September 2020 - Page 11 of 103 - Dr. Ware Technology Services

Azure DevTest Labs Outage: Lab operations may not work

by Contributed | Sep 28, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We would like to inform you that we are investigating an issue where certain lab operations may fail. Based on our current investigation, this is happening due to an outage within the Azure Active Directory service and is non-regional.

More details on the outage here: https://status.azure.com/en-us/status

As of 22:40 UTC, following lab operations may not work as expected:

DevTest Labs owners/users may not be able to sign in to the Azure portal and/or their virtual machines, environments.
Virtual machine auto-shutdown schedules may fail to run as expected

We will continue to monitor for a fix and post updates here.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. Please add a comment for any questions.

-DevTest Labs Team

Azure Sphere version 20.09 is now available

by Contributed | Sep 28, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The Azure Sphere 20.09 OS quality release is now available in the Retail feed. This update includes the following enhancements and bug fixes in the Azure Sphere OS; it does not include an updated SDK.

Upgraded Linux Kernel to 5.4.59.
Closed off 3 potential areas of vulnerability as part of ongoing security enhancements.
Fixed a bug that caused devices with duplicate trusted key store (TKS) images installed in the firmware partition to reboot after a software update.
Fixed a bug that caused a memory leak in libcurl.

Fixed a bug that caused random failures to reconnect to IoT hub.
Added new endpoint sphere.sb.dl.delivery.mp.microsoft.com for HTTPS over TCP protocols to the documentation on networking requirements
Fixed a bug that caused a SPI read/write larger than 2K to fail.
Reduced default TCP socket buffer size, and allowed users to set the buffer size to a value greater than 11K.
Fixed bug with parameter validation in file system quota checking.

Fixed block initialization bug during flash file truncation.
Changed validation of Azure Sphere-specific kernel capabilities to occur in the same manner as Linux kernel capabilities.

For more information on Azure Sphere OS feeds and setting up an evaluation device group, see Azure Sphere OS feeds.

If you encounter problems

For self-help technical inquiries, please visit Microsoft Q&A or Stack Overflow. If you require technical support and have a support plan, please submit a support ticket in Microsoft Azure Support or work with your Microsoft Technical Account Manager. If you would like to purchase a support plan, please explore the Azure support plans.

Azure Service Fabric managed clusters are now in public preview

by Contributed | Sep 28, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Azure Service Fabric is the foundational technology that powers Azure core infrastructure and mission critical services such as Azure SQL Database, Event Hubs, and Microsoft Teams. This technology, exactly as we use it within Microsoft, was made publicly available in 2015. Since then, we have seen it been used for the most demanding and performant workloads, both inside and outside Microsoft. We have seen adoption of the product to support highly available, scalable, and flexible workload types, including containers, stateful and stateless programming models, and regular executables. Over this period of time customers have expressed feedback that infrastructure deployment and management should be easier.

To provide our customers with a simplified experience we are excited to announce the preview of Service Fabric managed clusters. Service Fabric managed clusters in Azure maintain the same enterprise-grade reliability, scalability, and proven mission-critical performance that our customers have come to expect, while making it easier than ever before to deploy and manage your Service Fabric environment, freeing you up to deliver on business impact.

Simplified Cluster Deployment and Management

We have exciting new features that will make managing your Service Fabric clusters easier than ever before:

Encapsulated Resource Model – Service Fabric managed clusters will allow you to create a cluster without needing to define all of the separate resources that make up the cluster such as VMs, storage, or networking configurations. A managed Service Fabric cluster is deployed as a single ARM resource. This reduces the average ARM template from over 1000 lines of JSON to about 100 lines of JSON.
Storage backed by managed disks – When creating a Service Fabric managed cluster, you are no longer limited by the size of the temp storage that comes with the VM. Now, you can easily select the amount of storage that meets your application needs.
Fully managed cluster certificates – Cluster certificates are now fully managed by Azure, ensuring that you don’t have to worry about things like an expired cluster certificate.
Single step cluster operations – Operations such as removing a node type that previously required multiple steps can now be completed in a single step. Service Fabric managed clusters will automatically make any changes necessary to fulfill the request and better handle failures during the process.
Enhanced cluster safety – Cluster operations will be validated by the Service Fabric resource provider to ensure that they are safe to perform.
Simplified Cluster SKUs – Two new cluster SKUs (Basic, Standard) to help you create test and production environments. When using Standard SKU, the durability and reliability values will be automatically adjusted to best utilize the available resources in your cluster.

See below how easy it is to deploy a Service Fabric managed cluster:

Deployment of a Service Fabric managed cluster using Azure PowerShell.

Looking towards the future

The Service Fabric managed cluster resource is the first step in providing a managed experience for our customers. In the near future, we are working towards decreasing the operational overhead even further by separating out the system service components and providing them as a managed service. Look out for additional announcements around this work in the coming months!

Try it out

Start out with our quickstart or head over to the Service Fabric managed clusters documentation page to get started. You can find many resources including documentation, and cluster templates. You can view the feature roadmap and provide feedback on the Service Fabric GitHub repo.

Azure Advocates Weekly Round Up – A Blazing Week at Microsoft Ignite!

by Contributed | Sep 28, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Content Round Up

Microsoft Graph + Logic Apps + Microsoft Teams ToDo Scenario
Ayca Bas

Wouldn’t it be nice to receive your list of assigned tasks every morning on Microsoft Teams?

Build a flow using Azure Logic Apps to automate Microsoft Teams Flow bot for sending To-Do tasks every morning at 9 AM! In this article you will learn about the queries and responses of Microsoft Graph To-Do APIs in Graph Explorer, how to register your app in Azure Active Directory, building Azure Logic Apps Custom Connector to consume Graph To-Do API for getting the tasks and finally creating a Logic Apps flow to automate sending tasks from Microsoft Teams Flow bot every morning.

Blogpost about file upload in the browser with azure blob storage sdk v12
Alvaro Videla Godoy

This article explains how to add a serverless API to an Azure Static Web App, to generate SAS keys that authorize users to upload images to Azure Blob Storage. The examples use the latest Azure SDK for JavaScript.

Serverless ToDoMVC app using Azure Static WebSites, Azure Functions, Vue.Js, Node and Azure SQL

The ToDoMVC app has been around for a while and it is a great sample app to get started on front-end building. But what about the full-stack? And what if we want to create a complete Serverless Full-Stack solution? Well with Azure Static Websites, Azure Functions, Node and Azure SQL, this is much simpler than anyone could expect! Let’s see how simple is that!

Develop a Serverless Integration Platform for the Enterprise

Integrating different systems is critical. Let’s see how we can create a completely #Serverless Enterprise Integration Platform using the tools #Azure offers: #AzureFunctions, #LogicApps and #ServiceBus.

Azure Stack Hub Partner Solutions Series – Byte
Thomas Maurer

Today, I want you to introduce you to Azure Stack Hub Partner Byte. Join our Australian partner Byte as we explore how they are using the Azure Stack products to simplify operations, accelerate workload deployment, and enable the teams to focus on creating value rather than “keeping the lights on”.

Writing safe orchestrator functions with the Durable Task Analyzer
When using Durable Functions, the orchestrator function will replay several times. This behavior puts some restrictions on the code that can run in the orchestrator. The Durable Task Analyzer, a Roslyn code analyzer written for Durable Functions, helps you write deterministic C# code, safeguarding the replay behavior. In this post, Marc Duiker demonstrates the code violations and their solutions.

Livestream: Deep Dive VM and Kubernetes Management to any Infrastructure with Azure Arc
Thomas Maurer

Azure Arc has the ability to managed multi-cloud and on-premise. Join us on the second day of the Azure Hybrid Cloud Webinar Series to learn and discover how to manage and govern your Windows and Linux machines hosted outside of Azure on your corporate network or other cloud providers, similar to how you manage native Azure virtual machines. When a hybrid machine is connected to Azure, it becomes a connected machine and is treated as a resource in Azure. Azure Arc provides you with the familiar cloud-native Azure management experience, like RBAC, Tags, Azure Policy, Log Analytics, and more.

Azure Stack Hardware Experience App (NDA until Ignite)
Thomas Maurer

As you know, Microsoft Ignite 2020 has gone virtual this year. We have some great sessions, engagement options, the Cloud Skills Challenge, and much more for you. However, one part I would have missed this year would have been the expo hall, where I could look at all the new Azure Stack hardware. That is why the Azure Stack team created a mobile app that allows you to look at Azure Stack hardware and new form factors through augmented reality (AR) in the comfort of your environment.

This app allows you to look at some of our Azure Stack hardware portfolio, including Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack HCI, and the all-new Azure Stack Edge and Azure Stack Edge pro devices, running at the edge in your Hybrid Cloud environment.

Writing an Azure Function in node.js to implement a webhook
Integrating disparate systems can be a fiddly business. Find out how @Zegami developed an Azure Function App in node.js to create a serverless bridge between their CRM system and accounts API.

5 Reasons to go Serverless with Azure
At some point, you’ll need to hook up your mobile application to some database in the cloud and becoming a cloud engineer to do that would be quite overkill and really unnecessary when you can easily get the services of all cloud professionals by going serverless. Here are 5 reasons why you want to go serverless with the azure platform as a mobile applications developer.

Step-by-Step: How to deploy a container host with Windows Admin Center
Anthony Bartolo

Last week Microsoft released a new version of the Containers extension on Windows Admin Center. This release was focused on helping IT Admins getting their container hosts up and running without much effort.

AzUpdate: Post Ignite recap, Responsible AI, Azure Auto Manage, Azure Resource Mover and more
Anthony Bartolo

Well Microsoft Ignite 2020 is over and while out Fitbit counters may not have captured as many steps as last year… it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a plethora of Azure news shared. Here are the headlines we are covering this week: The IT Professional’s role in the Responsible use of AI, Azure Auto Manage for VMs, Move resources to another region with Azure Resource Mover, New Windows Virtual Desktop Capabilities, Hybrid Cloud announcements surrounding Azure Arc and Azure Stack as well as the Microsoft Learn module of the week.

Data Ingestion into Azure Data Explorer with Kafka Connect and Strimzi
Abhishek Gupta

In this blog, we will go over how to ingest data into Azure Data Explorer using the open source Kafka Connect Sink connector for Azure Data Explorer running on Kubernetes using Strimzi. Kafka Connect is a tool for scalably and reliably streaming data between Apache Kafka and other systems using source and sink connectors and Strimzi provides a “Kubernetes-native” way of running Kafka clusters as well as Kafka Connect workers.

Public Preview: Run Steeltoe .NET Applications in Azure Spring Cloud
Shayne Boyer

Earlier this month at SpringOne, we announced general availability of Azure Spring Cloud. Today we are bringing you another exciting update and launching the public preview of Steeltoe .NET application support in Azure Spring Cloud.

Azure Stack Hardware Experience App
Thomas Maurer

Azure Stack Hub Partner Solutions Series – Byte
Thomas Maurer

Docker image deploy: from VSCode to Azure in a click
Lucas Santos

In this article, we explore the newest integration between Azure and Docker CLI on VSCode!

CloudSkills.fm Podcast – Azure Architecture with Thomas Maurer
Thomas Maurer

In this episode we dive into Azure Architecture with Thomas Maurer. Learn about Enterprise Scale Landing Zones, Azure Bicep, the Well Architected Framework, and more.

Thomas Maurer works as a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. As part of the Azure engineering team (Cloud + AI), he engages with the community and customers around the world to share his knowledge and collect feedback to improve the Azure platform.

Calling all Unreal enthusiasts… help Kippy Escape!

by Contributed | Sep 28, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Kippy the robot wakes up to find itself stranded on an island… and it’s up to you to solve a series of puzzles and help it find a path to its rocket ship! Kippy’s Escape is a new open source sample app for HoloLens 2, built with Unreal Engine 4 and Mixed Reality UX Tools for Unreal. It’s now available for download from the Microsoft Store; once you’ve played through, you also can check out the repository from GitHub and dig into how it was made.

We built Kippy’s Escape to highlight Unreal Engine’s HoloLens 2 support, the HoloLens 2’s capabilities, and the UX components provided out-of-the-box by the Mixed Reality Toolkit. We wanted to inspire developers to imagine what they could create with Unreal and HoloLens 2. As such, we came up with three guiding principles for the experience: that it needed to be fun, interactive, and have a low barrier to entry. We wanted the experience to be intuitive enough that even a first-time mixed reality user wouldn’t need a tutorial to go through it.

Key HoloLens 2 features helped make the game feel fun. Eye tracking allowed us to fire off material and sound attributes, highlighting key pieces of the game without being too distracting or overwhelming. Spatial audio helped make the levels feel at home in the player’s surroundings. Being able to grab objects, push buttons and manipulate sliders engages the player in such innovative ways, it was important to make sure these connection points felt natural.

The Mixed Reality UX Tools plugin provided us with a set of extensible components to make the game interactive. Hand interaction actors enable both direct and far manipulation of holograms out-of-the-box. At the start of Kippy’s Escape, the user is given the opportunity to set the location of the game. Hand beams extending from the user’s palm make it easy to manipulate large holograms that are far away, like the placeholder scene. The scene is able to be dragged and rotated using UX Tools’ bounds control component. On the second island, the user must pick up gems with manipulators attached and place them in their matching slots. A slider component appears on the fourth island, triggering the final bridge to be raised.

We hope you enjoy Kippy’s Escape, and better yet, that it inspires you to re-use and even build off the experience. We would love to see posts of your reactions to Kippy’s Escape, and even any spin-offs from the experience, on social media- that’s why we’ve open sourced it!