Hi, and welcome to Azure This Week. My name's not Lars and I don't have llamas,
but I do love me some Azure. So I'm thrilled to join you for this episode.
My name is Landon, and honestly, Azure is a bit boring this week.
That's right. I said it. Come on Azure.
At least put some effort into keeping the sparks alive. Well that's okay.
This gives us an opportunity to highlight some areas of improvement that are
important, but go unnoticed behind all the hype.
And so we'll be talking about some advancements to our machine overlords,
also known as the Internet of Things.
We'll get a peek at how Microsoft wants to harness 5G video for video
analytics. And finally, we'll talk about Microsoft;
s surprising love affair with open-source databases.
Let's get started.
Uh.
Depending on who you ask, IoT is either a fad, the wave of the future,
or infant versions of the robot apocalypse. No matter where you stand,
the hard truth is that traditionally there's been a lot of upfront frustration
to get started. Industrial manufacturing, in particular,
has bought into and received benefit from connected devices and sensors,
but you can imagine how long it takes to get these devices up and running in
their existing massive production environments.
Enter Azure IoT Plug and Play. Simply put,
it uses a device model to advertise the device's capabilities to an IoT Plug and
Play-enabled application.
This makes connection and configuration dramatically easier.
And with hundreds of IoT Plug and Play-enabled certified devices in their Azure
device catalog,
anyone can easily get up and running with an IoT solution regardless of their
level of IoT expertise. Microsoft is now joining with even more partners,
such as CloudRail and Omnio,
to bring Plug and Play capability to a wide variety of IoT-capable sensors and
devices already deployed.
This enables a whole new level of intelligent cloud workloads at the edge.
So if you've been sitting on the edge,
and reluctant to futurize your production lines,
there's never been a better time to get started.
Hi,
my name's Lars Klint and I'm a cloud Training Architect and llama wrangler in
Melbourne, Australia.
Now me and my team are doing a live hands-on cloud experience at the Women in
Cloud and UNGA, event on the 14th of October.
Now I'm supposed to tell you how great we are and how much cloud we know,
and blah, blah, blah, blah.
All you really need to know is that it's for learners that are very new to
Microsoft Azure, and you can sign up today to start your cloud journey.
I look forward to meeting you. See ya.
Our next story didn't necessarily happen this week,
but it's also an important ongoing area of improvement by Microsoft in the
intelligent cloud. That is in the field of video analytics.
Video is the dominant traffic type of the internet ever since 4g arrived on the
scene,
and edge solutions have been constructed to analyze visual data about everyday
situations, such as traffic congestion. With the advent of 5G,
the amount of data and opportunities for intelligent solutions will only
increase. To meet this opportunity,
Microsoft has developed things such as Microsoft Rocket:
an open-source platform to make building video streams easy.
They are combining that with the high-capacity,
low-latency connectivity provided by 5G to bring video analytics to things like
parking lot cameras with autonomous networks, multi-hop camera networks,
and more.
The only question is can they capture and analyze all of this video while still
playing nice about privacy? I don't know.
Get the full story on their plans at the link below and see how 5G might be the
tipping point you've been waiting for for your edge video solution.
Being a data guy,
I would be remiss not to mention recent improvements to Azure's database
services.
Most people don't think of Microsoft when they hear the words open-source
database, but Redmond wants to change that.
For years we've had Azure SQL database and it's become known and loved by SQL
server fans. But quietly in the background,
Microsoft also made way for popular database services,
such as MySQL and PostgreSQL to live as PaaS offerings.
These are fully-managed and scalable services without the taste of evil that
open-source fans expect of Microsoft and they keep getting better.
In the last week Microsoft has added new capabilities to the open-source
offering such as improved Citus clusters for PostgreSQL.
Azure Pipelines support for both MySQL and PostgreSQL - Flexible Server.
Azure Resource Health for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server and Terraform support,
also for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server.
The addition of Terraform support to me is particularly exciting.
I'm a huge fan of automating all the things and with Terraform template-based
configuration, you can define,
provision and configure your PostgreSQL databases in a predictable and
repeatable way. Yay for less human error.
They've even gone so far as to add the ability to have an Oracle consistent
snapshot using Azure VM backup.
But we won't mention that name anymore in case they charge us extra for it.
Most of the open-source database improvements are currently in public preview.
That's it for this week Azure fans. Thanks for letting me join you.
I don't have llamas, or a cool accent,
or rugged good looks...but I'm sure that guy will be back next week.
As he would say, "Seek and you shall cloud." Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.