// V024 - Weekly Technology Vlog #24

Vlog #24 came to you on a Monday morning — a sunny weekend meant Sunday’s scheduled recording was skipped in favour of family celebrations. Same great content, one day later.

Azure News

Azure Virtual Desktop (the newly rebranded Windows Virtual Desktop) continued to generate buzz, with Azure Active Directory support, multi-session Windows 10 Enterprise VM management, and expanded enterprise scenarios all now available.

The Azure API for FHIR update highlighted compliance deadlines relevant to healthcare organisations using the CMS Patient Access and Provider Directory APIs.

Azure’s reliability engineering series continued, examining the engineering principles behind hyperscale data centres — power distribution, UPS design, and pre-production validation using technologies like Azure Sphere.

SAP on Azure rationale was outlined: hybrid solutions, cost savings, enterprise security and compliance, and the ability to extract business intelligence from SAP S/4HANA data.

Preview of the Azure Arc hybrid and multi-cloud digital event (June 29) — promising a major Azure Arc announcement alongside stories from Avanade, Siemens Healthineers, and SKF Group.

Azure Updates rapid-fire: TLS 1.0/1.1 deprecation for MARS agent (September 1, 2021 deadline), PostgreSQL Flexible Server and Postgres 13 public preview, Azure Migrate private endpoint support (now able to migrate without traversing the public internet — a significant security improvement for lift-and-shift projects), Azure Cache for Redis zone redundancy GA, enterprise-scale landing zone for AKS GA, Azure Monitor syslog collection for Linux (public preview), Application Insights alert-based smart detection, and Azure Defender GA for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB single servers.

Azure DevOps News

Azure DevOps community posts this week featured deployment automation for Azure API Management, Databricks notebook CI/CD pipelines, PowerShell scripts for listing Git repositories, and SQL database deployment automation tutorials.

GitHub News

GitHub supply chain security improvements: scanning for leaked package registry credentials stops credential theft before malicious packages can be published. A companion blog post dissected a seven-year-old Linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerability, making the case for a proactive security mindset.

The May GitHub recap covered: video uploads in issues/PRs/discussions, one-click fork sync from the web, GitHub Desktop 2.2 with Apple Silicon native support, GitHub Discussions announcement categories, Dependabot enhancements (ignore by major/minor/patch, Go advisory database), and SSH authentication with security keys.

GitHub’s Blacktocat fifth anniversary — celebrating five years of amplifying Black voices and talent in the tech industry. Chris reflected on the importance of multidimensional diversity and outlined his commitment to doing more on the channel.

Cloud With Chris Updates

Recent sessions recapped:

• Carl Cook — GitHub Actions deep-dive covering automation on Cloud with Chris and the upcoming integration platform
• Azure Arc for Apps blog series finale — Event Grid on Azure Arc, with seamless mapping of topics and subscriptions
• Sarah Lean — Dual session on hybrid cloud and the unvarnished reality of developer advocacy
• Will Esprit — Geode pattern hands-on: globally distributed CosmosDB-backed applications that keep serving traffic when individual nodes fail

Coming up this week: Shannon Keane on Azure VMware Solution (Wednesday), and John Lund’s cloud journey to the cloud (Friday). The Cloud with Chris GitHub organisation is now live — all repositories for the platform are being consolidated there, including the integration platform Chris is building in the open.