[Azure] News for Developers, October 2017

Technical / November 3, 2017 / Jasper Siegmund / 0

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 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!

Where the previous edition featured a lot of stuff due to Ignite, things are a bit slow for this one. But still, some good news came from Redmond!

App Service specific updates

Here are some important updates from the world of Azure App Services:

• Steps have been made to improve performance of the App Service blades in the Azure Portal. And better performance is always nice!
• There’s now support for public key certificates, which allows you to use your self-signed certs.
• A new deployment option allows you to push zip files with updates to your Functions and Web Jobs instances. (link)
• Durable Functions were officially announced in preview last month. This special type of function allows you to orchestrate longer running processes where normal functions are limited in execution time. (link)

The app services team keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo. Check them out!

Visual Studio (Team Services)

Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team Services teams!

• The Visual Studio team keeps pushing updates like crazy! Release 15.4 is out in the open (link) and they released a preview version of VS 15.5. (link)
• If you’ve got the Visual Studio Continous Delivery Tool Extension installed, you can now view notifications from VSTS right within the Visual Studio IDE. (link)
• Multiple enhancements have been made to the Search experience for Code and Work Items.
• It’s now possible to reference work items from within Wiki pages.
• You can now use secrets stored in Azure Key Vault within your CI builds. Nice, keep all passwords secure in one place and limit access to just the people who should have access. No more secrets in code!
• Fields that previously supported the “In” query operator now also support “Not in“
• Customizable work item rules now allow you to set certain fields read only in work items, for instance after an item is closed.
• The “create release” experience has been revamped with some nice visualisations in place.
• Last and in my opinion certainly least; your profile picture is now circle-shaped! Nope, I don’t know who cares either 🙂

The new revamped UI for VSTS release management.

Check out https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/release-notes/2017/oct-06-vsts and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/release-notes/2017/oct-30-vsts for the complete overview!

Azure

Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:

• If you’re living in China and you’re craving for some more Azure power, Microsoft has got you covered. They’re tripling the capacity in China next six months. (link)
• Talking about power, those with a need for speed should check out Fv2 virtual machines which are the fastest VMs in Azure available right now! These feature Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. (link)
• Announced at Ignite, the Kubernetes support for Azure Container Service is now in preview. (link)
• Still in doubt whether you want to use AWS or Azure? Check out this Cloud Service Map: link
• Got some Java bits and pieces you want to move to the cloud? Azure Functions now feature support for Java! (link)
• Are you looking to automatically deploy your infrastructure as part of your deployment process (DevOps baby!), but don’t know where to start? Check out Azure Building Blocks, a set of templates for Azure Resource Manager that might suit your needs. (link)

That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund