It's Microsoft Build time.
The annual developer event is a hundred percent online this year again,
and I watched every single session to figure out the top three takeaways just
for you. Now,
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While there isn't any, 'wow,
this is new and amazing and will change the world forever' kind of news,
there were many improvements and upgrades to lots of things,
I guess that is a sign of product maturing and being more stable.
And I'll take that. Okay. Let's start with number three.
And the third strongest trend from Microsoft Build is data. Of course,
data is the food for any computing system.
So it makes sense Microsoft is upping its Azure data game.
The most interesting new data feature is the ledger capability for Azure SQL
Database.
This adds tamper evidence capabilities to your Azure SQL Databases
using blockchain technology, but without blockchain infrastructure.
Microsoft has abstracted away all the complexity of setting up blockchain for
your data and pretty much made it a button in Azure.
You simply enable ledger functionality on the tables you want and keep using SQL
like normal. But now you can tell if the data has been tampered with, nifty.
Other notable mentions in the Azure data space are updates for Cosmos DB to
expand the free tier and provide partial document updates, hmm!
12 months free use of Azure Databases for PostgreSQL and MySQL,
Azure Synapse updates for hardware acceleration and Database Integration.
One of Azure's strong points is number two - hybrid.
With the historic customer base of Windows Server,
Active Directory and many other Microsoft products,
there are a lot of companies that have existing infrastructure,
which they seek to enhance with cloud powder. Sprinkle it on.
At Microsoft Build a lot of focus was an Azure Arc.
The Arc service lets you run any Windows, Linux,
SQL server or Kubernetes cluster across data centers,
whether it is on premises in Azure or even in another cloud.
Arc is for multi-cloud, however you define that.
And at Build some more goodies were announced for Arc.
Azure app services are now Arc enabled, as Microsoft likes to call it,
through Kubernetes. So you can have your Azure native app services,
like Functions and App services, and Logic Apps, and Event Grid,
running almost anywhere. Open Service Mesh, or OSM,
is now in preview with Arc.
The OSM on simplifies integration between OSM and Azure Arc
enabled Kubernetes clusters. Azure Kubernetes services, AKS,
on Azure stack HCI is in general availability and is fully Arc
enabled. They Really liked that term. Hang on. Gar.
If only they named it Azure Arrrrgh!
The pirate service that sneaks into other cloud platforms and plunders their
resources.
Okay, was there just a pirate here?
Finally, the number one trend from build - cloud native.
And if you aren't familiar with the term,
it means using services that are a hundred percent living on cloud platforms,
such as containers, service meshes, microservices, and immutable infrastructure.
And there are a bunch of updates ready? Okay.
As mentioned a moment ago, App services, Functions, Logic Apps,
API management and Event Grid can now run on Kubernetes clusters anywhere across
on premises, multicloud and edge environments with Azure Arc.
Native support for WebSocket APIs in Azure API management is now in preview.
Azure communication services has a new UI library, call recording,
direct routing and much more.
Azure Logic Apps has new hosting options,
improved performance and developer workflows and 4,000 extra
actions for the consumption tier.
Two new Azure Marketplace offers for Java Enterprise Edition (EE) and Jakarta EE
workloads are generally available. PowerShell support in Durable Functions,
and a whole lot more.
That is all I could fit in for MS Build 2021.
What was your favorite announcement or session this year?
Let me know in the comments and give us a thumbs up.
Also join our new Azure This Week discord channel to discuss the trends from
this episode, and also to interact with other students and ACG people.
I'm on there! You'll find the link below in the description.
As we say on the A Cloud Guru team,
when the amount of news is threatening to fill every space of our online
office, seek and you shall cloud. So see you next week,
keep being awesome cloud gurus.