Do you find it difficult to keep up-to-date on the frequent updates and changes in the Microsoft Azure cloud? If so, Build Azure Weekly is the solution you’ve been looking for! Build Azure Weekly is a weekly newsletter that includes all the latest Microsoft Azure Service Updates from the week in addition to links to many other blog articles, podcasts and videos from all over the Internet.

If you want to receive the newsletter in your email every week, then you’ll absolutely want to Subscribe!

Azure Availability Zones goes GA in Select Regions

Azure Availability Zones offer the ability to build mission-critical applications in a more highly-available manner within a single Azure Region by spreading your workload across multiple Zones within a single Azure Region.

To get an overview of what Availability Zones are and how to use them, I encourage you to read the “Azure Availability Zones” by Build Azure’s own Dan Patrick.

The addition of Azure Availability Zones bring with it an update to the SLA (service-level agreement) when hosting Virtual Machines (VMs) to offer a 99.99% SLA guarantee for VMs within Azure using Availability Zones!

The Weeks Top Links

Here are some of the most notable links from the week:

#GlobalAzure Bootcamp 2018 by Magnus Martensson
Azure Availability Zones now available for the most comprehensive resiliency strategy by Tom Keane
Azure Content Spotlight – Virtual Machine Serial Console (Preview) by Sjoukje Zaal
Announcing the Availability of Azure Functions in National Clouds by Asavari Tayal
The new Azure Load Balancer – 10x scale increase by Yousef Khalidi
Yes, Microsoft is Racing to a $1 Trillion Market Cap Too by Paul Thurrott
Azure SQL Data Warehouse now generally available in all Azure regions worldwide by Ayo Olubeko
Deployment Groups is now generally available: sharing of targets and more… by Roopesh Nair
Soft delete for Azure Storage Blobs now in public preview by Michael Hauss
Announcing the general availability of Azure Files share snapshot by Rena Shah
Big data, IoT, blockchain, Xamarin all on the Microsoft Build 2018 agenda via ZDNet
Learn from experts and play with emerging tech at Microsoft Build via Microsoft Azure Blog
Enable SAP NCo library logging/tracing for Azure On-Premises Data Gateway and the SAP Connector by David Burg
Announcing Azure Service Health general availability – configure your alerts today by Dushyant Gill
Project Denali to define flexible SSDs for cloud-scale applications by Laura Caulfield

Azure Service Updates

Here’s a list of the Microsoft Azure Service Updates from over the past week:

Monthly Sponsor

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Blog Articles

Here’s a collection of some of the most note worthy blog articles posted over the past week:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Secure your backups, not just your data! by Aruna Somendra
Azure Availability Zones now available for the most comprehensive resiliency strategy by Tom Keane
Azure Content Spotlight – Virtual Machine Serial Console (Preview) by Sjoukje Zaal
Azure Application Gateway uses the Load Balancer by David-Sanchez
The new Azure Load Balancer – 10x scale increase by Yousef Khalidi
Azure Monitor–General availability of multi-dimensional metrics APIs by Anirudh Cavale
Enable SAP NCo library logging/tracing for Azure On-Premises Data Gateway and the SAP Connector by David Burg
Open Sourcing a WSL Sample for Linux Distribution Maintainers and Sideloading Custom Linux Distributions by Tara Raj
Virtual Machine Serial Console access by Corey Sanders
Project Denali to define flexible SSDs for cloud-scale applications by Laura Caulfield
Encrypting Data Disks on Linux with Azure Disk Encryption by ejarvi

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Get a look at the Bing Maps Fleet Management APIs on April 3 by Bing Team
Soft delete for Azure Storage Blobs now in public preview by Michael Hauss
Announcing the general availability of Azure Files share snapshot by Rena Shah
Get Community driven Docker images for Web app for Containers by mksunitha
Uploading Files from On-Prem File System to Azure Blob Storage Using ADF V2 by Ben Jarvis

Serverless and Functions as a Service (FaaS)

Announcing the Availability of Azure Functions in National Clouds by Asavari Tayal

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Security Assessment using Office 365 Secure Score by Isaiah Williams

Command-Line / ARM Templates

How to Check Your Azure Management Tools Version by ejarvi
Deployment Pipelines For Versioned Azure Resource Manager Template Deployments by Peter Groenewegen
Azure Subscription Management with Resource Providers by Martynas Valkunas
Overcoming the maximum limit for deployments per Resource Group by Radoslav Gatev

Database / Big Data

Azure Event Hubs Geo-DR configurations, now enabled in all Azure regions by Shubha Vijayasarathy
How Catania secures public data with Azure SQL Data Warehouse by Kuber Sharma
Power BI Tricks, Tips and Tools from the owners of PowerBI.Tips Mike Carlo and Seth Bauer by Charles Sterling
New SQL Graph Features in Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2017 by Shreya Verma
Azure SQL Data Warehouse now generally available in all Azure regions worldwide by Ayo Olubeko
Preview: SQL Database Transparent Data Encryption with Azure Key Vault configuration checklist by Alice Kupcik
Azure vs. AWS Analytics and Big Data Services Comparison by Thomas LaRock
You Are Not Data-Driven by Thomas LaRock
Implementation patterns for big data and data warehouse on Azure by Matt Goswell
New metrics for Queues and Topics emitted by Ch. Wolf
Using the first job run to optimize subsequent runs with Azure Data Lake job AU analyzer by Jie Su
Lesson Learned #37: How to use distributed transactions in Azure SQL Database by Jose M Jurado
Lesson Learned #38: Which is the impact using connection pooling in my application by Jose M Jurado

Internet of Things (IoT)

3 intelligent manufacturing IoT trends to watch out for at HMI 2018 by Colin Masson
How to get support for Azure IoT SDK by Yi Zhong
3 misperceptions vs. reality of using IoT in manufacturing by Colin Masson

Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence

How AI is helping solve our biggest environmental challenges by Microsoft Cloud Perspectives Blog Team
How to build a chat bot in 10 minutes by Natalie Afshar
Using artificial intelligence to analyze roads by Ben Cotton
How to train, large scale, state of the art, neural networks on the Microsoft Data Science VM by Lee Stott
Training Many Anomaly Detection Models using Azure Batch AI by Said Bleik
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Primer by Justin Henriksen
Using Microsoft Azure Video Indexer by Greg Oliver
BigDL Spark deep learning library VM now available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace by Christine Alford

Development and DevOps

What’s new in VSTS Sprint 131 Update by Alex Nichols
Azure Tips and Tricks Part 109 – Day 8 – An end to end scenario with Azure App Service, API Apps, SQL, VSTS and CI/CD by Michael Crump
VSTS/TFS Continuous Deployment to App Service Environment (ASE) after Disabling TLS 1.0 by Michael S. Hansen
Adding support for Debug Adapters to Visual Studio IDE by Visual Studio Blog
Azure Tips and Tricks Part 108 – Day 7 – An end to end scenario with Azure App Service, API Apps, SQL, VSTS and CI/CD by Michael Crump
Deployment Groups is now generally available: sharing of targets and more… by Roopesh Nair
Migrating from Xamarin Test Cloud to App Center Test by Donovan Brown
Granular VSTS/TFS Deployment Privileges using Service Principals by Michael S. Hansen
Codefresh+Azure: DevOps, Kubernetes, Helm Webinar by Jessica Deen
Manage Web.config Values between Environments in Release Management and TFS by Eric Parvin

Containers / Service Fabric

Create Service Fabric Clusters from Visual Studio now available by Cristy Gonzalez
Building Microservices with AKS and VSTS — Part 1 by Andreas Helland
Service Fabric 6.1 Refresh Three Release by Service Fabric Team

Security

Deadline extended for connecting VSTS accounts to AzureAD by Justin Marks
Talk: Running Securely On Azure by Bill Wilder
How to connect to an AD Domain Secured SQL Server from a non-domain PC by nrogoff

Learning / Certification

How to Think About Exam Preparation in This New World by Liberty Munson

Azure Government

Dynatrace Managed Instance now available for Azure Government by Sarah Weldon
The Azure Government Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) program keeps growing by Todor Batchvarov

Events

#GlobalAzure Bootcamp 2018 by Magnus Martensson
Big data, IoT, blockchain, Xamarin all on the Microsoft Build 2018 agenda via ZDNet
Learn from experts and play with emerging tech at Microsoft Build via Microsoft Azure Blog

Other

Microsoft Windows Gets a New Leader by Mehedi Hassan
Microsoft Opens up the Windows Subsystem for Linux to All Developers by Mahedi Hassan
Yes, Microsoft is Racing to a $1 Trillion Market Cap Too by Paul Thurrott
Announcing Azure Service Health general availability – configure your alerts today by Dushyant Gill
A Microservices implementation journey — Part 6 by Aram Koukia
Support for tags in cost management APIs is now available by Vinod Kurpad
Why a developer should build a solution with microservices by Gaurav Aroraa
Essential tools and services for building mobile apps y Rob Caron

Videos

Here are links to some of the videos that have been posted over the past week:

Introduction to GVFS | Level Up via Channel 9
Azure IoT Hub features for device management | Internet of Things Show via Channel 9
Episode 11: Five Things About Deploying a React App | Five Things via Channel 9
Azure SQL Data Warehouse Costs vs AWS Redshift by Thomas LaRock
Operationalization of ML model using Azure ML and Kubernetes cluster [Part 4/4] | AI Show via Channel 9
Unit Testing your Database Changes | The DevOps Lab via Channel 9
TPM Based Authentication For IoT Devices | Internet of Things Show via Channel 9
Introduction to the Microsoft AI Platform by Buck Woody
Azure Serial Console | Tuesdays With Corey via Channel 9
How quantum physics can make encryption stronger | Vikram Sharma via TED Talks Daily
Part 3 of 4: Create a Web App for Containers and set up a web hook | The Open Source Show via Channel 9
Cloud scale events with Azure Event Grid | On .NET via Channel 9
Azure Virtual Machine Serial Console via Azure Friday
Debugging and Diagnostics of Durable Functions | On .NET via Channel 9
Azure + Visual Studio + Xamarin = Great Mobile Apps | Azure Friday via Channel 9

Audio / Podcasts

To complete the collection of different mediums to allow you to consume your Azure news / info in any way you want, here’s a list of the podcasts released this week:

Episode 56 – An Overview of Azure Security Center via Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast
Episode 244 | Developer Surveys & Azure Stream Analytics via Microsoft Cloud Show
Episode 222 – Azure Portal Update via The Azure Podcast

General Cloud / Related

Here’s some noteworthy links about Cloud computing and other related topics that aren’t necessarily specific to Microsoft Azure:

Au revoir via Docker Blog by Solomon Hykes
Have I Been Pwned is Now Partnering With 1Password by Troy Hunt
Command line “tab” completion for .NET Core CLI in PowerShell or bash by Scott Hanselman
Serverless: Databases with OpenFaaS and Mongo by Alex Ellis
Announcing TypeScript 2.8 by Daniel Rosenwasser
Google Loses Java Copyright Case, Could Owe Billions by Paul Thurrott
Nvidia’s DGX-2 System Packs An AI Performance Punch by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Nvidia Memory Switch Welds Together Massive Virtual GPU by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Video Series: Modernizing Java Apps for Developers Part 3 by Sophia Parafina
The Future of Programming GPU Supercomputers by Nicole Hemsoth
Docker Proxies and DNS containers by Simon J.K. Pedersen
What It Takes to Get Into IoT Development by Nathan Sykes

Feedback

Do you have any suggestions or general feedback on the Build Azure Weekly blog series? Please contact me and send it on over! Or tweet it over to @BuildAzure.

Please feel free to reach out and let me know your feedback on the Build Azure Weekly series. I post this weekly post as a service to others and really want to make it the best it can be.

You can also join the Build Azure Slack Group as well.

About the Author

Chris Pietschmann

Chris Pietschmann is a Microsoft MVP, HashiCorp Ambassador, and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) with 20+ years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He has worked with companies of all sizes from startups to large enterprises. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.