Azure news below as heard on the need to know podcast Episode 124:
Microsoft Azure Storage Import/Export Announcements
Azure Import/Export Service enables transfer of data in and out of Azure Blob Storage by using hard drives filled with your very own data sent to Microsoft. Rather than waiting for ages till your data copies over the network, you can send your disks instead. Recently Microsoft have announced some improvements to this service.
Microsoft have announced the general availability of Azure Import/Export Service in the new Azure portal.
In the Azure Ibiza portal, you can:
Manage import / export jobs across all storage accounts from the same pane.
View the status of overall jobs and of each drives individually with percentage complete during data transfer.
Obtain a link to the error log in case of a warnings/failure encountered during import or export job.
See reminder warning signs if you happen to miss updating tracking information to avoid delays in the job-processing.
You can now copy data from multiple source directories in a single command line
Support for both Cold and Hot Azure storage tiers
also, in addition to 3.5″ internal SATA II/III disks, Azure Import/Export now supports 2.5″ Internal SATA drives and internal SSD drives.
More info.
Several New Azure Services now available in UK
SQL Server Stretch Database now available in UK – SQL Server Stretch Database migrates your cold data transparently and securely to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Provides cost-effective availability for data you do not use regularly, doesn’t require changes to your queries or applications & keeps your data secure even during migration. It targets transactional databases with large amounts of infrequently used data, which are typically stored in a small number of tables.
Azure Functions now available in UK – Azure Functions is a solution for easily running small pieces of code (“functions“) in the cloud. You can write the code you need for the problem at hand, without worrying about a whole application of the infrastructure to run it. You can also use any language of your choice, such as C#, F#, Node.js, Python, or PHP.
Power BI now available in UK – Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service that enables anyone to connect to, visualize & analyze data with greater speed, efficiency and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of live data through easy-to-use dashboards, provides interactive reports and delivers compelling visualizations that brings data to life.
Power BI Embedded now available in UK – Power BI Embedded is an Azure service that enables application developers to embed stunning, fully interactive reports and visualizations in customer-facing apps without the time and expense of having to build custom controls from the ground up.
Azure DocumentDB now available in UK – Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution and ease of development. As a schema-free NoSQL database, DocumentDB provides rich and familiar SQL query capabilities with consistent low latencies on JSON data.
Azure DevTest Labs now available in UK – Azure Devtest Labs is a service that helps developers and testers quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. The goal for this service is to solve the problems that IT and development teams have been facing:
delays in getting a working environment
time-consuming environment configuration, production fidelity issues
high maintenance costs
Since the launch, DevTest Labs has been helping our customers to quickly get “ready to test” with a worry-free self-service environment. The reusable templates in the DevTest Labs can be used everywhere once created. Azure DevTest Labs can also be used in other scenarios like training and hackathons.
More info.
Azure Media Services Video Subclipper open-source release
Microsoft have announced the open-source release of the Azure Media Services (AMS) Video Subclipper Plugin for Azure Media Player on GitHub.
The Azure Media Player (AMP) subclipper plugin provides a user interface to find subclip mark-in and mark-out points on a live or video-on-demand stream. The plugin outputs the mark-in and mark-out points in the stream that can then be consumed by a video content management system or the Azure Media Services subclipper API to produce dynamic manifest filters or new subclipped rendered video assets. This tool allows users to find mark-in and mark-out points with group-of-pictures (GOP) accuracy or frame accuracy
More info.
AzCopy 5.1.1 Release
Microsoft have announced the release of AzCopy 5.1.1, and have made the following updates:
Integration of the Data Movement Library into AzCopy
A request we get often is “how does AzCopy work?” With this release, they have now integrated Data Movement Library into AzCopy, which allows you to see exactly how our transfer logic works.
Also the following improvements:
Perform Blob and File uploads using a Write-Only Shared Access Signature (SAS).
Create a destination container, share, or table with a Shared Access Signature.
During copy operation, show total amount of data transferred and average transfer speed.
Use full path in verbose log instead of relative path.
Journal file name has changed – from AzCopyEntires.jnl to AzCopyCheckpoint.jnl
More info.
Announcing Exclude Disk Support for Hyper-V VMs with ASR
A key ask that Azure Site Recovery (ASR) customers often have is the ability to exclude disks from replication, ASR’s VMware to Azure scenario has had this capability since earlier this year. Azure have announced this feature for ASR’s Hyper-V to Azure scenario as well.
More info.
PowerShell to EXE converter
Any PowerShell scripts you have, you can now massively and simply simplify them by converting the PowerShell scripts to .exe files. What’s more, this can be done over the web using a web browser.
More info.
General Availability – Larger Block Blobs in Azure Storage
There has been an introduction of larger Block Blobs for Azure Storage.
The introduction of larger Block Blobs increases the maximum file size from 195 GB to 4.77 TB.
Azure have also increased the maximum allowable block size from 4 MB to 100 MB, while maintaining support for up to 50,000 blocks committed to a single Blob.
More info.
