Dear Azure fans, Azure.Source is going on hiatus. Thank you for reading each week and be sure to follow @Azure for updates and new ways to learn more.
Now available
Announcing the general availability of Azure premium files
We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure premium files for customers optimizing their cloud-based file shares on Azure. Premium files offers a higher level of performance built on solid-state drives (SSD) for fully managed file services in Azure.
Premium tier is optimized to deliver consistent performance for IO-intensive workloads that require high-throughput and low latency. Premium file shares store data on the latest SSDs, making them suitable for a wide variety of workloads like databases, persistent volumes for containers, home directories, content and collaboration repositories, media and analytics, high variable and batch workloads, and enterprise applications that are performance sensitive. Our existing standard tier continues to provide reliable performance at a low cost for workloads less sensitive to performance variability, and is well-suited for general purpose file storage, development/test, backups, and applications that do not require low latency.
Leveraging complex data to build advanced search applications with Azure Search
Data is rarely simple. Not every piece of data we have can fit nicely into a single Excel worksheet of rows and columns. Data has many diverse relationships, such as the multiple locations and phone numbers for a single customer .or multiple authors and genres of a single book. Of course, relationships typically are even more complex than this, and as we start to leverage AI to understand our data the additional learnings we get only add to the complexity of relationships. For that reason, expecting customers to have to flatten the data so it can be searched and explored is often unrealistic. We heard this often and it quickly became our number one most requested Azure Search feature. Because of this we were excited to announce the general availability of complex types support in Azure Search. In this post, we explain what complex types adds to Azure Search and the kinds of things you can build using this capability.
Azure Blockchain Workbench 1.7.0 integration with Azure Blockchain Service
The release of Microsoft Azure Blockchain Workbench 1.7.0, which along with our new Azure Blockchain Service, can further enhance your blockchain development and projects. You can deploy a new instance of Blockchain Workbench through the Azure portal or upgrade your existing deployments to 1.7.0 using the upgrade script. This update includes the improvements such as integration with Azure Blockchain Service, and enhance compatibility with Quorum.
New PCI DSS Azure Blueprint makes compliance simpler
Announcing our second Azure Blueprint for an important compliance standard with the release of the PCI-DSS v3.2.1 blueprint. The new blueprint maps a core set of policies for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) compliance to any Azure deployed architecture, allowing businesses such as retailers to quickly create new environments with compliance built in to the Azure infrastructure. Azure Blueprints is a free service that enables customers to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that implement and adhere to standards, patterns, and requirements. Azure Blueprints allow customers to set up governed Azure environments that can scale to support production implementations for large-scale migrations.
Now in preview
Event-driven analytics with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
Announcing that Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 integration with Azure Event Grid is in preview. This means that Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 can now generate events that can be consumed by Event Grid and routed to subscribers with webhooks, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Functions, and Logic Apps as endpoints. With this capability, individual changes to files and directories in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 can automatically be captured and made available to data engineers for creating rich big data analytics platforms that use event-driven architectures.
Technical content
How to deploy your machine learning models with Azure Machine Learning
Azure Machine Learning service is a cloud service that you use to train, deploy, automate, and manage machine learning models, all at the broad scale that the cloud provides. The service fully supports open-source technologies such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and scikit-learn and can be used for any kind of machine learning, from classical ml to deep learning, supervised and unsupervised learning. In this article you will learn to deploy your machine learning models with Azure Machine Learning.
Azure Cloud Shell Tips for SysAdmins Part II - Using the Cloud Shell tools to Migrate
In the last blog post Azure Cloud Shell Tips for SysAdmins (bash) the author discussed some of the tools that the Azure Cloud Shell for bash already has built into it. This time he goes deeper and show you how to utilize a combination of the tools to create an UbuntuLTS Linux server. Once the server is provisioned, he will demonstrate how to use Ansible to deploy Node.js from the nodesource binary repository.
Step-By-Step: Migrating The Active Directory Certificate Service From Windows Server 2008 R2 to 2019
End of support for Windows Server 2008 R2 has been slated by Microsoft for January 14th 2020. Said announcement increased interest in a previous post detailing steps on Active Directory Certificate Service migration from server versions older than 2008 R2. Many subscribers of ITOpsTalk.com have reached out asking for an update of the steps to reflect Active Directory Certificate Service migration from 2008 R2 to 2016 / 2019 and of course our team is happy to oblige.
Home Grown IoT - Local Dev
Now that we’re starting to build our IoT application it’s time to start talking about the local development experience for the application. At the end of the day I use IoT Edge to do the deployment onto the device and manage the communication with IoT Hub and there is a very comprehensive development guide for Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2019. The workflow of this is to create a new IoT Edge project, setup IoT Edge on your machine and do deployments to it that way. This is the way I’d recommend going about it yourself as it gives you the best replication of production and local development.
Delivering static content via Azure CDN | Azure Friday
In one of the prior episodes we learned how to serve a static website from Azure's blob storage<?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = "[default] http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" NS = "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" /> . This is great for a low volume web site. As your site starts getting more hits, you wanted to deliver the content closer to the end user. In this episode, we will learn how to deliver a static content via Azure Content Delivery Network(CDN). Azure CDN offers developers a global solution for rapidly delivering high-bandwidth content to users by caching their content at strategically placed physical nodes across the world.
Azure shows
Deploy your web app in Windows containers on Azure App Service | Azure Friday
Windows Container support is available in preview in Azure App Service. By deploying applications via Windows Containers in Azure App Service you can install your dependencies inside the container, call APIs currently blocked by the Azure App Service sandbox and use the power of containers to migrate applications for which you no longer have the source code. All of this and you still get to use the awesome feature set enabled by Azure App Service such as auto-scale, deployment slots and increased developer productivity.
Using open data to build family trees | The Open Source Show
Erica Joy joins Ashley McNamara to share her not-so-secret personal mission: making genealogy information open, queryable, and easily parsable. She shares a bit about why this is so critical, common challenges, and tips for re-building your own family tree - or using open data to uncover whatever the information you need for your personal mission.
Supporting Windows forms and WPF in .NET Core 3 | On .NET
There is significant effort happening to add support for running desktop applications on .NET Core 3.0. In this episode, Jeremy interviews Mike Harsh about some of the work being done and decisions being made to enable Windows Forms and WPF applications to run well on .NET Core 3.0 and beyond.
Five things about RxJS and reactive programming | Five Things
Where do RxJS, Reactive Programming and the Redux pattern fit into your developer workflow? Where can you learn form the community leaders? Does wearing a hoodie make you a better developer? Oh and remember, go to RxJS Live and drinks are on Aaron!
How to use the Global Search in the Azure portal | Azure Portal Series
In this video of the Azure Portal “How To” Series, you will learn how to find Azure services, resources, documentation, and more using the Global Search in the Azure portal.
Episode 285 – The Azure Journey | The Azure Podcast
Sujit, Kendall, and Cynthia talk with the one and only Richard Campbell on how to tell the cloud story, the conversations to have with customers as they enter the cloud and the implications of globally distributed cloud that needs to be considered. Probably one of our favorite shows.
Industries and partners
Solving the problem of duplicate records in healthcare
As the U.S. healthcare system continues to transition away from paper to more a digitized ecosystem, the ability to link an individual’s medical data together correctly becomes increasingly challenging. Patients move, marry, divorce, change names and visit multiple providers throughout their lifetime, with each visit creating new records, and the potential for inconsistent or duplicate information grows. Duplicate medical records often occur as a result of multiple name variations, data entry errors, and lack of interoperability—or communication—between systems. Poor patient identification and duplicate records in turn lead to diagnosis errors, redundant medical tests, skewed reporting and analytics, and billing inaccuracies. The Azure platform offers a wealth of services for partners to enhance, extend, and build industry solutions. Here we will describe how one Microsoft partner, Nextgate, uses Azure to solve a unique problem.
A solution to manage policy administration from end to end
Legacy systems can be a nightmare for any business to maintain. In the insurance industry, carriers struggle not only to maintain these systems but to modify and extend them to support new business initiatives. The insurance business is complex, every state and nation has its own unique set of rules, regulations, and demographics. Creating new products such as an automobile policy has traditionally required the coordination of many different processes, systems, and people. These monolithic systems traditionally used to create new products are inflexible and creating a new product can be an expensive proposition. The Azure platform offers a wealth of services for partners to enhance, extend, and build industry solutions. Here we describe how one Microsoft partner, Sunlight Solutions, uses Azure to solve a unique problem.
Using natural language processing to manage healthcare records
The Azure platform offers a wealth of services for partners to enhance, extend, and build industry solutions. Here we describe how SyTrue, a Microsoft partner focusing on healthcare uses Azure to empower healthcare organizations to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes.
Azure Cosmos DB: A competitive advantage for healthcare ISVs
CitiusTech is a specialist provider of healthcare technology services which helps its customers to accelerate innovation in healthcare. CitiusTech used Azure Cosmos DB to simplify the real-time collection and movement of healthcare data from variety of sources in a secured manner. With the proliferation of patient information from established and current sources, accompanied with scrupulous regulations, healthcare systems today are gradually shifting towards near real-time data integration.