Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.13

June 28, 2023

Welcome to the thirteenth 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.

The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

ONE.

In the last newsletter, I briefly listed a bunch of CosmosDB features that were announced at Microsoft Build. They were:

Azure Cosmos DB burst capacity, in GA
Azure Cosmos DB serverless container with 1 TB storage, in GA
Azure Cosmos DB hierarchical partition keys, in GA

All of these new features are now generally available, which means you can access them for production workloads starting now.

Burst capacity allows you to “bank” some of the idle capacity of your Cosmos DB database and then be able to use that extra capacity if there is a spike in requests later. It’s like a battery! You can accumulate up to 5 minutes of idle capacity at a time, and then Cosmos DB will use that saved capacity the next time there is a spike in traffic that would normally exceed your RU/s limits.

Cosmos DB uses partition keys to split a database across physical partitions if required. For instance, if the partition key on your database table was “Car Make,” then all of the cars of the same make will be stored in the same physical partition on the disk, while it’s possible that cars of other makes will need to be stored separately depending on how big the database gets.

There is a limit of 20 GB for a single partition. So if you think that you will need more than 20 GB of data for a single partition key, you will need to choose another key.

This can be less than ideal. Choosing another partition key could result in undesirable things, such as forcing all queries to be cross-partition, thereby driving up the cost.

Cosmos DB now supports hierarchical partition keys. This allows you to choose up to three partition keys which will be used in hierarchical order when splitting up the data.

In our example, we could make the partition key first “Car Make,” and then “Car Model”, and then “Car Year”. This way, if partitioning the table using “Car Make” doesn’t result in it being over 20GB, the partition does not need to be split. But when the size reaches the limit, the table will be partitioned according to “Car Model”.

It’s a clever solution to a problem that probably only affects a small number of customers but a welcome solution to them.

Serverless Cosmos DB has been available for a while, but has had a database limit of 50 GB until now. During Microsoft Build, Microsoft announced the storage limit was being increased to 1 TB.

If you rely on Cosmos DB for some of your data, you should check out the announcements from Microsoft Build.

For more:
https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/06/azure-cosmosdb-performance-cost/

TWO.

One of the ways the big three cloud providers (AWS, Azure and GCP) compete for business is by trying to get regulators to take action against their competitors.

When Microsoft Azure was granted the big JEDI contract from the US Department of Defense, Amazon was in court trying to get the award stopped. And eventually, they even won. The latest was that Amazon had won a larger share of the JEDI contract with Microsoft also getting a piece.

In the latest spat, Google is now trying to get the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Microsoft Azure for anti-competitive behavior.

The FTC is actively asking for public feedback on competition in the cloud computing space, and of course Google wants the government to break up the Amazon-Microsoft public cloud duopoly if they can.

Google is arguing that Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly in Windows Server and Microsoft Office in the cloud. Google claims that its very difficult to gain a foothold with companies for its own Google Cloud Platform since companies have very complex licensing arrangements with Microsoft.

Google even invoked the SolarWinds security breach in its filing. Having Azure as a dominant player in the cloud is apparently a national security threat.

You can read the public responses from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle, and the EFF on the FTC’s website.

The FTC is here:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FTC-2023-0028/document

For more on this:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/21/google-accuses-microsoft-of-anticompetitive-practices-in-azure-cloud.html

AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

The following updates to the Azure platform were announced in the last two weeks:

Azure Video Indexer reduced pricing
Redis extension for Azure Functions, in preview
Azure Cache for Redis instance in the Web App Marketplace
Microsoft Azure Load Testing supports setting up quick start tests using requests per second
Azure Monitor Alert resources now visible in the Azure portal, in GA
Azure Data Explorer bindings for Azure Functions, in preview
Azure Cache for Redis trigger for Azure Functions, in preview
Azure Cache for Redis now supports up to 30 shards, in preview
Custom Image Templates for Azure Virtual Desktop, in preview
App Service support for .NET 8, in preview
MySQL extension for Azure Data Studio, in GA
Azure Event Hubs SDK for Go, in GA
Azure Blob Storage SDK for Go, in GA
Azure Queue Storage SDK for Go, in GA
Azure OpenAI Service On Your Data, in preview

Be sure and check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/

COMING UP FOR ME.

Earlier this month, I completed a new course on ChatGPT for Researchers. If you deal with research as part of your job, you might find it interesting on how ChatGPT can be used to help you with your work.

https://sjd.ca/research

I then started re-recording my AI-102 course. It’s been a couple of years since that course went live, and although it still gets good reviews, it’s time for a refresh. So this week, I’ve re-recorded the first 2 hours of it. And I’ll continue this week and next to freshen it up. Azure AI Services have changed a little bit lately, and it’s good to capture those changes.

https://sjd.ca/ai102