on 23 Aug 2016
Fun with Azure Episode 3
Fun with Azure
Click here to view Episode 3
News Items
Azure Usage and Billing portal
Last year the Azure Resource Usage and RateCard APIs were released, now the Developer Experience team has open sourced a Usage and Billing portal that provides a veneer across the API allowing you to see the usage across your subscriptions. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-release-of-the-azure-usage-and-billing-portal/)
AppSource
A big announcement at WPC was the release of AppSource, a marketplace to help users find and evaluate SaaS solutions built by ISVs on top of Microsoft services. There are a few requirements for the applications, like using Azure AD and providing a trial, but this is a great way to market a solution to a wider audience. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/microsoft-introduces-appsource-for-saas-business-apps/)
Azure Storage SDK for Node.js GA
The Node.js SDK for Azure Storage has made it to general availability, and there are a bunch of samples to try out from your Node applications. It’s available via npm or grab it from GitHub. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-storage-node-js-ga/)
MPI support on Linux on Azure Batch
If you need to use MPI on Azure Batch for high scale processing, previously the only option was Windows. That’s now changed and you can run MPI on Linux within Azure Batch, and a sample has been provided that uses OpenFOAM. OpenFOAM is an open source computational fluid dynamics toolkit, but you can equally use Azure Batch for things like fire modelling, Monte Carlo simulations, or any other high performance computing workload that can leverage MPI. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-mpi-support-for-linux-on-azure-batch/)
Azure Security Center GA
Azure Security Center has been in preview since December last year. The service allows you to check how secure or insecure your Azure services are; it then provides suggestions on how to improve the security of those services. This service uses advanced analytics and threat modelling to constantly keep up with the latest cyber threats. The service has now reached general availability, and has some new features including support for Linux and a bunch of new machine learning algorithms. (http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2016/07/21/new-microsoft-azure-security-capabilities-now-available/)
Azure Logic Apps GA
Azure Logic Apps are Microsoft’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offering that provide a bunch of triggers, connectors and more advanced processes for controlling data and business workflows for your applications. The service has been in preview for a long time and has many revisions, but the team has now announced generally availability. Logic Apps is part of App Services, like Web Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps and Azure Functions, and like Functions, from GA now supports a full consumption model that means you don’t need to stand up your own App Service plan to support it. With the release has come a preview of a Visual Studio design tool for Logic Apps that works through the Azure Resource Management templating process already within Visual Studio. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-logic-apps-general-availability/)
Azure Service Bus Messaging Namespaces
Azure Service Bus has long been one of the services that has languished in the old or classic portal. This week the announcement we’ve been waiting for came out, that Service Bus is now available in the main Azure portal. With this announcement was also the announcement that Microsoft are splitting the namespaces between messaging, event hub and relay. Currently only messaging namespaces are supported in the new portal, so Queues and Topics, if you want to provision an Event Hub or Relay you still need to go in to the old portal. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/service-bus-and-the-new-azure-portal/)
Azure IoT X.509 Support
X.509 certificates are an industry standard way of securing message exchanges between two systems, and now Azure IoT Hub supports them for information exchange between devices and IoT Hub itself that are capable enough to store a private key. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-iot-support-for-x-509-certificates/)
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