[Azure] News for Developers, May 2020

Technical / June 2, 2020 / Jasper Siegmund / 0

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. Want to know more? Check out the readme.

Azure

Here is a roll-up of all the Azure news which might relate to you as a developer. Note that all services mentioned are Generally Available (GA) so they can be used in production scenarios today. Exact availability of services might vary based on the Azure region you’re deploying to.

• Azure Spot Virtual Machines bring great discounts because you’re using unused capacity. This comes at the cost of less predictability on when the resources are available. (link)
• Azure Private Link is now available for multiple new Azure services. (link)
• There is now Azure Active Directory support for MySQL (link) and PostgreSQL (link)
• Cosmos DB now supports encrypting data at rest using customer managed keys. (link)
• There were a number of developer updates for the Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service. (link)
• Azure Container Registry diagnostic logs are now available. (link)
• ASP.NET Blazor now supports WebAssembly. (link)
• You can use GitHub Actions to deploy to Azure from your favorite tools. (link)
• Azure Service Health now also shows emering issues which previously were only found on the Azure status page. (link)
• Azure KeyVault bring your own key is now generally available (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 16.6 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.7 preview 1. (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.6 is now available (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 168 and 169 in Azure DevOps:

• MS Teams and Slack integrations have been improved including event subscriptions and notifications for repositories. (link)
• The Repository Settings pages have been merged into one page built on a new web platform. (link)
• Output variables from pipeline stages can now be used in different stages where previously these were scoped to their stage. (link)
• You can now limit the scope of access tokens for YAML pipelines so that any leaked token can only be used to access the repos that the pipeline uses (previously this would grant access to all repos). (link)
• The multi-stage pipeline UI has been released. (link)
• You can now configure your deployment strategy (rolling, canary, blue-green, etc.) right from within Azure Portal when configuring DevOps from there. (link)
• The ability to build YAML based CD pipelines has been rolled out. Pipelines can now do CI, CD or both! (link)
• The new UI for service discovery has been made the default experience, which you’ll notice when editing / creating service connections. (link)
• And for those service connections, you can now easily share these across projects. (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.

That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund