They finally let me back on the show. Yeah, as I'm not sure that'll happen again. I better make
the most out of it. So on this episode, we give away a PlayStation 5, we cure cancer, and we solve
the great mystery of, in this episode, we go to space, get some Function updates, and catch up on
the many changes to Azure SQL. That was okay? All right. I'm Lars Klint and you are watching Azure
This Week, the only Azure news show that is made from compressed and recycled Cosmos DB instances.
A secure hosting platform and application toolkit designed to enable developers to create, deploy,
and operate applications on orbit. Does that sound good? Now, the key to this is that last
bit "on orbit". That means spacecrafts, and this week Microsoft released the preview of
the Azure Orbital Space SDK, which is not only a great name, but also a way for developers to take
the cloud to, well, space. And this isn't some service that potentially might talk to things
in space. The Azure Orbital Space SDK (I can keep saying that), is designed to be spacecraft
agnostic. Yeah, exactly like when Jeff Goldblum uploads that virus into the alien spaceship in
the movie Independence Day. Exactly like that. I think. Also Jeff would like you to click that
subscribe button. He told me so himself. Anyway. What does this really mean for us humans though?
Well, with the new SDK we, and I mean us cloud developers can make more sophisticated
software that can live on the spacecrafts and prioritize what gets transmitted back to earth,
improving the quality of the data, and at the same time, saving very costly bandwidth.
Now sort of think of it like edge computing on the edge of edge computing... ultimate
edge? For example, being able to prioritize images that are useful or even being able to
send insights rather than the raw data down to the ground. Satellites might use it to optimize
communication to remote parts of the earth, making connectivity even more achievable,
well anywhere. Or we can model and combat climate change even better with much better data. Now
there are a ton of possibilities and Microsoft is bringing a standard to an industry that
traditionally hasn't well had any for application development on the actual spacecraft. Microsoft
goes on to mention a bunch of companies that are already using the Azure Orbital Space SDK,
but you can read about those yourself. If you want to try out the SDK for now, you have to work
for one of the Azure Space Partner Community members. But that is just for the preview.
Expect the launch of the public SDK soon. I've done a lot with Azure Functions since
they were first released more than five years ago. It's one of the most important and useful
services on Azure for developers. However, there is still room for improvement and adding features,
and one of those features was released in public preview this week. The Azure SQL trigger for
Azure Functions means you can now trigger an Azure Function when a row in a SQL database is created,
updated, or deleted. This is extremely useful for many scenarios. For example, when a new
customer record is inserted, you can trigger a Function that sends, let's say, a welcome email,
inserts another record, fetches their profile image from social media, and much more. Azure
SQL bindings for Azure Functions have also enabled input and output binding support to Java,
PowerShell, Python, JavaScript, and C# Functions. So well everyone can join in on the fun.
One scenario I can see with this is that data manipulation in the database row can be outsourced
to an Azure Function, which creates a lot more flexibility. So give it a go. Try it out today.
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To continue in the SQL track, a bunch of smaller updates for Azure SQL came out in
the past couple of weeks as well. You can now monitor Azure SQL Database Restore progress at
a more granular level, which is useful for critical restore operations, for example,
to a production environment. There's better transparency for backups by making backup tables
queryable. This allows you to confirm what data is in your managed Azure SQL backups. No more black
box, fingers crossed, hope you have the right backup kind of scenario. You can use the Log
Replay Service to migrate to an Azure SQL managed instance. For the general availability release,
Azure has included the no checksum requirement for backup files, resumable restores in case it well
gets interrupted, a detailed progress report and my favorite managed identity support. That last
point means that backups can now be restored from Azure blob storage. Much simpler. Yeah,
very good. And of course, finally do a point in time restore of Azure SQL across subscriptions
without screwing up a bunch of things. Hmm, there are a bunch of limitations to this though, so,
but you can read about those in the link below. Okay, I have no more this week,
but if you are after much more cloud content, why not subscribe to the channel,
follow us on Twitter, or maybe even get a completely free subscription to the platform?
In any case, take care, do more cloud and stay awesome Cloud Gurus.