[Azure] News for Developers, December 2018
Happy new year everyone! To start off a brand new year, here’s the round-up of 2018’s final month!
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:
- Sorry, no app service specific updated announced in December!
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:
- The first preview version of Visual Studio 2019 was released. Get it while hot! (link)
- Visual Studio 2017 15.9 has been released. And version 15.9 now reached preview version 3. (link)
And here’s the news from Azure DevOps:
- If you’re using GitHub, you can now link commits and PRs to Azure Board work items. (link)
- When your PR is set for autocomplete, ADO will automatically queue a new build in case the previous one expired. (link)
- You can now create GitHub releases using Azure Pipelines. (link)
- YAML based pipelines can now be edited using VS Code (link) or using the web editor featuring IntelliSense (link).
- When your company is using ServiceNow for change management, be aware that ADO now has support for it as well. (link)
- Within the post deployments section of a release, policy can now be set to automatically retry a failed release. (link)
- Is ADO down? Previously hard to answer, there is now a health overview page which provides more info on the service status. (link)
- Crap, deleted the wrong project! The API’s got you covered, providing a way to recover deleted projects for up to 28 days. (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:
- API Management now offers a consumption plan, which lines up nicely with serverless architectures where you only want to pay for what you actually use. Note that this is a preview feature. (link)
- There were several advances in the field of IoT (Internet of Things). Check out the linked post for more info. (link)
- Support for CORS was added to Azure Cosmos DB. (link)
- Azure Container Service (ASC) is targeting to be retired on Jan 31, 2020. Customers should move to Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). (link)
- The Azure Scheduler is also planned to retire, in this case on Sep 30, 2019. Customer should move to using Logic Apps instead. (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”.
- Azure Database for MariaDB. (link)
- Application Insights was released to the UK South region. (link)
- Azure Stream Analytics on IoT Edge. (link)
- JavaScript support for Durable Functions. (link)
- The Azure Machine Learning Service. (link)
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL and MySQL now offers increased compute up to 64 cores. (link)
- Azure Monitor for Containers. (link)
- The new ‘az’ module for Powershell was release in a 1.0 version, which is to be updated bi-weekly. These new commands line up with the Azure CLI and will (most likely) therefore eventually replace the other Powershell cmdlets for Azure. (link)
- Azure Service Bus and Azure Event hubs network and firewall rules. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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