Read the latest announcements about Azure Maps, our machine-learning tools, how we give clinicians the right data, and more.
— Read on azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-source-86/
Category: Cloud
Comparing Serverless Architecture Providers: AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Other FaaS Vendors – DZone Cloud
This article takes a look at the four largest cloud vendors and compares them based on services, prices, languages and more, and offers some alternatives.
— Read on dzone.com/articles/comparing-serverless-architecture-providers-aws-az
Meet your Cloud Developer Advocates
What is a Cloud Developer Advocate? Their a global group of passionate developers that advocate to help solve problems with the cloud. Jeremy Likness wrote up a great post on what is a Cloud Developer Advocate that is great to read and he himself is a Cloud Developer Advocate. These folks are here to help and support you, so don’t be shy and reach out and connect with them. I’ve learned so much from them and have had the pleasure to meet and speak in person at a few events like the Microsoft Tech Summit, Microsoft Build and the Global Azure Summit.
To see a list of the current Cloud Developer Advocates and how you can to reach out and connect with them, please head over to the Cloud Developer Advocates page.
Enjoy!
Reference
Build your cloud skills at Microsoft Tech Summit
Microsoft is hosting another Microsoft Tech Summit this March and April 2018 across additional Canadian cities.
The cloud is changing expectations – and transforming the way we live and work. At the Microsoft Tech Summit you will learn how Microsoft’s cloud platform can help you lead your organization through real digital transformation – and shape your future. This one-day event is a free technical learning event focused on Azure and Microsoft 365. Whether you’re developing innovative apps or delivering optimized solutions, Microsoft Tech Summit can help evolve your skills, deepen your expertise, and grow your career.
The day will kick off with a keynote and following the keynote, you will have a number of sessions to choose from including Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Apps Innovation, Data + AI or the Modern Workplace. Each session offers a learning opportunity to be hands on with Microsoft technology.
Whether you’re developing innovative apps or delivering optimized solutions, Microsoft Tech Summit can help you evolve your skills, deepen your expertise, and grow your career.
- Connect with experts from Microsoft and the community, and learn how to get the most from the cloud. Ask your toughest questions, learn best practices, and share strategies.
- Choose from a variety of learning opportunities to deepen your cloud expertise, from keynotes and breakout sessions, to hands-on labs.
- Customize your learning – whether you’re already cloud-savvy or just getting started – Microsoft Tech Summit has something for everyone.
- Discover the latest trends, tools, and product roadmaps through 4 unique sessions covering a range of topics across multiple tracks.
I was fortunate to attend the Microsoft Tech Summit in Toronto in December 2017 and it was a great 2-day event – I highly recommend attending if you can.This is a great event to build your cloud skills, connect with experts and get inspired.
Here is a listing of the Canadian cities and date. Click on the city closet to you to learn more and register:
Enjoy!
Essential tool for blurring Azure secrets for presentations and screen recordings
For those that do Azure presentations / screen recordings you know that you often find yourself scrubbing out your sensitive and personal information such as subscription keys, email addresses, keys and connection strings. What if you could have this magically done for you?
Well let me introduce to you a handy Chrome extension called Azure Mask that will mask GUIDs (such as Subscription IDs), email addresses, keys, and connection strings with a blur. The intention of the extension is to make it easier to do screen recordings without revealing sensitive, personal, account information that may show up on screen.
NOTE: This extension will only run and apply against Azure portal URLs.
Features
- Blurs GUIDs (such as Subscription IDs)
- Blurs your account email
- Hides the "Report a Bug" button (if found)
- Toggle the mask on/off and store this state
- Apply the mask (if enabled) after Document Object Model (DOM) mutations
Installing the Extension
As mentioned on the Azure Mask GitHub repository readme, you can install this extension in Chrome from either a package or from source. Let’s take a look at how we can install from source.
- Download or clone the repository: git clone git@github.com:clarkio/azure-mask.git
- Open up Chrome and bring up the extensions settings by typing in the address bar: chrome://extensions/
- Check the “Develop mode” option and click on Load unpacked extension button:
- Navigate to where you cloned this repository and then choose path: /azure-mask/src
- Follow the prompts and then the extension will be available in Chrome:
Using Azure Mask
After installing the Azure Mask extension in Chrome, navigate to your Azure portal and after signing in you will see all your Azure secrets magically blurred:
If you want to turn off this extension, click on the Azure Mask extension button in Chrome to bring up the options:
Enjoy!
References
Microsoft’s new Azure & AWS Cloud Service Map
Microsoft recently introduced a new Cloud Service Map to help customers and developers quickly compare the capabilities between Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform across all categories. You can leverage this guide for planning multi-cloud solutions or simply to migrate from AWS to Azure.
The cloud service map (PDF available for download) is broken out into 13 sections to make navigation between each service simple:
- Marketplace – Cloud marketplace services bring together native and partner service offerings to a single place, making it easier for customers and partners to understand what they can do.
- Compute – Compute commonly refers to the collection of cloud computing resources that your application can run on.
- Storage – Storage services offer durable, highly-available, and massively-scalable cloud storage for your application, whether it runs in the cloud or not.
- Networking & Content Delivery – Allows you to easily provision private networks, connect your cloud application to your on-premises datacenters, and more.
- Database – Database services refers to options for storing data, whether it’s a managed relational SQL database that’s globally distributed or multi-model NoSQL databases designed for any scale.
- Analytics and big data – Make the most informed decision possible by analyzing all of the data you need in real time.
- Intelligence – Intelligence services enable natural and contextual interaction within your applications, using machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that include text, speech, vision, and search.
- Internet of Things (IoT) – Internet of Things (IoT) services connect your devices, assets, and sensors to collect and analyze untapped data.
- Management & monitoring – Management and monitoring services provide visibility into the health, performance, and utilization of your applications, workloads, and infrastructure.
- Mobile services – Mobile services enable you to reach and engage your customers everywhere, on every device. DevOps services make it easier to bring a higher quality app to market faster, and a number of engagement services make it easier to deliver performant experiences that feel tailored to each user.
- Security, identity, and access – A range of capabilities that protect your services and data in the cloud, while also enabling you to extend your existing user accounts and identities, or provisioning entirely new ones.
- Developer tools – Developer tools empower you to quickly build, debug, deploy, diagnose, and manage multi-platform, scalable apps and services.
- Enterprise integration – Enterprise integration makes it easier to build and manage B2B workflows that integrate with third-party software-as-a-service apps, on-premises apps, and custom apps.
This guidance is laid out in a convenient table that lets you quickly find and learn more about each of the services you’re most interested in. In this instance, you can quickly see the service name, description and the name of the services in AWS and Azure. Links are also provided for each of the Azure services.
Enjoy!
Additional Resources
Microsoft Tech Summit
Microsoft is hosting their Tech Summit conference in Toronto from December 13-14, 2017. You can build your skills with the latest in cloud technologies at a free, technical learning event for IT professional and developers.
This is a great event to build your cloud skills, connect with experts and get inspired. What’s great is that you can customize your learning – there is something for everyone.
Click here to register.
Reference
Azure Monitor
This week saw the announcement of the public preview of Azure Monitor. Azure Monitor allows you to manage and explore all common tasks from a single view. Azure Monitor provides the following types of data – Activity Log, Metrics and Diagnostics Logs.
You can access the Azure Portal by clicking on the Monitor tab in the Azure Portal.
Enjoy!
Getting Started with Azure Functions
The first article of this series, Introduced what Azure Functions are and the capabilities they offer when used by themselves or combined with other Azure resources. This article will focus on getting started with just one of the types of Azure Functions available…the HttpTrigger function.
Creating the Azure Function
You can quickly get started with creating an Azure Function by going to the Azure Functions Get Started Portal. After logging in you will be taken to the Azure Functions getting started portal as shown below.
Using the above Getting Started portal, enter the name and location of your Azure Function app, in my case I’m using a name of GettingStartedAzureFunction and a location of East US.
Then then click on Create + get started button. This will then take you to the Azure portal inside your Azure Function app. From here you can get started quickly with a premade function, in my case I went with Webhook + API, and C# for the language. Finally click on the Create the function button to create this function.
A new function named HttpTriggerCSharp1 will be generated for you, which will be based on C# and this function will be run whenever it receives an HTTP request.
At this point your function is ready to go. You can see the Function URL at the top and below is the generated code for the Http trigger.
Testing your Function
Since this function is generated from the quick starts, it already contains functional code which you can immediately run and test.
In this example you can quickly test the function by clicking on the Run button at the bottom of the page. It will pass a request body with the named parameter of “Azure” to the function, which will then show up in the Output pane to the right.
Alternatively you can also test the function by browsing to the URL to trigger the function. In this case I’ll navigate to the URL provided and the pass in the parameter name of “callon” to the query string like so.
Monitoring your Function
Now that your function is up and running you can easily monitor it by going to the Monitor tab of your function. From here you can see recent success and error counts and inspect the function requests.
Managing your Functions
After creating your Azure Function app, you will be taken to your Azure Function app blade where you can create and manage your functions. If you need to get back to your Azure Function apps at a later time, you can navigate to the App Services blade and then filter by function as shown here.
Next Steps
Now that you have your Azure Function you will most likely want to integrate it into other Azure resources or other apps. If you click on the Integrate tab of the function, you can quickly define an integration (triggers, inputs and outputs) and there is also an advanced editor available if needed.
Lastly if you scroll down on the Integrate tab, you will come to some handy documentation.
In a future post I will walk through integrating an Azure function with another Azure resource.
Enjoy!
References
Azure Functions
Azure Functions Documentation
Testing Azure Functions
How to Upgrade an Azure Function App
After creating an Azure Function app, you may notice a notification in your Azure Function app tat there is a new version of Azure Functions. I’ll walk you through the current process for upgrading your Azure Function app.
To start the upgrade process, click on link “Function app settings”:
Then click on “Update”:
Within a second your Function app should be upgraded to the latest version:
That’s all that is required when upgrading your Function apps.
Enjoy!
