As we close out 2022, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022.
At its Build 2022 conference this week, Microsoft added a bevy of tools and platform updates as part of its effort to improve the productivity of developers and the DevOps teams that support them.
A Microsoft Dev Box offering, for example, provides access to a set of pre-configured environments on the Azure cloud that enables developers to be onboarded in seconds, while a previously announced GitHub Copilot tool that makes use of artificial intelligence to make writing code faster will be made generally available this summer.
Donovan Brown, a partner program manager in the Azure CTO Incubations team, told conference attendees the overarching goal was to enable developers to stay agile while they continue to work remotely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For DevOps teams, a Smart Maps capability was added to the Application Insights module within Azure Monitor. Smart Maps leverages machine learning algorithms to surface performance bottlenecks or failure hotspots and is also available as a technical preview.
There is also a tool that discovers and groups dependent Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers to ensure all required components are identified and included during an Azure migration.
Other updates include an App Service Landing Zone Accelerator that provides a combination of artifacts and documentation to automate application deployment using the Azure App Service 3.0 and preview tools for migrating ASP.NET web applications to the platform. In addition, Microsoft is previewing support for Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) on the Microsoft Azure App Service. A .NET Multi-Platform App UI framework allows for building natively compiled applications for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows using C# and XAML in a single codebase.
Microsoft has also extended the reach of its cloud platform for managing application programming interfaces (APIs). The Azure API Management service now supports the Azure Private Link virtual private network (VPN) along with a capability that automatically renews certificates. In addition, Microsoft is previewing support for the GraphQL query language for APIs.
In addition, a GitHub OpenID Connect (OIDC) with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) workload identity federation capability has also been added to eliminate the need to store and access secrets outside of the Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft, in partnership with VMware, is adding a managed Azure instance of the Spring framework for building Java applications and making previews of the Dynatrace observability platform and NGINX proxy software available as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications on the Azure cloud.
Finally, Microsoft has added a raft of tools to make it simpler to build cloud-native applications on Kubernetes clusters.
It’s not clear how quickly developers are adopting these tools, but DevOps teams can expect to see the rate at which applications are developed on the Azure cloud increase in the months ahead. The challenge, of course, will be managing all those applications—both as they are being built and after they are deployed either in Azure or some other compatible IT environment.
