[Azure] News for Developers, April 2020
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!
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”.
- Want your data to be extra safe? Azure managed disks now support customer managed keys for server-side encryption. (link)
- Azure Monitor for virtual machines is now available. (link)
- Azure API Management now offers a new self-hosted option for companies who prefer running their own instance based on Kubernetes. (link)
- Windows Server Containers and private clusters for Azure Kubernetes Services are now GA. (link)
- You now have the ability to create custom roles in the Azure Portal for more customized role-based access schemes. (link)
Visual Studio & Azure DevOps
Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Azure DevOps teams!
For Visual Studio lovers:
- If you’re a user of Visual Studio Online, you might be interested to know that you can now register you own machines and access them from Visual Studio Code or the web version. (link)
- Visual Studio 2019 version 16.5 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.6 preview 3. (link)
And these updates were part of sprint 167 in Azure DevOps:
- Querying and filtering for pull requests has been improved. (link)
- Resource owners can now add automated checks to pipelines to verify quality and security requirements. (link)
- Users will now get an e-mail notification of pending approvals. (link)
- Auditing events are now available for Azure Artifacts. (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 App Services now generally support .NET Core 3.1. (link)
- There is now a Support API allowing the automated creation of tickets and querying your support tickets. (link)
- Expanded capabilities for Azure Archive are now available. (link)
- Some changes to AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) include: Private Link (link), Azure Advisor Integration (link), Managed Identity (link).
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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