by Evan Basalik
July 16, 2014
The Worldwide Partner Conference is currently underway in Washington D.C. and there were a ton of announcements related to Microsoft Azure. Cale and Sujit break down some of them for our listeners as well as discuss a comment from one of our listeners.
Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode35.mp3
Site for the Sept 6 Charlotte Azure Boot Camp is live at https://cltazurebootcamp.eventday.com
Event Hubs Public Preview http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/event-hubs
Machine Learning Public Preview http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning
New Portal features:
IaaS:
- Create, deploy, monitor, manage VMs
- Manage VNETs
- Automate the deployment of rich multi-machine application templates with a few clicks - deploying a multi-tier, highly-available SharePoint farm from the portal will be a few clicks away!
- Resource Group enhancements:
- Manage IaaS VMs & VNETs along with PaaS Web Sites and Databases, all within the same Resource Group
- Azure Image Gallery Updates: The completely re-imagined Azure Gallery with the addition of several new virtual machine images that enable you to provision dev/test servers or production applications in minutes.
Azure SQL Database: Manage Azure SQL DBs within the Portal, including provisioning databases across Web and Business (currently in general availability) and Basic, Standard, and Premium (currently in preview).
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/scicoria/archive/2014/07/14/sharepoint-2013-farm-in-less-than-an-hour-new-azure-portal-and-azure-templates.aspx
Microsoft has acquired InMage Systems, an innovator in the emerging area of cloud-based business continuity.
- Forrester Research recognized InMage Systems as an enabling technology for top Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service providers
- InMage Systems won a Penton Media Best of TechEd award.
- Customers across a variety of industries, including financial services, healthcare and government, rely on InMage technology to keep their organizations up and running.
- InMage Systems technology is behind leading DRaaS offerings from companies like Sungard and HP.
- InMage solutions are being integrated into Azure Site Recovery service
- Will help accelerate our strategy to provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment, be it Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others.
Blog series by Principal PM Lead Josh Twist on Azure API Management covering:
A blog post by CVP Jason Zander announcing collaboration with Google and Docker to support new open source projects on Microsoft Azure:
- Kubernetes - declarative container management solution supporting orchestration and scheduling of Docker containers, originally built on top of Google Compute Engine
- libswarm - imperative management on Docker, so that libswarm will natively support Azure in enabling deployment of containers on Azure Virtual Machines.
Diagnostics as a Service (DaaS) for Azure Web Sites is announcedby Sr. PM Apurva Joshi:
- Provided as a Site Extension
- Helps isolating or root causing an application specific issue(s). The following symptoms are typical for issues that can be diagnosed with DaaS:
- Website is responding slowly
- Random requests are timing out
- Web page(s) hang (keeps on spinning without opening fully)
- DaaS can also be used to draw a sample of the health of your website and do some analysis against a set of data at any given time.
- Diagnose Now” option:
- Collects and analyzes memory dumps, HTTP logs and event logs from all VM instances of your web site.
- Collects and analyzes a second memory dump after 2 minutes (this provides two different states of your application and is useful in troubleshooting slow performance issues).
- “Schedule Analysis” option - provides you a way to customize your diagnostics sessions and lets you:
- Schedule a DaaS session at a specific time or timespan.
- Choose data type or types to collect and analyze.
- Choose a specific VM instance to collect and analyze data from (addressing a scenario where your website is running on multiple instances)
- Choose an option to collect and analyze right away, or just collect for now and analyze at some later time.
- Configure a custom blob storage location for the data and reports to be stored.
New sizes and regions for Azure Redis Cache are available.
NOTE: Be sure to migrate to Redis or a Managed Cache service. Shared Caching will be decommissioned on September 1, 2014.
- Azure Block Blob Storage pricing is changing from 3 decimals to 4 decimals to provide more precise pricing which will take effect on September 1, 2014
- Service Bus Queues and Topics pricing changes - effective starting October 1, 2014:
- Messaging is now offered in Basic and Standard tiers
- Service Bus Connections are introduced - can now be used in conjunction with Event Hubs in large throughput and high-connection applications including IoT command and control scenarios (e.g., “Unlock car door from smartphone”). A single AMQP connection can be used for all Queues, Topics, and Event Hubs in a Service Bus namespace.
US Central in Iowa and US East 2 in Virginia are now GA.
A blog post by Principal Researcher Thore Graepel demonstrating an application of Machine Learning in action – implementing recommendation features on web sites