Microsoft Build 2023 News Round Up

Microsoft Build, Microsoft's developer conference, has been happening this week in Seattle. There was an in-person element to the event, and it was available online live and is still available on demand for anyone looking to catch up.

I've been keeping an eye on the announcements, and I've picked out a bunch in the infrastructure space that have caught my eye.

Public preview: Soft delete for recovery points for Azure Backup

In public preview we now have soft delete for recovery points for Azure Backup.

This will allow you to recover data from recovery points that might have been deleted as a result of making changes to a backup policy associated with a backup item.

This is available in selected regions and will be available in other regions in the following weeks.

You can find more documentation on the feature here.

Generally Available: Linked backends for Azure Static Web Apps

Generally available is a new feature for Azure Static Web Apps called linked backends. This allows you to link your APIs to your Static Web Apps and API requests are automatically routed to the linked API.

It supports Azure Functions, Azure App Service, Azure Container App and Azure API management backends.

With linked backends you are getting integrated security with direct access to user authentication and role-based authorization data, plus seamless routing that makes the API route available to the front-end web app without custom cross origin resource sharing rules (CORS).

Generally Available: SQL binding for Azure Functions

Are you linking Azure SQL and Azure Functions together? A new generally available feature called SQL bindings for Azure Functions is out. This will help you reduce the amount of code required to link the two together.

You can write these SQL input and output bindings in .NET, Java, Python, Node.js, and PowerShell Azure Functions.

Public Preview: GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps

In public preview is now GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps.

You can start to use the code scanning, secret scanning and dependency scanning capabilities in your Azure DevOps environment.

These features can really help you implement security earlier in your software development lifecycle and fix security issues before your code is deployed to production.

Optimize your reservation purchases with reservation utilization alerts

Azure reservations can provide cost savings by committing to one- or three-year plans, but sometimes they can go unutilized or underutilized, which negates any savings.

You can view the utilization percentage of your reservation purchases in the Azure portal, but let’s face it sometimes it can be easy to miss important changes.

With a new preview alert though you can avoid missing those changes.

You can now set up an alert email that will notify you whenever any of your reservations exhibit low utilization, giving you a chance to act and avoid financial losses and ensure your investments are delivering the expected cost savings.

You can find more information on how to set up this alert here.

Microsoft Cost Management AI capabilities

A new experience is launching within Microsoft Cost Management that will lever next generation AI capabilities. Which will help you understand, analyse and manage your cloud costs and bills.

This feature is coming soon to the Azure portal, right now you can put your name on the waitlist for the private preview.

Public Preview: Azure API Center

The Azure API Center is a new product to be announced, it is a central hub for you to discover, track and manage all APIs in your organisation. It will also enable you to build up company wide API standards.

It should allow your developers and engineers quickly discover and consume APIs that can be reused to help accelerate or enable development.

You’ll be able to keep a track of APIs with the API inventory management functionality.

You can see version information, specifications, deployments and metadata schema information, Plus management administrative access to APIs and other assets with role based access control.

To get access to this new service you can register for it via the Azure portal and the team expects to start giving people access in June this year.

Generally Available: Azure Linux

Microsoft have launched their own version of Linux, Azure Linux container host for Azure Kubernetes service. It is optimised for performance on Azure. This was previewed in October 2022 under the project codename CBL-Mariner.

Microsoft Dev Box

Microsoft Dev Box will be generally available in July 2023.

And there are some new capabilities coming as well.

The first one being new starter images in the marketplace which will be ready to use. And the ability to customise your dev box using configuration as code files in git source control.

GitHub Copilot X

GitHub Copilot was the world’s first at scale generative AI tool made with OpenAi’s codex model. The GitHub team has been working on a new iteration, GitHub Copilot X.

Utilising the GPT-4 model they are introducing chat and voice for Copilot plus bring Copilot to pull requests, the command line and docs to answer questions.

You can start using Copilot X here.

Summary

Folks, there were so many awesome things announced this week at Build, these are just some of the highlights that caught my eye.

Be sure to check out the Book of News for more information on the ones I’ve mentioned and the ones I haven’t covered!