[Azure] News for Developers, May 2021

Technical / June 8, 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.

The pandemic something makes me lose track of things a little bit, but last month was BUILD month! That traditionally means: lots of news to report.

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.

• You can now leverage a capacity calculator for Azure Cosmos DB API for MongoDB to estimate your workload needs. (link)
• Azure Static WebApps have been made generally available. (link)
• The SLA for Azure KeyVault has been raised up to 99.99% (link)
• Several updates were rolled out for Azure API Management. (link)
• Azure Arc lets you run a set of well known Azure services on any cloud, anywhere. This truly enables cross-vendor cloud experiences. (link)
• The free tier of Cosmos DB has been extended to bring you the first 1000 RU/sec and 25GB of storage for free (limited to one instance per subscription). (link)
• Also with Cosmos DB, there is now a serveless pricing model as well. (link)
• And lastly, role based access is now enabled for Cosmos DB. (link)
• Azure App Service Managed Certificates let you secure your domains at no additional costs. (link)
• Logic Apps received a bunch of updates, including new developer workflows with a Visual Studio code extension. (link)
• I’m not sure why you’d want to (unless your ops maybe), but you can now write your Durable Functions in PowerShell. (link)
• Azure Bicep is a code-based abstraction layer on ARM templates, allowing you to deploy your resources in a better way (imho). (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 16.10 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.11 preview 1. (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.10 is now available (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 186 & 187 in Azure DevOps:

• In Azure DevOps, Delivery Plans 2.0 is now GA. (link)
• This also features Dependency Tracking, which I personally love. (link)
• There’s an upcoming change in which framework SDK versions are installed on hosted Ubuntu agents. (link)
• The API to manage Personal Access Tokens (PAT) is now GA. (link)
• You can now have repos as a protected resource within the scope of a project. (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