Welcome issue #1 of Azure Weekly

Having been long time subscribers to both DevOps Weekly and Hadoop Weekly, we at endjin, were surprised that a similar community newsletter didn't exist for the Azure ecosystem; so we decided to create one!

We've picked quite a good week to launch this newsletter - it's been a busy one as new regions have been have been officially opened, new services have been released and several others have graduated to "General Availability".

Management & Automation

This section of the newsletter covers all things automation; from Azure Automation, Resource Manager to PowerShell and beyond!

• At the heart of the new (v3) Azure Management Portal is the Azure Resource Manager; a management service that allows not only the creation of resources, but enables deeper configuration of those resources. It also enables scenarios such as deploying an application as a unit of difference resources via a template that can also be used to deploy Dev/Test/Prod environments. Developers can create their own deployment projects in Visual Studio 2013 by downloading the Azure Resource Manager Tools Preview.  Or the API can be executed via PowerShell. Full documentation for the Azure Resource Manager Template Language was also released this week.
• Azure Automation has graduated to general availablity. This services enables users to create PowerShell based "runbooks" (or use pre-canned templates in the Runbook Gallery) to automate many of the Azure services.
• Jamie Thomson blogs about "Passing credentials between Azure Automation runbooks".
• In "Cloud Automation in a Windows World", Matt Wrock (creator of Boxstarter & contributor to Chocolatey) describes how you can use many of the popular automation tools (Vagrant, Chef, Puppet, PowerShell DSC, Boxstarter, Chocolatey) and containers like Docker & Spoon.net across a hybrid cloud environment.
• Scott Hanselman & Chris Sanders dig into Azure Automation on Channel 9
• Dushyant Gill presents "Role-Based Access Control for Microsoft Azure Resources"
• Beth Cooper & Joe Levy provide an introduction to the New Microsoft Azure Automation Service.

Compute

This section of the newsletter covers PaaS, IaaS & RemoteApp

• "Big Compute in the Cloud with High Performance Computing on Azure" describes the different problem domains big compute tackles.
• Rohit Bakhshi has published a quick step-by-step guide to deploy the  Hortonworks Data Platform on Microsoft Azure IaaS.
• Ross Gardler writes about "Docker Community Updates from Tech Ed and Docker Global Hack Day". This post contains some good information if you've heard about Docker & containers and want to know what all the fuss is about.
• Scott Field blogs about the availability of Microsoft Antimalware for Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Machines. 
• Khalid Mouss digs a little deeper into the Azure VM Unique Id support recently added to IaaS.
• Kenaz Kwa describes how to "Migrate Azure Virtual Machines between Storage Accounts"
• Garvin Casimir explains how to run Elasticsearch In Azure PaaS, while endjin's own Richard Kerslake shares some gotchas when installing an Elasticsearch cluster on Azure IaaS.
• Tristan Scott & Thomas Willingham provide a useful "Introduction to Microsoft Azure RemoteApp".
• Narayan Annamalai & Ganesh Srinivasan talk about "Designing Hybrid Scenarios with Microsoft Azure".
• It may have been a while since you created a Cloud Service Worker Role from scratch, but the default template was updated in the Azure 2.4 SDK, to reflect updated guidance. It might be worthwhile updating existing code to take advantage of these suggestions.
• Craig Landis from the Azure Support Team, shares an interesting tip on how to use port pings instead of ICMP to test Azure VM connectivity.

Networking

This section of the newsletter covers Virtual Networks, ExpressRoute & Traffic Manager

• Following up the excellent overview "Integrate your Azure Website with an Azure Virtual Network", Chris Comby has written a more in-depth article about setting up an Azure VPN to connect an Azure Website to a database running in a VM or On Prem in "Using VNET integration and Hybrid connections with Azure Websites". Essential reading if you want to get started with this Azure Website feature.
• Narayan Annamalai makes an appearance on Cloud Cover to talk about Virtual Networks & Hybrid Connections.

Web & Mobile

This section of the newsletter covers Azure Websites, Mobile Services, API Management, Notification Hubs & Event Hubs.

• Jaime Espinosa announces that WebJobs have gone into full production.
• Javier Lozano describes how to "Build Your Virtual Conference with Azure" using Azure Websites and Traffic Manager.
• endjin's Mike Larah describes how to restrict access to Azure Websites by whitelisting
• Ruslan Yakushev shows how to use Azure Website as a reverse proxy.
• Mini Xu highlights "Rich Push with Notification Hubs in iOS 8" using Mobile Services with a .NET backend.
• Carlos Figueira talks about new features available in Mobile Services: "Custom Login Scopes, Single Sign-On, new ASP.NET Web API – updates to the Azure Mobile Services .NET backend"
• Elio Damaggio celebrates Event Hubs going GA by dropping in on Cloud Cover to showcase some demo use cases.
• Todd Holmquist-Sutherland & Clemens Vasters demonstrate Telemetry and Data Flow at Hyper-Scale using Azure Event Hub.
• Sandrino Di Mattia has produced a useful tool for generating Shared Access Signatures for sending events to Service Bus Event Hubs from any device and provides a blog post demonstrating how to use it.
• Nazim Lala describes how to use Certificates in Azure Websites Applications.
• Azure Websites Hosting Plans are a relatively new concept, if you're not familiar with them, this in-depth overview is a handy guide.
• David Ebbo announced on twitter that SSL v3 has been globally disabled on Azure Websites. See this article by Nazim Lala for more info. 
• Apurva Joshi shares interesting tips on creating "Auto-Healing Windows Azure Web Sites".

Data & Analytics

This section of the newsletter covers SQL Database, HDInsight, Stream Analytics, Data Factory, Machine Learning, DocumentDB, Azure Search & Cache.

• Oliver Chiu announces "Azure Stream Analytics for real-time event processing", which integrates directly with Event Hubs for Internet of Things (IoT) based scenarios. If you've ever used StreamInsight for Complex Event Processing, this new Azure service will be familiar, although it has replaced Rx with a new SQL based language, with 1st class support for Windowing.
• Jesus Aguilar describes "How to use Azure DocumentDB with Azure Mobile Services"
• Use Azure DocumentDB Query to test writing queries against DocumentDB without requiring an Azure Subscription.
• Pablo Castro provides an Azure Search Deep Dive.
• Parmita Mehta explains how to make the most of Machine Learning End-to-End.

Storage & Backup

This section of the newsletter covers Storage, Import / Export Service, Backup & Site Recovery.

• If you are used to using LINQ to query data sources, Azure Table Storage only support a subset of operators. "Query Operators Supported for the Table Service" is a valuable resource for learning its limitations.
• Ahmed El-Shim shows the Cloud Cover team what StorSimple, the  hybrid-cloud storage device can do.
• Leonidas Rigas & Vinay Shah provide an overview of Microsoft Azure Storage.
• Many Azure Subscription limits have changed recently, so it's worth making sure you're up to date with the latest figures.

Media & CDN

This section of the newsletter covers Media Services & Content Delivery Network.

• Mingfei Yan makes an appearance on Cloud Cover to talk about Azure Media Services and Content Protection  on Channel 9
• Xavier Pouyat describes how to manage media workflows with the new Azure Media Services Explorer Tool.
• Jason Suess & Martin Wahl share lessons learned from the World Cup in "Building Secure Live Streaming Workflows for Broadcasters and Enterprises".

Hybrid Integration

This section of the newsletter covers BizTalk Services & ServiceBus.

• Sam Vanhoutte & Guru Venkataraman describe how to Architect and Implement Integration Solutions with BizTalk.

Identity & Access Management

This section of the newsletter covers Active Directory & Multi-Factor Authentication.

• Alex Simons announces "Workday inbound user provisioning with Azure AD now in preview!" 

Useful Links

• Azure Architect's Reference - if you are an architect responsible for building an application on Azure, or are trying to figure out how you could migrate an application and need to dig deep into the workload, cost, security, capacity, availability, deployment and operational modelling - this invaluable resource should be your first stop. An open source project, with contributions from several experienced architects, it gathers data from many different references into a single, useful guide that is constantly updated by the community. This month a new Gitter chatroom has been created for the project.