Azure Advocates Weekly Round Up with Turnips!

Azure Advocates Weekly Round Up with Turnips!

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

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Another great week of Azure blogs, videos and podcasts from the team.  Learn how to build a reminder for Turnip time, more GraphQL on AppService, IoT for July and much more!

 

Content Round Up

Building an Animal Crossing Turnip Timer!
Chloe Condon

Have you started playing Animal Crossing New Horizons on your Nintendo Switch? Do you keep forgetting to buy turnips every Sunday? Looking for a fun & easy project that will help remind you when to start searching for Daisy Mae? :thinking_face::money_bag::chart_increasing:

No problem! We made a Courier + Azure Function problem to solve that!

 

The Future of Xamarin
Brandon Minnick

Talk “The Future of Xamarin” by Brandon Minnick from Microsoft at the first day of mDevCamp Online.

 

Download New Azure Architecture Icons now!
Thomas Maurer

With the latest Azure Portal refresh, Microsoft Azure got some new icons as well. If you want to draw some Azure architecture diagrams you can now download the latest Azure Architecture Icons from the Azure Architecture Center.

What’s shutting down my VM?
Sonia Cuff

This post details the shutdown causes/triggers as well as runs through the Auto-shutdown support for Azure VMs. Sonia shares the steps she used to find a resolution to address the issue.

GraphQL on Azure: Part 2 – App Service
Aaron Powell

In this post we’ll look at how we can deploy a .NET GraphQL server into an Azure App Service using GraphQL .NET.

Stronger Together: Datos Interview
David Smith

Israel-based startup Datos Health https://www.datos-health.com/ provides a telemedicine platform, and has seen tremendous growth following the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. In this interview, CEO Uri Bettish shares how Datos scaled to provide “virtual clinics” to monitor COVD-19 patients at home.

Managing Your Hybrid Cloud using Azure Arc with Thomas Maurer – RunAsRadio PodCast
Thomas Maurer

We all have a hybrid cloud solution – how do you manage it? Richard chats with Thomas Maurer about Azure Arc, a tool in the Azure suite for managing virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and data services in Azure, your on-premises servers, even other cloud providers! Thomas talks about how IT folks end up with an array of tools for managing servers depending on the location and how Azure Arc ends that. Arc provides location-independent access to all your resources, and it’s in preview now, so free to use (although you may have to pay for additional Log Analytics data)… check it out!

Getting started with Azure Data Explorer using the Go SDK
Abhishek Gupta

With the help of an example, this blog post will walk you through how to use the Azure Data explorer Go SDK to ingest data from a Azure Blob storage container and query it programmatically using the SDK. After a quick overview of how to setup Azure Data Explorer cluster (and a database), we will explore the code to understand what’s going on (and how) and finally test the application using a simple CLI interface

What’s New in the Azure Hybrid Space?
Thomas Maurer

This week I had the honor to be on Mary Jo Foley podcast called MJFChat on Petri.com and talk about what’s new in the Azure Hybrid space. This was the perfect time since we had some great Hybrid Cloud announcements this week during Microsoft Inspire, especially when it comes to Azure Stack HCI.


Tartine & Tech: VSCode Remote Development Extension
Yohan Lasorsa

In this episode, Yohan talks about the Remote Dev Extensions in VSCode. Find out how to open your project in a container, a remove machine or in WSL.

 

 

Azure Mini Fun Bytes: How to setup Azure Blob Storage
Anthony Bartolo

In this post, Jay Gordon walks through steps to setup Azure Blob Storage.


JulyOT Learn IoT Live Stream Series Episode 4 – Café Dev
Christopher Maneu

Are you a developer and curious about IoT? Want to learn how you can create IoT solutions:globe_with_meridians:? Let’s do this together in July! Join me each Thursday 5pm CET/8am PST to learn how to create IoT solutions. Follow along with online exercises on Microsoft Learn and ask your questions live!

:blue_book:Episode 4 menu Today, we’ll see how you can easily make sense of timed data with a Time Series database. For this, we’ll use Azure Time Series Insights, a managed time-services database.

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 80

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 80

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

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 86 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Applications

5G-ready AI-enabled Operational Analytics.png

5G-ready AI-enabled Operational Analytics: Offered as a service on Microsoft Azure, Nokia’s AVA enables carriers to move out of private datacenters and manage their networks securely, efficiently, and at scale using AI-enabled automation.

Air flights Schedule.png

Air flights Schedule: AIRPLANE SOLUTIONS S.L. offers this suite of API services that provides a single source of airline flight information based on the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) Standard Schedules Information Manual (SSIM) standard.

Air Quality Sensors and Analytics.png

Air Quality Sensors & Analytics: Leveraging AI and IoT technologies and built on Microsoft Azure, Breeze Technologies’ low-cost air-quality sensors gather real-time air-quality insights and provide tailored recommendations for efficient and effective clean air throughout urban environments.

All you can Meet- Teams Meeting Room as a Service.png

All you can Meet: Teams Meeting Room as a Service: Wortell’s Videobutler service for Microsoft Teams provides personal support to meeting participants to help optimize collaboration and ensure successful remote meetings.

Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs.png

Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs: Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs is a monthly subscription program enabling managed service providers, IT resellers, and IT consultants to provide backup and recovery services for Office 365 mailboxes as well as OneDrive and SharePoint files.

AML Compliance and Fraud Management.png

AML Compliance & Fraud Management: Alessa provides anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities that banks, fintechs, casinos, and other regulated industries need in one platform. It integrates with core systems and facilitates due diligence, screening, transaction monitoring, and regulatory reporting.

Archivist Security Twin Platform.png

Archivist Security Twin Platform: Jitsuin’s Archivist Security Twin Platform delivers the transparency, collaboration, and automation needed to move fast and fix connected things while boosting digital transformation. It helps reveal, reduce, and report risks in IoT while building trust with secure distributed ledgers.

Arkose Labs Fraud Prevention Platform.png

Arkose Labs Fraud Prevention Platform: Combining real-time risk assessments with interactive enforcement challenges, the Arkose Labs fraud prevention platform eliminates automated attacks and provides organizations with long-term protection against fraud and abuse.

AutoCom Clean.png

AutoCom Clean: AutoCom Clean is a cloud-based task management system that sends tailored cleaning and disinfecting tasks to employees’ mobile devices. Generate reports for task completion and product usage along with service receipts for customers. This app is available in Spanish.

AutoCom Delivery.png

AutoCom Delivery: AutoCom Delivery is a cloud-based task management system that facilitates the delivery of clients’ grocery orders and contactless order collection. This app is available in Spanish.

Aviatrix Controller Meter License - PAYG.png

Aviatrix Controller Meter License – PAYG: The Epirus Azure Blockchain Service Explorer is a complete solution for providing insight into your blockchain deployments on Microsoft Azure, providing detailed views for interpreting tokens, contracts, accounts, transactions, and block data on your ledger.

Barracuda CloudGen WAF for China.png

Barracuda CloudGen WAF for China: Barracuda CloudGen WAF is a feature-rich application security platform that protects applications from advanced threats and zero-day attacks. It scans vulnerabilities and remediates them with a single click, ensuring security and compliance for your applications and data.

BindTuning Design - SharePoint & Office 365 Themes.png

BindTuning Design – SharePoint & Office 365 Themes: BindTuning Design provides easy-to-use tools so you can quickly and without coding create an intranet design aligned with your brand. The large selection of SharePoint and Office 365 themes are easily customizable with BindTuning Design’s powerful point-and-click customization tool.

Bookbot.png

Bookbot: Bookbot is a virtual reading assistant that listens to children read aloud and helps them as they progress, guiding them through its reading levels until they become confident, independent readers.

Cerebreon - Intelligent Debt Recovery Platform.png

Cerebreon – Intelligent Debt Recovery Platform: Cerebreon is a SaaS solution that empowers creditors to make automated, data-driven decisions while maximizing debt recovery. It provides a single platform to extract, analyze, and transfer debt data while maintaining GDPR compliance and industry regulations.

Citrix ADM Onprem Agent.png

Citrix ADM Onprem Agent: The Citrix ADM on-premises agent works as an intermediary between the Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) service and NetScaler instances on Microsoft Azure, providing a secure channel for configuration, logs, and telemetry data.

citrix.services (DaaS).png

citrix.services (DaaS): ProTechnology GmbH offers its managed remote desktop as a service (DaaS) based on the latest Citrix and Microsoft technologies. The cloud-based solution fully integrates with your IT environment, uses your user authentication method, and is available for any workspace.

Claims automation modules for property and vehicle insurance.png

Claims automation modules for property and vehicle insurance: Powered by AI computer vision technologies, MotionsCloud helps property and vehicle insurance companies streamline and automate claims processes and evaluate damages using data-driven, customer-centric interfaces.

CloudHealth Cloud Management Platform.png

CloudHealth Cloud Management Platform: VMware’s CloudHealth platform helps organizations optimize, secure, and govern their Microsoft Azure and multicloud environments. Deliver higher-quality products and solutions faster while keeping costs under control with CloudHealth.

Sonda Comply SaaS.png Comply SaaS Probe: Comply, a governance and tax compliance solution by SONDA, determines withheld taxes, calculates indirect taxes, and helps companies meet federal and municipal obligations. This app is available only in Brazilian Portuguese.
daenet Visual Components Detector (VCD).png

daenet Visual Components Detector (VCD): The correct identification of components and spare parts in complex machines can be a time-consuming and error-prone task. Visual Components Detector uses machine learning and AI-powered image classification to identify products.

DAML on Azure Database.png

DAML on Azure Database: The DAML programming language enables enterprises to bring innovative business processes to market quickly. DAML on Azure Database is built on Digital Asset’s open-source DAML on PostgreSQL integration and takes full advantage of the highly available, resilient Azure database stack.

Data-driven Disaster Resilience.png

Data-driven Disaster Resilience: Leveraging AI/ML, IoT, and cloud-edge technologies with real-time data and advanced analytics, IPgallery’s solution helps cities improve their ability to monitor, predict, and respond to sudden shocks and long-term stresses, such as floods, wildfires, and other crises.

Demand Solutions Supply Chain Management Platform.png

Demand Solutions Supply Chain Management Platform: The Demand Solutions Supply Chain Management Platform combines AI and advanced analytics to automate planning, accelerate cycle times, improve operating performance, break down business silos, and deliver greater visibility throughout your organization.

Digital OSS.png

Digital OSS: Netcracker Digital OSS enables the rapid creation and delivery of high-value digital services on hybrid networks and automates and simplifies processes to help organizations gain improved operational agility and efficiency.

Documénteme Facturación Electrónica.png

Documénteme Facturación Electrónica: The Documénteme electronic invoicing solution for Colombia runs as a service on Microsoft Azure and is ISO27001-certified to ensure compliance with legal and government regulations.

Email Auditor19.png

Email Auditor 19: Email Auditor 19 is an automated email audit system that uses artificial intelligence to help prevent fraud and establish an effective compliance system. This app is available only in Japanese.

Employee Self Service by AGIT Development Center.png

Employee Self Service by AGIT Development Center: Employee Self Service (ESS) is a human resources solution that enables employees to perform many job-related functions, such as applying for reimbursement, updating personal information, and accessing company benefits information. This app is available in Indonesia.

Epsagon.png

Epsagon: The Epsagon SaaS platform delivers automated, cloud-native application performance monitoring and troubleshooting. It’s designed to make DevOps teams more efficient by identifying problems, correlating data, and finding root causes.

GDi Ensemble A3.png

GDi Ensemble A3: GDi Ensemble A3 is an enterprise asset management solution that enables organizations to digitize and optimize material asset maintenance operations, resulting in higher efficiency and reduced costs.

GDi Ensemble W4.png

GDi Ensemble W4: GDi Ensemble W4 is a workforce management solution featuring web and mobile applications that enable organizations to efficiently plan, forecast, and schedule work and related resources to meet service-level goals.

Glaass Pro.png

Glaass Pro: Glaass Pro is a construction management solution designed to handle the scale and complexity of enterprise projects. Glaass Pro includes Glaass Core with customizable modules to help teams deliver projects on time and within budget.

Grafana Image Renderer Container Image.png

Grafana Image Renderer Container Image: The Grafana Image Renderer is a plug-in for Grafana that uses Headless Chrome to render panels and dashboards as PNG images. Bitnami container images follow industry standards and are continuously monitored for vulnerabilities and application updates.

HAProxy Community on CentOS.png

HAProxy Community on CentOS: HAProxy Community is free open-source software that provides a high-availability load balancer and proxy server for TCP- and HTTP-based applications that spreads requests across multiple servers. Websoft9 images are packaged using industry best practices and are continually updated.

Horizon.png

horizon: Truenorth Corporation’s horizon is a process automation tool that works independently, beside, or integrated with traditional ERP or CRM tools. It enables users to create and manage forms-based processes, define levels of approval, and visualize processes to make better business decisions.

HYDRA COVID-19 Risk Management Platform.png

HYDRA COVID-19 Risk Management Platform: Designed to increase safety and provide holistic situational awareness, HYDRA COVID-19 Risk Management Platform helps users make decisions based on insights and take quick action to protect people and create safe working environments.

IdProo.png

IdProo: IdProo helps businesses manage identity and centralized access across all systems in their organization, making it easier for users to utilize products and technologies. It’s designed to improve user experience and to boost security and employee productivity.

iGeneration - Digital Twin Implementation.png

iGeneration – Digital Twin Implementation: Adfolks’ iGeneration on Azure for Industrial IoT connects to multiple streaming services, including Azure IoT Hub, Azure Event Hubs, and Apache Kafka to create real-time applications and dashboards.

InvSolv - Inventory Management.png

InvSolv – Inventory Management: The InvSolv inventory management system integrates with retail ERP, warehouse management, and other business systems to provide real-time stock levels, future stock availability, demand forecasting, and dashboards and reports.

IoTSense - Full Scale IoT Platform.png

IoTSense – Full Scale IoT Platform: A full-scale IoT platform with edge and cloud capabilities, IoTSense is device- and network-agnostic, allowing users to use existing hardware, as well as current devices and sensors, on a multitude of networks.

MachineScope - Additive workflow management and analytics.png

MachineScope – Additive workflow management & analytics: MachineScope is a closed-loop workflow management and analytics solution for additive manufacturing (3D printing) that offers a single-pane-of-glass system to manage workflows and performance of multi-vendor 3D printers.

mailDocPRO.png

mailDocPRO: mailDocPRO manages certified email (PEC) and corporate correspondence to help optimize business processes, secure data, and reduce costs. This app is available only in Italy.

Moody's Analytics GridLink As A Service (GlaaS).png

Moody’s Analytics GridLink As A Service (GlaaS): Moody’s Analytics GridLink as a Service (GlaaS) lets you submit AXIS actuarial modeling jobs to a cloud-based infrastructure for processing using a pay-per-use model. GlaaS server farms are deployed in multiple Microsoft Azure regions to ensure redundancy and respect data residency requirements.

navigine platform.png

Navigine Platform: The Navigine Platform provides mobile developers and system integrators with development tools for creating indoor navigation and tracking services. Build applications that leverage indoor navigation, marketing, analytics, and tracking functionalities with the Navigine Platform.

Nuclei.png

Nuclei: Designed to provide seamless customer experience, real-time integration with third-party products, and a data-driven approach to digital transformation, Nuclei enables users to increase customer engagement through several merchant and wealth management services.

OpsRamp ITOM and AIOps Platform.png

OpsRamp ITOM + AIOps Platform: OpsRamp provides an IT operations management platform for hybrid enterprises, delivered with service-centric artificial intelligence for operations (AIOps). Put productivity, governance, visibility, and control back in the hands of modern IT operations teams with OpsRamp.

Peg.png

Peg: The Peg software suite powers influencer marketing for more than 1,700 companies across 169 countries. Peg connects to Shopify, AppsFlyer, Adjust, and Google Analytics to measure the ROI of performance-driven influencer marketing.

Power Analytics Portal - (Power BI Embedded App).png

Power Analytics Portal – (Power BI Embedded App): Share unlimited Microsoft Power BI reports and dashboards with Power Analytics Portal from BITECHSOL. Power Analytics Portal is built on Power BI Embedded, a Microsoft Azure service that lets developers embed visuals, reports, and dashboards into an app.

PredictSense - Automated Machine Learning.png

PredictSense – Automated Machine Learning: PredictSense, an automated machine learning platform, enables you to quickly solve complex business problems with its high-power algorithms. PredictSense builds predictive models that help you make precise and optimal business decisions.

PremierOne Cloud CAD.png

PremierOne Cloud CAD: PremierOne Cloud CAD from Motorola Solutions helps agencies manage calls faster and allocate resources more efficiently. PremierOne Cloud CAD is powered by Motorola Solutions’ CommandCentral platform.

Prometeia PFTPro.png

Prometeia PFTPro: PFTPro from Prometeia enables banks to automate routine tasks while providing personalized wealth management services for various investor segments. It also ensures compliance with FIDLEG, MiFID II, and other regulations.

QuickReach- Intelligent Process Automation.png

QuickReach: Intelligent Process Automation: QuickReach, an intelligent process automation platform from BlastAsia, lets you rapidly build automated workflows without coding. Features include a workflow builder, an automation designer, and AI add-ins.

rapyuta dot io.png

rapyuta.io: Accelerate your robotics solution development with rapyuta.io, a portal that offers unified runtime, managed infrastructure, and flexibility and scalability advantages. Build and manage robots across multiple sites with centralized access to business, engineering, and operations metrics.

Recordsure Docs.png

Recordsure Docs: Designed to handle regulated industries’ document workflows, the Recordsure Docs product suite brings client documentation into a single electronic case file and offers programmable search filters to accelerate review time.

Recordsure Voice.png

Recordsure Voice: The Recordsure Voice product suite offers game-changing speech analytics for regulated industries. Using AI technology, it helps teams triage content, classify conversations, extract key facts, and gauge risk with advanced anomaly detection.

Retail media development OMO solution AI Beacon-AI Tag.png

Retail media development OMO solution “AI Beacon/AI Tag”: AI Beacon helps retailers improve profitability by visualizing the customer journey, while AI Tag utilizes near-field communication technology to issue coupons by linking with products on the shelf. Both solutions are available only in Japanese.

S3 Building Insights Platform.png

S3 Building Insights Platform: The S3 Building Insights platform integrates data from disparate systems to monitor energy usage, security systems, equipment performance, space utilization, and more. Customers can choose from a range of turnkey modules.

Search and analysis of Instagram bloggers.png

Search and analysis of Instagram bloggers: Yoloco’s search and analysis service uses AI and filters to help brands and advertising agencies find Instagram bloggers so they can improve their sales and influencer marketing campaigns. This app is available in English and Russian.

Silk Cloud Data Platform.png

Silk Cloud Data Platform: Through real-time data reduction, thin provisioning, and continuous resource optimization, the Silk Cloud Data Platform allows organizations to get 10 times the performance out of their cloud data while spending 30 percent less.

smartQED Free App.png

smartQED Free App: smartQED helps operations, support, and DevOps teams systematically solve complex problems. Its machine learning-powered visual workspace enables efficient collaboration for fast incident resolution.

Solar PV App.png

Solar PV App: OrxaGrid’s Solar PV App helps building owners calculate the optimal size of solar panels for their roof so they can save money on their energy bills. The software will consider location, orientation, angle, roof surface, tariff information, and more.

Status List.png

Status List: Made for companies that run HTTP services, Status List monitors uptime and provides instant notification when services fail, degrade, or resume. Tackle your issues long before your customers call.

stickers.png

stickers: MojiLaLa Unlimited provides you with access to more than 60,000 artistic and animated emoji stickers to enhance your chat, email, or video messaging experience. Always find the right sticker to express yourself and share with your family and friends.

SyncHub.png

SyncHub: SyncHub lets you sync your cloud data with Microsoft Power BI in real time. Run advanced reports and analytics beyond the reporting already available in your cloud apps, and say goodbye to manual CSV exports and incomplete reports.

TAIKAI - Online Hackathons and Open Innovation Platform.png

TAIKAI – Online Hackathons and Open Innovation Platform: TAIKAI’s platform allows companies to run online hackathons and open innovation challenges, connecting them with promising freelancers, universities, and startups.

Trask ZenID.png

Trask ZenID: Trask ZenID’s optical character recognition and data capture functions speed up the client identity verification process and can detect high-quality counterfeit IDs, passports, or licenses. This app is available only in Czech.

Tresorit.png

Tresorit: Tresorit’s content platform empowers users with seamless cross-device collaboration while protecting files from unauthorized access, disclosure, and loss. Tresorit’s patented technology features end-to-end encryption.

Trifacta for Azure.png

Trifacta for Azure: Trifacta, a modern data preparation platform, cleans and prepares data for analytics and machine learning. Trifacta is integrated with numerous Microsoft Azure services, including Azure Data Factory, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Azure Blob storage.

Univonix Automated PBX Migration to Microsoft Teams.png

Univonix Automated PBX Migration to Microsoft Teams: Planner and Migrate, two parts of Univonix’s suite of migration services, offer advanced process automation for PBX assessment, planning, and provisioning to Microsoft Teams. Smoothly transition from legacy PBX (Cisco CUCM, Avaya CM, Mitel, Siemens, Nortel) to Teams.

Univonix PBX Assessment for Migration to Microsoft Teams.png

Univonix PBX Assessment for Migration to Microsoft Teams: The Univonix PBX Assessment is an advanced migration tool that delivers an aggregated view of all users, extensions, and devices on your legacy PBX voice configuration. It also maps your feature parity when migrating to Microsoft Teams.

Vault-ERP.png

Vault-ERP: Vault-ERP resource planning software can help you manage your business and increase productivity with solutions across HR, sales, projects, operations, and company culture. Take advantage of time tracking, financial planning, reporting, and more.

Vectra AI.png

Vectra AI: Vectra AI’s Cognito platform accelerates threat detection using artificial intelligence to enrich collected network metadata. Vectra AI offers three apps on the Cognito platform: Cognito Stream, Cognito Recall, and Cognito Detect.

VisionSense.png

VisionSense: VisionSense, Winjit’s computer vision product, applies machine learning to huge data sets for advanced image processing, matching, and object detection (2D and 3D), which can be used in smart surveillance, advanced analytics, and more.

Voyager Labs.png

Voyager Labs: Voyager Labs enables law enforcement agencies and private-sector clients to collect and analyze massive amounts of unstructured data, helping them combat crime, fraud, trafficking, terror attacks, and other threats.

Wearable SaaS for Firstline workers.png

Wearable SaaS for Firstline workers: Turnpike wearable devices empower retail staff with information and recommendations gathered from IoT sensors, point-of-sale systems, and AI cameras. This veritable sixth sense allows staff to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction.

WEBFRONT-KS(WAF-BYOL).png

WEBFRONT-KS(WAF-BYOL): The WEBFRONT-K web application firewall from PIOLINK provides web security with dual detection engines to prevent cyberattacks. WEBFRONT-K offers high speed and stability, supporting small and large-scale businesses alike.

WordLift.png

WordLift: WordLift’s natural language processing (NLP) allows you to inject structured data into your content, which helps search engines serve your content to the right person at the right time. Power up your SEO with WordLift’s AI and personalized knowledge graphs.

Yeastar for Microsoft Teams.png

Yeastar for Microsoft Teams: This integration from Qunifi lets users on the Yeastar PBX System use their phones or the native Linkus Unified Communications softphone to connect with Microsoft Teams users.

Consulting services

1 Day Workshop- Artificial Intelligence.png

1 Day Workshop: Artificial Intelligence: Designed for business and IT stakeholders, this workshop from Trianz IT and Cloud Solutions Pvt. Ltd. will help you understand the AI products and services offered by Microsoft Azure and how best to use them.

AzMigrate - 8 Week Implementation.png

AzMigrate – 8 Week Implementation: BrainScale will assess your infrastructure and applications, prepare a secure landing zone in Microsoft Azure that meets your organizational compliance needs, perform a migration with the tool of your choice, and optimize your workload on Azure.

Azure DevOps- 2-Day Bootcamp Workshop.png

Azure DevOps: 2-Day Bootcamp Workshop: This workshop from SP Technology Co. Ltd. will provide hands-on training of microservices architecture, Docker, and Microsoft Azure DevOps. The workshop will be conducted in Korean.

Cloud Migration- 2 hour free Workshop.png

Cloud Migration- 2 hour free Workshop: Move AS will help you understand how Microsoft Azure can give your organization a competitive advantage. This includes streamlining the transition process by applying a proven integration approach based on a set number of servers, applications, and workloads.

Dyncloud Retail- 10-Wk Implementation.png DynCloud Retail: 10-Wk Implementation: Gonzalez, Cortina, Glender y Cia will implement DynCloud Retail, which helps optimize and strengthen your end-to-end processes for inventory management, supply chain optimization, e-commerce, marketing, and mobile point-of-sale services. This offer is available in Spanish.
Pre-Configured Accounting- 4 Wk-Implementation.png Pre-Configured Accounting: 4 Wk-Implementation: Best Practices Consulting will implement Pre-Configured Accounting, a configuration in Microsoft Dynamics 365 that standardizes financial processes so companies can comply with tax requirements. This offer is available only to customers in Mexico.
Security Service - 1 Hour Briefing.png

Security.Service – 1 Hour Briefing: Get a cloud security overview in this briefing from A3Cloud Solutions. Experts from A3Cloud Solutions will cover deployment best practices, Microsoft Azure cybersecurity services, and more.

Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure- 2 week PoC.png

Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure- 2 week PoC: Suitable for organizations that haven’t already virtualized their desktops, this proof of concept from Move AS offers a comprehensive virtualization service through Windows Virtual Desktop.

Collation conflict when moving Azure SQL DB to SQL server on-premises or Azure VM using SQLPackage.

Collation conflict when moving Azure SQL DB to SQL server on-premises or Azure VM using SQLPackage.

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

Error message sample:

*** Error importing database: Could not import package. Error SQL72014: .Net SqlClient Data Provider: Msg 468, Level 16, State 9, Procedure GETTABLESWITHOPENCURSORS, Line 142 Cannot resolve the collation conflict between “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS” and “Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_KS_WS_SC” in the equal to operation.

 
 

error1.png

 

Error cause:

The conflict is happening because the database containment is enabled on source, hence it is forcing the same on target that makes any system or temp objects to use the default windows collation “Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_KS_WS_SC” instead of the instance/DB collation “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS”.

 

What can enable containment on Azure SQL DB?

When exporting Azure SQL DB to a Bacpac the containment is None by default, unless database has a contained database users created under it, then it will force the containment to Partial.

In SQLPackage, the DAC framework will force enabling the containment during the import process if one of the below conditions is true:

  • If source database containment = Partial in model.xml.
  • If containment was not being set in model.xml file and database has a contained database users.

In our scenario, the second option is true, hence the containment was being forced during the import of the bacpac, you can see it in SQLPackage logs as mentioned below:

logs1.png

 

Resolution/Workaround:

In order to disable containment in Azure SQL DB, you need to drop the contained DB users created under the database, and it will set the containment = None when importing the database to target SQL server.

 

How to identify and drop contained DB users is Azure SQL DB?

1. Detect the contained DB users:   

   A. Run the below script to list all users:

 

select name as username,

       create_date,

       modify_date,

       type_desc as type,

       authentication_type_desc as authentication_type

from sys.database_principals

where type not in (‘A’, ‘G’, ‘R’, ‘X’)

      and sid is not null

      and name != ‘guest’

order by username;

 

   B.  Users with authentication_type DATABASE is a contained DB user:

            ssms1.png

 

2. Remove the contained DB user on source database by following the below steps:

  A. Run the below script to confirm if the user is an owner to a schema:

      SELECT s.name

      FROM sys.schemas s

      WHERE s.principal_id = USER_ID(‘test2’);

  B. If it’s an owner to a schema, then change the owner for this schema to dbo

      ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON SCHEMA::<SchemaName> TO dbo;

  C. Drop the user now under the database.

      DROP USER [test2]

Traditional Failover Clustering in Azure

Traditional Failover Clustering in Azure

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

Hello folks,

 

Last month I presented a session during the “Windows Server webinar miniseries – Month of Cloud Essentials”.  The session was on how to create highly available apps with Azure VMs.  Following the session I was asked about setting up traditional Windows Server Clusters.

During that conversation I stated my belief that if you are building modern apps that can run in an active-active model, a traditional cluster might not be needed.

 

You can achieve the same results with Azure Availability Set/Zones, Azure Load Balancers and virtual machine.   However, if your migrating or deploying an app that requires the traditional Windows cluster, or shared storage.  Our story was not the best.  Up to now, you had to deploy an additional VM that would “host” the Cluster Shared Volumes.

 

That changed last week with 2 announcements…

 

The first announcement was about Announcing the general availability of Azure shared disks and new Azure Disk Storage enhancements.  The general availability of shared disks on Azure Disk Storage will now enable enterprises to easily migrate your existing on-premises Windows and Linux-based clustered environments to Azure.  This is a new feature for Azure managed disks that allows you to attach a managed disk to multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously. Therefore, allowing you to either deploy new or migrate existing clustered applications to Azure.

VMs in the cluster can read or write to their attached disk based on the reservation chosen by the clustered application using SCSI Persistent Reservations (SCSI PR). The shared disks are exposed as logical unit numbers (LUNs) and look like direct-attached-storage (DAS) to your VM.

 

shared-disk-updated-two-node-cluster-diagram.png

 

The second interesting announcement is Windows Admin Center version 2007 is now generally available!. The new version comes with multiple new improvements but one in particular caught my attention.  New Cluster deployment experience and capabilities.

Windows Admin Center now provides a graphical cluster deployment workflow. It allows you to deploy multiple cluster types based on the operating system that runs on their choice of servers.

 

cluster.png

 

Together these two announcements are enabling the deployment of traditional Windows or Linux Clusters without the need for an additional VM to host the CSV. Therefore, simplifying your deployments and making them more cost efficient since you save the cost of the additional VM.

Our Story is getting better all the time and Hybrid is built into it.

 

Cheers!

 

Pierre Roman

Augmenting Azure Advisor Cost Recommendations for Automated Continuous Optimization – Part 3

Augmenting Azure Advisor Cost Recommendations for Automated Continuous Optimization – Part 3

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

This is the third post of a series dedicated to the implementation of automated Continuous Optimization with Azure Advisor Cost recommendations. For a contextualization of the solution here described, please read the introductory post for an overview of the solution and also the second post for the details and deployment of the main solution components.

 

Introduction

 

If you read the previous posts and deployed the Azure Optimization Engine solution, by now you have a Log Analytics workspace containing Advisor Cost recommendations as well as Virtual Machine properties and performance metrics, collected in a daily basis. We have all the historical data that is needed to augment Advisor recommendations and help us validate and, ultimately, automate VM right-size remediations. As a bonus, we have now a change history of our Virtual Machine assets and Advisor recommendations, which can also be helpful for other purposes.

 

So, what else is needed? Well, we need first to generate the augmented Advisor recommendations, by adding performance metrics and VM properties to each recommendation, and then store them in a repository that can be easily consumed and manipulated both by visualization tools and by automated remediation tasks. Finally, we visualize these and further recommendations with a simple Power BI report.

 

Anatomy of a recommendation

 

There isn’t much to invent here, as the Azure Advisor recommendation schema fits very well our purpose. We just need to add to this schema some other relevant fields:

 

  • Confidence score – each recommendation type will have its own algorithm to compute the confidence score. For example, for VM right-size recommendations, we’ll calculate it based on the VM metrics and whether the target SKU meets the storage and networking requirements.
  • Details URL – a link to a web page where we can see the actual justification for the recommendation (e.g., the results of a Log Analytics query chart showing the performance history of a VM).
  • Additional information – a JSON-formatted value containing recommendation-specific details (e.g., current and target SKUs, estimated savings, etc.).
  • Tags – if the target resource contains tags, we’ll just add them to the recommendation, as this may be helpful for reporting purposes.

 

Generating augmented Advisor recommendations

 

Having in the same Log Analytics repository all the data we need makes things really easy. We just need to build a query that joins Advisor recommendations with VM performance and properties and then automate a periodic export of the results for additional processing (see sample results below). As Advisor right-size recommendations consider only the last seven days of VM performance, we just have to run it once per week.

 

hspinto_0-1595627743251.png

 

For each exported recommendation, we’ll then execute a simple confidence score algorithm that decreases the recommendation confidence whenever a performance criterion is not met. We are considering these relatively weighted criteria against the recommended target SKU and observed performance metrics:

 

  • [Very high importance] Does it support the current data disks count?
  • [Very high] Does it support the current network interfaces count?
  • [High] Does it support the percentile(n) un-cached IOPS observed for all disks in the respective VM?
  • [High] Does it support the percentile(n) un-cached disks throughput?
  • [Medium] Is the VM below a given percentile(n) processor and memory usage percentage?
  • [Medium] Is the VM below a given percentile(n) network bandwidth usage?

 

The confidence score ranges from 0 (lowest) to 5 (highest). If we don’t have performance metrics for a VM, the confidence score is still decreased though in a lesser proportion. If we are processing a non-right-size recommendation, we still include it in the report, but the confidence score is not computed (remaining at the -1 default value).

 

Bonus recommendation: orphaned disks

 

The power of this solution is that having so valuable historical data in our repository and adding other sources to it will allow us to generate our own custom recommendations as well.  One recommendation that easily comes out of the data we have been collecting is a report of orphaned disks – for example, disks that belonged to a VM that was meanwhile deleted (see sample query below). But you can easily think of others, even beyond cost optimization.

 

hspinto_1-1595627743272.png

 

Azure Optimization Engine reporting

 

Now that we have an automated process that generates and augments optimization recommendations, the next step is to add visualizations to it. For this purpose, there is nothing better than Power BI. To make things easier, we have meanwhile ingested our recommendations into an Azure SQL Database, where we can better manage and query data. We use it as the data source for our Power BI report, with many perspectives (see sample screenshots below).

The overview page gives us a high-level understanding of the recommendations’ relative distribution. We can also quickly see how many right-size recommended target SKUs are supported by the workload characteristics. In the example below, we have many “unknowns”, since only a few VMs were sending performance metrics to the Log Analytics workspace.

 

hspinto_2-1595627743311.jpeg

 

In the exploration page, we can investigate all the available recommendations, using many types of filters and ordering criteria.

 

hspinto_3-1595627743393.jpeg

 

After selecting a specific recommendation, we can drill through it and navigate to the Details or History pages.

 

hspinto_4-1595627743396.jpeg

 

In the Details page, we can analyze all the data that was used to generate and validate the recommendation. Interestingly, the Azure Advisor API has recently included additional details about the thresholds values that were observed for each performance criterion. This can be used to cross-check with the metrics we are collecting with the Log Analytics agent.

 

hspinto_5-1595627743428.jpeg

 

In the History page, we can observe how the confidence score has evolved over time for a specific recommendation. If the confidence score has been stable at high levels for the past weeks, then the recommendation can likely be implemented without risks.

 

hspinto_6-1595627743445.png

 

Each recommendation includes a details URL that opens an Azure Portal web page with additional information not available in the report. If we have performance data in Log Analytics for that instance, we can even open a CPU/memory chart with the performance history.

 

hspinto_7-1595627743468.jpeg

 

Deploying the solution and next steps

 

Everything described so far in these posts is available for you to deploy and test, in the Azure Optimization Engine repository. You can find there deployment and usage instructions and, if you have suggestions for improvements or for new types of recommendations, please open a feature request issue or… why not be brave and contribute to the project? ;)

 

The final post of this series will discuss how we can automate continuous optimization with the help of all the historical data we have been collecting and also how the AOE can be extended with additional recommendations (not limited to cost optimization).

 

Thank you for having been following! See you next time! ;)