[Azure] News for developers, May 2017
Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to leave and comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
App Services updates
The app services team announced a couple of new updates in their monthly blog post. These include:
- Deployment slot support for Azure Functions (preview)
Anyone working with Functions should be interested in this one. Functions now supports deployment slots just like we know from other App Services. Makes it a lot easier to run your non-production Functions without the need for a second, third, fourth instance. Does not magically solve your versioning approach though. - New back-up experience for apps
- New Delete experience for apps on App Service
- App Service support for Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Recently announced at //BUILD and now supported in app services: Azure Database support which brings both MySQL and PostgreSQL to Azure app services. - Insights Profiler is now Generally Available for App Services. Especially useful when performance matters to you (which it should).
Blog post:Â https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2017/06/01/may-2017-app-service-update
Visual Studio Team Services
From the world of Visual Studio team services:
- Built-in support for container related tasks
Previously available through extensions, now built-in. Includes Docker, Docker-Compose, Kubernetes and Service Fabric support. - Deployment support for Node.js, Python and Azure Web App for Linux using containers
- Azure portal CI/CD with Node application support. Also includes the Azure CLI.
- Using Jenkins for Continuous Integration
- Visualisation for git repositories. Brings those metro (as in the trains) style visualisations into VSTS.
- General Availability of Delivery Plans. This helps companies to organize the effort of multiple teams into one plan (roadmap).
- Work item search.
Check out https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-studio-team-services-may-2017-digest/ for the complete overview.
Other
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- Azure CLI 2.0 brings new commands for App Services, MySQL and Azure Functions. On the desktop and of course right within the portal itself.
- At //BUILD, Azure Cosmos DB was announced which will replace the product formerly known as DocumentDB. More:Â https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-azure-documentdb/
- The Azure App is here! Now available in the PlayStore and iStore, monitor and control your resources from anywhere in the world. More: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-app-preview/
Azure Overview (dot com)
In the line of this blog post, keeping track of everything that’s in Microsoft Azure can be a challenge. Good friend Barry Luijbregts created and maintains https://www.azure-overview.com/ where you get exactly that: a nice overview of all of the components in Azure. Barry also lists what’s in preview so I’m going to check out that website each month to see what I might be missing for this blog series. Nice work, Barry!
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news.
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