Microsoft Ignite 2021 took place online November 2-5. This fall edition was full of dev news, and if you don’t want to miss anything related to App development and innovation, keep reading!
Session Highlights
What does it take to build the next innovative app?
During the Digital and App Innovation Into Focus session, Ashmi Chokshi and Developer and IT guests Amanda Silver, Donovan Brown and Rick Claus discussed processes and strategies to help deliver innovative capabilities faster.
Developers are driving innovation everywhere, and Ashmi started the conversation strong sharing how she sees the opportunity to drive impact. Then, Donovan presented his definition of cloud native, the benefits of a microservices architecture, and engaged in a discussion with Rick around DevOps and Chaos Engineering. This session also discussed how to transform and modernize your existing .NET and Java applications. Amanda Silver concluded with a demo showing how tools like GitHub Actions, Codespaces and Playwright can help with development, testing and CI/CD, no matter what language and framework you are using.
The sketch below illustrates the cloud native and DevOps segment showcasing the new public preview of Azure Container apps, a fully managed serverless container service built for microservices that scales dynamically based on HTTP traffic, events or long-running background jobs.
To dive deeper into the latest innovation on containers and serverless to create microservices application on Azure, don’t miss Jeff Hollan and Phil Gibson’s session where they demoed Azure Container apps and the Open Service Mesh (OSM) add-on for Azure Kubernetes Service, a lightweight and extensible cloud native open-source service mesh built on the CNCF Envoy project. Brendan Burns, Microsoft CVP of Azure Compute, also shared his views on how Microsoft empowers developers to innovate with cloud-native and open source on Azure in this blog.
Another highlight of Ignite was the Build secure app with collaborative DevSecOps practice session, followed by the Ask-the-expert, where Jessica Deen and Lavanya Kasarabada introduced a complete development solution that enables development teams to securely deliver cloud-native apps at DevOps speed with deep integrations between GitHub and Azure.
Announcements recap
In addition to Azure Container apps and Open Service Mesh add-on for AKS, we also announced new functionalities for Azure Communication Services, API management, Logic Apps, Azure Web PubSub, Java on Azure container platforms and DevOps.
- Azure Communication services announced two upcoming improvements designed to enhance customer experiences across multiple platforms: Azure Communication services interoperability into Microsoft Teams for anonymous meeting join, generally available in early December; and short code functionality for SMS in preview later this month.
- Regarding Azure Logic Apps, updated preview capability and general availability to Logic Apps standard features have been made available for SQL as storage provider, Managed identity, Automation tasks, Designer, Consumption to standard export and connectors.
- Azure Service Bus premium tier namespaces now support sending and receiving payloads up to 100MB.
- New solutions for running Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications on AKS and Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) are now available in the Azure marketplace: Customers can now use Azure Marketplace offers for Oracle WebLogic Server on AKS and IBM WebSphere Liberty/Open Liberty on AKS and ARO to automatically provision resources on Azure.
- As for news around DevOps, developers can secure their deployments to Azure through OpenID Connect integration between Azure Active Directory and GitHub Actions. At Ignite, the DevOps Workflow Generator tool was also released to help customers visualize their entire DevOps toolchain and find ways to improve it.
The complete line up of Azure Application development sessions and blogs is listed below:
On-demand sessions:
Blog-posts:
Additional learn resources:
- Each session has a curated Microsoft learn collection with learn modules and paths, e-books recommendations, related blog posts etc. Here is the collection for Digital and App Innovation IntoFocus session: https://aka.ms/intofocus-digital-apps
- We also just released the new 2021 edition of the Developer’s Guide to Azure, free for you to download!
We can’t wait to see what you create!
Microsoft
