How can I possibly share all of the Azure awesomeness from Microsoft Build
in a single episode? How can I share this news without breaking into tears of joy?
I must do it. I must do it for the viewers. I can do this. I'm David Tucker for A Cloud Guru,
and this is the post-Microsoft Build edition of Azure This Week. Now, while we could easily spend
an hour talking about Build, I'm gonna give you a lightning round of the announcements I
am most excited about coming out of this event. There will be new services,
services becoming generally available, and yes, maybe even a few tears of joy.
I'm going to attempt to pack in more announcements per second than you've ever seen before, across
four key areas: containers, DevOps and developer tools, AI and ML and data. Let's get to the news.
Oh, and if you want to know about all of the amazing Azure news – not just from
Build but throughout the entire year, hit that subscribe button.
It's not a surprise that containers were a key part of the announcements for Build. In the last
episode of Azure this week, Erik covered the release of Draft 2, but the AKS announcements
don't end there. Microsoft had a whole host of announcements all centered on enabling
more developers to deploy their applications into Kubernetes, without having to deal with as much
boilerplate configuration. Now, as a part of this, they launched the web application routing add-on,
which makes it easier to deal with all of the configuration around DNS, and certificates,
and ingress settings. And they also launched the KEDA, or Kubernetes-based event-driven
autoscaling) add-on for AKS. Developers can now configure scaling rules via KEDA in a way
that is fully supported by the service. There were also a ton of announcements around Azure
Arc support for AKS, for organizations leveraging a hybrid cloud strategy.
Now, if you think that's enough container announcements for a week, you'd be wrong. We also
saw Azure Container Apps transition from preview to being generally available. Now this service,
which I covered on a recent episode of Cloud Builder Live, gives developers an even easier
pathway to getting their containers into the cloud. This service, which actually runs on
Kubernetes, provides an opinionated configuration, which takes away most of the boilerplate
configuration while still supporting open-source Kubernetes tools like KEDA, Dapr, and Envoy. Now,
since it's now GA, you can start planning for it to be a part of your production workloads.
Honestly, everyone, this is where I may cry a tear of joy.
Microsoft announced an updated Service Bus Explorer for the portal, which brings all actions,
including sending and receiving messages into your grasp without having to install any third-party
applications. Now, this is the kind of update I love as it truly makes a developer's life just a
bit easier by putting everything in one place. It brings me joy. Give me a minute to compose myself.
Okay. We also saw significant updates to both API Management and App Service. The GraphQL
passthrough support for API Management has graduated to being generally available.
Another big announcement is the support of resolvers to create synthetic GraphQL services.
This exciting new feature is available in preview. App Service adds a lot as well.
One of the highlights was support for gRPC when leveraging Linux on Azure App Service.
This is currently supported in .NET, but support for Node and Python are expected
in the near future. Now we also have updated networking support and new Landing Zones
to help organizations deploy production App Service apps. Now next we're starting to see
more and more of the development experience move directly into the cloud. While we have
seen a first phase with GitHub Codespaces, we now have the next generation with Azure Dev Box.
With this new service in preview organizations can configure a complete development environment that
can be spun up in a matter of minutes, instead of days of configuration. Unlike Codespaces,
Dev Box runs on Windows and can be configured for any tool that can run on Windows. In addition,
organizations can efficiently manage access using Azure AD. Now you can sign
up from the link in the description to request access to this preview.
Next, we have AI and ML, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say there was a huge emphasis placed
here during Build. One key announcement was the expansion of the OpenAI service,
which has been in preview since it's launched back in November. This service was launched as
a partnership between Microsoft and the OpenAI organization, with the goal of bringing OpenAI
services, such as the popular and mind-blowing GPT-3 model to any Azure developer. With the
announcement at Build, organizations can now apply to be included in the preview.
Also, the service now supports increased use cases with additional managed models from OpenAI.
Now, another challenge that Microsoft sought to address was helping organizations
innovate responsibly in AI. And this was made possible through the new Azure ML
Responsible AI Dashboard, which is currently available in preview.
This one dashboard pulls in metrics for both model debugging and business decision making to ensure
organizations are acting on the right data. Now not all frameworks are supported for all metrics.
So check out the documentation to see what is supported with this preview release.
Now we've made it through three of the four categories, we're in the home stretch now.
Finally, we have data and we have a lot to get to.
First up in this category we have CosmosDB and, and don't worry,
no bad news this time, just the good news with new capabilities available in public preview.
Now this includes burst capacity, which enables your workloads to still function,
even if you've temporarily exceeded your throughput. The serverless
container capacity has also increased, up to 1TB, and there also are major upgrades
on how to deal with partitions that include hierarchical partition,
keys, and partition merge. Get all the details from the link in the description.
Also Azure SQL is making it easier for you to build cloud applications on your own
machine. How? Well they now have released a local developer experience for Azure SQL
with a containerized runtime alongside a VS Code extension.
This update alone would be newsworthy, but they have also announced the availability of
Azure SQL ledger, which provides a blockchain-like verified ledger, but without the complexity of
setting up a blockchain environment. Now, we also cannot forget that, for the first time,
many of us can get our hands on the public preview of SQL Server 2022. And this release continues to
blur the lines between SQL Server and Azure with integrations we simply have not seen in
previous versions. So check out the link in the description to see how you can grab it today.
Well, I think that is all they'll let me cram into a single episode, and remember I did it for you,
the viewers! Don’t forget that the cloud never slows down, so you can come back next
week for even more Azure announcements here on Azure this Week. Be sure to let us know if you
have any comments below, and if you’ve enjoyed this, hit the like and share it with others.