Stay updated on Microsoft Azure - blogs, service status, news
Everyone wants to know what’s happening on their area of interest. Being up to date is a necessity in this new world of Cloud Computing, where you see various things happening every minute, new services getting released, old services getting updated with incremental changes, announcements, price reductions, and whole a lot more. I’ll try to list down a few ways in which you could be stay updated on various things around Microsoft Azure Platform.
Service Status
Microsoft Azure Status is the page you should visit to see the various services health status. Previous Service Dashboard is now replaced with this new page, and it’s just awesome!
Azure Service Updates
Here is an quick page that brings all the latest service updates in one page. This also has an RSS feed, so you could subscribe it in your favorite RSS reader. I personally subscribe to various RSS feeds in my favorite application, NextGen Reader available for both Windows and Windows Phone. Of course, if you aren’t aware, your favorite email client, Office Outlook could do for your subscriptions too.
Blogs for Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft Azure Blog – Almost all the teams working on Azure posts their latest blogs, announcements in this one. https://azure.microsoft.com/blog
- ScottGu does a lot too https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu
- Scott Hanselman does a variety of posts https://www.hanselman.com/blog
- Azure Mobile Services team https://blogs.msdn.com/b/azuremobile
- The team I work for, Microsoft Azure Technical Support team https://blogs.msdn.com/b/wats
- The previous team the I worked for, Microsoft Azure Websites Support team https://blogs.msdn.com/b/waws
- more..
I’m pretty sure I’m missing many other blogs. If you have any other in your list, post it via the comments below. I’ll update the post. How are you going to read these blogs is up to you. You could also like Microsoft Azure on Facebook to see the updates in your FB feed.
Videos on Microsoft Azure
Azure Friday, and Tuesdays with Corey are certainly my favorites. You could subscribe it as an RSS feed too, or in any of your favorite podcasts application. Did I say that I watch a few of these in my TV? Yes, I did.
- Azure Friday https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/videos/azure-friday
- Tuesdays with Corey https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLasX02E8BPApu7UDhGo6ScuWp9havvir
- Azure Video Center https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/videos/home
- Channel 9 Azure https://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Azure
- Azure Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/windowsazure
What are your feedback channels?
The awesome product is always in the making. Products gets better with the community feedback. Microsoft Azure has the general feedback site where you could submit your feedbacks. I’m pretty sure various teams at Microsoft looks, and act on these feedbacks.
Of course, various folks are in Twitter. While not an official channel, you have a great chance to be updated on their online updates, a few related to technology, I should warn you ;) Find them yourself, and follow. I do follow a lot of people. David Ebbo, Azure Websites Development Lead has created this twitter list of people from Websites team. You could subscribe to the list too. You could also search for #azure in Twitter lists to see more of those.
Where can you seek help on Microsoft Azure?
For online forum support from the experts, you could always reach out to sites like StackOverflow, or MSDN Forums. While not an official site, here is one which you could use to see the various features and their support status. For Azure Support Options, you can see your options here. Depending on the support plan that you choose, you could get a support person like me directly to talk to you over phone/email to answer your questions, solve your technical problems, help you with migrating your applications to Microsoft Azure. Let me know if you need any help in running your applications in Microsoft Azure! @rakkimk is my twitter handle if you want to send me a quick tweet.
Alright! Stay updated. Dance now :-)