The Flying Maverick

In the early days of Microsoft Azure, back in 2010 when it was called Windows Azure, Microsoft had announced plans to make the Azure services available to be run / hosted in on-premises datacenter. Shortly after the announcement they released Azure Pack which wasn’t quite what we had all hoped for. Then about 2 years ago, Microsoft started talking about “Azure in your datacenter” again! The started talking about this new product offering called Azure Stack. We’ve seen a couple technical previews of Azure Stack so far, but not much in the way of a GA (Generally Available) release. That is until now. This week, Microsoft announced that in coordination with hardware OEMs you can now order Azure Stack integrated system hardware, with the first systems beginning to ship in September. There is also some pricing information, and an Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) being made available.

This is an…

Hello!

A few days ago I was asked about an easy way to create audio files to be used as datasets in Custom Speech Service (CRIS). As I mentioned in a previous post, the audio files must have special features, so it is important to create them correctly.

Note: the files are WAVs files, mono and another pair of details makes it not easy to create them in a single step.

Although there are several ways to create these files, this is the one I use and it works.

• To record the audio I use an app that comes by default in Windows: Voice Recorder

• I guess I don’t need to explain how the app works. Just press the microphone button. Nor do we expect many options in the Settings section.

• Once we have recorded a session, we can access the list of recordings. If we see the record path…

DocumentDB has been around for awhile now in Microsoft Azure. It’s a Document based, NoSQL database in the cloud. There’s been tons of advancements to the service over time, including MongoDB API support so you can use it in place of MongoDB for existing code bases. It’s always been called “DocumentDB” since initial release of the service, but for a time it was labeled as “NoSQL (DocumentDB)” in the Azure Portal. It seems there was some indication that Microsoft wasn’t happy with the name they first chose.

Today, we wake up in the morning to updates that have been made to the Azure Portal where DocumentDB is no longer there. Well, it actually is there, but has undergone renaming / rebranding. From this day forward, DocumentDB will no longer be called DocumentDB. Instead we will call this NoSQL, Document based database service….. Azure Cosmos DB.

From this day forward, DocumentDB…

Azure Storage Queues provide an easy to implement messaging communication mechanism for reliably passing messages to/from different components of a single application or multiple applications. Storage Queues have an HTTP/HTTPS API to allow for support of any development platform; however, Microsoft does provide a .NET SDK to make it even easier to implement from C# or other .NET languages.

There is a saying “Can’t see the forest for the trees” this could also apply to Azure and its provided services. I haven’t seen a good overview of Azure and the offered services until today. While browsing the internet, I bumped into this site here http://azureplatform.azurewebsites.net/en-us/ .

It is an interactive site which shows the single services in each category and provides links to more information like updates, pricing, SLA, documentation etc.

I love this page and I highly recommend to explore and bookmarking it! It is even available in German :).

The other day I hosted a FREE Webinar with Opsgility that provides an Introduction to Azure for Developers. In this webinar I went over an introduction to what IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are. Then I dove into the Azure Portal and showed how to create IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) VMs with Windows and Linux, as well as how to remote into those VMs with Remote Desktop and SSH; respectively. I also went into deploying a Web Application into an Azure Web App PaaS (Platform as a Service) service directly from within the Visual Studio IDE, and I even showed how you can easily deploy a website directly from Github into an Azure Web App as well! I also discussed Azure SQL Database (“Database as a Service”), as well as a few additional services and features.

I encourage you to watch the entire webinar recording to see the whole demo…

This post contains 10 tips and tricks you can use to save money on your Virtual Machines (VMs) running in the Microsoft Azure cloud. The cost analysis of the cloud can be scary at first, and it’s actually one of the reasons companies are shy to start adopting the cloud. Once you know these tricks you’ll feel confident that you won’t overspend and go broke in Microsoft Azure.

Some of these tips are almost secrets, as they aren’t really talked about anywhere. I know these from my years of experience working with Microsoft Azure and getting to know many of the ins and outs of the platform. So, read below, and benefit from my years of Azure experience in just a few minutes.

Using these tips will certainly help you save your company or organization money, and will likely impress your boss!