[Azure] News for Developers, July 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!
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 Lighthouse is a new offering especially for Partners, allowing for more easy cross customer management. (link)
- A lot of services became available in the South Africa region. I won’t add links to all of the articles, be sure to check out https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/services/ for more information.
- The Cosmos DB team release .NET V3 SDK which brings performance improvements, a new change feed and more. (link)
- Azure Container registry tasks allow scheduling tasks in your container registry instance. (link)
- Need cores? Like… a lot? You can now use 48vCPU VM sizes in Azure. (link)
- The Azure Resource Graph enables exploration of your resources at scale. (link)
- Azure SQL Database now supports UTF-8 character encoding. (link)
- Azure blob lifecycle management offers things like automated retention of blobs. (link)
Visual Studio & Azure DevOps
Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Azure DevOps teams!
For Visual Studio lovers:
- Visual Studio 2019 version 16.2 is GA and version 16.3 is on preview 1. (link)
- Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.2 is available and version 8.3 is in preview. (link)
- If you’re programming Java, check out the latest updates for Java on Visual Studio Code. (link)
And these updates were part of sprint 155 in Azure DevOps:
- Azure DevOps now allows to invite GitHub collaborators directly in DevOps. (link)
- Three new Board reports include Burndown, Cumulative Flow Diagram and Velocity. (link)
- For users of Slack there is now an Azure Board App for Slack which gives you board updates right within your channels. (link)
- I noticed this already in our environment: automated code coverage metrics within PRs. (link)
- As a preview feature, you can now share package feeds publicly. (link)
- Manual approvals are now supported in multi-stage YAML pipelines. (link)
- All different hosted pools will be rolled up in one single hosted pool over the next few weeks / months. (link)
- There is now integration with Terraform (link) and Google Analytics. (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:
- It is now even easier (and cheaper!) to bring you Linux based app to an Azure app service. (link)
- When you’re building bots, you might want to check out the new capabilities of Direct Line with speech. (link)
- When you’re using an ISE (Integration Service Environment) underneath your app service, you know it’s costly. The new dev/test offering brings this functionality at a reduced cost. (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:
- The Form Recognizer AI offers you the ability to scan a receipt and automatically get things like the subtotal and total amount. (link)
- There has been an update to pricing for Azur SQL Database serverless, providing even greater price optimization. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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