Tuesday, August 28, 2018

MySQL and PostgreSQL gets VNet Service Endpoints


Recently Microsoft has released Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
What’s it offers?
These include the high availability of the community versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL (99.99%) and also include elastic scaling for performance, and industry-leading security and compliance on Azure.
And as a part of the service Microsoft has introduced new features and capabilities such as increased storage and availability across more regions worldwide.
Now they have announced the general availability of Virtual Network (VNet) service endpoints for Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL in all regions where the service is available for General Purpose and Memory Optimized servers.
You can check the service availability by visiting region expansion for MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Azure CosmosDB JavaScript SDK 2.0: Public Preview

Version 2.0 RC of the Azure Cosmos DB JavaScript SDK is available for public previews. You can use the node pckage manager to install in your project using the following command.

npm install @azure/cosmos


Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-model database service that is highly scalable. It also features turn key global distribution as well as transparent multi-master replication. The best part about this API is it is based on TypeScript. TypeScript has many implementations and improvements happened over the years. Also the version 2.0 has major changes to the prior version including support for on-premises implementations. 

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Windows Container Support in Azure App Services: Public Preview

Containers are on the rise and Azure is supporting the containers as much as they can. Windows Container Support in Azure App Services come in as result of the increasing need for developers to know and control what is installed inside a container. This is right now on public preview. 

Application modernization now become very easy with this feature

Quoting from Microsoft Azure Blog, following opportunities are available. 
  •  Lift and Shift to PaaS – When a developer wants to  migrate .NET Framework and .NET Core applications to Azure, and is trying to transform straight to a PaaS service to get the many productivity benefits from the App Service platform.
  • Relaxed security restrictions – The Windows Container is an isolation and security boundary, When deploying a containerized application. Normally Libraries will be blocked by Azure App Service and instead of it will be succeed when running inside of a Windows Container
  • Third-party application migration – Customers often have business critical applications developed by third parties with which the company no longer has a relationship. Containerizing these types of applications unlocks the opportunity to migrate applications to Azure App Service.
  • Applications with dependencies – Ina scenario, when a developer deploying an app within a Windows Container, it allows to install custom dependencies. Even when a developer wants to install libraries into  Global Assembly Cache (GAC) done by easily.
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Saturday, August 11, 2018

Managed Disk Migration on Azure


Converting the unmanaged disks to managed disks is now easy and will take only a single click. No need for writing any scripts anymore. 

What is a Managed Disk?

Managed disks do manage the storage accounts associated with the Virtual Machine disks. The users has to only specify the type of disks they want as in Standard HDD, Standard SSD or Premium SSD. Azure will create the managed disk for you.

Managed Disk Advantage

  • Storage account limit is not necessarily considered
  • Up to 1,000 instances for the VM Scale sets Created
  • High-availability across the compute and storage resources
  • Azure RBAC allows securing disks, snapshots and images

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Azure Management Groups now Available

You may have several subscriptions for your Azure portal. Organization, Private account, and other azure subscriptions. So it’s bit confused to handle multiple subscriptions together. So azure has given a solution to that by introducing Azure Management Groups, which users can manage your multiple subscriptions in a single place.
This cool feature enables users to apply governance controlling as Role Based Access Controls as well as like Azure Policies. You can create a management group by adding your subscriptions and apply rules and governance policies to the group and will be inherited to those subscriptions.
There can be many type of subscriptions like Certified Solution Partner, Enterprise Agreement, Pay-As-You-Go and other types as well. To use this feature, customer need to pay no additional cost even if it’s come to large scale service.

The best thing about this new feature is user can apply policy or RBAC to multiple subscriptions. Also users can group other management groups even. So users can manage their subscriptions as well as other management groups from one place.

Azure Cloud Shell Editor with Visual Studio Code

Everyone loves Azure Cloud Shell. It can run Bash or PowerShell commands and all you need is to have logged into the Azure Portal and a storage account there for it. Who would have thought running PowerShell commands on a web browser? 

Things have improved and things are getting even better with more features being added. CloudShell now comes with some open source tools like Terraform, Ansible and Inspec pre-installed. That might make it a bit heavy, but will do a lot more good for people. 

What is very interesting is being able to run those commands on Visual Studio Code. Yes. The Visual Studio Code now allows running Azure Cloud Shell commands without you need to run anywhere. Its super easy to launch and you can easily see or update your Azure resources from the favourite IDE.