Given that Microsoft Build happened last week,
the Azure news this week is sparse. Instead,
I'll take a deep dive into more details for some of the best announcements from
Build.
It's my recommendation of the most delicious parts of the Microsoft Build buffet
of tasty cloud treats. Now, before we get into it,
I want to invite you to the ACG Community Summit taking place
28th to the 30th of June. It is three days,
includes six cloud learning tracks and is live and hands-on,
and it's free to attend. Yeah, I know! The link is in the description.
So come along.
Also join our new Azure This Week Discord channel to discuss the trends from
this episode,
interact with other students and ACG people and get help for your cloud journey.
You'll find the link below in the description.
Build saw a ton of exciting and interesting updates for Cosmos DB.
And if you are using this amazing, globally scaled,
single digit millisecond latency database, listen up. First of all,
the free tier has been expanded.
You can now get the first thousand request units per second of provision
throughput and 25 gigabytes storage each month for the lifetime of one
Azure Cosmos DB account per Azure subscription.
This used to be 400 RUs and five gigabytes. Now in public preview,
you can perform path level updates to specific fields or properties in a single
document without needing to perform a full document read, replace operation.
This is excellent news for developers and will make applications more
performant.
You can now encrypt sensitive data inside your client application before it get
stored in your database with 'always encrypted',
a new feature in public preview.
Azure Cosmos DB emulator for Linux and macOS is in public
preview. Cosmos DB role-based access control,
or RBAC, is now in general availability.
This enables even finer grained access control to the data.
Cosmos DB can now make you breakfast with minimum latency.
Azure Cosmos DB serverless now in general availability,
and this model can optimize costs for spiky or intermittent workloads.
Mmm spiky workloads.
You can now use the Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache to optimize read
costs and latency.
Cosmos really has been receiving the Azure development love lately.
Azure Functions have traditionally been for developers of cloud applications,
and PowerShell has been for system administrators of cloud computing.
Could they be combined? Now
what is the world coming to?
Using a special type of function called an orchestrator function,
you can write PowerShell code to describe a stateful workflow that orchestrates
other PowerShell Azure Functions that perform activities in the workflow.
That makes sense? So PowerShell becomes the master of many functions.
You can then use loops and conditionals in PowerShell to execute complex
workflows that consists of activity functions running in sequence and / or
concurrently. This is the best of both worlds.
Use the link in the description for a bunch of very detailed examples of using
PowerShell and Durable Functions.
Often when the term blockchain is mentioned, there are confused looks,
misunderstood concepts and much infrastructure to build, to even use it.
One of the main features of blockchain inherent to the technology is the trust
in the data.
If the blockchain is tampered with it is immediately obvious as the constantly
performed integrity checks fail.
Azure SQL Database is taking advantage of this feature,
but without the management or complexity of having to add
blockchain from the ground up. Instead,
you pretty much get a button to enable the ledger feature in Azure
SQL Database.
And this will enforced trust in the data,
which can be critical as a component of something like smart contracts -
a self executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and
seller being directly written into lines of code.
You can enable ledger functionality on tables in your database and interact with
them like any other table, no data migration needed,
no application changes required.
And this is a great example of what cloud computing is all about.
With a flick of a button, good button, and minimal disruption,
your data and applications are suddenly much more powerful. Love it.
Did you like those new features too?
Azure cloud is just getting better and better all the time.
Let me know in the comments what you think and give us a thumbs up.
As we say on the A Cloud Guru team when the video editor for this week's episode
threatens to make me Swedish, "Seek and you shall cloud".
So see you next week and keep being awesome cloud gurus.