May 23, 2023
Welcome to the eleventh edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2023.
Hello again, my friends from around the world. I’m so happy you continue to subscribe and read this bi-weekly newsletter on Azure. I enjoy sitting down each week to research and write this, and hopefully, you will continue to find value in it. Feel free to invite your co-workers or others to subscribe if you think they would find it helpful.
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ONE.
The annual Microsoft Build event happened last week. This event is aimed at developers and often has some interesting announcements. In this newsletter, I cover some of the most interesting things announced at Build.
- Microsoft announced that it would adopt the same open plugin standard for its AI services as OpenAI did for ChatGPT. This is so that plugins developed for ChatGPT can also be used with Microsoft’s “CoPilot” offerings (and vice-versa). This is an interesting move. Standards are better than making your own proprietary format, obviously. As well, the copilot services now come with hundreds of pre-developed plugins that should work too. Making it immediately useful.
- Microsoft Fabric is a new preview service that integrates all analytics workloads, including Power BI, Data Factory, and the next generation of Synapse, in one unified SaaS model. Fabric will also have a copilot integrated, so that you can us AI to help you generate code, enable custom Q&A, and deploy to Microsoft Teams, Power BI and Web.
- Cosmos DB now supports hierarchical partition keys. This allows you to have up to three partition keys on your data, without giving up the performance you usually have to when having multiple partition keys. This is generally available.
- Cosmos DB now supports Materialized Views. Views are a concept from the SQL Database world that allows you to create and maintain secondary views of data that are more costly. You can now query the views instead of the data directly, which should improve query performance.
- The open-source project Prometheus now has a fully-managed service in Azure. Prometheus is a common standard for monitoring containerized workloads. It integrates with Azure Monitor.
- Azure Cost Management is getting a new AI buddy. You can ask it why your bill is so high, how can you reduce costs, or to get quick insights and recommendations on your usage of Azure resources.
- Finally, a new Azure Deployment Environments service, now in general availability, allow developers to use the service to self-deploy the environments they new on demand using infrastructure-as-code templates like ARM and Terraform. So if you need to spin up a new dev box for some reason, you can do that from the Deployment Environments dashboard instead of having to find the specific template you want yourself.
You can find more about these announcements by watching the Microsoft Build reruns, or by looking at the Book of News below for more direct links to articles and documentation on that.
See more:
https://news.microsoft.com/build-2023-book-of-news/
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
I’ll summarize the updates in the next newsletter.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/
COMING UP FOR ME.
Not much to report right now. I’m working on a couple of courses in May and June. I’ll post more about them when they get closer to launching.
WHERE TOFIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 4.11 Thanks for reading this far. Talk to you again in two weeks.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
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