Hey friends, you know we've covered
the Azure SDK since the very
first episode of Azure Friday,
and it continues to evolve,
grow, and just get better.
The SDK provides a cohesive developer
experience for interacting with
over 150 offerings across Azure.
Connie Yau is here to give me an update on what's
new with the Azure SDK – today on Azure Friday.
Hey friends,
I'm Scott Hanselman and it's Azure Friday.
I'm here with engineer Connie Yau and
we're going to talk about the Azure SDK.
How are you?
Hi, I'm pretty good.
How about yourself?
I'm excited to learn about new
things and I love hanging out
with new friends in Azure Friday,
and I understand that you work
on the Azure SDK team and you're
an engineer who is kind of being
involved in the revamping of
the SDK for Azure services.
And there's a lot of cool things happening.
Oh yeah, totally.
Like most app developers,
when you deploy your app,
you probably have like multiple Azure
services that you integrate with
like storage Key Vault and you know
by the time you deploy your app you
realize that you have to like deploy
thousands of configurations and
understand different ways to authenticate.
So we've tried to make that user
story a lot easier for developers.
There's a lot going on and you really
having having a nice layer on top of
it that makes all of those things cohesive.
So if you know how to use one,
you can kind of guess how to use.
Another is a really great experience.
Oh yeah, definitely,
that's one of our design principles
that we've used like consistency.
So once you know one pattern,
for example, we all use clients,
then you'll know the patterns to add
different Azure services to your application.
I've heard it referred to
as a unified client library,
a lot like unification is a big
part of what Azure SDK stands for.
Yeah, definitely.
Will actually demo this for you,
so is that OK if I share my screen?
Let's see it.
Let's do the demos.
Alright here we go,
what are we looking at?
Alright so here we have this kind
of it's a dummy application but it
kind of gives you an example of
what an app developer might have.
So right here we have.
Cloud clipboard, which stores some clips.
In this case I've entered like
I'm a clip and like hello.
Uh, in addition,
you might want a Key Vault
to hold some of your secrets,
like some connection strings to
a database or so and so forth.
So right now we have, you know,
a secret that I have in my Key Vault,
which is my favorite drink.
But what matters to app developers
is the code behind that,
so I'm just going to show you what
our legacy client library look like,
so this is a class that allows me
to communicate with Key Vault.
And as you can see,
like on this code, I had to search
all over the Internet to figure out
how to authenticate with Key Vaults.
And once I copied this code and
then I added storage on top of it.
I realized I couldn't use
the same methodology.
To authenticate with storage,
so I had to learn something else.
That is a hassle that is confusing,
yes, so one of the features that we
have in our new client library is this
unified way to authenticate with Azure.
So let me just show you here in my new code,
so right here this is all I needed
to do to authenticate with Azure.
Like all of our clients start
with builders in Java,
and so you'll know exactly what to
do when you see our new library.
Go like new builder of some sort and
all you have to do is get this token
credential and this token credential
is backed by our underlying library
Azure identity which all Azure all
our new Azure libraries can use and
not to do is go like new default
Azure credential builder Dot build.
Yeah so based on the environment that
your app is running in it'll actually
figure out the best credentials to use.
So let's say you're a dev.
Just pressing F5 in Visual Studio,
it can use your Visual Studio credentials
to log into Azure so you don't have
to copy and paste some special like
service principal client to save.
Wow, so it actually knows the
context in which you're running.
Yeah,
So what it does is like the first thing
it does is tries to see if you're in
a magic managed service identity and
then if not it checks for a service
principle and then if not it'll go
and check other things like it can do
interactive browsing to like log in.
Or does Visual Studio or elsewhere does
Azure CLI like looks for eventual there?
Wow that's cool and I see that from
an object oriented programming
perspective you're using kind of like
provider model and I'm I'm wrecking.
Like I'm looking at this Java code
and I'm thinking this would work
in C# and this could work in
other languages with this model.
Be familiar if I moved to other languages.
Yeah,
so in C# you would also
see a default Azure credential.
So like if you're a polyglot and you
have other services in different languages,
you'd know exactly like that.
You could use exact same classes
and the exact same packages,
because one of the things we tried
to do is make sure that if you have a
feature in one library you also have
that feature in another language.
This seems like it would be really
cool for polyglot,
not just pulling out people,
but polyglot organizations,
particularly ones that use microservices.
And they're having all these services
talking to each other and then talking
to all the different Azure services.
Definitely one of the things
we also improved on is
people complain about docks a lot,
so we've improved that story a lot.
We have a ton of samples
that we can show you.
So if you go to like a dot Ms.
Azure SDK, you'll find a lot of
samples that we've included,
so it gets people get getting started easier.
That's great, fantastic.
Good documentation is fundamental
for this kind of stuff.
Yeah, definitely.
OK, cool what's next?
Oh well, I was going to show you
another cool thing that I liked about
our new client libraries is that
all the classes implement our common
Azure core so let's say pagination
is a common thing like you want to
list your secrets or list clips.
You can use the same classes and the same.
I guess methodology to
go through those clips,
so if you notice all of our paginate,
all our paged calls use paged flux.
So you can apply the same learnings
when you go and like move to
storage or schema registry to
use the exact same knowledge.
In addition we have.
We have a common.
Logging layer, so let's say you want
to be able to enable logging because
something failed in production.
You can set similar environment variables
to get logging across all the Azure SDK's.
All the client libraries in
the Azure SDK. Wow!
Okay, so when you talked about unified like
you weren't kidding like that's really cool.
Actually having unified logging,
especially again getting microservices
and applications that have a lot of layers,
that's huge. Oh yeah, and it.
Oh sorry. Like I got excited.
We also have. Please get excited.
We also have.
We've also implemented like telemetry
tracing like open senses and open
telemetry so you can actually plug those
things into your application as well,
or your own tracing as well till I get
more information about your application.
Alright, fantastic.
Ah, I see OldKeyVault and I say NewKeyVault.
What's going on there?
Oh, so in my demo application I want
to show you how easy it was to move
like how much less cognitive burden
it was to write in the new Azure SDK.
So like over here we have a lot
of code just to create a clients,
but over here it's pretty simple.
Like you know, right when you
show that beginning?
Actually I was trying to read
the old one and I love that you
called it cognitive burden.
Because I was kind of like.
I was trying to pretend like I
understood what was going on,
but I got lost somewhere unlike line 47.
So yeah, I like there's some magic
string here that I had to look up,
but if you look at the new client it
kind of automatically does that for you.
I no longer have to understand what this
identity is or how to connect to it.
I just know hey if I pass you this token
like and it's this user can access it.
Please just give me access so.
I also like the iPad.
I'm a fan myself with the Fluent API style,
right?
This is online 21 there.
That's all one line from 21 through
24 and that's that fluent sentence
building kind of API style.
Yeah, for Java we decided to use
fluent models because yeah,
just like that you get to connect
and Chain operates together.
In.net you can instantiate your secret
client using just constructors,
so it'll feel idiomatic to you
as a user as well.
You're just I love what you're saying here,
Connie,
because you just hit another
one of my favorite words,
which is idiomatic,
right?
Like you don't want to be writing Java and
then feeling like the person that wrote
the SDK is a Ruby programmer and you're like,
like what language are we speaking here,
right?
And idiomatic is really important.
Yeah,
that's one of the feedbacks that we had
gotten for our legacy client libraries.
Is that sometimes it didn't
feel idiomatic to the language,
so now we work across we work with
many different language experts
in their respective languages too.
Create this SDK so you know it'll
feel intuitive for you as like a
JavaScript developer. C++. Go developer.
That's awesome. Fantastic.
And the last thing is that we love
getting feedback and we're also open source.
So if you want to contribute to our
repository or you see some sort of
scenario that might be missing, like,
feel free to hit up our GitHub and just.
Interact with us.
That's another great point.
The Azure SDK.
The people who work on it yourself.
Like you're out there.
You want to talk to people.
You're on social.
You're on GitHub.
There's whole conversations about
the future of the Azure SDK.
They're happening in GitHub issues,
so if you're watching Azure
Friday and you want to
talk to Connie and her compatriots
that are working on this stuff,
they want to hear from you.
Alright, alright so actually let me
bring up that kid hubs you get lost.
Let's do that yeah so it's just Azure
Azure SDK for Java and if you replace this
with Azure SDK for NET or Azure SDK for
JS you'll go to the respective language.
Fantastic alright well thank you so
much for hanging out with me today.
Thanks for having me.
I am learning all about some of the
great work that's happening revamping
the Azure SDK for all the great Azure
Services today on Azure Friday.
Thanks for watching this
episode of Azure Friday.
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