The guys have a great chat with Ellis Butterfield, a PM in the Azure team, on the nuts and bolts behind the SQL Data Warehouse service.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode173.mp3

Other updates:

Azure MFA cloud based protection for on-premises VPNs is now in public preview!

Azure MFA provides a hybrid multifactor authentication solution for Windows 10 VPN. Using a first-party auth extension, an on-premises NPS server provides the primary auth, forwarding RADIUS-encrusted REST calls to an Azure MFA tenant for the secondary authentication.

Azure Service Bus: Hybrid Connections feature of Azure Relay generally available
Pricing | Service Bus webpage
The Azure Relay Hybrid Connections feature in Azure Service Bus is generally available. For more information about pricing, please visit the Service Bus Pricing webpage. Hybrid Connections lets you use open standards like HTTPS and WebSockets to securely connect resources sitting behind a firewall on-premises with other cloud-based services or assets. To learn more about this service, please visit the Service Bus webpage.

Azure HDInsight available in additional regions
Pricing | HDInsight webpage
Azure HDInsight is now available in the West US 2 region, and Azure HDInsight for Linux is also now available in the Central India region. For more information about pricing, please visit the HDInsight Pricing webpage. HDInsight is a fully managed cloud Hadoop offering that provides open-source analytic clusters for Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and R Server, backed by a 99.9 percent service-level agreement (SLA). To learn more about this service, please visit the HDInsight webpage.

Azure Advisor generally available
Now generally available, Azure Advisor will continue to offer access to Advisor recommendations at no additional cost. Advisor analyzes your resource configuration and usage, and then recommends solutions that can help you improve high availability, security, performance, and cost-effectiveness of your Azure resources. To learn more about this service, please visit the Advisor webpage. To begin using it, please visit the Azure portal.

L-Series instances in Azure Virtual Machines generally available, price reduced
Pricing | Virtual Machines webpage
L-Series instances in Azure Virtual Machines are now generally available in the following regions: East US 2, West US, Southeast Asia, Australia East, Canada Central, and Canada East. Effective with subscription cycles starting on or after April 1, 2017, prices are reduced up to 69 percent on the now generally available L-Series instances in Virtual Machines. These price reductions vary by region and are applicable in all regions where L-Series Virtual Machines are available today. For more information about pricing, please visit the Virtual Machines Pricing webpage. To learn more about this service, please visit the Virtual Machines webpage.

Azure DocumentDB: Aggregate support, Emulator in Docker, and Azure Search integration
Pricing | DocumentDB webpage
Azure DocumentDB now supports aggregates at global scale in public preview. DocumentDB has also reduced the number of request units (RUs) charged for queries by 20 percent, to serve more queries per second for the same price. For more information about pricing, please visit the DocumentDB Pricing webpage. The DocumentDB query engine has built-in support for SQL aggregate operators COUNT, MIN, MAX, AVG, and SUM. For more information, please visit the Aggregate Functions section of the SQL query and SQL syntax in DocumentDB documentation webpage and the Use the Azure DocumentDB Emulator for development and testing documentation webpage, and for information about Azure Search integration, visit the Azure Blog.

Azure DocumentDB: API for MongoDB generally available
Pricing | DocumentDB webpage
The API for MongoDB is now generally available, inheriting the same 99.99 percent financially backed service-level agreement (SLA) as Azure DocumentDB. For more information about pricing, please visit the DocumentDB Pricing webpage. With this API, users can now achieve limitless scale with support for managed sharded collections. Standard data transfer rates apply for replication data transfer between regions. To learn more about this API, please visit the Azure Blog, the What is DocumentDB: API for MongoDB? documentation webpage, or the DocumentDB: Database-as-a-Service for MongoDB Developers video.

4 TB option for P11 and P15 databases in Azure SQL Database
Pricing | SQL Database webpage
Available immediately in public preview, customers using P11 and P15 databases in Azure SQL Database can now use up to 4 TB of included storage at no additional cost. For more information about pricing, please visit the SQL Database Pricing webpage. Increasing the available storage to 4 TB for P11 and P15 is an important step toward reaching our commitment to provide more storage across all performance tiers, giving customers more flexibility when choosing the best platform to run their applications. To learn more about the 4 TB option, please visit the SQL Database options and performance: Understand what's available in each service tier documentation webpage.

DirSync and Azure AD Sync end of support on April 13, 2017
We previously offered two synchronization tools for hybrid identity implementation to extend the reach of on-premises identities to cloud services: Windows Azure Active Directory Sync (DirSync) for single forest directory implementations and Microsoft Azure Active Directory Sync (Azure AD Sync) for multi-forest and other advanced capabilities. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Connect now replaces these older tools for all scenarios. DirSync and Azure AD Sync are no longer being updated. They have been deprecated and will not be supported after April 13, 2017. For more information on the transition to Azure AD Connect, please visit the Upgrade Windows Azure Active Directory Sync and Azure Active Directory Sync documentation webpage.

Cale, Evan and Sujit get into an interesting discussion around containers in Docker, ACS and Service Fabric, their use-cases and container registries. Cale shares some of his experiences using them for his work.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode172.mp3

Other updates:

Azure DevTest Labs is now available in Korea South and Korea Central, in addition to the other regions it has supported. The support includes the full Azure DevTest Labs capabilities, as well as the auto-shutdown option for all Azure Resource Manager–based VMs in these regions. To see the other supported regions, check out the Azure products available by region matrix.
Since the launch, DevTest Labs has been helping customers to quickly get “ready to test” with a worry-free self-service environment. The reusable templates can be used everywhere after they're created. The public APIs, PowerShell cmdlets, and Visual Studio Team Services extensions make it easy to integrate your dev/test environments from labs to your release pipeline. In addition to the dev/test scenario, DevTest Labs can be used in scenarios like training and hackathon.

Effective April 5, 2017, Azure API Management will be available only in the Azure portal. Access from the classic portal will no longer be supported.

Azure DevTest Labs supports Managed Disks in newly created labs, including VM OS disks, data disks, and custom images. Managed Disks helps you manage storage accounts for large-scale VM deployments.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) is now generally available in all public cloud regions as part of the Azure Application Gateway WAF SKU. WAF helps protect web applications from common web-based attacks like SQL injection, cross-site scripting attacks, and protocol anomalies. It comes preconfigured with Core Rule Sets to provide protection from many of the threats identified by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) as the top 10 common vulnerabilities.

Now, instantly restore files from Azure Linux VM backups with no additional cost or new infrastructure by using Azure Backup. You can quickly mount an iSCSI-based recovery volume and browse and copy the files to the destination of your choice. With this feature, users can:
Instantly recover files. Whether it’s accidental file deletion or simply validating the backup, instant restore drastically reduces the time to recover your data.
Mount application files without restoring them. You can use our iSCSI-based approach to open/mount application files directly from cloud recovery points to application instances, without having to restore them. For example, in case of backup of an Azure Linux VM running MongoDB, you can mount BSON data dumps from the cloud recovery point. You can then quickly validate the backup or retrieve individual items such as tables without having to download the entire data dump.

Up your SaaS application game
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/up-your-saas-application-game/

Large-Scale Analysis of DNS Query Logs Reveals Botnets in the Cloud
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/large-scale-analysis-of-dns-query-logs-reveals-botnets-in-the-cloud/

We talk to Edward Walton, a Cloud Solution Architect @ Microsoft, about a topic that he is very passionate about - making the Enterprise Cloud Secure & Productive.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode171.mp3

Other updates:

Announcing Support for Multi-member Consortium Blockchain Networks on Azure
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/multi-member-consortium-blockchain-networks-on-azure/
 
Azure AD B2C Access Tokens now in public preview
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-ad-b2c-access-tokens-now-in-public-preview/
 
Lighting up network innovation
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/lighting-up-network-innovation/
 
Announcing Azure Service Fabric 5.5 and SDK 2.5
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-service-fabric-5-5-and-sdk-2-5/
 
Azure Resource Manager template reference now available
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-resource-manager-template-reference-now-available/

Evan and Sujit talk to Gino Filicetti & Jim Priestley, both Cloud Solution Architects @ Microsoft about how they help customers realize the potential of the cloud by starting with Disaster Recovery using OMS and implementing a DevOps mentality.

@gino_msft 

@cloudynj  

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode170.mp3

Other updates:

Last year, we introduced Azure App Service certificates, a certificate lifecycle management offering. The Azure portal provides a user-friendly experience for creating App Service certificates and deploying them through Azure Key Vault to App Service apps. But customers have been asking for the ability to use these certificates outside the App Service platform, say with Azure Virtual Machines.
You can now create a local PFX copy of an App Service certificate so that you can use it anywhere you want. For more information, read our blog post.

You can now use SELECT..INTO in your SQL code when you want to persist the results of a SELECT statement into a table.
The SELECT..INTO syntax is streamlined. With very little effort, your results will be stored in a round_robin clustered columnstore. From there, you can conduct further analysis as required. Azure SQL Data Warehouse also continues to support CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS).
CTAS affords greater control on the structure of the resulting table but requires a little more effort on your part. To compare SELECT..INTO to CTAS, please refer to the recent blog post and product documentation, which highlight the differences between these approaches.

Evan, Russell, Alex and Sujit talk to Barry Luijbregts, an Independent Azure Architect from the Netherlands, about building apps that span the globe using the right Azure PaaS offerings.

Barry is an independent software architect and developer with a passion for the cloud. He is also a Pluralsight author. He has worked for lots of companies throughout the last decade and is keen to share his knowledge with the community. He has a broad and deep knowledge of the Microsoft stack with a special interest on web technology and the cloud. He co-runs a usergroup focused on technology and soft-skills called .NET Zuid (South) and currently teaches people about the benefits of the cloud. He lives in the Netherlands with his beautiful wife and baby girl and loves to play with their two Siberian huskies.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode168.mp3

Other updates:

Announcing new Azure Functions capabilities to accelerate development of serverless applications

Azure Command Line 2.0 now generally available

Microsoft MPI v8.0 release

Azure Data Sync update

Azure IoT Suite adds device management capability updates

VS2017 launch – Tues 7th - free training on 8th Azure SQL Database enables the direct load of files stored in Azure Blob storage by using BULK INSERT and OPENROWSET commands.

Russell, Cale and Sujit talk to Mike Becker and Marcel Bindseil from Microsoft Germany about an innovative solution they developed for a customer, that uses App Service to build a complete EAI integration solution.

@winmike64

@Bindsi

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode166.mp3

Other updates:

Ruby support is available on Web Apps on Linux 
 
Public preview: Cross-subscription virtual network peering
Virtual networks that are created through the Azure Resource Manager deployment model and classic deployment model—but that belong to different subscriptions—can now be peered through this preview release. Read the Create a virtual network peering using Azure PowerShell article for further details.
Note that you can peer virtual networks that exist in two different subscriptions as long as a privileged user of both subscriptions authorizes the peering and the subscriptions are associated with the same Active Directory tenant. You can find more information in the Virtual network peering article.
 
Key updates to Azure Backup Server
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-backup-server-key-features/
 
Azure Application Insights JavaScript SDK: reliability and performance improvements
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-application-insights-javascript-sdk-reliability-and-performance-improvements/
 
What’s new in Azure Active Directory B2C
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-in-azure-ad-b2c/
 
Adding #AzureSearch to #DocumentDB collections with a click of a button
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/adding-search-to-documentdb-collections-with-a-click-of-a-button/
 
Bletchley – The Cryptlet Fabric & Evolution of blockchain Smart Contracts
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/scanatomy-2/
 
10 GitHub samples with Azure DocumentDB you shouldn’t miss!
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/10-github-samples-with-azure-documentdb-you-shouldn-t-miss/

Evan and Sujit have a great discussion with Kevin Loh, a Director with Worldwide Licensing and Pricing @ Microsoft on what customers should be thinking about and how they can get the best value when migrating to Azure.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode164.mp3

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter/Privacy/GDPR
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/default.aspx

Other updates:

Get early access to the newest Azure portal features
Try https://preview.portal.azure.com and let us know what you think by sending a smile in the portal to provide feedback or by posting your ideas on the Azure portal feedback forum. You can go back to the public portal anytime. Check back in to see what else is in the works (and follow @AzurePortal on Twitter for more updates).
 
 
Connect to DocumentDB by using BI analytics tools with the ODBC driver
You can use the Azure DocumentDB ODBC driver to connect to DocumentDB by using BI analytics tools such as SQL Server Integration Services, Power BI Desktop, and Tableau. You can then analyze and create visualizations of your DocumentDB data in those solutions.
The driver offers rich features to help you renormalize data in DocumentDB. By using the driver, you can represent data in DocumentDB as tables and views. The driver enables you to perform SQL operations against the tables and views, including grouping by queries, inserts, updates, and deletions. To learn more, see the documentation page.
 
Azure DevTest Labs: Set expiration date for new VMs from Azure portal
In Azure DevTest Labs, you can now set VMs to expire on a specific date.
Although the ability to set an expiration date has been available through Azure Resource Manager templates, there's now a counterpart to set expiration on the Azure portal. When you set an expiration date, the VM will be deleted on the specified day. If you want to use DevTest Labs for a hackathon or class, this feature can help control costs and clean-up if you set the VMs to expire shortly after the events are over.
You can set the expiration date when you provision a new VM in the lab. From the Create lab blade, select Advanced settings and select a date.
 

The guys discuss some interesting topics around VMs taken from these series of blog posts:

Evan, Russell and Cale talk to Mat Clothier of Cloudhouse Technologies, an Azure partner.

www.cloudhouse.com

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode162.mp3

Evan and Sujit talk to Vishwas Lele, an Azure MVP and Microsoft Regional Director, about his role in the community, his Azure projects and his views on Azure services, specifically Hybrid scenarios.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode161.mp3

Twitter:@vlele

Company website www.appledis.com

Azure courses on Pluralsight Courses  - https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/vishwas-lele

Channel 9  Videos  - https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/vishwas-lele

Other updates:

Azure SQL Database is increasing read and write performance
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-sql-database-is-increasing-the-read-and-write-performance/
 
Azure Virtual Machine Internals – Part 1
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-virtual-machine-internals-part-1/
 
HDInsight tools for IntelliJ & Eclipse December Updates
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/hdinsight-tools-for-intellij-eclipse-december-updates/
 
Azure Storage Queues New Feature: Pop-Receipt on Add Message
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-storage-queues-new-feature-pop-receipt-on-add-message/

Av2-Series now generally available for Azure Cloud Services 
Av2-Series instances for Azure Cloud Services are now available in all regions where Av2 virtual machines are currently offered. Av2-Series Cloud Services are up to 36 percent less expensive than the current A-Series Standard Cloud Services. For more information about pricing, please visit the internal pricing website. Av2-Series are available in standard memory options in 1, 2, 4, and 8 cores with memory ranging from 2 GB to 16 GB, and in higher memory options in 2, 4, and 8 cores with memory ranging from 16 GB to 64 GB. To learn more about this service, please visit the Cloud Services webpage.