[Azure] News for Developers, October 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
There was just one applicable update coming from the Azure App Services teams:
- App Services can now start to be integrated into Vnets. But be aware this is still a preview feature that’s only available in East US and North Europe regions. (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 3. (link)
And here’s the news from VSTS Azure DevOps:
- Azure DevOps is now available over ExpressRoute connections! (link)
- Test Analytics allows you to monitor the results of your tests over time, right from within the pipelines. (link)
- Previously changing the target branch of a PR meant opening a new one, you can now change it on an existing PR. (link)
- If you had not seen the new UI yet, you will have now. Because the new navigation is on for all users now. (link)
- And next to that, folks who love the black can now switch to a dark theme in Azure DevOps. (link)
- There have been several improvements to YAML pipelines, for example you can specify which branches to build for PRs. (link)
- The new App Service Deploy task now supports “Run from Package” and deploying Linux containers. (link)
- The Azure Test Runner can now be used to run (manual) test suites for desktop applications. (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 you’re using Azure Powershell to manage your resources, you can now use the Az module instead, it will replace AzureRM (link)
- The Azure Kubernetes Service will stop supporting versions 1.7 and 1.8 of Kubernetes, starting November 20, 2018. (link)
- The Azure Portal got some updates in October, which you’ve probably seen. If you want an overview, click the link! (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”.
- You now have the ability to move MySQL servers to new resource groups and subscriptions. (link)
- And the same applies to PostgreSQL servers as well. (link)
- If you’re using Log Analytics, you can now use Metric alerts for logs to get alerts based on log data (instead of, for instance, resource status). (link)
- When you’re using the UK West datacenters and you we’re waiting for AKS to hit there… you’re in luck! (link)
- The Azure SignalR Service allows you to have a super scalable communications hub within your solution, without the cost of running it yourself. (link)
- When you’re deploying your services on a regular basis, you might have seen the new Deployment Center in action already. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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