We talk to Ryan CrawCour, a Senior PM on the DocumentDB team about ... well DocumentDB! This is a new NoSQL database-as-a-service that is currently in Preview on Azure.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode47.mp3

Getting started with DocumentDB - http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/documentdb/

Evan and Sujit talk to Andrew Connell, a renowned independent SharePoint consultant (who also has his own Podcast).  Andrew has leveraged Azure to extend SharePoint via the new App model and he shares his experiences with us.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode46.mp3

Andrew's Podcast website: http://www.microsoftcloudshow.com/

Some of his work with the Microsoft SharePoint team: github.com/officedev

And he has his own Azure-related startup too http://www.kerrb.com/

The guys talk about the new 'D' series VMs, Mark Russinovich's promotion to CTO of Azure, Redis Cache and penetration testing your apps on Azure.

Media file:

http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode45.mp3

We talk to Microsoft Azure consultant Andrew Weiss, who specializes on IAAS, on how to use Docker and Kubernetes on Azure.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode44.mp3

Evan talks to long-time Microsoftie John Gose who is the guy that is called when the Azure Infrastructure does not work as expected.

Media File: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode43.mp3

The guys talk to Sandrino Di Mattia, an Azure Consultant from Belgium, who has recently focused on the new Azure Search service and done some groundbreaking work around this service.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode42.mp3

Some links to Sandrino's work:

Manage your Azure Search index with this Site Extension for Azure Web Sites: http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/new-site-extension-available-for-azure-web-sites-search-portal-for-azure-search/

.NET client for Azure Search: http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/introducing-microsoft-azure-search-and-the-reddog-search-client-sdk/

Getting Started with Azure Search: http://justazure.com/getting-started-microsoft-azure-search/

The guys talk with Rama Ramani (Azure CAT team) about a White Paper that he and his team recently published on upgrading cloud apps with minimal disruption.

White Paper: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn790385.aspx

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode41.mp3

A discussion on the evolution of Azure with Simon Gurevich, veteran MCS consultant specializing in cloud development.

Media file: 

http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode40.mp3

Link to the grid of services to region mapping.  link

Link to Tejaswi Redkar's book that was referenced.  link

The guys chat with Mike McKeown  who has spent nearly two decades as Microsoft FTE and now is with key MS partner Aditi Technologies as Principal Cloud Solutions Architect. His passion is to help stakeholders or customers define their business/system requirements, and then apply Windows Azure Cloud architecture patterns and best practices to meet those goals. He loves to blog (http://www.michaelmckeown.com) about the Azure Cloud.  In his spare (what spare?) time he also authored Azure online training courseware as a course author for Pluralsight. 

Mike would like to plug the MVP community event, the Charlotte Azure Partner Boot Camp, Sept 6, at the Microsoft offices in Charlotte, NC that he is hosting.  Evan and Jeff Nuckolls (last week’s guest) are also speaking there. He talks at length about Brewmaster!

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode39.mp3

Updates: 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/azureapimgmt-changelog/archive/2014/08/06/aug-7-2014.aspx

• Azure API Management REST API. Use it to integrate with and automate your service. User, group, product, and subscription resources are exposed in this update. We will make other resources available shortly. Please note that we will continue to tweak the API based on feedback until the GA release and will be announcing the changes here.
• Delegation of user registration and product subscription.  Use your existing web site for handling developer sign-in/sign-up and subscription to products as opposed to the built-in functionality in the developer portal.
• WADL import/export bug fix. Default operation parameter values are now handled properly and are required to be present in the value lists.
• Operation URL template matching bug fix. Operations in the same API with identical paths but different query parameters in their URL templates are now resolved correctly.
• Service update speed improvement. We are now able to roll out updates to all our customers six times faster than before!

Azure Resource Groups can now be created with VS 2013 Resource Manager Tool

Script Browser

 Scale to millions of API calls

Throttle, rate limit and quota your APIs

Bring modern formats like JSON and REST to existing APIs

Mobile enable enterprise APIs

Maximize developer success with interactive console

Get deep insights with rich analytics

Media File: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode38.mp3

TIP: Using AzCopy to copy a VHDs from one sub to another

Visual Studio Update 3 is available [download]

New Features:

-          Websites: Publish WebJobs from Console or Web projects.

-          Mobile Services: Create a Dev/Test environment in the cloud when creating Mobile Services projects. Use the Push Notification Wizard with .NET Mobile Services.

-          Notification Hubs: View and manage device registrations.

Azure SDK 2.4 for .NET is available [VS 2013 download | VS 2012 download]

New features:

-          Virtual Machines:

o   Remote debug 32-bit Virtual Machines.

o   Configure Virtual Machines, including installation & configuration of dynamic extensions (e.g. anti-malware, Puppet, Chef and custom script).

o   Create Virtual Machine snapshots of the disk state.

-          Storage:

o   View Storage activity logs for diagnostics.

o   Provision Read-Access Geo-redundant Storage from Visual Studio.

-          Cloud Services:

Emulator Express is the default option for new projects (Full Emulator is deprecated). Configure new networking capabilities in the service model.

Blog post by Scott Guthrie on new features released for Azure Mobile Services .NET

 A blog post by SR EE Craig Landis describing how to use Azure monitoring features to check for Storage Account Throttling:

Why to monitor:

• There is a 20,000 IOPS limit per storage account
• For Azure VMs, storage limits is 500 IOPS per disk

With close to 40 highly used VHDs, it’s easy to bump against the account storage IOPS limit.