TWIL: November 7, 2021

This week there was a lot of news to catch up. Between Microsoft’s announcements from Ignite, a security checklist for containers and an awesome periodic table of DevOps tools, there’s a lot of interesting stuff to read. I hope you find it useful.


Microsoft Ignite News

This was the week of Microsoft Ignite 2021, one of the largest yearly Microsoft events, where a lot of announcements are usually made. This edition was no exception so find some of them below.

Microsoft Ignite 2021 Book of News
The Microsoft Ignite Book of News is a guide to key news items that were announced at Microsoft Ignite. It includes a summary for each announcement and a link to more detailed information, as well as images on some of the contents.

Microsoft Loop
Microsoft Loop is a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that move freely and stay in sync across applications. It’s an awesome co-authoring and collaboration tool, tightly integrated into most Office applications, based on Microsoft’s Fluid Framework and composed of Loop workspaces, Loop pages and reusable Loop components.

Microsoft Office—Transforming for the hybrid world
Microsoft Office is changing with the times. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Outlook are better than they’ve ever been—with Microsoft Teams integration and cloud-powered AI across web, desktop, and mobile. But we needed to go further. That is why we are reimagining Office, adding new apps to respond to new opportunities, and making Office a universal, interactive canvas for creators of all kinds. We are introducing Microsoft Loop, a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that move freely and stay in sync across apps—enabling teams to think, plan, and create together.

Microsoft acquires Clipchamp to empower creators
Clipchamp is an in-browser video creation and editing experience founded in 2013 with a mission to empower anyone to tell stories worth sharing. The Clipchamp team is dedicated to making a video app they would personally love and are proud to have the world use as well. Clipchamp’s technical approach is to combine the simplicity of a web app with the ability to process video using the full computing power of a PC with graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, something that was formerly limited to traditional video applications.

Azure Fluid Relay
Azure Fluid Relay is a managed cloud service that supports Fluid Framework Clients. Fluid Framework is a collection of client libraries for distributing and synchronizing shared state. These libraries allow multiple clients to simultaneously create and operate on shared data structures using coding patterns similar to those used to work with local data.

Microsoft launches Azure Container Apps, a new serverless container service
At its Ignite conference, Microsoft announced the preview launch of Azure Container Apps, a new fully managed serverless container service that complements the company’s existing container infrastructure services like the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Microsoft notes that Azure Container Apps was specifically built for microservices, with the ability to quickly scale based on HTTP traffic, events or long-running background jobs.


Containers

Container Security Checklist: From the image to the workload
Great resource to anybody building solutions with containers. It explains the container threat model and provides an extensive checklist to build and secure your container images across several phases of the lifecycle: Build, Container Registry, Container Runtime, Infrastructure, Data and Workloads.


DevOps

Migrating Azure Pipelines from Classic to YAML
If you have started using Azure DevOps several years ago (maybe its name was Visual Studio Team Services by then), then you are probably still using the Classic Build and Release pipelines to fulfill your CI/CD needs. There is nothing wrong with these Classic Pipelines but the trend over the years has been to follow the Everything as Code approach, including CI/CD Pipelines as Code, and Azure Pipelines also supports it by using YAML Pipelines.

Periodic Table of DevOps Tools
The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools is the industry’s go-to resource for identifying best-of-breed tools across the software delivery lifecycle. Created by DevOps practitioners for DevOps practitioners, over 18,000 votes were cast across more than 400 products in 17 categories to produce the 2020 Periodic Table of DevOps Tools.


Cool Stuff

Four Minute Books
Four Minute Books is a collection of over 1,000 free book summaries of the world’s best books. Created by Niklas Göke to allow everyone to learn from the best books for free, without having to read through all of them. According to Niklas and his team, all you need is to spend 4 minutes each day to speed up your learning. Seems like a good challenge to take up.

Why Chaos is Good Sometimes – A Guide to Chaos Engineering
Chaos Engineering is a principle where planned and systematic experiments are conducted to reveal weaknesses of a system. These weaknesses include “what if” – what if the system fails? No one likes chaos, and in Bert Lance’s words, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But times have changed, and advancement in technology is at a tremendous pace. Nowadays, one must have a backup data center, neither have failover data centers nor failover apps – and this kind of availability is improved only through chaos engineering.

.NET 6 Launches at .NET Conf, November 9-11
.NET Conf is a FREE, 3 day virtual developer event organized by the .NET community and Microsoft. Next week .NET 6 will launch at .NET Conf 2021! Over the course of these three days, there is a variety of live sessions that feature speakers from the community and .NET teams.


Have a great week!

Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash