AzUpdate: Azure Defender for IoT Architectural Reference, Backup for Azure Managed Disks and more

by Contributed | Jan 22, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Lots to cover this week. News stories to be discussed include the availability of Azure Defender architectural references for IoT, Backup for Azure Managed Disk is now in limited preview, Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows available for public preview, ITOps Talks: All Things Hybrid update and of course the Microsoft Learn Module of the Week.

Azure Defender architectural references for IoT

Azure Defender for IoT provides two sets of capabilities, agentless solution for organizations, and agent-based solution for device builders.  Designed for scalability in large and geographically distributed environments with multiple remote locations, the agentless solution enables a multi-layered distributed architecture by country, region, business unit, or zone. 

The agent-based solution offers numerous modes to thwart security attacks. Built-In mode offers real-time monitoring, recommendations and alerts, and single-step device visibility. Enhanced mode analyzes raw security events from your devices and can include IP connections, process creation, user logins, and other security-relevant information.

More information can be found here: Azure Defender for IoT architecture

Backup for Azure Managed Disk is in limited preview

Azure Backup now enables the ability to configure protection for Azure Managed Disk currently in limited public preview. Azure Backup provides snapshot lifecycle management for managed disk by automating periodic creation of snapshots and retain them for a configured duration using Backup policy. The backup solution is crash-consistent which takes point in time backup of a managed disk using incremental snapshots with support for multiple backups per day and does not impact production application performance. It supports backup and restore of both OS and Data disk (including Shared disk), regardless of whether or not they are currently attached to a running Azure Virtual machine.

Read the following documentation to learn more about Azure Disk Backup.

Fill this form to sign-up for preview.

Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows

The solution enables the ability to run containerized Linux workloads alongside Windows applications in Windows IoT deployments. IoT Edge for Linux on Windows works by running a Linux virtual machine on a Windows device which comes pre-installed with the IoT Edge runtime. Any IoT Edge modules deployed to the device run inside the virtual machine. Windows applications running on the Windows host device can communicate with the modules running in the Linux virtual machine.

Further details can be found here: Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows available for public preview

Periscope up – What’s on the horizon for ITOps Talks: All Things Hybrid event

Acknowledging there is room for improvement in the way virtual events are delivered, the team is currently heads down building on-demand content.  The event’s theme is a 300 level look at Hybrid architecture, harnessing the best of on-premises and cloud, from aspects of enablement, security and management.  Microsoft Engineers and Experts have been working with our team to ensure all content presented is demo heavy and an acurate representation of the challenges experianced in harnessing a hybrid architecture.

Details surrounding all the upcoming sessions can be found in Rick Claus’ post here: Periscope up – what’s on the horizon for hybrid event

Community Events

• Patch and Switch – Rick Claus and Joey Snow are back again?  Unusual for them to have back to back shows.  Must be announcing something big for 2021.


• ITOps Talks: All Things Hybrid – A new type of event that allows you to watch sessions on your time.  Focusing on “All Things Hybrid” the event, the sessions will focus on hybrid based cloud strategies and resources at a 300 level.
   

MS Learn Module of the Week

AZ-104: Monitor and back up Azure resourcesotect against threats with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection

Learn how to monitor resources by using Azure Monitor and implement backup and recover in Azure. This learning path helps prepare you for Exam AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator. Get a grasp on how to handle infrastructure and service failure, recover from the loss of data, and recover from a disaster by incorporating reliability into your architecture.
 

This learning path can be completed here: AZ-104: Monitor and back up Azure resources

Let us know in the comments below if there are any news items you would like to see covered in the next show. Be sure to catch the next AzUpdate episode and join us in the live chat.

How Your Program Works

by Contributed | Jan 21, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Would you like to learn how your program works?  You can learn it with Small Basic Online.

Small Basic Online has new Debug feature.  You can run your program step by step.  And you can see values of variables and call stack.

Steps to see how your program runs:

1. Type your program in Small Basic Online editor.
2. Push [Debug] button.
3. Push [Memory] icon to see variables and call stack.
4. Push [Next Line] button to advance one step in your program.

If you’d like to set break point, insert Program.Pause() command in the editor.  Then use [Continue] button to run till the break point.

Have Fun with Debug!

Azure Data Factory Enables Data Wrangling at Scale with Power Query

by Contributed | Jan 21, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The Azure Data Factory team is excited to announce a new update to the ADF data wrangling feature, currently in public preview. Wrangling in ADF empowers users to build code-free data prep and wrangling at cloud scale using the familiar Power Query data-first interface, natively embedded into ADF. Power Query provides a visual interface for data preparation and is used across many products and services. With Power Query embedded in ADF, you can use the PQ editor to explore and profile data as well as turn your M queries into scaled-out data prep pipeline activities. Data Flows in ADF and Synapse Analytics will now focus on Mapping Data Flows with a logic-first design paradigm, while the Power Query interface will enable the data-first wrangling scenario.

With Power Query in ADF, you now have a powerful tool to use in your ADF ETL projects for data profiling, data prep, and data wrangling. You have immediate feedback from introspection of your Lake and database data with the Power Query M language available for your data exploration. You can then take your resulting mash-up and save it as a first-class ADF object and orchestrate a data pipeline with that same M Power Query executing on Spark.

When you have completed your data exploration, save your work as a Power Query object and then add it as a Power Query activity on the ADF pipeline canvas. With your Power Query activity inside of a pipeline, ADF will execute your M query on Spark so that your activity will automatically scale with your data by leveraging the ADF data flow infrastructure.

In the example above, I added my Power Query activity to my pipeline for cleaning addresses from my ingested Lake data folders with Power Query, then handing the results off to a Data Flow via ADLS Gen2, where I perform data deduplication and then use the ADF pipeline to send emails when the process completes.

Because you are in the context of an ADF pipeline, you can define destination sinks for your Power Query mash-up so that you can persist the results of your transformations to data store like ADLS Gen2 storage or Synapse Analytics SQL Pools. Leverage the power of ADF to define source and destination mappings, database table settings, file and folder options, and other important data pipeline properties that data engineers need when building scalable data pipelines in ADF.

Click here to learn more about Azure Data Factory and the power of data wrangling at cloud scale with the new updated Power Query public preview feature in ADF.