Microsoft Build 2023: Highlights for App Developers
Last week, Microsoft's annual Developer conference took place and besides interesting sessions, a bunch of new announcements have been made. This post summarizes the most important ones for App Developers, along with a list of recommended sessions to watch.
TL;DR: Copilot everywhere, not only in the IDE. AI-based autocompletion and smart chats, can also be found on Windows, Office, Dynamics and Power Platform soon. Lots of new features and services for building AI experiences yourselves with Azure Machine Learning. A totally new SaaS for managing all kinds of data from everywhere called Microsoft Fabric. Every compute is containers these days and there were many enhancements announced around services like Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Apps. Lastly, security and monitoring seam to be even more popular than before.
Hero Announcements
Below, you can find a list of the announcements, that I found most interesting and relevant for App Developers. You can find the full list of announcements in the Book of News.
Developer Tools
- Azure Deployment Environments (Generally Available): Spin up and down on-demand infrastructure for development or Pull Request reviews | Announcement | Session
- GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps (Preview): Code scanning, secret scanning and dependency scanning | Announcement | Session
- Semantic Kernel: Open-source framework for building AI apps like Copilots | Announcement | Session
- Azure API Center: Centralize your portfolio of 1st and 3rd party APIs at one place | Announcement | Session
- Copilot in Power App and Power Pages: Describe elements or pages to the AI to get them generated | Announcement | Session
Containers
- Microsoft Container Storage: Azure native volume management service with fast disk attach and detach times built natively for containers (Preview) | Announcement | Session
- Azure Container Apps Jobs (Preview): Run ad-hoc tasks like CI/CD agents in a fully managed container environment | Announcement | Session
- Host Azure Functions in Azure Container Apps: Deploy containerized functions into Container Apps and benefit from built-in Dapr support | Announcement | Session
- Dedicated and Consumption plans in Azure Container Apps* (Preview): Mix and match serverless and workloads with dedicated hardware in your container apps environments with Workload profiles
- AKS long-term support: Not recommended, but now possible to specify a two-year support window | Announcement
- Kubernetes Apps (Generally Available): Partner ecosystem and marketplace to effortlessly deploy configure and deploy apps via Azure into your Kubernetes clusters | Announcement
Databases
- Azure Cosmos DB Burst functionality: Utilize idle throughput for bursts | Announcement
- Azure Cosmos DB Hierarchical partition keys: Combine up to three keys for more efficient partitioning | Announcement
Monitoring
- Fully managed Prometheus in Azure Monitor (Generally Available) | Announcement
Session recommendations
Keynotes
- Microsoft Build opening
- Shaping the future of work with AI
- The era of the AI Copilot
- Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud
Should watch
- Deploy & manage storage volumes with Azure Container Storage
- The future of app development with the Microsoft Power Platform
- Securing container deployments on Azure Kubernetes Service with open-source tools
- Building and scaling cloud-native, intelligent applications on Azure
- Azure Linux: A container host OS for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Q&A
- Focus on code, not infra with Azure Functions, Azure Spring Apps, Dapr
- Building AI solutions with Semantic Kernel
- Troubleshooting apps running on Kubernetes
- Build scalable, cloud-native apps with AKS and Azure Cosmos DB
- Azure Container Instances(ACI) use-cases and roadmap
- What’s new with Azure Messaging
- Self-serve app infrastructure using Azure Deployment Environments
- Optimizing Azure Cosmos DB: Strategies for cost efficiency and elasticity
- Modernizing your applications with containers and serverless
- Ship-It safely with GitHub Advanced Security
- Deliver apps from code to cloud with Azure Kubernetes Service
- Secure and observe your APIs no matter where they run
Fun to watch
- Developer joy with Scott Hanselman and friends
- Inside Azure innovations with Mark Russinovich
- Scott and Mark Learn to Code
Worth mentioning
- What's new in .NET 8 for Web, frontends, backends, and futures?
- What’s new in C# 12 and beyond
- Cloud-native development with .NET 8
- Integrating Azure AI and Azure Kubernetes Service to build intelligent apps
- Native Authentication for Customer-Facing Applications
- Getting started with generative AI using Azure OpenAI Service
- Using Azure to improve your organization’s sustainability posture
- Ship-It safely with GitHub Advanced Security
- Accelerate development with Visual Studio and Microsoft Power Platform
- Seamlessly integrate security throughout your code to cloud workflow
- What's new in Container Networking
Did I miss anything? Do you have any session recommendations? What were your highlights? Please let me know in the comments!
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