Cale unravels the mystery that is Blockchain, as we understand what is happening under the covers of a simple 'Hello World' app. Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode167.mp3 Other updates: Blockchain on NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=515728601 Kubernetes now Generally Available on Azure Container Service Kubernetes now generally available (GA) – We announced preview support for Kubernetes in November 2016. Since then, we have received a lot of valuable feedback from customers. Based on this feedback we have improved Kubernetes support and now move it to GA. For more details, check out Brendan’s blog titled, "Containers as a Service: The foundation for next generation PaaS". Preview of Windows Server Containers with Kubernetes – Coinciding with latest Kubernetes release, adding support for Windows Server Containers and coupled with enterprise customers expressing strong interest in adopting and going into production with Windows Server Containers, this is a great time to provide additional choice in orchestrator for Windows Server customers using ACS. Customers can now preview both Docker Swarm (launched in preview last year) as well as Kubernetes though ACS, providing choice as well as consistency with two of the top three Linux container orchestration platforms. DC/OS 1.8.8 update – We are updating our DC/OS support to version 1.8.8. DC/OS is a production-proven platform that elastically powers both containers and big data services. ACS delivers the open source DC/OS while our partnership with Mesosphere ensures customers requiring additional enterprise features are catered for. Key features of 1.8.8 include a new orchestration framework, called Metronome, to run scheduled jobs. This has been added to a new Jobs tab in the DC/OS UI, along with a number of other UI improvements; and the addition of GPU and CNI support in the Universal container runtime. Based on Apache Mesos, DC/OS is trusted by Esri, BioCatch and many other Fortune 1000 companies. We have worked with Mesosphere to produce an e-book called "Deploying Microservices and Containers with ACS and DC/OS." New Lower Prices on Azure Virtual Machines and Blob Storage New in Azure Stream Analytics: Geospatial functions, Custom code and lots more! Native support for Geospatial functions Starting today, customers can easily build solutions for scenarios such as connected cars, fleet management, and mobile asset tracking with tremendous ease using Azure Stream Analytics. Developers can now leverage powerful built-in geospatial functions in their stream-processing logic to define geographical areas, and evaluate incoming geospatial data for containment, proximity, overlap, and generate alerts or easily kick-off necessary workflows etc. These geospatial capabilities are in alignment with the GeoJSON specification. Custom code with JavaScript user defined functions With Azure Stream Analytics, customers can now combine the power of JavaScript with the simplicity and pervasiveness of SQL. Historically, Azure Stream Analytics let developers express their real-time query logic using a very simple SQL like language. That said, customers have also been asking us to support more expressive custom code to implement advanced scenarios. Today, in our journey to offer richer custom code support, we are pleased to announce the support for User defined functions using JavaScript in Azure Stream Analytics. With this new feature, customers can now write their custom code in JavaScript, and easily invoke it as part of their real-time stream processing query. Visual Studio tools for Azure Stream Analytics To help maximize end-to-end developer productivity across authoring, testing and debugging Stream Analytics jobs, we are rolling out a public preview of Azure Stream Analytics tools for Visual Studio. Local testing on client machines to enable tru