Last week in Azure: Azure SDK for Go GA, and more

On Wednesday, Microsoft CVP, Charlotte Yarkoni announced Microsoft for Startups, a new program that delivers access to technology, go-to-market and community benefits that helps startups grow their customer and revenue base. Of note, the program provides startups with up to $120,000 in free Azure credits, enterprise grade technical support and development tools – supporting the languages of their choice, such as Node.js, Java and .NET.

The Go gopher has cause to celebrate as the Azure SDK for Go became generally available, including an Azure for Go developers documentation hub that brings together quickstarts, code samples, and API reference to manage and interact with Azure services from your Go applications.

Now in preview

Preview of Log Alerts feature for Application Insights - You can now create alerts that automatically run log queries at regular intervals from Azure Log Analytics and Application Insights. If the results of the log query match particular criteria, it will create an alert record and automatically run one or more actions to proactively notify you of the alert, or invoke another process, such as running runbooks using Action Groups.

Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage in Storage Explorer – public preview - With the release of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) resources in Azure Storage Explorer, you can freely navigate ADLS resources, you can upload and download folders and files, you can copy and paste files across folders or ADLS accounts and you can easily perform CRUD operations for your folders and files.

Faster Application Deployment in Azure AD Application Proxy - You can now use PowerShell to manage deployment of your Azure AD Application Proxy using the new preview of the AzureAD Powershell module. Using these cmdlets will also help you build and maintain a standardized and predictable process for deploying Application Proxy applications in your environment.

Now generally available

Build Go apps for Azure with the Go SDK, now generally available - The Azure SDK for Go is now generally available to help developers build apps for Azure with Go. The SDK features support for connecting to data sources including Cosmos DB and Azure Storage, deploying Azure resources programmatically, authenticating users, and much more.

Azure Redis Cache geo-replication is now generally available - Azure Redis Cache geo-replication is a valuable tool to protect your important data against unforeseeable disasters. Redis Cache joins a growing list of Azure services that enable developers and IT pros to build disaster recovery plans for your services running on the cloud. This ensures the availability of mission-critical applications, even in the unlikely event of a widespread regional failure.

Build Go apps for Azure with the Go SDK, now generally available - The Azure SDK for Go is now generally available to help developers build apps for Azure with Go. The SDK features support for connecting to data sources including Cosmos DB and Azure Storage, deploying Azure resources programmatically, authenticating users, and much more.

Application consistent backup for Linux VMs using Azure Backup is generally available - Application consistent backup ensures that the backed-up data is transactionally consistent, and that applications will boot up post VM restore. To ensure transactional consistency, applications need to be quiesced and there should be no unfinished transactions when taking a VM snapshot.

ExpressRoute monitoring with Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is now generally available - NPM, part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), is a cloud-based network monitoring solution that monitors connectivity between Azure cloud deployments and on-premises locations. NPM support is now generally available for monitoring network performance over ExpressRoute circuits that are configured to use Private Peering, which enables you to identify and eliminate network issues.

News & updates

Microsoft partners with National Science Foundation to empower data science breakthroughs - Learn how Microsoft has partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF). Microsoft is committed to a continued partnership with the National Science Foundation in its efforts to bring the power of the cloud to research computing in academia.

Azure IoT SDKs released new Long-Term Support branch - The Long-Term Support (LTS) branch for the Azure IoT SDKs offers customers a guarantee that they will benefit from any necessary security or critical bug fixes with minimal impact to their device’s code. At the same time, developers can access latest updates in the master branch of the repositories, staying on top of the technology and features, with a faster response and resolution time to posted issues.

Microsoft partners with National Science Foundation to empower data science breakthroughs - Learn how Microsoft has partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF). Microsoft is committed to a continued partnership with the National Science Foundation in its efforts to bring the power of the cloud to research computing in academia.

Create tomorrow today with emerging tech at Microsoft Build - Registration for Microsoft Build started on Thursday, February 15th. Spanning three days at the epicenter of emerging tech, Build brings together developers, game-changers, and like-minded professionals to imagine what's next in cloud, artificial intelligence, mixed reality and more.

Azure Marketplace new offers in January 2018 - The Azure Marketplace is the premier destination for all your software needs – certified and optimized to run on Azure. Find, try, purchase, and provision applications & services from hundreds of leading software providers. In January, we published over 30 new offers.

Simplify cloud adoption with Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Datometry - Microsoft has partnered with Datometry to simplify our customer’s journey to the cloud. With Datometry’s Adaptive Data Virtualization technology, existing Teradata applications can run instantly and natively on Azure SQL DW without rewriting or redesigning the legacy applications.

Protect machines using managed disks between Azure regions using Azure Site Recovery - Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now provides you with the ability to set up Disaster Recovery (DR) for IaaS VMs using managed disks. With this feature, ASR fulfills an important requirement to become an all-encompassing DR solution for all of your production applications hosted on laaS VMs in Azure, including applications hosted on VMs with managed disks.

Microsoft updates Cognitive Services terms - Recently, we started moving Cognitive Services under the same terms as other Azure services. Under the new terms, Cognitive Services customers own, and can manage and delete their customer data. With this change, many Cognitive Services are now aligned with the same terms that apply to other Azure services.

Technical articles

New reference architecture for Jenkins on Azure - The patterns & practices (p&p) group of the Azure Customer Advisory Team (Azure CAT), has published a new reference architecture for deploying and running a Jenkins server on Azure with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Use the best practices in this reference architecture to set up a Jenkins server on the Azure platform.

Developer Spotlight: Serverless and Mobile

How to Build a Notification That You Won't Hate - Burke Holland shows how he uses Azure Functions and Logic Apps connected to a LIFX lightbulb for receiving his Twitter notifications.

Code First in the Cloud: Going Serverless with Azure - Jeremy Likness recently presented this topic at South Florida Code Camp, and he went the extra distance to make it all available online in this blog post that includes his deck, demos, and more.

Serverless Doorbell — Azure Functions and Ring.com (Part 1) - Jeff Hollan connected his Ring video doorbell to Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, Event Grid, Logic Apps, and Video Indexer to create his own doorstep version of HAL 9000. Also: Part 2 | Part 3

Distribute Apps Faster with Visual Studio App Center and Azure Functions, Part I - Patrick Nikoletich shows how to set up a continuous release pipeline that redistributes your app to beta testers, without any manual work, based on crash and analytics data.

Better Decisions Through Better Analytics: Visual Studio App Center with Azure Application Insights - Blanca Delgado Parra shows how you can use App Center Analytics and Application Insights together to help you make decisions in your app.

Service updates

• Public preview: Automatic OS image updates in virtual machine scale sets
• Azure Analysis Services available in Central US

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