What’s Brewing ?

April 2016

Azure IoT Gateway SDK

Details: Click here

• Azure IOT Gateway SDK enables developers and ISVs to easily build

and deploy gateway intelligence tailored to their specific scenario.

• Currently the SDK contains-

• A framework to create extensible gateway solutions.

• Code which sends data from multiple devices over gateway to

cloud connection.

• An example of how to connect a non-TCP/IP enabled device to

the cloud via protocol translation on the gateway.

Public beta

Azure IoT Hub device management

Details: Click here

• Device management features in Azure IoT Hub enable IoT solutions

to organize, query, configure, and update devices in Azure based IoT

solutions. These features include –

• Device twin

• Device queries

• Device jobs

Preview

Azure Cool Blob Storage

Details: Click here

• Azure Cool Blob Storage is a low cost storage for cool object data. In

general, any data which lives for a longer period of time and is

accessed less than once a month is a perfect candidate for cool

storage.

• Capabilities of Blob storage accounts include:-

• Cost effective

• Compatibility

• Performance

• Availability

• Durability

• Scalability and Security

• Global reach

General Availability

DocumentDB now supports Time-To-Live (TTL)

Details: Click here

• Azure DocumentDB now provides the ability to store data and with

the ability to have that data automatically purged from the system.

• By setting the “ttl” property of a document, customers can control

exactly when documents will be automatically purged by the service.

• This expiry time interval can be set at a collection level or at an

individual document level.

Azure support upgrade for enterprises

Details: Click here

• Eligible customers who don’t choose to purchase support will

automatically get Azure Standard support which offers unlimited

technical assistance for subscription management and break-fix

issues.

• Customers who purchase Azure Standard support will be upgraded to

Professional Direct. Professional Direct support offers faster initial

response and escalation management for high priority issues,

proactive monitoring of business critical support issues and account

management.

Migrate your Application Insights mobile app to HockeyApp

Details: Click here

Updates

• Transition to HockeyApp is now live.

• Simply log into your app, and notice the transition status bar at the

top of your app. This single button click will transfer your existing

application over to HockeyApp. No need to change any SDKs, no

need to change your experience.

Azure SQL Database now supports geo-replication for all service tiers

Details: Click here

• Ability to create the secondary database in any region in the world.

• Ability to connect to the secondary database with read-only access.

• Ability to create up to 4 parallel secondary databases in the same or

different region.

• Ability to configure performance objective of the secondary database.

• When failover is activated to one of the secondary databases, other

secondaries are automatically linked to the new primary

Azure Stream Analytics and Power BI

Details: Click here

• Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed, cost effective Azure

Service that enables you to do real-time stream processing on data

in-motion using a simple SQL like language.

• With this announcement we are adding another output connector,

the Power BI connector, which allows you to stream data directly to a

live dashboard.

General Availability

Live Metrics Stream in Application Insights

Details: Click here

• Live Metrics Stream in Application Insights while your deployment is

happening, and you’ll see the effect immediately.

• Live Metrics is designed to have minimal latency. But it doesn’t store

data or provide search facilities.

• Live Metrics Stream is available now out of the box without any

additional configuration.

Customize developer portal pages using Azure API Management templates

Details: Click here

• Azure API management now provides a way to customize the content

of the developer portal pages themselves.

• Great flexibility to configure the content of the pages as you see fit.

• API Management provides a comprehensive set of templates

covering the various pages in the developer portal.

Video OCR on Azure Media Analytics

Details: Click here

Private Preview

• OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the conversion of visual text

from video into editable, searchable digital text. Video OCR detects

text content in video files and generates text files for your use.

• When used in conjunction with a search engine, you can easily index

your media by text, and enhance the discoverability of your content.

JSON functionalities in Azure SQL Database

Details: Click here

• New JSON functionalities are now available in Azure SQL Database.

• Azure SQL Database enables you to store JSON in standard textual

format, use standard SQL language for querying JSON data, with the

same indexing methods as on other standard SQL data types..

• JSON functionalities in Azure SQL Database can help you in different

scenarios such as -

• Easy ingestion of JSON data.

• Exchange data with other systems or libraries via JSON

documents.

• Handling data variety with flexible data models.

Public Preview

Azure Mobile Apps Node.js Server SDK v2.1.0

Details: Click here

• This release of the Server SDK adds support for SQLite on the server.

This provides a new data store that can be used for a number of

important scenarios.

• We now support a full decoding of the AAD claims, which includes

AAD Group membership.

Video Summarization on Azure Media Analytics

Details: Click here

• The Azure Video Thumbnails Media Processor lets you create a short

series of clips or “highlights” for a video.

• You can use these motion thumbnails to create a short, five-second

video preview to show users when they hover over the thumbnail of

the video in your portal.

Azure Container Service

Details: Click here

• Azure Container Service provides simplified configurations of proven

open source container orchestration technology, optimized to run in

the cloud. With just a few clicks you can deploy your container-based

applications on a framework designed to help manage the

complexity of containers deployed at scale, in production.

• With Docker image support and our commitment to open source

software in the orchestration layer, your application is fully portable

across any cloud and on-premises.

• Built on 100% open source software to maximize portability of

workloads and offers a choice among popular orchestration engines.

General Availability

FACT Certification for Azure

Details: Click here

• Azure certification by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT),

makes Azure the first public cloud to gain this accreditation.

• This audit joins the work we’ve completed for Azure Media Services,

CDN, Storage, and other platform capabilities to prove compliance

with established media-industry security best-practices, including

Content Delivery and Security Association’s (CDSA) Content

Protection and Security (CPS) Standard and the Motion Picture

Association of America’s application and cloud security guidelines.

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Details: Click here

General Availability

• Originally announced in preview last November, VM Scale Sets are a

way to manage Azure VMs as a group, providing easy deployment

and management options, and simple ways to integrate with Azure

autoscale and load balancing.

• Key Features-

• Easy portal create experience.

• Simple scaling properties.

• Integrated autoscale.

• Azure Resource manager integration.

Tableau Server in the Azure Marketplace

Details: Click here

• From Azure a simple step-by-step experience to deploy the server.

• Tableau not only enables deep integration with Azure SQL Data

Warehouse and Spark Service on Azure HDInsight. Tableau also offers

AzureAD integration for Tableau Server (on-premise or cloud) and

Tableau Online.

Azure Stack Technical Preview 1

Details: Click here

• Improvements included in this release -

• Faster VM deployment times.

• Better performance in VM-related actions such as stop, start,

delete.

• Incremental stability and reliability improvements to the portal

experience.

• Updated extensions for Desired State Configuration and Docker

(for purposes of Azure alignment).

Updates

Azure diagnostics and Azure Audit logs

Details: Click here

• Azure Audit Logs is a data source that provides a wealth of

information on the operations on your Azure resources. The most

important data within Azure Audit Logs is the operational logs from

all your resources. you can now route all operational logs to your

Blob storage and stream it to your Event Hub.

• Also, you can now stream Azure Diagnostics counters and events

within seconds to your Azure Event Hub. This includes ETW events,

Performance Counters, Windows Event Logs and Application Logs.

Updates

Performance testing with App Service Continuous Deployment

Details: Click here

• Integrated with Visual Studio Load Testing to trigger a test as part of

your continuous integration workflow. This means, as soon as you

check in a new version, your app can be updated and tested so you

can validate behavior and performance in an automated fashion.

• Complete setup can be done through Azure portal.

Updates available at http://azure.microsoft.com

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/