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.    

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  

We talk to Principal PM Saad Ladki about how customers can achieve their desired resiliency in Azure. Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode159.mp3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation http://azure.com/resiliency   Other updates: Enhanced loading, monitoring, and troubleshooting experience for Azure SQL Data Warehouse https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/enhanced-loading-monitoring-and-troubleshooting-experience-for-azure-sql-data-warehouse/   Introducing Change Feed support in Azure DocumentDB https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-change-feed-support-in-azure-documentdb/   New Azure Logic Apps innovation – general availability of cloud-based Enterprise Integration Pack https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/new-azure-logic-apps-innovation-general-availability-of-cloud-based-enterprise-integration-pack/   Project Bletchley - Corda Distributed Ledger available on Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/project-bletchley-corda-distributed-ledger-available-on-azure/  

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  

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  

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  

Russell, Cale and Sujit talk to Donovan Brown, the DevOps Senior PM, about the maturity of VSTS and how companies can adopt DevOps both in the cloud and on-premises.  Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode155.mp3 @DonovanBrown   Other updates: URL Authorization Rules in App Service Friday, November 18, 2016 We’re happy to announce the initial preview of URL Authorization Rules in Azure App Service. One of the goals of Azure App Service Authentication / Authorization is to make it easy to add “auth” to your App Service apps (which is why we often refer to it as Easy Auth). Most of our investments so far have focused on creating a streamlined authentication setup experience. However, until now, authorization was something developers had to implement mostly on their own. Typically, authorization rules involve restricting access to certain resources within your app. Ideally, such authorization rules can be just as simple to set up without writing a bunch of custom code. Read more on how to implement these new authorization rules in our team blog.   Single VM SLA – but you need to use premium storage.  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-4-tb-for-sap-hana-single-instance-sla-and-hybrid-use-benefit-images/   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-auto-shutdown-for-vms-using-azure-resource-manager/   Schedule based shutdown. Webhooks to be called 15 minutes before shutdown.     https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-token-authentication-with-azure-cdn/ Authenticated requests for content right at the CDN Edge    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/enhancements-abound-in-general-availability-of-azure-iot-hub-device-management/   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-the-azure-iot-hub-ip-filter/ Possibly in response to WebCam DDOS a few weeks ago.   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-iot-gateway-sdk-general-availability-release/ On-premises IoT gatewyas can easily hook up to Azure to do further upstream processing.    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-azure-paas-services-available-for-azure-stack-technical-preview-2-tp2/ App Service and SQL and MySQL services now available for Stack.    Announcing the public preview of Azure Advisor https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-public-preview-azure-advisor/

Cale, Evan and Sujit talk to Asir Selvasingh, a Principal PM in the Azure Team, about the work his team is doing to simplify the management libraries in .NET and Java so that it takes a single statement to say create a VM. Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode154.mp3   Other updates: New Documentation Format for Azure https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/   The Intelligent Data Lake https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-intelligent-data-lake/   Public Preview: Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio Code (VSCode) https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/public-preview-azure-data-lake-tools-for-visual-studio-code-vscode/   App Service on Linux now supports Containers and ASP.NET Core https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/app-service-on-linux-now-supports-containers-and-asp-net-core/   The Santa Cloud https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-santa-cloud/   What’s brewing in Visual Studio Team Services – November 2016 Digest https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-studio-team-services-november-2016-digest/  

The whole gang talks to Amit Bapat, a PM in the Azure team about perhaps the most important and least known Azure service of all - Key Vault.   Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode153.mp3 Docs  http://aka.ms/kvdocs Blog http://aka.ms/kvblog Feedback [email protected] Community https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/azure/en-US/home?forum=AzureKeyVault   Other updates: Azure Backup already supports backup and restore of virtual machines created through the classic and Azure Resource Manager deployment models, along with Azure Premium Storage VMs. Azure Backup now supports backup and restore of virtual machines encrypted through Azure Disk Encryption. Azure functions GA'd this week Bot as a service (uses functions + Bot framework to provide serverless compute). We're excited to introduce a public preview of the DocumentDB Emulator, which provides a local development experience for the Azure DocumentDB service. Today, Microsoft announced a new partnership with OpenAI, a nonprofit AI research organization co-founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.

Evan and Sujit talk to Bob Ward, a Principal PM from the SQL Server team about SQL Server 2016 and Azure. Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode152.mp3 http://aka.ms/bobsql https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sql_server_team http://twitter.com/bobwardms    Other updates: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-in-memory-oltp-in-azure-sql-database-premium/    Azure Container Registry preview From     Azure DocumentDB updates: quick start experience, backup and restore, and firewall support   From   Azure Media Redactor in public preview    Media Redactor is a media processor that automatically blurs faces from video. For more information, please visit the Azure Blog.  Microsoft Cognitive Services: Content Moderator in public preview    Part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, Content Moderator automatically filters out offensive content in text, image, and video across platforms, and includes human review tools for more nuanced cases.