Cloud Platform Release Announcements for September 5th, 2018

Visual Studio for Mac | Update

This latest Visual Studio for Mac update is now available. This release brings a number of fixes that address code editor reliability issues, performance problems, and stability issues that have been reported to us. The latest release has also added improved support for Azure Functions—developers can now create and deploy Functions to Azure directly from the IDE. We also improved the NuGet package restore time on solution load and reduced the overall memory consumption.

Read the complete release notes. You can get the update today through the Visual Studio for Mac update or download directly.

Azure security and operations management | Control IPs that can access secrets from Key Vault

Virtual Network service endpoints for Key Vault allow you to restrict Key Vault access to specified Virtual Networks or Internet Protocol version 4 address ranges. Any caller connecting to a key vault from outside those sources will be denied access to that key vault. This helps ensure only trusted IPs can receive secrets from Key Vault.

To learn more about the ways to control which IPs can access your secrets, visit our documentation on Virtual Network Service Endpoints.

Avere vFXT for Azure | In preview

Avere vFXT for Azure now in preview

The Avere vFXT for Azure provides high-performance file access for high-performance computing (HPC) applications. It arms those tasked with managing critical HPC workloads with scalability, flexibility, and easy access to cloud and file-based storage locations. The Avere vFXT caches active data closest to compute nodes in Azure, initially reading data from its home in on-premises network-attached storage or Azure Blob and hides latency between the storage and Azure Compute. It's now available in the Azure Marketplace in preview.

To learn more, see this blog post and the Avere vFXT for Azure preview page.

Azure IoT Hub | Integration with Azure Event Grid

IoT Hub integration with Azure Event Grid is now generally available, making it even easier to transform these insights into actions by simplifying the architecture of IoT solutions.

Some key benefits include:

  • Easily integrate with modern serverless architectures, such as Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps, to automate workflows and downstream processes.
  • Enable alerting with quick reaction to creation, deletion, connection, and disconnection of devices.
  • Eliminate the complexity and expense of polling services and integrate events with partner applications using webhooks such as ticketing, billing systems, and database updates.

Together, these two services help easily integrate event notifications from IoT solutions with other powerful Azure services or partner applications. They add important device lifecycle support with events such as device created, device deleted, device connected, and device disconnected, in a highly reliable, scalable and secure manner.
Here is how the integration works:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Internet-of-Things-Show/Azure-IoT-Hub-and-Event-Grid/player" width="960" height="540" allowFullScreen frameBorder="0">

This capability is available in the following regions:

Asia Southeast West US 2 Canada Central
Asia East South Central US Canada East
Australia East Europe West Central India
Australia Southeast Europe North South India
Central US Japan East Brazil South
East US 2 Japan West UK West
West Central US Korea Central

UK South

West US Korea South

Try this tutorial to get started.

Are there other IoT Hub events you would like to see made available? Please continue to submit your suggestions through the Azure IoT User Voice forum.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse | Azure Government cloud availability

Azure SQL Data Warehouse Gen2 is now available in Azure Government cloud

The Compute Optimized Gen2 tier of Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now available in US Government cloud. We recently made the service available in US Government Virginia and US Government Arizona regions. Compute Optimized Gen2 tier, using adaptive caching and instant data movement, brings at least five times better performance for all our customers, compared to before.

Find out more.

BulkExecutor for Azure Cosmos DB Gremlin API now available

The BulkExecutor library for Azure Cosmos DB Gremlin API is now generally available. This allows for fast data migration operations with configurable parameters to adapt to the specific needs for every database.

Check out the sample and the announcement on the GitHub blog post.

Azure Cosmos DB Emulator build task for Azure DevOps now in preview

The Azure Cosmos DB Emulator build task extension for Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services) is now available in the marketplace for preview. With the new build task, run tests directly against an instance of the Cosmos DB Emulator as part of your CI/CD pipeline, without the need to write custom code to download, install, and start the emulator.

To learn more, visit the Azure blog post and the Visual Studio Team Services marketplace.

Azure Database Migration Service | Support for PostgreSQL to Azure Database for PostgreSQL online migrations

Now available in preview, the Azure Database Migration Service provides you the ability to migrate on-premises PostgreSQL databases or PostgreSQL databases running in a virtual machine to Azure Database for PostgreSQL while the source database remains online during migration.

To learn more about using DMS to perform online migrations with minimal downtime, see the article Migrate PostgreSQL to Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Azure Database Migration Service | Support for PostgreSQL on-premises or on virtual machines to Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Now in preview, you can migrate PostgreSQL databases to Azure Database for PostgreSQL with minimal downtime by using the Azure Database Migration Service. Use the Azure CLI to provision an instance of the DMS service to perform migrations from PostgreSQL on-premises or on virtual machines to Azure Database for PostgreSQL.