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!

The Weeks Top Links

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

Microsoft Ignite 2018 Top Announcements: Build Azure Weekly Special – September 25, 2018 by Chris Pietschmann
Introducing Role-based Microsoft & Azure Certification Shakeup by Chris Pietschmann
Microsoft readies previews of Azure Digital Twins, Azure Sphere secure-edge service via ZDNet
Azure Functions 2.0: Create, debug and deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by Atul Verma
Serial console for Azure VMs now generally available by Corey Sanders
Near real-time analytics in Azure SQL Data Warehouse by Casey Karst
Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure Stack together for hybrid enterprise solutions by Natalia Mackevicius
General availability of Tomcat and Java SE on App Service on Linux by Jason Freeberg
Announcing the public preview of Shared Image Gallery by Kay Singh
Move Managed Disks and VMs now available by Kay Singh
Release models at pace using Microsoft’s AutoML! by Blesson John
SAP at Microsoft Ignite: Announcing SAP Data Custodian for Azure by Girish Bablani
Azure Cosmos DB – database for Intelligent Cloud – Intelligent Edge era by Rimma Nehme
Premium Files pushes Azure Files limits by 100x! by Gunjan Jain
Introducing Azure Premium Blob Storage (limited public preview) by Claus Joergensen
Announcing general availability of Azure Cosmos DB reserved capacity by Rimma Nehme
Announcing Azure user experience improvements at Ignite 2018 by Leon Welicki
Azure Data Explorer Public Preview by Ben Martens
Introducing Azure Functions 2.0 by Eduardo Laureano
Announcing public preview of Azure Front Door Services by Daniel Gicklhorn
Expanding the Azure Data Box family by Dean Paron
Microsoft Ignite 2018: Build and secure next-generation IoT and edge solutions at scale by Sam George

Azure Service Updates

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

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)

Microsoft Ignite 2018–Azure Migrate by Aidan Finn
Azure Networking Fall 2018 update by Yousef Khalidi
Announcing private preview of Azure VM Image Builder by Daniel Sol
Azure Monitor alerting just got better! by Kiran Madnani
Rich insights for virtual machines from Azure Monitor by David Seidman
Serial console for Azure VMs now generally available by Corey Sanders
Microsoft Azure: The only consistent, comprehensive hybrid cloud by Arpan Shah
Storage Configuration Guidelines for SQL Server on Azure VM by Mine Tokus Altug
Azure Advisor has new recommendations for you by Kaitlyn Corazao
Announcing the public preview of Shared Image Gallery by Kay Singh
Move Managed Disks and VMs now available by Kay Singh
Announcing Alias records for Azure DNS by Subra Sarma
Application Gateway Analytics via GoAccess by Subra Sarma
SAP at Microsoft Ignite: Announcing SAP Data Custodian for Azure by Girish Bablani
Microsoft Focuses Azure More Tightly On HPC And AI by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network is now generally available by Maxwell Gattuso
Expanding the Azure Data Box family by Dean Paron
Using Azure Shared Image Gallery replicaCount for higher scale concurrent VM deployments by Arsen Vladimirskiy
Microsoft Ignite 2018: Implement Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery At Scale in Azure by Aidan Finn

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

General availability of Tomcat and Java SE on App Service on Linux by Jason Freeberg
Premium Files pushes Azure Files limits by 100x! by Gunjan Jain
Introducing Azure Premium Blob Storage (limited public preview) by Claus Joergensen
Announcing the New App Service Diagnostics Experience by Jennifer Lee
Azure SignalR Service now generally available by John Montgomery
A new era for Azure Files: Bigger, faster, better! by Tad Brockway
Announcing Bring your own Storage to App Service by Ranjith Ramachandra
Announcing Webapps Undelete (Preview) by Ahmed Elnably
Kudu: The Magic Behind Azure App Service Continuous Deployment by Radoslav Gatev
How to change memory_limit on WordPress Web App for Linux on Azure by Brad Edwards

Serverless and Functions as a Service (FaaS)

Azure Functions 2.0: Create, debug and deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by Atul Verma
Service Principal for Logic App Connector by Vincent-Philippe Lauzon
Serverless Apps with Azure Functions by Gerald Versluis
Introducing Azure Functions 2.0 by Eduardo Laureano
Handling recursivity in Logic Apps by Vincent-Philippe Lauzon

Database / Big Data

Eight new features in Azure Stream Analytics by Krishna Mamidipaka
Try Azure CosmosDB for 30 days free, no commitment or sign up by Kirill Gavrylyuk
New Azure HDInsight management SDK now in public preview by Tyler Fox
Real-time performance monitoring for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance by Denzil Ribeiro, Dimitri Furman
Ingesting Your First CSV Into Azure Data Explorer by Ben Martens
SQL Vulnerability Assessment now supports Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure SQL Database Managed Instance by Ronit Reger
Azure HDInsight and Starburst bring Presto to Microsoft Azure customers by Ashish Thapliyal
Announcing General Availability of Azure SQL Database Managed Instance Migration in Azure Database Migration Service by Raj pochiraju
Seamless access to management insights for SQL Data Warehouse with Data Studio by Kevin Ngo
Azure SQL Data Warehouse now supports maintenance scheduling by Anthony van Gemert
Near real-time analytics in Azure SQL Data Warehouse by Casey Karst
Deep dive into Azure HDInsight 4.0 by Ashish Thapliyal
Azure Cosmos DB: Pushing the frontier of globally distributed databases by Dharma Shukla
Azure Database Migration Service and tool updates – Ignite 2018 by Sudhakar Sannakkayala
Performance updates and tuning best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL by Diana Putnam
Redefine data analytics with Modern Data Warehouse on Azure by John Macintyre
Latest updates to Open Source Database Services for Azure – Ignite 2018 by Sudhakar Sannakkayala
Azure HDInsight brings next generation Hadoop 3.0 and enterprise security to the cloud by Arindam Chatterjee
Azure Databricks – Delta in preview, 9 regions added, and other exciting announcements by Yatharth Gupta
Azure Cosmos DB – database for Intelligent Cloud – Intelligent Edge era by Rimma Nehme
Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Database for MySQL in preview by Mark Bolz
Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Database for PostgreSQL in preview by Mark Bolz
Announcing general availability of Azure Cosmos DB reserved capacity by Rimma Nehme
Azure Data Explorer Public Preview by Ben Martens
Always Encrypted with Secure Enclaves – Try It Now in SQL Server 2019 Preview! by Jakub Szymaszek
Cosmos DB Emulators can also run in the Cloud by Julien Oudot
Spark Debugging and Diagnosis Toolset for Azure HDInsight by Jenny Jiang
Database Copy may cause Azure SQL Database to run out of transaction log space by Holger Linke

Internet of Things (IoT)

Microsoft readies previews of Azure Digital Twins, Azure Sphere secure-edge service via ZDNet
Eight new features in Azure Stream Analytics by Krishna Mamidipaka
Extended offline operation with Azure IoT Edge by Venkat Yalla
Allego offers electric vehicle smart charging solutions powered by Azure Digital Twins by OP Ravi
Happy anniversary: New IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service features out today by Nicole Berdy
A powerful and intuitive way to route device messages in Azure IoT Hub by Ashita Rastogi
Announcing Azure IoT Edge Jenkins plugin by Xin_Shi
Introducing Visual Studio Tools for Azure IoT Edge by Xin Shi
E.ON and Azure Sphere: building smart home experiences on a foundation of security by Galen Hunt
Microsoft Ignite 2018: Build and secure next-generation IoT and edge solutions at scale by Sam George
Announcing Azure Digital Twins: Create digital replicas of spaces and infrastructure using cloud, AI and IoT by Bert Van Hoof
Microsoft is bringing the Robot Operating System to Windows 10 via ZDNet
How the cloud is transforming weather prediction via Microsoft Cloud Perspectives Blog Team

Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft AI & ML developer – Video Moderation with Content Moderator by Deva
Can AI Generate Programs to Help Automate Busy Work? by Joseph Sirosh, Sumit Galwani
Experimentation using Azure Machine Learning by Daniel Schneider
Build conversational experiences with Microsoft Bot Framework by Lili Cheng
Global scale AI with Azure Cognitive Services by Lance Olson
Release models at pace using Microsoft’s AutoML! by Blesson John
Azure AI – Making AI real for business by Eric Boyd
Microsoft tries again to win developers with new Cortana Enterprise Skills Kit via ZDNet
Announcing automated ML capability in Azure Machine Learning by Deepak Mukunthu
What’s new in Azure Machine Learning service by Hai Hing
Integrate end-to-end speech translation into your products with Microsoft Speech services via Microsoft Translator
Microsoft’s new neural text-to-speech service helps machines speak like people by Xuedong Huang
What to expect in Spark + AI summit Europe by Pratim Das

Development and DevOps

Deploy Angular and .NET Core 2.1 to the Azure Cloud (Part Four) by Jeremy Likness
Using AzureAD identities in Azure DevOps organizations backed by Microsoft Accounts by Justin Marks
Go Cloud-native with Spring Cloud on Azure by Titao Dong
Manage Azure Monitor using Java by Asir Selvasingh
Azure Pipelines is the CI/CD solution for any language, any platform, any cloud by Gopinath Chigakkagari
Ignite2018: Container DevOps with Microsoft Azure – the blog post! by Jessica Deen
Microsoft and Azul Systems bring free Java LTS support to Azure by Asir Selvasingh
Azure Cosmos DB JavaScript SDK 2.0 now generally available by Deborah Chen
Azure Cosmos DB Developer Experience updates by Deborah Chen
Azure DevOps Reporting – What reports do you want? by Gregg Boer
Continuous build and deployment of Visual Studio extensions using Azure Pipelines by Utkarsh Shigihalli
Using AzureAD identities in Azure DevOps organizations backed by Microsoft Accounts by Justin Marks
Uncovering The Details Of Hosting a Node Application On Azure by Wael Kdouh

Containers / Service Fabric

Service Fabric Customer Profile: Solidsoft Reply EMVS by Charles Young, Russel Young
Azure Functions 2.0: Create, debug and deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by Atul Verma
Microsoft Ignite 2018–Azure Service Fabric Mesh: The Serverless Microservices Platform by Aidan Finn
Ignite2018: Container DevOps with Microsoft Azure – the blog post! by Jessica Deen
Kubernetes on Azure: Lessons learned from the field by Fabien Dibot
Azure Service Fabric updates at Ignite 2018 by Subramanian Ramaswamy
Azure Container Registry: Public preview of Helm Chart Repositories and more by Steve Lasker
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): Deploying Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) and consume messages from Azure Event Hub by Atul Verma

Blockchain / Smart Contracts

Building with blockchain on Azure by Matthew Kerner

Security / Privacy

Manage your SQL Information Protection policy in Azure Security Center by Ronit Reger
Strengthen your security posture and protect against threats with Azure Security Center by Gilad Elyashar
SQL Vulnerability Assessment now supports Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure SQL Database Managed Instance by Ronit Reger
Azure Advisor has new recommendations for you by Kaitlyn Corazao
DDoS Protection Attack Analytics and rapid response by Anupam Vij
Azure Active Directory authentication for Azure Files SMB access now in public preview by Yuemin Lu
Strengthen security with key Azure innovations by Avi Ben-Menahem
Healthcare Cloud Security Stack now available on Azure Marketplace by Christine Alford

Learning / Certification

Microsoft Learn by Lee Stott
Introducing Role-based Microsoft & Azure Certification Shakeup by Chris Pietschmann
AZ-200 Microsoft Azure Developer Core Solutions Certification Exam by Chris Pietschmann
AZ-201 Microsoft Azure Developer Advanced Solutions Certification Exam by Chris Pietschmann
AZ-300 Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies Certification Exam by Chris Pietschmann
AZ-301 Microsoft Azure Architect Design Certification Exam by Chris Pietschmann
Are You an Azure Developer? Take the New Job Role-Based Certification Exams Today! by Liberty Munson
Are You an Azure Solutions Architect? Take the New Job Role-Based Certification Exams Today! by Liberty Munson
Skill up and stand out, with new role-based training and certification! by Alex Payne
New role-based certification and training is here, and we’re just getting started! by Selina Winter
Azure Tips and Tricks Part 160 – The BEST of Azure Tips and Tricks is now available as a FREE ebook by Michael Crump

Azure Government

Secure development on Azure Government – Part 1 by Steve Michelotti
Service Health on Azure Government by Steve Michelotti

Azure Stack

Microsoft and OEMs working on Azure Stack GPU Support by Thomas Maurer
Azure ISVs expand the possibilities with Azure Stack by Bradley Bartz
Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure Stack together for hybrid enterprise solutions by Natalia Mackevicius
Introducing Event Hubs for Azure Stack by Shubha Vijayasarathy
New investments in Azure Stack extend Microsoft’s hybrid cloud leadership by Natialia Machevicius

Other

Microsoft Ignite 2018 Top Announcements: Build Azure Weekly Special – September 25, 2018 by Chris Pietschmann
New features and enhancements released in Bing Custom Search V3 by Mahesh Balachandran
Solidsoft Reply – Microsoft Azure technical customer story by Ed Price
Announcing the EA preview release of management group cost APIs by Adam Wise
Azure Monitor is providing a unified logs experience by Noa Kuperberg
A new way to send custom metrics to Azure Monitor by Anirudh Cavale
Azure Quickstart Center update by Ayesha Ghaffar
Beneath A Surface – The Inside Story of How Microsoft Built the Billion-Dollar Brand by Brad Sams
Get notified when your Azure resources become unavailable by Dushyant Gill
Azure Deployment Manager now in public preview by David Tepper
Data-driven styling and more in the latest Azure Maps Web SDK update by Ricky Brundritt
Announcing Azure user experience improvements at Ignite 2018 by Leon Welicki
Microsoft to bring multi-user virtualization to Windows and Office with Windows Virtual Desktop service via ZDNet
Microsoft Ignite 2018–Azure Keynote by Aidan Finn
Announcing public preview of Azure Front Door Services by Daniel Gicklhorn

Videos

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

Dial up your MXChip Azure IoT starter kit | Internet of Things Show via Channel 9
A Conversation with Azure CTO, Mark Russinovich | Channel 9 Live at Microsoft Ignite 2018 via Channel 9
Troubleshoot and diagnose Azure Virtual Machines with Serial Console via Azure Friday
What’s New in Visual Studio Code | Channel 9 Live at Microsoft Ignite 2018 via Channel 9
Introducing Azure Data Box Edge | Azure Friday via Channel 9
Introducing the Azure Data Box family via Azure Friday
First Anniversary for Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service | Internet of Things Show via Channel 9
Routing Messages in Azure IoT Hub based on Device Twin | Internet of Things Show via Channel 9
Azure Front Door Service (Preview) via Azure Friday

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:

MVP Podcast 32: Larry Lentz via The Microsoft Business Applications Podcast
Episode 85 – Ignite Stories with Sean Bugler via Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast
Episode 248 – Updates from Ignite 2018 via The Azure Podcast
Episode 97: Microsoft Flow with Merwan Hade from Microsoft via The Microsoft Business Applications Podcast
Episode 96: Future of the Maker Experience with Evan Chaki via The Microsoft Business Applications Podcast
Episode 86 – What Microsoft 365 Admins Need to Know about Azure (Live from Microsoft Ignite) via Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast
Episode 272 | Live from Microsoft Ignite 2018 with Alex Simons 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:

Should the Average Consumer Worry About IoT Privacy? by Frank Landman
Intel Kicks FPGA Performance Up a Notch With Stratix 10 PAC by Nicole Hemsoth
Forging A Hybrid CPU-FPGA Supercomputer by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Berkeley Lab Building Own Open Architecture Quantum Chips by Nicole Hemsoth
Command Query Separation (CQS) – A simple but powerful pattern by Tim Sommer
Re-Open-Sourcing MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 by Rich Turner
Are AI and Big Data the Economic Levelers We’ve Been Looking for? by Brad Anderson
Cloud Frugality: How to reduce >99% of your small-scale semi-static website costs? by Radoslav Gatev

Feedback

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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.