Microsoft Build 2021: Developer and Cloud Native Highlights
Microsoft's yearly Build Conference took place last week and brought us a bunch of new announcements around Microsoft Azure. Here are my highlights from a cloud-native and developer perspective.
Microsoft's yearly Build Conference took place last week and brought us a bunch of new announcements around Microsoft Azure. Here are my highlights from a cloud-native and developer perspective.
Hint: You can find all announcements in the official Microsoft Build 2021 Book of News
Kubernetes
Deploy Azure App Services to Kubernetes (Preview)
Any Kubernetes Cluster connected to Azure with Azure Arc is now a deployment target for Azure App Services like Web Apps, Azure Functions and Logic Apps. So you can use the developer experiences you know and love in any Kubernetes cluster, including on-premises and other clouds.
Azure Arc for Kubernetes is now Generally Available
Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes enables you to attach any CNCF-conformant Kubernetes cluster to Azure for management. Your clusters can run anywhere, and if they have connectivity to Azure, onboarding is as easy as deploying the Azure Arc cluster agents using the Azure CLI extension. This enables you to use Azure Management Services like Policies and Security Center with Kubernetes anywhere.
App Services
Free TLS Certificate for Web Apps
Azure Web Apps can now finally issue a free SSL Certificate for your custom domains. In the past, I often used the Let's Encrypt extension, which is not needed anymore with this long-awaited change.
API Management
Native support for WebSocket APIs (Preview)
You can now expose Web Socket APIs for real-time applications via Azure API Management and use the monitoring, protection and management capabilities that you might already know from REST APIs also for Web Sockets.
Databases
Azure Cosmos DB: New Linux and Mac emulators (Preview)
The local Azure Cosmos DB Emulator now comes to non-Windows operating systems as a Docker Container. Especially when testing code changes locally or running integration tests, this can become very handy.
Azure Cosmos DB: Serverless Tier
For smaller and very elastic workloads, the Serverless Tier of Azure Cosmos DB helps to optimize costs by only charging for the Request Units and Storage has has actually been consumed. In serverless mode, you don't have to provision any throughput when creating containers in your Azure Cosmos account. At the end of your billing period, you get billed for the number of Request Units that were consumed by your database operations.
Azure Cosmos DB: Partial Document Update (Private Preview)
Partial Document Update allows developers to only modify specific fields of a document without reading the whole document. This does not only save Request Units, but also enables more consistent and safe operations like incrementation.
Documentation | Private Preview Registration
.NET
.NET 6 Minimal Web APIs (Preview)
A new project type for Micro-Services that abstracts away a lot of boilerplate code. The extremely simplifies the project setup reminds me of the simplicity of Express.js from the Node.js ecosystem.
