by Cale Teeter
February 10, 2017
We talk to Travis Falls, a Senior Consultant at Microsoft about DSC. He shares his stories about the advantages of DSC in general and specifically in a DevOps world.

Twitter: @travisfalls
Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode165.mp3
Other updates:
Azure Active Directory Domain Services is available in 10 new Azure regions:
West Central US
North Central US
Canada East
Canada Central
Brazil South
Central India
West India
South India
Japan East
Japan West
Azure IP Advantage
Protecting your innovation in the cloud
Reduce risk, innovate with confidence, and operate with freedom in the cloud. Azure IP Advantage provides the industry’s most comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks.
Announcing the new Azure Marketplace experience
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-new-azure-marketplace-experience/
Microsoft and Tierion collaborate on attestations & Blockchain proofs
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/blockchain-identity-proofs/
Webjet's Travel Bookings Blockchain Will Move to Pilot in 2017
http://www.coindesk.com/webjets-travel-bookings-blockchain-will-move-pilot-2017/
Announcing general availability of Managed Disks and larger Scale Sets
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-managed-disks-and-larger-scale-sets/
Azure DocumentDB: Entry point for partitioned collections now 75% cheaper
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-documentdb-entry-point-for-partitioned-collections-now-75-cheaper/
Announcing preview of Storage Service Encryption for File Storage
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/preview-storage-service-encryption-for-file-storage/
Keywords: DSC
Filed Under:
by Sujit D'Mello
February 4, 2017
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.
by Cale Teeter
January 26, 2017
The guys discuss some interesting topics around VMs taken from these series of blog posts:
Other updates:
by Evan Basalik
January 20, 2017
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
by Sujit D'Mello
January 12, 2017
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.
by Sujit D'Mello
January 5, 2017
We have a great discussion with Mark Eisenberg, who is an Application Development Manager at Microsoft, about a topic that he is very opinionated about - Service Fabric & Microservices. He lays out his thinking on what constitutes the Service Fabric Way of building Microservices.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode160.mp3
Other updates:
End-to-end cloud experiences for developers at Node.js Interactive North America
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/end-to-end-cloud-experiences-for-developers-at-node-js-interactive-north-america
General Availability: Larger Block Blobs in Azure Storage
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/general-availability-larger-block-blobs-in-azure-storage
by Sujit D'Mello
December 28, 2016
by Sujit D'Mello
December 24, 2016
As part of our Tales from the Field series, we talk to Yunus Emre Alpozen, an Azure Architect at Microsoft, who helps customers migrate their workloads to Azure. He gives us tips and tricks to ensure a seamless migration path.

LinkedIn: https://tr.linkedin.com/in/yemre
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yemre_alpozen
Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode158.mp3
by Sujit D'Mello
December 15, 2016
As part of our series highlighting various Azure partners, we talk to Matt Watson, the founder and CEO of Stackify, about how their APM solution was not only built on Azure but also helps Azure developers identify performance issues, bugs etc. in production.

About Stackify Retrace for Azure
http://stackify.com/azure_apm
Retrace vs App Insights
http://stackify.com/retrace-vs-application-insights
Azure Marketplace:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/stackify/retrace/
Hilarious video about Prefix!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djR5XD-wqbA
Twitter: @stackify and Matt's personal one is @mattwatson81
Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode157.mp3
by Sujit D'Mello
December 7, 2016
The gang revisits IoT Hub from an Open Source perspective by talking to Claudio Caldato, a Principal Program Manager in the IoT Team about enabling open source software and libraries like Akka and Kafka to talk directly to IoT Hub.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode156.mp3
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/kafka-connect-for-azure-iot-hub