[Azure] News for Developers, November 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.
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!
Due to Microsoft Ignite, there was a lot of news in November! I moderated it a bit more than I normally do to keep the length of the blog post readable. If you want more, please check out the blogs as mentioned in the post below!
New offerings / services
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”.
- The Azure Functions Premium Plan allows running functions without cold start and on large(r) machines. (link)
- Azure Functions now also offers PowerShell support. (link)
- Azure Bastion, the stepping stone / secure RDP access solution is now GA. (link)
- SQL Server 2019 has been released into the wild. (link) Also check out the compatible Data Migration Assistant. (link)
- Durable Functions v2 has been officially released. (link)
- Data protection at rest using bring-your-own-key is now available for Azure SQL Databse. (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 16.4 is GA bringing GitHub publishing from team explorer, hot XAML reloads and a lot MORE. Check out the => (link)
- Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.3 is available and version 8.4 is on preview 2. (link)
And these updates were part of sprint 160 & 161 in Azure DevOps:
- Multi-stage pipelines now have a new user experience (in preview). (link)
- Resource based approvals in YAML pipelines now have advanced approval options. (link)
- There were a number of updates around Azure Container Registry and Pipelines. (link)
- Public Feeds for artifacts are now available with upstream support. (link)
- The Sprint Burndown Widget has been updated. (link)
- You can now checkout multiple repositories from a YAML pipeline. (link)
- Start an automated workflow on any GitHub event using GitHub Actions for Azure. (link)
- Create bulk subscriptions in Azure Pipelines for Slack and Microsoft Teams. (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.
Azure / other
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- Azure Event Grid now has support for Machine Learning and Azure Keyvault events. (link)
- Event Grid now also supports Cloud Events v1.0 for greater interoperability. (link)
- Azure Kubernetes autoscaler functionality is now available (link)
- The new Azure API Management developer portal has been officially released. (link)
- The Azure SQL serverless offering brings an even more worry-free solution for hosting your databases in Azure. (link)
- There are new SDKs for both Azure Storage and Key Vault. (link)
- Running VM’s? Check out the new KeyVault extensions, which for instance ensures that certificates on a VM are updated with certs from KeyVault automatically! (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
Leave a Comment