• <1 minute

Last week in Azure: Event Grid GA, Ansible in Cloud Shell, and more

By Rob Caron, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Azure
Check out what happened last week in Azure: Event Grid became generally available, Ansible pre-installed in Cloud Shell, and more.

Last week in Azure, Azure Event Grid, a fully managed, scalable and flexible event routing service became generally available. Event Grid enables you to build reactive, event-driven apps with a fully managed event routing service using a publish-subscribe model to connect data sources and event handlers, automate operations, and integrate applications.

In addition, Ansible is now pre-installed in Bash in Cloud Shell. Ansible is an open-source product that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployments. By using Ansible, you can provision virtual machines, containers, and cloud infrastructures. You can also use Ansible to automate the deployment and configuration of resources in your environment.

Now in preview

Integrate Azure Security Center alerts into SIEM solutions – Announces the public preview of a new feature, SIEM Export, which enables you to export Azure Security Center alerts into popular SIEM solutions such as Splunk and IBM QRadar.

Now generally available

Announcing the general availability of Azure Event Grid – Azure Event Grid, a fully managed event routing service that simplifies the development of reactive, event-driven applications, is now generally available.

Network Watcher Connection Troubleshoot now generally available – Azure Network Watcher Connection Troubleshoot, previously in preview as Connectivity Check, is now generally available in the Network Watcher suite of networking tools and capabilities, which enables you to troubleshoot network performance and connectivity issues in Azure.

Azure Storage SDKs for Python, Ruby and PHP now generally available – The Azure Storage SDKs for Python, Ruby and PHP are now generally available. To reduce the footprint of the libraries and enable developers to use just packages in which they are interested, each of the Storage SDKs were split into four packages, one each for Blob, Table, Queue, and File.

New in Stream Analytics: General availability of sub-streams, query compatibility, and more – Announces the general availability of several features in Azure Stream Analytics: sub-streams support, egress to Azure functions, and query compatiblity levels.

Three new reasons to love the TSI explorer – Announces three new Time Series Insights (TSI) explorer: TSI explorer is now generally available, improvements were made to improve accessiblity, and its now easier to export aggregate event data to other analytics tools (e.g., Microsoft Excel).

Virtual Network Service Endpoints and Firewalls for Azure Storage now generally available – Announces the general availability of Firewalls and Virtual Networks (VNets) for Azure Storage along with Virtual Network Service Endpoints with network-based access control in all Azure public cloud regions and Azure Government.

Headlines & updates

A great developer experience for Ansible – Ansible is now available, pre-installed and ready to use for every Azure user in the Azure Cloud Shell. We also released an Ansible extension for Visual Studio Code that allows for faster development and testing of Ansible playbooks.

Azure ExpressRoute updates – New partnerships, monitoring and simplification – Get the latest news on an extended partnership between Cisco & Microsoft to build a new network practice providing Cisco Solution Support for Azure ExpressRoute, new monitoring options for ExpressRoute will be generally available later this month, simplified ExpressRoute peering, and new ExpressRoute locations.

Full MeitY accreditation enables Indian public sector to deploy on Azure – Microsoft recently became one of the first global cloud service providers to achieve full accreditation by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for the Government of India. The full MeitY accreditation adds to the Azure compliance portfolio of more than 70 offerings, the largest in the industry, with more than 30 offerings specific to regions and countries around the globe.

New Azure Data Factory self-paced hands-on lab for UI – Learn how to build scale-out data integration project using Azure Data Factory and how to build data integration patterns using ADF V2 with new hands-on labs.

Customer success stories with Azure Backup: Russell Reynolds – Having moved to Azure to reduce their IT and datacenter costs, global leadership and executive search firm Russell Reynolds adopts Azure Backup as an alternative to their tape backups, which was proving both cumbersome and expensive.

Jenkins on Azure: from zero to hero – Microsoft published an update of the Jenkins Master on a Linux (Ubuntu) VM, which brings the next phase of our support for Jenkins on Microsoft Azure with the launch of a secure, stable and production ready version of Jenkins.

Enhancements to Azure Budgets API supporting Resource Groups and Usage Budgets – Announces the release of additional features to the budgets API that support the scoping of more granular budgets with filters as well as support for usage and cost budgets, including support resource group and resource level budgets in addition to the subscription level budgets.

Enhancements to Cost Management APIs – ARM APIs now include Marketplace charges API for Enterprise and Web Direct customers with a few exceptions documented in the limitations and a Price Sheet API for Enterprise customers.

Azure #CosmosDB and Microsoft’s Project Olympus honored in InfoWorld’s 2018 Technology of the Year Awards – IDG's InfoWorld recently recognized Azure Cosmos DB in the InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards, which includes recognition for leveraging the work of Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport to deliver multiple consistency models. Azure Cosmos DB was also recognized for delivering a globally distributed system where users anywhere in the world can see the same version of data, no matter their location.

Technical articles

Using EXPLAIN to profile slow queries in Azure Database for MySQL – Learn how you can use the EXPLAIN statement with Azure Database for MySQL to profile client queries and thus help you identify the root cause of a slow query. You can use an EXPLAIN statement to get information about how SQL statements are executed. With this information, you can profile which queries are running slow and why.

Using the MySQL sys schema to optimize and maintain a database – Learn how to use the MySQL sys schema with Azure Database for MySQL to troubleshoot performance issues and manage resources efficiently.

Managing Azure Secrets on GitHub Repositories – Azure runs Credential Scanner (aka, CredScan) to monitor all incoming commits on GitHub, which checks for specific Azure tenant secrets such as Azure subscription management certificates and Azure SQL connection strings. The Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension in early preview provides developers an inline experience for detecting potential secrets in their code.

Lambda Architecture using Azure #CosmosDB: Faster performance, Low TCO, Low DevOps – Learn how Azure Cosmos DB provides a scalable database solution that can handle both batch and real-time ingestion and querying and enables developers to implement lambda architectures that enable efficient data processing of massive data sets.

How is AI for video different from AI for images – Learn how Azure Video Indexer implements serveral video-specific algorithms, and the shortcomings of taking an approach of just processing individual video frames as you would with images.

Developer Spotlight: Serverless

Azure – Event-Driven Architecture in the Cloud with Azure Event Grid – This MSDN Magazine article explores the flexibility of Azure Event Grid and shows how it can be used to resolve familiar challenges in enterprise applications.

Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook – Download the free, 325-page serverless computing e-book and get access to dozens of step-by-step recipes for quickly building serverless apps.

Monitoring issues on StackOverflow with serverless, CosmosDB, and Teams – In this blog post, Shayne Boyer, a developer advocate for Azure, covers a set of serverless functions (code on GitHub) his team uses to help monitor Azure developer questions on Stack Overflow.

Logic Apps Introduction – Get an overview of Azure Logic Apps in this article from the Azure docs.

Create a function triggered by Azure Cosmos DB – Learn how to create a function triggered when data is added to or changed in Azure Cosmos DB.

Service updates

Azure shows

Running Ansible on Azure – Kylie Liang shows Donovan Brown how to run Ansible playbooks on Azure using Cloud Shell, a browser-based shell experience hosted in the cloud. She also demonstrates how to use the Ansible extension for VS Code to accelerate Ansible playbook development using auto-completion and code snippets, and then run it inside Docker or Cloud Shell.

Azure Functions and Logic Apps – Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management on the Microsoft Azure Compute team sat down with Azure Functions / Azure Logic Apps PM Jeff Hollan to see what's new in the serverless space on Azure.

Cloud Tech 10 – 29th January 2018 – Zone Redundant Scale Sets and Storage and more! – Each week, Mark Whitby, a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft UK, covers what's happening with Microsoft Azure in just 10 minutes, or less.

Cloud Tech 10 – 5th February 2018 – Event Grid, Jenkins, Ansible and more! – Each week, Mark Whitby, a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft UK, covers what's happening with Microsoft Azure in just 10 minutes, or less.

The Azure Podcast: Episode 213 – Azure Dev using Windows Subsystem for Linux – Tara Raj, a PM who has been on the show before, talks to us about her latest endeavor, the Windows Subsystem for Linux and how it can be used for various tasks including Azure Development!