Azure.Source – Volume 81
We’re really looking forward to Microsoft Build 2019, our premier event for developers happening next week, May 6-8 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. It’s a chance for developers to gain access to the latest updates and developments across Microsoft’s products and solutions, understand our strategy and product roadmaps, and learn about new technology and open source software in innovative ways. Even the weather in Seattle looks like it's going to cooperate.
The Azure team is of course a big part of Build. We’ll be giving loads of presentations, and also posting a wide range of blog posts providing more details about what we share throughout the event. This Channel 9 video gives you a look ahead with the Azure IoT team:
As we're gearing up for Microsoft Build 2019, the IoT Show goes into Azure IoT's building on the Microsoft Campus to meet some of the speakers who are preparing awesome IoT content for you.
In the meantime, there’s plenty of other stuff going on around Azure right now. Here are some of the highlights:
News and updates:
Intelligent edge innovation across data, IoT, and mixed reality
We're at an incredibly exciting technology inflection point. The virtually limitless computing power of the cloud, combined with increasingly connected and perceptive devices at the edge of the network, create possibilities we could only have dreamed of just a few years ago – possibilities made up of millions of connected devices, infinite data, and the ability to create truly immersive multi-sense, multidevice experiences. This post looks at some of the newest advances.
Digitizing trust: Azure Blockchain Service simplifies blockchain development
In a rapidly globalizing digital world, business processes touch multiple organizations and great sums are spent managing workflows that cross trust boundaries. As digital transformation expands beyond the walls of one company and into processes shared with suppliers, partners, and customers, the importance of trust grows with it. Microsoft’s goal is to help companies thrive in this new era of secure multi-party computation by delivering open, scalable platforms, and services that any company from game publishers and grain processors, to payments ISVs and global shippers can use to digitally transform the processes they share with others.
Making AI real for every developer and every organization
AI is fueling the next wave of transformative innovations that will change the world. With Azure AI, our goal is to empower organizations to apply AI across the spectrum of their business to engage customers, empower employees, optimize operations, and transform products. Read this blog to learn about our three guiding investment principles.
Technical content
Azure Stack IaaS – part seven
This blog post covers the automation options in your Cloud IaaS toolkit. We’ve come a long way – in the virtualization days, before cloud and self-service, it took a while to get all the approvals, credentials, virtual LANs (VLANs), logical unit numbers (LUNs), etc. It took so long, that the actual creation part was easy. When cloud came along with self-service, not only was it easier to create a virtual machine (VM) without relying on others, but it changed our thinking about whether VMs were precious or disposable. We’ll discuss!
Migrating big data workloads to Azure HDInsight
Migrating big data workloads to the cloud remains a key priority for our customers, and Azure HDInsight is committed to making that journey simple and cost-effective. HDInsight partners with Unravel, whose mission is to reduce the complexity of delivering reliable application performance when migrating data from on-premises or a different cloud platform onto HDInsight. Unravel’s Application Performance Management (APM) platform brings a host of services towards providing unified visibility and operational intelligence to plan and optimize the migration process onto HDInsight.
Deploy a FHIR sandbox in Azure
In connection with HIMSS 2019, we announced the Azure API for FHIR, which provides our customers with an enterprise grade, managed FHIR® API in Azure. Since then, we've been busy improving the service with new configuration options and features. Some of the features we have been working on include authentication configuration and the SMART on FHIR Azure Active Directory Proxy, which enables the so-called SMART on FHIR EHR launch with the Azure API for FHIR. We've developed a sandbox environment that illustrates how the service and the configuration options are used. In this post, we focus on how to deploy the sandbox in Azure. Later blog posts will dive into some of the technical details of the various configuration options.
5 internal capabilities to help you increase IoT success
This article is the third in a four-part series designed to help companies maximize their ROI on IoT. In the first post, we discussed how IoT can transform businesses. In the second post, we shared insights on how to create a successful strategy that yields desired ROI. In this third post, we discuss how companies can move forward by identifying and filling capability gaps. Let’s dive into some ideas about how to solve some of the challenges that could slow your IoT progress.
Monitoring enhancements for VMware and physical workloads protected with Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery has enhanced the health monitoring of your workloads by introducing various health signals on the replication component, Process Server. The Process Server (PS) in a hybrid disaster recovery (DR) scenario is a vital component of data replication. It handles replication caching, data compression, and data transfer. Once the workloads are protected, issues can be triggered due to multiple factors including high data change rate (churn) at source, network connectivity, available bandwidth, under provisioning the Process Server, or protecting a large number of workloads with a single Process Server. These may lead to a bad state of the PS and have a cascading effect on replication of VMs. Troubleshooting these issues is now made easier with additional health signals from the Process Server.
Building recommender systems with Azure Machine Learning service
Recommendation systems are used in a variety of industries, from retail to news and media. If you’ve ever used a streaming service or ecommerce site that has surfaced recommendations for you based on what you’ve previously watched or purchased, you’ve interacted with a recommendation system. With the availability of large amounts of data, many businesses are turning to recommendation systems as a critical revenue driver. However, finding the right recommender algorithms can be very time consuming for data scientists. This is why Microsoft has provided a GitHub repository with Python best practice examples to facilitate the building and evaluation of recommendation systems using Azure Machine Learning services.
Six Principles to Build Healthy Data-Driven Organizations
Organizations are increasingly forming teams around the function of Data Science. Data Science is a field that combines mathematics, programming, and visualization techniques and applies scientific methods to specific business domains or problems, like predicting future customer behavior, planning air traffic routes, or recognizing speech patterns. But what does it really mean to be a data-driven organization? InfoQ takes a look.
Azure shows
MSDN Channel 9
DevOps for ASP.NET Developers, Pt. 7
In part 7 of our series, Abel and Jeremy show us two ways to scaffold out an Azure DevOps pipeline. We'll see how to use Azure DevOps projects via the Azure portal, which gives us a UI to configure everything. Also, they'll show us how to use the Yo Team generator that allows us to work from the command line.
Detect Shake (Xamarin. Essentials API of the Week)
Xamarin.Essentials provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications. On this week's Xamarin.Essential API of the week, we take a look at the Detect Shake API to help you detect when a user shakes a device.
YouTube
Mastering Azure using Cloud Shell, PowerShell and Bash!
Azure can be managed in many different ways. Learn your command line options like Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Cloud Shell to be more efficient in managing your Azure infrastructure. Become a hero on the shell to manage the cloud!
The Azure Podcast
Episode 276 – Cloud simplified
Ryan Berry, an Azure Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, talks about his own YouTube Channel where they distill down complex topics into bite sized chunks to make it easy for you to quickly leverage these features to address similar requirements you may have for moving something into Azure.
Azure DevOps Podcast
Rob Richardson on Containers in Azure
In this episode, Rob explains the critical steps when creating a container, what developers should consider when looking to run and support Containers through Azure, and much, much more.
Source: Azure Blog Feed