[Azure] News for Developers, September 2018
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? Here’s the round-up of last month!
App Service specific updates
These were the updates coming from the Azure App Services teams:
- The autohealing experience is App Service has been revamped. (link)
- And next to autohealing, the entire diagnotics section of an App Service is also brand new. (link)
- Running App Service on Linux? You’ll appreciate that the price for that service drops between 30 – 20%. (link)
- And if you’re running on Linux: Tomcat for Azure AppService on linux is now GA (link)
The app services team keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo. Check them out!
Visual Studio & Azure DevOps
Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Azure DevOps teams!
For Visual Studio lovers:
- Visual Studio 2017 15.8 was released was previously released. And version 15.9 now reached preview version 2. (link)
And here’s the news from VSTS Azure DevOps:
- VSTS was renamed into Azure DevOps. With the new UI and some new features, it’s good to go for all your DevOps related work. (link)
- Using Azure DevOps, you can now build Azure Pipelines which offer an unlimited amount of CI/CD minutes for open source software. (link)
- A new artifact type has been added: Universal Packages, which can store generic files such as ARM templates. (link)
- The management of personal access tokens (PAT) has been improved using filters and paging. (link)
- Azure Pipelines are now available through the GitHub marketplace. (link)
- YAML based build pipelines are now available everywhere. (link)
- GitHub issues and commits can now be tracked from a release. (link)
- With Azure DevOps, a new URL is also in place (dev.azure.com). Moving your organization to the new URL is now an opt-in setting. (link)
The Visual Studio blog can be found here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio. And the Azure DevOps team blog is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes.
Azure / other
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- If your project has requirements concerning document retention and / or immutability, Azure Storage is what you need. (link)
- Azure API Management got a couple of new features and bugfixes. (link and link)
- A new Logic Apps extension for Visual Studio codes enables you to edit your logic apps from within your favorite editor. (link)
- The Azure Container Registry now supports Helm repositories. (link)
- An improved Map Control API is available for Azure Maps. (link)
- The Azure portal itself got quite some UI / UX improvements. (link)
- Azure Service Health can now notify you when a resource becomes unavailable. I’m not sure what happens if Service Health itself would be unavailable though 😉 (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”.
- IoT Hub integration with Event Grid. (link)
- Azure Availability Zones is now available in North Europe and West US 2 datacenters. (link)
- The Event Hubs package for Node.js. (link)
- The Azure Functions runtime 2.0. (link)
- Previously released as SQL Operations Studio, Azure Data Studio is now GA. (link)
- Tomcat for Azure AppService on linux is now GA. (link)
- Reserved capacity for Azure Cosmos DB. (link)
- The Microsoft Graph Security API. (link)
- Azure Governance Services allow larger customers to better manage their resources in Azure. (link)
- Microsofts own Content Delivery Network. (link)
- The SignalR Service on Azure is now available, scaling all your SignalR needs to infinity and beyond! (link)
- Undelete for App Services allows you to restore a deleted site for up to 30 days. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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