Azure Technical News (December 2017)

First of all, Happy New Year! As usual, here you have the latest innovations all around Microsoft Azure. December was not as busy as other months, but still plenty of interesting stuff such as the new Lv2 VMs, lots of innovation around containers including the Open Service Broker and exciting new features in HDInsight. Enjoy reading!

Azure generic

• Microsoft Azure preview with Azure Availability Zones now open in France

Management

• New Azure management and cost savings capabilities
• Java SDK v1.4: Manage Azure Container Service (AKS) and more
• Dedicated URL for Azure Shell (Bash and PS): https://shell.azure.com

IaaS

• General availability of Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V
• Compute:
  • Announcing the Lv2-Series VMs powered by the AMD EPYC™ processor
  • Announcing the general availability of B-Series and M-Series
• Networking:
  • White Paper: Mesh and hub-and-spoke networks on Azure
• Storage:
  • Cloud storage now more affordable: Announcing general availability of Azure Archive Storage

Containers

• Connect your applications to Azure with Open Service Broker for Azure
• Azure brings new Serverless and DevOps capabilities to the Kubernetes community
  • Virtual Kubelet
  • Open Source of the "Open Service Broker for Azure": Open Service Broker API
  • Kashti: New dashboard and visualization tool for Kubernetes pipelines
• Partners enhance Kubernetes support for Azure and Windows Server Containers
  • Heptio for Kubernetes DR
  • Tigera for Windows Container Security
  • Windows Server Containers beta support in Kubernetes 1.9

Security and IAM

• Azure Active Directory (AD) Domain Services now available for Azure Cloud Solution Providers

Apps

• Free eBook – The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure now available
• Bringing hybrid cloud Java and Spring apps to Azure and Azure Stack
  • Pivotal Cloud Foundry in Azure Stack (beta)
  • Lighter Image for PCF in Azure Marketplace
  • Azure Services in Spring Initializr
  • Using Visual Studio Code to develop and debug Java Functions
  • Spring Boot extensions for Visual Studio Code
• Designing, building, and operating microservices on Azure

Data

• SQL DB:
  • Database Scoped Global Temporary Tables are generally available for Azure SQL DB
  • Resumable Online Index Rebuild is generally available for Azure SQL DB
• HDInsight:
  • Azure HDInsight announcements: Significant price reduction and amazing new capabilities
  • Enterprise Security Package preview for Azure HDInsight
  • Announcing Apache Kafka for Azure HDInsight general availability
  • Azure HDInsight Integration with Azure Log Analytics is now generally available

IoT

• Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service is generally available

AI

• Conversational Bots Deep Dive – What’s new with the General Availability of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding

Have fun!
Daniel