[Azure] News for Developers, June 2018

Technical / July 4, 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!

Do you sometimes feel lost in the world of Azure resources? Check out this post which was co-authored by Barry Luijbregts, explaining how to choose the right service for you.

App Service specific updates

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

• In preview, the App Service Deployment Center helps you to create an overview of all deployment options and provides a guided experience to set up deployments. (link)
• Azure Functions Proxies are now available in Functions 2.x, allowing the composition of multiple HTTP Functions, mocking and single page app hosting. (link)
• TLS configuration on App Service and Function instances is now blocking the use of TLS 1.0 when higher versions have been selected. (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  was previously released and 15.8 Preview 3 is out! (link)
• The latest release of the Service Fabric tools for Visual Studio now includes container support. (link)

And here’s the news from VSTS:

• The VSTS UI is getting a complete overhaul. And if you switch on the preview feature, you can already test it out yourself! (link)
• Along with the new UI, the new Work Hubs have been introduced as well, including favorites and quick search support. (link)
• The Queries hub is now out of preview and generally available, rolling out to all tenants. (link)
• Another preview is the new build results page, which gives you a more modern look at your builds. (link)
• If you ever have a hotfix you need to push through, any automated release gate can now be ignored. Provided that you have sufficient permissions to do so of course. (link)
• When creating a new release, you can now specify variables upon creation. (link)
• The UI experience in the Test Tab has also been improved, giving you more rich in-context test information. (link)
• If you are managing Personal Access Tokens (PAT), VSTS will now pro-actively notify you when they’re expiring. That should save you some “what the heck” moments”. (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 / other

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

• When compliancy is a thing for your company or customers, it’s good to know that Azure Search is now certified for ISO27001:2013, SOC 2 Type 2, GxP (21 CFR Part 11), HIPAA and HITECH act, HITRUST, PCI SDD Level 1 and Australia IRAP unclassified. (link)
• Azure Alerts now has twee new preview features: alert enumeration experience and API, alert state management and smart groups. (link)
• If your solution is using service bus, and you’re looking for more reliability; availability zones for service bus are now available in preview (limited to Central US, East US 2 and France Central regions). (link)

Generally Available

All of the items below are now GA, which means they are stable for production use and officially supported by Microsoft. Although its fine to use preview services for evaluation and development purpose, you’re safest option is to wait with taking things into production until they’re officially “GA-ed”.

• The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which offers you Kubernetes as a Service is now GA. (link)
• Data-in replication for Azure Database for MySQL allows you to sync data with a database living on-prem or elsewhere outside of Azure. (link)
• In the same category, Azure SQL data sync allows you to sync data between Azure SQL databases and any other SQL endpoints unidirectional or bidirectionally. (link)
• The Azure Security Center now offers a new overview dashboard to gain visibility into the security state of your hybrid cloud workloads. (link)
• Azure Traffic Analytics allows you to analyse both user and application traffic in your SaaS solutions. (link)
• The use of a Managed Service Identity (MSI) for App Service instances and Azure Functions is now GA. (link)
• Azure IoT Edge brings cloud power right where you want it to be: closer to your IoT devices. (link)
• And from IoT land as well: automatic device management, module identity and module twin. (link)
• Zone redundant premium databases and elastic pools for Azure SQL Database. (link)

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

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund