[Azure] News for Developers, April 2018

Technical / May 2, 2018 / 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!

App Service specific updates

These were the updates coming from the Azure App Services teams:

• App Services now allow you to configure the TLS version required for your app. It’s advised to switch to TLS 1.2. (link)
• App Services also have default support for HTTP/2 now! It can make your sites faster, so you should care. (link)
• To make things extra secure, you can now use EV SSL (Extended Validation) certificates. (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!

For Visual Studio lovers: Visual Studio 2017 15.7 Preview 3 is out in the wild. (link)

And here’s the news from VSTS:

• It’s now easy to use your commit messages when creating a new PR. (link)
• Build completion triggers allow you to trigger a build when another one finishes. (link)
• Deployment Groups can be used to group multiple parts of a deployment that take place on multiple machines. For instance: deploying a web application to a webserver and a database to a database server. Deployment groups allows easy management of these kinds of task groups. (link)
• Building in Go? VSTS now supports building your apps out of the box! (link)
• The publish code as wiki option allows you to automatically publish markdown files in your repository to your project wiki. (link)
• It’s now possible to trigger a CI build from Yaml. (link)
• Helm tasks are now supported to streamline deployment to Kubernetes. (link)
• Within continuous deployment schemes you can now use tags to control which builds are deployed. (link)
• Want to be notified that your favorite package was updated? That’s now possible! (link)
• You can now move your VSTS subscription between Azure Subscriptions or Resource Groups. (link)

The Visual Studio blog can be found here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio. And the VSTS team blog is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/release-notes/.

Azure

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

• The Standard Load Balancer service allows you to load balance both incoming and outbound traffic and scales up to millions of TCP or UDP connections. This service is now generally available! (link)
• Another new service that is GA is Azure Service Health. This allows for health messages of the azure services you want to have on your dashboard and also support things like notifications. For all your Ops needs! (link)
• The Azure Cosmos DB Data Explorer application is now generally available. This combines the Document Explorer, Query Explorer and Script Explorer we had before into one app. (link)
• Previously Azure DNS Zones were always public zones. Now, Azure DNS private zones can help you create internal DNS records which do not leave you’re network. Note that this is still a preview feature. (link)
• The ability to encrypt data in Azure SQL Database with your own key (Bring your own key) is now generally available. Key access and auditing can be managed in Azure KeyVault, where the secrets are stored. This feature is known as Transparant Data Encryption (TDE). (link)
• Azure Container Instances are also generally available! This service allows you to run container instances in Azure without the need to manage VMs or scaling. (link)

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

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund