Are you having difficulty keeping up to date on all the frequent changes and updates in the Microsoft Azure space? Then the Build Azure Weekly has the solution you’re looking for. Build Azure Weekly is a weekly blog post 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.

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Service Updates

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

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Blog Articles

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

Microsoft Certified for IoT Device Catalog by Chris Pietschmann
Connecting to a remote Azure Service Fabric cluster using PowerShell by Larry Wall
Securing Azure HDInsight with Apache Ranger & Azure Active Directory Domain-joined Clustering by Anindita
Azure Service Fabric with Azure Diagnostics and Nlog log retrieval by Larry Wall
Change Data Retention Period for Log Analytics in Operations Management Suite by martynas
Automatically Monitor and Change the service tier and performance level (pricing tier) of an Azure SQL database based on the DTU alert using Webhooks, Alerts, Runbooks by Pooja Kamath
My Take on an Azure Open Source Cross-Platform DevOps Toolkit–Part 4 by BrunoTerkaly
How to Add Application Insights telemetry to and existing .Net Core Application by Aram Koukia
Power BI 12 Days of Dashboards – Day 12 – Crazy Christmas Dashboard by Samuel Lester
Migrate SQL database from On-Prem to Azure using SQL Database Migration Wizard tool by Don Castelino
Exercise your greatest power as a developer by Nicole Herskowitz
Flashback 2016 – Highlights from Azure SQL Data Warehouse by John Macintyre
Export Azure RateCard data to CSV with C# and Billing API by Armin Reiter
A self-contained Azure Media Service (AMS) end-to-end szenario with dynamic AES128 encryption by juliajauss
Power BI 12 Days of Dashboards – Day 8 – Fitbit Dashboard by Samuel Lester
Power BI 12 Days of Dashboards – Day 9 – Building your first SCCM Report in Power BI by Samuel Lester
Power BI 12 Days of Dashboards – Day 10 – Exploring Twitter Data by Samuel Lester
Power BI 12 Days of Dashboards – Day 11 – NFL Football Touchdown Dashboard by Samuel Laster
Azure SQL Elastic Pool – ARM Templates by Vincent-Philippe Lauzon
Project Bletchley – Corda Distributed Ledger available on Azure by Christine Avanessians
Using Azure App Service Authentication with ASP.NET (Classic) MVC Applications by Adrian Hall
Microsoft Azure Storage Import/Export Announcements by Rena Shah
Real-time Prediction using Azure Machine Learning with Stream Analytics and Power BI by Agarwal Gaurav
Securing an Azure Service Fabric cluster with Azure Active Directory via the Azure Portal by Larry Wall
Creating and Deploying your first #NetCore web application to #Azure by Aram Kaukia
Use Key Encryption Keys to Backup Your Encrypted Azure Virtual Machines by Thomas W Shinder
Azure Analysis Services is now available in North Europe and West US by Josh Caplan
Get Threat Intelligence Reports with Azure Security Center by Thomas W Shinder
Integral Analytics moves to Azure SQL Data Warehouse from AWS for high performance by Prem Prakash
Azure Media Services Video Subclipper open-source release by Dwayne George
Several New Azure Services now available in UK by Andres Juarez
Announcing Exclude Disk Support for Hyper-V VMs with ASR by Nitin Soneji

Videos

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

Getting started with PHP, Java, and SQL Server on Linux | Visual Studio Toolbox 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 158 – Tales from the field – Seemless migration to Azure via The Azure Podcast
Episode 170 | News from AWS re:Invent and ExpressRoute for Office 365 via Microsoft Cloud Show
Episode 171 | More AWS re:Invent news, Microsoft news and an Interview with Scott Hoag and Ben Stegink on What’s New in Azure via Microsoft Cloud Show

General Cloud / Related

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

Verizon gearing up to dominate IoT landscape in 2017 by David Curry
SQL Server on Linux, aka project Helsinki: Story behind the idea by SlavaO
Adding HTTPS Support to Individual Windows Containers Using Self Issued Certificates by Benjamin Xue
IoT devices go forth and multiply, to increase 200% by 2021 by Donal Power

Featured Product

Microsoft Azure IoT Starter Kit – SparkFun Thing – $39.95

Microsoft and SparkFun have teamed up to bring you some IoT (Internet of Things) fun. The Microsoft Azure IoT Starter Kit for the SparkFun Thing Development Board has been designed to help you seamlessly connect your device to the cloud with Microsoft Azure IoT. This kit includes an ‘Azure certified for IoT’ SparkFun Thing Dev Board, and a breadboard and wires to help you set up your circuits. There are also a variety of sensors such as a photoresistor to sense light as well as a humidity/temperature sensor to read the ambient temperature and humidity in a room (or outdoors with some weatherproofing). Once your board is connected to Microsoft Azure you can start visualizing and analyzing your data.

Microsoft Azure is a leading provider of cloud computing and Microsoft Azure IoT Hub enables secure, reliable bi-directional communications between IoT endpoints such as sensors and the cloud. Azure IoT Hub supports a broad set of operating systems (Linux, Windows, RTOS etc.), protocols and common languages, so you can configure your connections to the devices.

The SparkFun Thing Dev Board is based on the popular ESP8266 WiFi module. With it you have a simple microcontroller with built in WiFi to interface with your sensors, buttons, and LEDs that can be controlled from or post data to the web. Everything you need to get started from voltage regulation to a PCB antenna are built into the board. Just plug a USB cable into the board and you can actually start programming in the Arduino IDE or other environments.

Feedback

Doe 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.

The types of feedback I’m looking for are:

What do you like?
What do you dislike?
What would you change?
What would you add?

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.

Alternatively, you can 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.