Microsoft Ignite Announcements for Developers

Microsoft Ignite Announcements for Developers

Fall 2022 Edition

With dozens of product announcements made at Microsoft Ignite on Wednesday morning, it's hard to know which are the biggest ones for developers. This is my take on the ones you should care about most, and why.

Azure DevOps Security Investments

Microsoft customers love Azure DevOps — it's a great value, integrates deeply with Azure, and includes the tools teams need to start adopting DevOps practices. Because of that, a bunch of new investments and improvements were announced to reassure customers that the service has a long life ahead and will continue to coexist with GitHub.

GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps

Previously only available with GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Advanced Security will soon be natively integrated into Azure Repos and Azure Pipelines, offering the same secret scanning, dependency scanning, and CodeQL code scanning features to help you "shift left" and integrate security early in the development process.

Microsoft Defender for DevOps

Microsoft Defender for DevOps provides security teams with visibility into DevOps security, including integration with GitHub Advanced Security running in Azure DevOps or GitHub Enterprise.

OpenID Connect support for Azure Pipelines hosted agents

Soon, you'll no longer need to use Personal Access Tokens (PATs) when using Microsoft-hosted pipeline agents and will instead be able to use OpenID Connect credentials, including ones from Azure Active Directory.

The Azure DevOps Roadmap page has been updated with all of the planned features and improvements. Its future is looking bright!

Why you should care: Integrating security into your DevOps pipelines help you find issues while they're cheaper and easier to fix and before they're deployed.

Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL

Azure Cosmos DB now supports both SQL and NoSQL workloads thanks to true distributed PostgreSQL compatibility and features, powered by Citus.

Microsoft Mechanics has a great overview video on how this works if you're interested in digging deeper.

Why you should care: Work with your relational data like you're used to, while gaining the benefits of global distribution, easy performance scale up/down, and support for building multi-tenant SaaS applications.

Azure Deployment Environments Public Preview

Azure Deployment Environments let developers quickly create application infrastructure in Azure that is consistent, compliant, and cost-efficient.

Azure Deployment Environments scenarios

Why you should care: Developers can get the fast access to the environments they need for development and testing while IT and platform teams can ensure their standards for security and compliance are being met.

Azure API Management Integration with Postman

Microsoft and Postman announced a partnership to simplify API testing and monitoring using Postman while making it much easier to deploy API definitions into Azure API Management from Postman.

Why you should care: These new features mean developers can create APIs faster and get them into production sooner.

Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus

Get the benefits of monitoring your containerized workloads with the Prometheus without needing to manage and care for your own installation. Built on the same platform used by Azure Monitor Metrics, Managed Prometheus is highly scalable and highly available.

Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus overview diagram

Why you should care: Continue to use the de-facto standard for monitoring Kubernetes workloads without worrying about managing and scaling your own infrastructure.

Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager

Azure Kubernetes Service does a lot to simplify the management of containerized workloads by offloading the operational overhead to Azure, but complexity quickly grows with the number of clusters in your environment.

Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager lets you join new and existing AKS clusters into your fleet, where you can manage them more like a single cluster.

Why you should care: Fleet Manager simplifies the process of propagating changes across clusters and enables scenarios like multi-cluster load balancing.

New Call Automation APIs in Azure Communication Services

Developers can now use new APIs to automate simple transactional call workflows (school closures, power outages, etc.) and complex interactive workflows (flight changes, conversational AI flows, etc.).

Call Automation APIs in Azure Communication Services

Why you should care: ACS Call Automation APIs makes it easier for you to automate many scenarios like click-to-call, appointment reminders, and interactive self-help workflows.

Azure App Service Updates

There was a collection of small updates announced for Azure App Service at Ignition, including:

  • New language version support, including Go language for the first time.
  • Day-zero support for .NET 7 when it becomes generally available in November
  • Support for new large SKU instance sizes in App Service Environment v3
  • Planned maintenance capability in App Service Environment v3
  • A new automated scaling option for dedicated app service plans

Why you should care: Azure App Service is the most popular way to run web applications and APIs in Azure because it lets developers focus on innovating by offloading most of the complexity of managing and scaling application servers.

Mariner AKS Container Host Preview

Mariner, the Microsoft-created Linux distribution optimized for containers, is now available in preview as a container host for Azure Kubernetes Service.

Why you should care: Mariner is already used in production by Microsoft today in Minecraft, Xbox, and many Azure services. It's optimized with fewer dependencies and a smaller attack surface and secured with the same software supply chain, build pipelines, and validation tests used by Microsoft engineers.

Dapr Support for Managed Identity in Azure Container Apps

Now, a Dapr-enabled container app can make use of the container app's Managed Identity when connecting to Azure services.

Why you should care: Managed Identity eliminates the need for managing secrets and is the recommended authentication method when working with Azure resources that support them.