Blogs in the Cloud about the Cloud: 3 Azure Blogs Worth Bookmarking
Microsoft Azure has been around for a while now, so much so that it has reached a certain status—a certain level of credibility and market share that it has started to become a world unto itself. Diving into the blogosphere to see what's out there on Microsoft Azure is the proverbial experience of shooting fish in a barrel. Here's a few you should follow if you're interested in or using Microsoft Azure:
This is clearly one to follow—the official Microsoft Azure blog. If you're only going to follow one, this should probably be it. This is the official word from Microsoft on all things Azure. Recent posts covered the recently released Azure Event Grid, online training for Azure Data Lake, and Azure's ISO certifications.
In his post entitled Introducing Azure Event Grid—an event service for modern applications, Corey Sanders writes, "Most modern applications are built using events—whether it is reacting to changes coming from IoT devices, responding to user clicks on mobile apps, or initiating business processes from customer requests. With the growth of event-based programming, there is an increased focus on serverless platforms, like Azure Functions, a serverless compute engine, and Azure Logic Apps, a serverless workflow orchestration engine. Both services enable you to focus on your application without worrying about any infrastructure, provisioning, or scaling. Today, I am excited to announce that we are making event-based and serverless applications even easier to build on Azure. Azure Event Grid is a fully-managed event routing service and the first of its kind. Azure Event Grid greatly simplifies the development of event-based applications and simplifies the creation of serverless workflows. Using a single service, Azure Event Grid manages all routing of events from any source, to any destination, for any application." Sanders is the Director of Compute for Azure.
In the post introducing online training for Azure Data Lake, Saveen Reddy writes, “We are pleased to announce the availability of new, free online training for Azure Data Lake. We’ve designed this training to get developers ramped up fast. It covers all the topics a developer needs to know to start being productive with big data and how to address the challenges of authoring, debugging, and optimizing at scale. Microsoft Virtual Academy: Introduction to Azure Data Lake.” Reddy is a Principal Group Program Manager for Azure Data Lake.
Microsoft Azure now apparently leads the industry in ISO certifications,which is is certainly excellent news. In her post introducing this, Alice Rison states, "We are happy to announce that Microsoft Azure recently completed a new set of independent third-party ISO and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) audits to expand our certification portfolio. Azure leads the industry with the most comprehensive compliance coverage, enabling customers to meet a wide range of regulatory obligations. If that were not enough, having a program with industry leading depth and coverage specific to ISO is exponentially useful to our customers globally as ISO standards provide baselines for information security management that are relied upon by many other standards across regulated industries and markets worldwide." Rison is the Senior Director of Microsoft Azure.
This is another good one, chock full of good specific posts pertaining to lots of cloud-related topics. They naturally have an entire section on Microsoft Azure.
Azure Stack: At Microsoft’s Inspire conference last month, Azure Stack became available for order. This post covers the basics of Azure Stack and addresses the following:
- What is Azure Stack?
- Why is Azure Stack only available from approved vendors?
- What are the use cases for Azure Stack?
- How do you learn how to use Azure Stack?
What is Azure Data Factory: Data migration on the Azure Cloud: This post provides an overview of Azure Data Factory, and takes a deep dive into using it for data migration. To prep for this tutorial, use either PowerShell, Visual Studio, or Azure Portal to create a Data Factory.
AWS vs Azure: Market Share, Performance, Monitoring and Cost Control: This post breaks down the differences between Azure and AWS, specifically looking at four factors:
- Market Share
- Virtual Machine and Serverless Performance
- Cost Control
- System Monitoring
Azure Blogger has some good specific tutorials, with step-by-step instructions of how to do things like setting up an Azure SQL database, connecting to Office 365, and more. Here are a couple examples:
How to Setup AD on Azure VM for Other VMs: This post walks you through setting up Active Directory on an Azure Virtual Machine for other VMs to access RDP, with step by step instructions and screenshots.
How to Resize an OS Disk on ARM: A quick tutorial on how to resize either a Linux or Windows OS Disk through the Azure Resource Manager.
Stay tuned for more posts on Azure resources worth a look!
Posted by Lafe Low on 08/25/2017 at 1:36 PM