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!

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:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Join a Virtual Machine to Existing Domain with Key Vault and ARM templates by Kirk Evans
Microsoft Azure: Send Diagnostic Monitoring Data from a Windows IaaS VM to an Event Hub, Part 2 by Greg Oliver
Azure Site Recovery Overview (Azure to Azure) by Mike Duddington
Getting Ready for Microsoft Cloud Identity – AAD Connect by Mike Duddington
Applying updates to a encrypted Azure IaaS Red Hat VM using Yum Update by Devendra Tiwari
Deprecating Azure disk encryption preview extension for Linux IaaS VMs by Devendra Tiwari
Start Stop Multiple Azure VMs on schedule using Azure Automation by Sanganak
Azure Site Recovery support for Storage Spaces and Windows Server 2016 by Ashish Gangwar
Azure Site Recovery now supports large disk sizes in Azure by Poornima Natarajan
Linux and Windows networking performance enhancements | Accelerated Networking by Yousef Khalidi
Protecting Windows Server 2016 using Azure Backup by Maanas Saran
New networking features in Azure scale sets by Guy Bowerman
Announcing StorSimple 8000 series in the new Azure portal! by Anoob Backer
Orchestrate fail over of Web Applications in Azure VMs to a DR Site using ASR by Srikantan

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Creating a Seal for an Azure Web App Certificate Purchased through the Azure Portal by Jeremy Brooks
Push your images to Azure CDN on publish with gulp by Shayne Boyer
(Cross-Post) Azure Service Bus Plugins by Justin Conway
WordPress Plugin: App Service Assistant for Windows App Service Web Apps by Mangesh Sangapu
Azure Web App PHP updates by Donna Malayeri
Accelerate websites with Azure CDN using Dynamic Site Acceleration by Richard Li

Serverless and Functions as a Service (FaaS)

Azure Function – take it to the limit, scale it up by Benjamin Perkins
Azure Functions, Node.js and Environment Variables by Christos Mastics

Command Line

Running Azure Batch jobs using the Azure CLI – no code required by Mark Scurrell
Installing the Azure CLI 2.0 on macOS by John Papa

Azure Stack

Use public / trusted certificates for your Azure Stack Development Kit by Mark Scholman
Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to Purchase! by Chris Pietschmann
Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order now by Mike Neil
Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo via ZDNet

Database / Big Data

Azure Data Warehouse Health Check Query by Cameron Battagler
Azure SQL DB in 1. 2. 3. by Eric W. DeBord
Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio Code (VSCode) July updates by Jenny Jiang
HDInsight: Scale Horizontally by Carlos Mendible
Generate Unique Identifiers (UID) in U-SQL on Azure Data Lake Analytics by Vijay Korapadi
Azure SQL Data Warehouse previews 3x compute scale with unlimited columnar storage by Rohan Kumar

Internet of Things (IoT)

Find What You Want to Learn about IoT with Our Extended IoT Scenarios by alan_liang

Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence

How Microsoft Bot Framework Can Help You Choose A Restaurant, And More On This Week’s Friday Five by Shaden Mar’i
Microsoft Cognitive Services updates – Bing Entity Search API and Project Prague via Microsoft Cognitive Services Team
Announcing Cortana Intelligence Solution Evaluation Tool by Avi Bathula, Jamie Olson

Development

Getting Started with Java on Azure by Derrick Sharpe, Andrea Martini
ADAL .NET 3.14.1 released by Jean-Marc Prieur
Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio Azure App Service by Benjamin Perkins

Certification / Learning

New 70-745 Implementing a Software-Defined Datacenter Certification Exam by Chris Pietschmann
776: Performing Big Data Engineering on Microsoft Cloud Services Beta Exam Now Available by Liberty Munson

Containers and Service Fabric

Mesosphere DCOS, Azure, Docker, VMware & Everything Between – Deploying DC/OS on VMware vSphere by Lior Kamrat
Deploy a collectd agent in a Kubernetes cluster on Azure by Ed Price
Azure Container Registry adds individual identity, webhooks, and delete capabilities by Steve Lasker
[Azure Service Fabric] Five steps to achieve Event aggregation and collection using EventFlow in Service Fabric by Maheshk
Deploy your ASP.NET Core app to Azure Service Fabric by Christos Mastics

Events

Join us: Advancing Digital Government in the Cloud — July 26 by Karina Homme
Service Fabric Community Q&A 14th Edition by Mark Fussell
Inspire 2017: New cloud services for partners to enable digital transformation by Julia White

Security

Microsoft Azure Enables NIST CSF Compliance: Protect Function by Matt Rathbun

Other

What does it take to migrate to Azure Government? by Steve Michelotti
Florida finalizes CJIS Technical Audit on Microsoft Government Cloud Services by Rochelle M. Eichner
Create Bot for Microsoft Graph with DevOps 13: BotBuilder features – Testing Proactive Messsaging by Kenichiro Nakamura
Create Bot for Microsoft Graph with DevOps 14: BotBuilder features – Intercept messages by Kenichiro Nakamura
Enterprise Cloud Strategy, 2nd Edition by Eduardo Kassner
Microsoft announces Project Olympus support for new Intel Xeon Scalable Processors by Kushagra Vaid
New Operations Management Suite Solutions Available by Sarah Weldon
Getting Ready for Microsoft Cloud Identity – Directory Preparation by Mike Duddington
Microsoft Azure Government Now Available from Six US Datacenter Regions by Tome Keane
Introducing cloud-native integration (and why you should care!) by Richard Seroter

Videos

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

Azure Network Watcher | Azure Friday via Channel 9
Tuesdays with Corey – Managed Applications | Tuesdays With Corey 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 187 – CosmosDB via The Azure Podcast
Episode 203 | Voitanos + Hyperfish updates and Microsoft AI Overview with Paul Stubbs 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:

How to learn Kubernetes ? “Kubernetes in action” the answer ! by ppatierno
Visual Studio Code Your Arduino by Greg Duncan
What’s next on Microsoft’s LinkedIn and Dynamics integration list via ZDNet
Setting up SQL Server High-Availability between Windows and Linux with SQL Server 2017 | Data Exposed by Scott Klein
All about Microservices by Wriju Ghosh
Micro:bit: the ‘All-in-one’ device that you have been missing out on by Ana-Marie Nicolaie
China Tunes Neural Networks for Custom Supercomputer Chip by Nicole Hemsoth
Check out our definitive IoT market participant landscape by Maya Rao

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.

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.