[Azure] News for Developers, February 2021

Technical / March 3, 2021 / 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.

• The support for API Management certificates in Azure KeyVault is now GA! (link)
• There is now a Visual Studio Code extension for API Management. This lets you, for instance, manage and test APIs, edit and debug policies and importing Functions, App Service or OpenAPI specs into API Management. (link)
• Lastly on API Management, you can now store your named values in KeyVault as well. (link)
• You can now stop/start your Azure Database for MySQL in order to save money during non-business hours for instance. (link)
• If you’re referencing KeyVault from Azure AppService or Functions, you can now reference without using the version of the secret. Updates to the secrets will be automatically handled by the platform! (link)
• More KeyVault! Azure RBAC support is now GA which lets you set role-based permissions down to secret / certificate level! (link)
• For CosmosDB, the use of composite indexes to optimize queries with aggregates and filter expressions with system functions is now GA. (link)
• Enterprise and Enterprise Flash tiers for Azure Redis Cache are now available, bringing higher availability and active geo-replication. (link)
• Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) now supports customer managed keys for encryption of OS and data disks. (link)
• And for managing your AKS clusters you can now use Just-In-Time access control. (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 16.9 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.10 preview 1. (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.9 is now available (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 180 & 181 in Azure DevOps:

• There were several changes which enable you to have project members not seeing eachother within the DevOps environment. (link)
• Group by Tags is now available in the Charts widget. (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