[Azure] News for Developers, May 2019
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!
For this month I’ve switched up the order of the sections a bit, this seems to make a bit more sense based on the amount of news items in each category. Let me know what you think in the comments below!
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”.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux BYOS and PAYG offerings are now GA. For those of you who missed that Microsoft ♡ Linux (link)
- Red Had OpenShift is now also GA. (link)
- Azure Dev Spaces are GA. This is a Kubernetes (AKS) add-on which allows you to develop one of the services in your micro service landscape, automatically switching service dependencies. (link)
- There is now enhanced SQL API query functionality in Azure Cosmos DB. (link)
- Reserved instance discounts are available for VMs and Azure SQL Databases in Dev/Test offerings. (link)
- The Consumption Tier for Azure API Management. (link)
- Logic Apps can now be hosted on an integrated service environment (ISE) for complete isolation. (link)
Visual Studio & Azure DevOps
Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Azure DevOps teams!
For Visual Studio lovers:
- Visual Studio for Mac version 8.1 Preview 1 is out. (link)
- Visual Studio itself has been updated to 16.1 and released version 16.2 Preview 1. (link)
- Visual Studio IntelliCode is generally available and included as part of VS 2019 version 16.1. (link)
And these updates were part of sprints 152 and 153 in Azure DevOps:
- You can now use a GitHub account to sign into Azure DevOps (link)
- Kubernetes integration with Azure Pipelines is now available. (link)
- There’s now support for multi-stage YAML pipelines. (link)
- Command line updates include: managing extentions, invoke rest APIs, managing users, managing pipeline, managing build tags, managing git references, updating the repository name + default branch and managing artifacts. (link)
- You can now share test run results using the “Copy results URL” feature. (link)
- Wiki has a new modern user experience, including HTML tag support and several UI updates. (link)
Changes to Azure DevOps can take up to three weeks to roll out across tenants. 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.
App Service specific updates
There was just one applicable update coming from the Azure App Services teams:
- Durable Functions now supports a new stateful entities pattern. (link)
- You can now also expose your Function App via API management, by linking it to a new or existing API. (link)
- On that same page, distributed tracing of serverless applications built with Functions and API management was improved as well. (link)
- App Service on Linux now offers a free tier. (link)
- Updates include: Python (3.7, 3.6 and 2.7 are all GA), Java 11 for both WAR and Tomcat 8.5 + 9.0. (link)
The app services team keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo. Check them out!
Azure / other
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- Some updates for the Bot Framework were release, including: adaptive dialogs, language generation package, emulator improvements and new templates for bot framework skills. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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