor in preview, and more

Now is a great time to learn more about Azure Cosmos DB through seven-part technical training series that started rolling out recently. The first part provides a technical overiew, and the second part on how to create a more intelligent and responsive globally distributed serverless application. Both are available now for on-demand viewing. You can join Part 3 live for an overview of both Graph API and Table API on Tuesday this week (10:00-11:00 AM Pacific Time, UTC-8). Subsequent parts are rolling out weekly through the end of March. Learn more and register for all of them here: Azure Cosmos DB Technical Training Series.

Now in preview

Monitor network connectivity to applications with NPM’s Service Endpoint Monitor – public preview – Network Performance Monitor (NPM) introduces Service Endpoint Monitor in preview, which integrates the monitoring and visualization of the performance of your internally hosted & cloud applications with the end-to-end network performance. You can create HTTP, HTTPS, TCP and ICMP based tests from key points in your network to your applications, allowing you to quickly identify whether the problem is due to the network or the application.

Introducing backup for Azure file shares – Azure Backup now enables a native backup solution for Azure file shares, a key addition to the feature arsenal to enable enterprise adoption of Azure Files. Using Azure Backup, via Recovery Services vault, to protect your file shares is a straightforward way to secure your files and be assured that you can go back in time instantly.

Now generally available

VNet Service Endpoints for Azure SQL Database now generally available – Virtual Network (VNet) Service Endpoints for Azure SQL Database is now generally available in all Azure regions, which enables you to isolate connectivity to your logical server from only a given subnet or set of subnets within your virtual network. The traffic to Azure SQL Database from your VNet will always stay within the Azure backbone network as this direct route is preferred over any specific routes that take Internet traffic through virtual appliances or on-premises.

News & updates

Cray in Azure for weather forecasting – Ben Cotton touches on how Microsoft's recent partnership with Cray for HPC workloads enables scnearios such as weather forecasting would benefit from solutions that leverage the combination of a Cray supercomputer with the elasticity of Azure and its broad suite of AI products.

Spring Security Azure AD: Wire up enterprise grade authentication and authorization – Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is now integrated with Spring Security to secure your Java web applications. With only few lines of configurations, you can wire up enterprise grade authentication and authorization for your Spring Boot project.

Unlock Query Performance with SQL Data Warehouse using Graphical Execution Plans – The Graphical Execution Plan feature within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is now supported for SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW). Now you can seamlessly and visually debug query plans to identify performance bottlenecks directly within the SSMS window, which extends the query troubleshooting experience by displaying costly data movement operations which are the most common reasons for slow distributed query plans.

Technical content

Migrating to Azure SQL Database with zero downtime for read-only workloads – Learn how we migrated MSAsset, an internal service we use to manage all Microsoft data center hardware around the world, to Azure. MSAsset’s data tier, consiting of SQL Server 2012 running on aging hardware, included a 107 GB database with 245 tables on SQL Server.

Sync SQL data in large scale using Azure SQL Data Sync – In this article, we are going to show you how to use data sync to sync data between large number of databases and tables, including some best practices and how to temporarily work around database and table limitations in Azure SQL Databases.

New Azure GxP guidelines help pharmaceutical and biotech customers build GxP solutions – GxP qualification guidelines are now available for our Azure customers. These guidelines give life sciences organizations, such as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, a comprehensive toolset for building solutions that meet GxP compliance regulations.

Get started with Azure Cosmos DB through this technical training series – Join us for one or all of a seven-week Azure Cosmos DB technical training series, which explores the capabilities and potential of Azure Cosmos DB. Whether you’re brand new to Azure Cosmos DB or an experienced user, you’ll leave this series with a better understanding of database technology and have the practical skills necessary to get started.

LUIS.AI: Automated Machine Learning for Custom Language Understanding – Language understanding (LU) helps enable conversational services such as bots, IoT experiences, analytics, and others by converting words in a sentence into a machine-readable meaning representation. Learn how Microsoft’s Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) enables software developers to create cloud-based machine-learning LU models specific to their application domains, and without ML expertise. .

Using AI to automatically redact faces in videos – Learn the background on what is driving the growth of body-worn cameras in law enforcement and how AI can help law enforcement agencies to process the videos they capture, such as redaction using an AI-based algorithm from Microsoft for detecting, tracking, and redacting faces in videos and is available for customers to use as part of Azure Media Analytics.

Deploying WordPress application using VSTS and Azure – part one – In the first of a two-part series, learn how to setup a CI/CD pipeline using VSTS for deploying a Dockerized, custom WordPress website working with Azure Web App for Containers and Azure Database for MySQL.

Developer spotlight

Ship Better Apps with Visual Studio App Center – Mark Smith shows you how to automate your app development pipeline with Visual Studio App Center. You’ll walk through how to connect your app to App Center and start improving your development process and your apps immediately.

Engage your users with push notifications in App Center – Learn how to better connect with your users by integrating push notifications in just a few steps. Create better engagement models with users by targeting push notifications to specific groups.

Getting Started with App Center – Sample Swift App and Tutorials – In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up a sample Swift app with App Center for iOS. Note that both Objective-C and Swift are supported.

Automate resizing uploaded images using Event Grid – This tutorial extends a previous tutorial on how to upload image data in the cloud with Azure Storage to add serverless automatic thumbnail generation using Azure Event Grid and Azure Functions. Event Grid enables Azure Functions to respond to Azure Blob storage events and generate thumbnails of uploaded images.

Create your first function in the Azure portal – Learn how to use Azure Functions to create a simple function in the Azure portal to see how you can execute your code in a serverless environment.

Service updates

• Analytics Platform System: Hardware refresh available for HPE appliances from May 2018
• Skip header rows on SQL Data Warehouse PolyBase load
• Seamlessly troubleshoot and tune query performance with SQL Data Warehouse
• New option to try out Web App for Containers
• Using Azure Log Analytics and an OMS workspace to monitor Azure backups
• Azure Container Instances: February updates

Azure shows