Interesting announcements at Ignite 2018

I thought I'd share some of the announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2018 that I found really interesting. Obviously this is a subset of announcements, related only to products I've used or am planning to use in the future.

IoT Hub/Edge:

1. There’s a Jenkins plugin for edge modules that enables builds and deployments to the devices: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/developer-tooling-improvements-for-azure-iot-edge/

• IoT Edge Module Marketplace. A place for hardware manufacturers/3rd party software vendors to publish hardware specific modules: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/publish-your-azure-iot-edge-modules-in-azure-marketplace/
• Edge devices can now restart and establish connections to the edge hub even if the hub isn’t connected to the internet (Still requires a one-time sync): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/extended-offline-operation-with-azure-iot-edge/
• Device Twin property based routing in IoT Hub: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/a-powerful-and-intuitive-way-to-route-device-messages-in-azure-iot-hub/
• Digital Twins in public preview: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-public-preview-of-azure-digital-twins/
• The Device Provisioning service has much higher limits now
• Edge support for Blobs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-edge/how-to-store-data-blob

Cosmos DB:

1. Support for multiple masters (which allows scaling writes across regions): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cosmos-db-database-for-intelligent-cloud-intelligent-edge-era/

• Reserved Capacity (subscription plan vs pay-as-you-go): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-azure-cosmos-db-reserved-capacity/

Containers/Container Registry/K8s:

1. The Registry now has support for Helm Chart Repos, Docker Content Trust and ACR tasks: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-container-registry-public-preview-of-helm-chart-repositories-and-more/

• ACR tasks are pretty cool – if you have multiple images dependent on a certain base image, you can trigger updated builds for all the images when you update the base image.
  Also – I think it can do a lot of what pipelines can?
• Azure Container Instances (ACI) can be deployed into existing VNETs: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/aci-vnet/
• K8S is available on Stack in preview

Ops:

1. As you may have already heard me say elsewhere, Azure Pipelines is AMAZING: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-pipelines-is-the-ci-cd-solution-for-any-language-any-platform-any-cloud/

• Configuring a build is really clean. (I'll create a build using a public repo soon!)
• Allows you to connect “service connections” like our docker registry to pull images from, k8s clusters, jenkins
• Build steps can run on either the VM or within (one or more) containers
• Allows defining multiple “jobs” that run in parallel
• Extensions for deploying to AWS, Azure, K8S clusters
• Resource specific alerts (configurable alerts for platform issues. This might be useful for alerting systems): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/get-notified-when-your-azure-resources-become-unavailable/
• Deployment Manager (for multi-stage/multi-region deployments): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-deployment-manager-now-in-public-preview/

Misc:

1. Recommendation system for models based on your dataset. I’m assuming this will work well for generic problems. Definitely something interesting to play around with!: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-automated-ml-capability-in-azure-machine-learning/
2. HDInsight supports Hadoop 3.0:
   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-hdinsight-brings-next-generation-hadoop-3-0-and-enterprise-security-to-the-cloud/
   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deep-dive-into-azure-hdinsight-4-0/
3. Azure CDN is GA: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-s-content-delivery-network-is-now-generally-available/
4. Functions V2 is GA: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-functions-2-0/

• Support for Java and Python is still in preview
• Consumption plan for Linux is in preview
• Event Hubs is available on Azure Stack
• Service Fabric is available on Azure Stack

As always, feel free to reach out to me @rohchak if you have any questions!