Azure.Source – Volume 41

Now in preview

Azure Service Fabric Mesh is now in public preview – Azure Service Fabric Mesh is a fully-managed service that enables developers to deploy and operate containerized applications without having to manage VMs, storage or networking configuration, while keeping the enterprise-grade reliability, scalability, and mission-critical performance of Service Fabric. Service Fabric Mesh supports both Windows and Linux containers, so you can develop with the programming language and framework of your choice. The public preview of Service Fabric Mesh is available in three Azure regions – US West, US East, and Europe West. We will expand the service to other Azure regions in the coming months.

Azure Security Center is now integrated into the subscription experience – Azure Security Center is available in public preview from within the subscription experience in the Azure portal. The new Security tab for your subscription provides a quick view into the security posture of your subscription, enabling you to discover and assess the security of your resources in that subscription and take action.

Speech services July 2018 update – The 0.5.0 update to the Speech SDK for Azure Cognitive Services was just released in preview. This update adds support for UWP (on Windows version 1709), .NET Standard 2.0 (on Windows), and Java on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow, API level 23) or later. It also includes feature changes and bug fixes. Most notably, it now supports long-running audio and automatic reconnection. This will make the Speech service more resilient in the event of time-out, network failures, or service errors. Improvements to error messages make it easier to handle errors.

Also in preview

• Public preview: Business Critical service tier in Azure SQL Database Managed Instance

Now generally available

Score one for the IT Pro: Azure File Sync is now generally available! – Azure File Sync transforms your Windows Server machines into a quick cache of your Azure file share. You can use any protocol that's available on Windows Server to access your data locally, including SMB, Network File System (NFS), and File Transfer Protocol Service (FTPS). You can have as many caches as you need across the world. You must have an Azure storage account and an Azure file share in the same region that you want to deploy Azure File Sync. Region availability for Azure File Sync.

Also generally available

• General availability: vCore-based purchasing model for SQL databases and elastic pools
• General availability: SQL Database auto-failover groups
• General availability: Configurable long-term backup retention for Azure SQL Database

News and updates

Announcing the Azure Cloud Shell editor in collaboration with Visual Studio Code – Through collaboration with the Visual Studio Code team and their open-source Monaco project, the same web-standards based editor that powers Visual Studio Code is now integrated directly into Cloud Shell. The Monaco code editor brings features like syntax coloring, auto completion, and code snippets. The new Cloud Shell integration includes a file explorer to easily navigate the Cloud Shell file system for seamless file exploration. This enables a rich editing workflow by simply typing “code .” to open the editor’s file explorer from any Cloud Shell web-based experience.

Spring Data Gremlin for Azure Cosmos DB Graph API – Spring Data Gremlin is now available on Maven Central with source code available on GitHub. Spring Data Gremlin supports an annotation-oriented programming model to simplify the mapping to the database entity. It also provides supports to create database queries based on Spring Data Repository.

Azure cost forecast API and other updates – The Azure Consumption APIs give you programmatic access to cost and usage data for your Azure resources. The latest update adds a Forecasts API, location and service data normalization, price sheet mapping to usage details, a flag for charges that are monetary commit ineligible, additional properties for identifying late arriving data, and PowerShell support. These APIs currently only support Enterprise Enrollments and Web Direct Subscriptions (with a few exceptions).

Additional news and updates

• Azure Site Recovery Update Rollup 26: provider and agent updates
• Azure Container Instances now available in Australia East, East US 2, and Central US
• PHP minor version and Xdebug update for August 2018 in App Service
• Workspace selection added to Analytics, in each of your query editor tabs
• Batch services and advanced routing services for Azure Maps
• New in Azure Maps: API, map control modules, imagery, and styling features
• What’s new in Azure Monitor—container health
• Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 name change
• Azure Content Delivery Network GUID migration and UoM change

The Open Source Show

Azure Friday

Technical content and training

Foretell and prevent downtime with predictive maintenance – Learn how Azure can provide your predictive maintenance solution by using data about previous breakdowns to model when failures are about to occur, and intervene just as sensors detect the same conditions. Until recently this has not been a realistic option, as modeling did not exist, and real-time processing power was too expensive. See how Azure solves that problem.

Getting started with IoT: how to connect, secure, and manage your “things” – The value of the data an IoT solution generates depends largely on how effectively you deploy and manage the devices. Learn how to get started with securing, provisioning, and managing your devices with Azure IoT Hub.

The Azure Podcast

Customers and partners

R3 on Azure: Launch of Corda Enterprise v3.1 – R3 launched their Corda Enterprise v3.1 offering to the Azure Marketplace with a free trial offer, giving you the opportunity to kick the tires before you buy. Corda Enterprise is the mission critical version of Corda, the open source blockchain platform. Enterprise brings the higher performance, high availability and other capabilities demanded by enterprise organizations.

Globally replicated data lakes with LiveData using WANdisco on Azure – WANdisco enables globally replicated data lakes on Azure for analytics over the freshest data. With WANdisco Fusion, you can make data that you have used in other large-scale analytics platforms available in Azure Blob Storage, ADLS Gen1 and Gen2 without downtime or disruption to your existing environment.

Intelligent Healthcare with Azure Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) technology – Learn how Change Healthcare implemented Azure SQL Database Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) with BYOK support. TDE with BYOK encrypts databases, log files and backups when written to disk, which protects data at rest from unauthorized access.

Azure Marketplace June container offers – The Azure Marketplace is the premier destination for all your software needs – certified and optimized to run on Azure. In June we published 42 container offers from Bitnami, including container images for Cassandra, Kafka, and Open Service Broker for Azure.

Industries

Blockchain as a tool for anti-fraud – Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. There are many factors driving the high cost of healthcare, and one of them is fraud. There are two root vulnerabilities in healthcare organizations: insufficient protection of data integrity, and a lack of transparency. Learn how you can use blockchain as a tool for anti-fraud.

Azure This Week