Azure.Source – Volume 36

Now in preview

Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management in public preview – Both Blob-Level Tiering and Archive Storage help you optimize storage performance and cost. Blob-Level Tiering enables you to transition blobs between the Hot, Cool, and Archive tiers without moving data between accounts. In response to customer feedback, you can now automate blob tiering and retention with lifecycle management policies. Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management offers a rich, rule-based policy which you can use to transition your data to the best access tier and to expire data at the end of its lifecycle.

Exciting advances in Azure Alerts – From better alert management to Smart Groups – Three new features in Azure Monitor enable you to enumerate alerts at scale across log, metric or activity log alerts, filter alerts across subscriptions, manage alert states, look at alert instance specific details, and troubleshoot issues faster using SmartGroups that automatically group related alerts. Observe alerts across Azure deployments with the new alert enumeration experience and API. Change the state of an alert to reflect the current situation of the issue in their environment with Alert state management. To reduce alert noise and help in mitigating events faster, Smart Groups encapsulate mutliple related alerts.

Azure Alerts Smart Groups in the Azure portal

Hallelujah! Azure AD delegated application management roles are in public preview! – You can improve your security posture and reduce the potential for unfortunate mistakes by eliminating the need to grant people the Global Administrator role for things like configuring enterprise applications. We added support for per-application ownership, which enables you to grant full management permissions on a per-application basis. We also introduced a role that enables you to selectively grant people the ability to create application registrations.

Also in preview

• Azure API Management integration with Azure Application Insights
• Tags to group, filter, and search APIs, operations, and products
• Virtual network service endpoints for Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Azure Standard SSDs in preview
• Delegate administration of applications in Azure Active Directory

Now generally available

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) GA – New regions, more features, increased productivity – Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is now generally available. We added five new regions including Australia East, UK South, West US, West US 2, and North Europe, so AKS is now generally available in ten regions across three continents with ten more regions coming online in the coming months.

Also generally available

• Data-in replication for Azure Database for MySQL now generally available
• General availability: Scaling across tiers in Azure Database for MySQL
• General availability: Scaling across tiers in Azure Database for PostgreSQL

News and updates

Participate in the 15th Developer Economics Survey – The Developer Economics Q2 2018 survey is here in its 15th edition to shed light on the future of the software industry. Every year more than 40,000 developers around the world participate in this survey, so this is a chance to be part of something big, voice your thoughts, and make your own contribution to the developer community.

Quick Recovery Time with SQL Data Warehouse using User-Defined Restore Points – SQL Data Warehouse, a flexible and secure analytics platform for the enterprise optimized for running complex queries fast across petabytes of data, now supports User-Defined Restore Points. Now you can initiate snapshots before and after significant operations on your data warehouse to ensure that each restore point is logically consistent and limit the impact and reduce recovery time of restoring the data warehouse should this be needed.

Container Tooling for Service Fabric in Visual Studio 2017 – The latest version of the Service Fabric tools, which is part of Visual Studio 2017 Update 7 (15.7), includes the new container tooling for Service Fabric feature. This new feature makes debugging and deploying existing applications, in containers, on Service Fabric easier than ever before.

Debugging Containers on Service Fabric in Visual Studio 2017

TLS Configuration now fixed to block 1.0 – We recently announced that all Azure App Service and Azure Functions apps could update TLS configuration. However, after deployment, an edge case scenario was identified involving SNI-SSL. This scenario led to SSL-analyzing tools, such as SSL Labs, showing that TLS 1.0 was still accepted, while higher versions were selected. The deployment to solve the issue for SSI-SSL is complete. Reporting tools should correctly indicate that lower versions of TLS (mainly TLS 1.0) are blocked.

Additional news and updates

• Scaling across tiers in Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL
• New Azure Security Center Overview dashboard
• Azure Container Instances: June updates
• Logic Apps available in US Gov
• Azure Batch updates
• Start/Stop VMs during off-hours in Azure Automation has been updated

Name changes and GUID migrations

• App Service Basic and Standard plans
• SQL Database Singleton
• SQL Advanced Threat Protection
• SQL Database Singleton US Government

The Azure Podcast

Technical content and training

Eight Essentials for Hybrid Identity: #2 Choosing the right authentication method – The second essential for hybrid identity is when setting up single sign-on for your employees and partners to all their SaaS applications and on-premises apps and resources, the first thing we want to do is establish identities in the cloud. With identities as your control plane, authentication is the foundation for cloud access. Choosing the right authentication method is a crucial decision, but also one that’s different for every organization and might change over time. Catch up on the first essential here, Eight Essentials for Hybrid Identity: #1 A new identity mindset.

SmartHotel360 Microservices on Azure Kubernetes Service – To help you learn how to deploy microservices written in any framework to AKS, we updated the SmartHotel360 back-end microservices source code and deployment process to optimize it for AKS. Clone, fork, or download the AKS and Azure Dev Spaces demo on GitHub to learn more.

Bing Visual Search and Entity Search APIs for video apps – Bing Visual Search API enables you to use an image as a query to get information about what entities are in the image, along with a list of visually similar images from the image index built by Bing. Bing Entity Search API enables you to brings rich contextual information about people, places, things, and local businesses to any application, blog, or website for a more engaging user experience. By combining the power of these two APIs, you can build a more engaging experience in your video app.

Azure tips & tricks

Events

Service Fabric Community Q&A 25th Edition – We will be holding our 25th monthly community Q&A call this Thursday, June 21 at 10 AM Pacific Time (GMT-7). In addition, we will hold another call at 4 PM Pacific Time (GMT-7) this Thursday, June 21 to accommodate folks in other time zones.

Microsoft Azure Data welcomes attendees to ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2018 – ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2018 took place last week in Houston, Texas. In this blog post, Rohan Kumar Corporate Vice President, Azure Data, shares some of the exciting work in data that’s going on in the Azure Data team at Microsoft, and invites conference attendees to take a closer look.

Azure Friday

Customers and partners

Rendering in Azure with Qube 7 – Rendering is the most compute-intensive part of a movie production. To address this complexity companies like PipelineFX offer render management solutions that simplify the management and control of render pipelines. PipelineFx recently announced their latest software release, Qube 7. Read this post to learn more about the 30-day trial of Qube and our low-priority Virtual Machines for getting a lot of rendering done without spending a lot of money.

New free Go-To-Market Services for all marketplace publishers – Starting March 1, 2018 all new listings in Azure Marketplace and AppSource were extended a set of free Go-To-Market (GTM) services. These benefits help our partners jumpstart discoverability of their offer in marketplaces. No action is required by partners to initiate these benefits. Upon listing, Microsoft will reach out to the partner to kick-off discussions.

Publish your solutions to Azure Government – what, why and how – The Azure Marketplace is the premier destination for all your software needs, optimized to run on Azure. The Azure Government Marketplace includes many of the same solutions for use in Azure Government, an exclusive instance of Microsoft Azure that enables government customers to safely transfer mission-critical workloads to the cloud. See this post to learn how partners can use this platform reaching new government customers.

The IoT Show

Developer spotlight

Tutorial: Deploy your ASP.NET Core App to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with the Azure DevOps Project – The Azure DevOps Project presents a simplified experience where you bring your existing code and Git repository, or choose from one of the sample applications to create a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline to Azure.

Quickstart: Create a Kubernetes dev space with Azure Dev Spaces (.NET Core and Visual Studio) – Follow this quickstart to learn how to set up Azure Dev Spaces with a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure. iteratively develop code in containers using Visual Studio, and debug code running in your cluster.

Quickstart: Create a Kubernetes dev space with Azure Dev Spaces (Node.js and VS Code) – Follow this quickstart to learn how to set up Azure Dev Spaces with a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure. iteratively develop code in containers using VS Code, and debug code running in your cluster.

Quickstart: Deploy an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster – In this quickstart, you deploy an AKS cluster using the Azure portal. A multi-container application consisting of web front end and a Redis instance is then run on the cluster. Once completed, the application is accessible over the internet.

A Cloud Guru: This week in Azure