Azure Weekly Newsletter Issue #498 - 12th January 2025
It's quite a hefty issue as it covers all the content since mid-December. We'll start with a public service announcement: Important: Switching CDN providers. If you had extended holidays in December, there's a very useful summary of the Festive Tech Calendar 2024 - YouTube Videos. There's loads of fantastic community content. The Microsoft Entra team really do crank out features, and they have published a very useful Top 50 features of 2024.
AI Updates
In AI, there's an interesting GitHub Copilot Bootcamp happening in February from the 4th-16th. We rolled out GitHub Copilot internally in September 2023 and we still find new techniques and features daily. Some other interesting community blogs: What is Microsoft.Extensions.AI Library and Will It Replace Semantic Kernel?, Overcome Azure AI Services Limits: A Practical Guide, and Creating an agent with the Azure AI Agent SDK.
Analytics Highlights
In Analytics, Four places you can visualize data in Microsoft Fabric, a really useful Decision Guide for Selecting an Analytical Data Store in Microsoft Fabric, and a dive into Microsoft Purview’s New Pay-As-You-Go Pricing Model for Data Governance.
DevOps Insights
In DevOps, Slash command your deployment with GitHub Actions (something I've wanted to do for ages, but not had the bandwidth to figure out), a great deep-dive into Automated Deployment of a Zero Trust Azure Automation Environment, and in networking, a comparison of Azure Private Endpoint vs. Service Endpoint: A Comprehensive Guide.
I enjoyed reading Building a Cryptographically Secure Product Licensing System on Azure Functions and Cosmos DB, as I worked on something similar 10 years ago.
Engineering Practices and Productivity
Finally, we've been working on some content to cover our engineering practices (in the vein of "it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it") and productivity; Ian Griffiths is working on a series of posts talking about Working locally with Spark Dev Containers, and Carmel Eve kicks off a video series demonstrating how to Simplify your Streamlit Python Development Experience with Dev Containers.
