Microsoft Build is a fantastic annual event where so many announcements of updates and new technologies are made it can be hard to keep up … This is a short series of articles to bring everything together and give you a high-level view of what happened at Build 2019 and what you should be aware of!
Azure Red Hat OpenShift is now available.
In the newest update in 2019, Azure announced that it will be able to provide a fully managed Red Hat OpenShift implementation that is deeply integrated to the Azure control plane. With this, you will be able to create clusters in the Azure portal through Azure command-line tools or through your own custom codes written from SDKs provided by Azure. Now you can easily integrate cluster creation, upgrading, scaling and deletion with existing tools and CI/CD pipelines.
You no longer have to manage Virtual machines as Azure does it for you. DevOps teams can focus on the operation of your application without paying attention to certain activities like upgrading, patching, repairing and recovering as they are done for them by azure service itself.
Another important feature of this development is the ability to integrate Azure directory into the OpenShift’s Kubernetes-based control plane. This enables you to apply enterprise policies such as two-factor access, geolocation to people who deploy and manage software in your cloud.
Azure monitor build 2019 updates
The Azure monitor is a comprehensive service provided by Azure to collect, analyze and act on telemetry from your on-premise and cloud environments. Thus it helps to maximize the availability and performance of your application. Further, it helps you to identify issues and monitor resources that affect the performance of your application. Wit MS build 2019, some exciting new features are added to the Azure Monitor service.
- End to end monitoring for AKS – In the latest update, we have added support for live Kubernetes events. Also, we are extending Application Insights to provide a new out of the box experience for application monitoring for any AKS hosted app.
- Integrated access control for logs - You can cascade the permissions at resource level with newly introduced granular role-based access control for logs. This helps to simplify governance and policies
- Intelligent and scalable alerts – New machine learning algorithms are deployed so that Azure Monitor is capable of automatically determining the right threshold for alerts. It’s a new feature called Alert Rules introduced in MS build 2019.
- Application change analysis - This new feature will give you a centralized view of all the changes done to a web app. So you can easily troubleshoot your web app.
Improvements to the Azure portal user experience
Several new features are added to the Azure portal to improve the user experience.
- Global search is very popular to find azure services and resources. It is improved to produce faster and smart results. With the new smart global search, even a misspelled keyword search is likely to return the expected results.
- New display and filtering enhancements were introduced to make resource browsing more intuitive.
- Azure Research group has more powerful querying capabilities across your resources
- You can Sign in to the Azure portal with your GitHub account.
- Azure Quickstart Center is improved to provide you with an enhanced customer experience
- Create virtual machine instances wit improved and streamlined process.
- Experience Full-screen for Azure Application Gateway.
- Activity Log is capable of making detailed change tracking.
App Service support for Java 11 (Linux and Windows) is now available
You know that with app service you can build, deploy, and scale web apps. It already supports many programming languages such as .NET, .NET Core, Node.js, Java, PHP, Ruby, or Python.
With MS build 2019 updates, app service supports Java 11 on both Windows and Linux versions. This update will save you Java SE subscription fees while enjoying many services such as free security patches.
Azure Shared Image Gallery is now generally available
Aure introduced Shared Image Gallery to easily manage and share custom virtual machine (VM) images. You can share them either within Azure regions or across Azure regions. There are many advantages of using Shared Image Gallery.
- You can easily group and version images for easy management.
- Globally replicate images.
- Scale your deployments by specifying the number of replicas/images you want Azure to keep.
- Make your images highly available by storing them in ZRS accounts located in regions with Availability Zones.
- Use Azure RBAC to control the access.
- The best news is there is no extra cost for shared image gallery.
New-and-improved SAP connector is now generally available
MS Build 2019 announced an improved SAP connector. You know that Azure logic apps are used to connect business-critical apps and services. This SAP connector works with Logic apps to enable the flow of data between SAP and other LOB applications. This data flow is bidirectional. This connector also works with classical SAP’s releases such as R/3, ECC systems on-premises. The improved SAP connector is suitable for HANA based SAP systems which were introduced recently. For example, you can use SAP connector for S/4 HANA hosted on either of on-premises or in the cloud. The SAP connector uses one of the following means to operate.
- Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI)
- Intermediate Document (IDoc)
- Remote Function Call (RFC)
There are three key operations of this SAP connector. Those are,
- Send to SAP - This operation sends IDoc over tRFC, calls RFC/tRFC or calls BAPI functions over RFC in SAP systems. The XML format is used for transaction payload. If the operation was successful, you will receive the configured response or a GUID. if the operation fails, you will receive a response with error code and details.
- Receive from SAP - This operation is based on webhooks. It registers the Logic Apps with data gateway. It is triggered when the gateway receives a BAPI function calls or an IDOC from the target SAP system.
- Generate Schemas - This operation generates schemas for the SAP artifacts for BAPI, IDoc, or RFC.
SAP connector uses basic authentication for all three operations mentioned above.
Azure Monitor can give AIOps alerts with Dynamic Thresholds is now generally available
With the latest update, Azure monitor can set Metric alerts with dynamic Thresholds. This is a significant improvement to the Azure monitor Metric Alerts. This feature frees you from the burden of manually setting thresholds for alerts. The alert rule uses Machine Learning to learn from metrics historical behavior, to identify patterns and anomalies. This helps to notify you about possible service issues. This feature has been further enhanced considering the customer feedbacks.
- A more simplified metric alert rule authoring experience is provided so that users who used static thresholds in the past can easily move to dynamic thresholds.
- Recommendation info balloons were added which will.provide you information about patterns detected by machine learning algorithms.
- The new alert view has a chart which shows the metric behavior at the alert time.
- You can provide feedback on dynamic threshold alerts. These feedbacks are used by machine learning algorithms to enhance your experience in dynamic threshold alerts in the future.
Full-Screen Experience in Azure App Service
Customers were asking for a full screen for the Azure app service. You will get it with MS build 2019. Full-screen experience provided by Azure will simplify application creation and publishing workflow. It will guide you to select OS, publishing mode, application stack, comprehensive validation options.
Durable Functions now supports a new stateful entities pattern
Azure functions allow you to build serverless applications relatively easily overcoming common serverless challenges. It has a productive event-driven programming model.
Durable functions play a special role in Azure functions. They are an extension to azure functions which is used to write stateful functions.
Durable functions manage checkpoints, state, and restarts for you. With the new update, you can achieve more with durable functions.
Now it supports stateful entities pattern and as a result of that, you can build stateful functions that map to an actor. Doing so, you can preserve both state and data. You will be only charged when these actors are running and not when they are idle.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux BYOS images now available
You probably have heard of BYOS images in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. BYOS stands for bring-your-own-subscription. It's available through a preview process with the latest Azure updates in MS Build 2019. PAYG - (pay-as-you-go) images are still available for you as well. If you are an RHEL user who has entitlements this could be very good news for you. You no longer need to pay extra for PAYG images to migrate to Azure. These BYOS images are identical to PAYG images. There is an authorization process that needs to be followed in order to access BYOS images. The purpose of the authorization process is to ensure customers have valid RHEL entitlements.
IoT Plug and Play announcement at Build
Azure consistently innovate towards IOT. from now on you can build IOT plug and play compatible devices. Then you have to certify the devices with azure certified for IOT program before allowing the customers to use it. The same approach can be used for devices working on any OS be it Android, Linux, Windows IOT, the Azure Sphere, RTOs, and more. More importantly, Azure support for IOT plug and play is open source.
There was a LOT unveiled in Build 2019 - the next installment in this series is coming soon.