Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.16

August 24, 2022

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022.

As we’re coming to the end of August, there does not seem to be much Azure news. I pulled out a couple of stories that caught my attention. Hope you are having a lovely summer.

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ONE.

I spent most of my career (before becoming a trainer) as a consultant, working for various clients. I can vividly recall arriving at a new client site in 2015 with a fresh new computer in front of me. They sent me a list of instructions on how to get the development system set up. It took two days to download the code from source control, compile everything, and get the inter-application communication connections (WCF!) working between the various components. Two whole days before I could contribute even a single line of new code to the project.

And every time this company purchased new workstations for their developers, the development team had to pause work for two days to set the new machines up. Or when something on a developer workstation stopped working for an unknown reason, that person had to wipe everything clean and start over.

In 2022, this should no longer be an issue.

Recently, Microsoft announced a new service called Dev Box. I am excited to see this rolled out because it’s needed in many places.

A company can now create a developer VM image, already provisioned with everything a developer needs to do their work. The development manager can ensure all of the security settings are properly assigned for that developer to work, and the operations manager can ensure the device is up-to-date with all the latest patches and authorized to be on the network.

These VMs can be customized per project. So front-end developers can get one setup, and data engineers can get another.

New developers are ready to work on a project earlier than in the past. Senior developers can more easily “context switch” between different projects. If you work from home on a personal device, it means not needing to install all the IDEs, code, and extras on your computer just to do some work. Especially if that machine doesn’t exactly match the standard developer workstation.

Of course, you can have both auto-shutdown and auto-start controls on these VMs to save money. Developers actively working in a VM will be prompted and can delay the auto-shutdown if they are still working in that environment.

This idea of a development workstation being in the cloud is not new. But having an integrated environment where developers, development managers, and IT ops can manage these cloud VMs means that everyone knows what is happening. It also ensures that the appropriate security controls are in place, so these developer VMs remain compliant with company policy as existing workstations.

Dev Box is in public preview and is available to test in the Portal.
Read more: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-microsoft-dev-box-preview/

TWO.

I saw this a couple of weeks ago and thought it needed more attention.

Microsoft is dropping official support for PHP starting with version 8.0.

And PHP 7.4 on Azure reaches the end of extended support on November 28, 2022.

Therefore, if you have any PHP applications (WordPress?) running in an Azure App Service for Windows, you might consider migrating those applications to Linux soon. And upgrading to PHP 8.

Don’t worry. PHP apps won’t stop working after November 28. They’ll just not be getting any further updates. And you can’t create new applications (using the Portal wizard) for that old language version.
Read more: https://github.com/Azure/app-service-linux-docs/blob/master/Runtime_Support/php_support.md#end-of-life-for-php-74