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:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Building Microservices and container solutions using Azure Service Fabric and Azure Container Service by FitGeekGirl
Introducing Backup Pre-Checks for Backup of Azure VMs by Saurabh Sensharma
Announcing application consistent backup for Linux VMs using Azure Backup by Anurag Mehrotra
Azure Site Recovery available in five new regions by Ashish Gangwar
Azure Disk Encryption Preview by RalfWi
How to build a High Available PaaS/IaaS platform on Microsoft Azure by Fabien Dibot
High CPU in monitoringhost.exe on Azure Virtual Machines (be careful what you wish for) via The Scripting Guys

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Service Fabric Customer Profile: P2ware via Service Fabric Team
Service Fabric .NET SDK goes open source via Service Fabric Team
Announcing Azure Service Fabric 5.5 and SDK 2.5 by Vaclav Turecek
Service Fabric stateful services by Andrei Dzimchuk
Azure App Service (Web, API, Mobile, ASE) & Azure Functions SKU Comparison Matrix by Cory Fowler
Setting up VNET integration in App Services using PowerShell by Dustin M
Secure ASP.NET MVC multi-tenant Power BI Embedded hosted in an Azure WebApp by Frank Boucher
Create WordPress using Web Apps on Linux by mksunitha

Functions as a Service (FaaS)

Building Serverless applications with Azure Functions by FitGeekGirl
Azure Functions improvements with WebPack by Christos Matskas
•[Azure Functions] Intro to Serverless applications in Azure by Maheshk

Database / Big Data

Getting Started with Azure Data Lake by Premier Developer
Hive Metastore in HDInsight – Tips, Tricks & Best Practices by AshishThapliyal
Azure SQL hybrid data movement by Xiaochen Wu
Azure SQL Database – The Intelligent Cloud Database for App Developers by FitGeekGirl
End-to-End Data Science Walkthrough with Spark 2.0 on Azure HDInsight Hadoop Clusters via Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog
Learn about Azure Analysis Services at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit 2017 by Christian Wade
40TiB of advanced in-memory analytics with Azure and ActivePivot by Matthew Thomson
Azure Data Factory offers SAP HANA and Business Warehouse data integration by Linda Wang
Lesson Learned #24: How to read or import Azure SQL Auditing Blob file? by Jose M Jurado
Azure SQL Data Warehouse now generally available in 29 regions worldwide by Prem Prakash

Internet of Things (IoT)

Introduce a Web-based tool to use Azure IoT Hub by michaeljqzq
Announcing online Azure IoT Hub Developer Tool – IoT DevTool (For IoT Hub Device Administrators) by Sneezry
Event Hubs Archive, what’s the new naming convention by Shubha Vijayasarathy
Partner perspectives: Predictive maintenance on the frontlines via Microsoft IoT

Machine Learning

Using Text Analytics Key Phrase Cognitive Services API from PowerShell by Ritesh Modi

Development

Announcing R Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio 2015 via Cortana Intelligence and ML Blog Team
How to deploy an ASP.NET Core 1.1 application to an Azure App Services Web App using Visual Studio 2017 by Benjamin Perkins
Using F# to write serverless Azure Functions by Lee Stott

Other

Groups and Named values can now be managed from Azure Portal by Anton Babadjanov
Analyze your data with Application Insights Analytics by Dan Hadari
Azure AD B2C Access Tokens now in public preview by Parakh Jain
Lighting up network innovation by Yousef Khalidi
Azure Germay in CSP by Kirill Kotlyarenko
Announcing Support for Multi-member Consortium Blockchain Networks on Azure by Christine Avanessians
Activate Free Azure Cloud Credits – Visual Studio Dev Essentials by ChengBinTham
Azure Resource Manager template reference now available by Tom FitzMacken
Using Service Bus Client Performance Counters by John Taubensee
Comparing Azure to AWS a quick guide to the key differences by Lee Stott
PowerShell Authentication to Azure Resource Manager by martynas

Videos

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

Introduction to the Azure Portal by Chris Pietschmann
Manage Azure Resource Policies in the Azure Portal by Chris Pietschmann
Episode 225: Deep Learning with Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) via Microsoft Cloud Cover Show
Cloud Gal: Oana Platon (Ep. 1) via Channel 9
Telemetry for the Bot Framework via Channel 9
Episode 464: Ed Charbeneau on Machine Learning and the Full Stack Developer via Channel 9
An introduction to Azure Analysis Services on Microsoft Mechanics by Josh Caplan

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 185 | Richard diZerega on Developing for Microsoft Teams and Bot Framework 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:

Today’s Community Champ: Chris Pietschmann by Mary Jo Foley

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.