This week I recommend a set of podcasts, namely one on Synthentic Data and one on ALM for Power Platform. Also, a few interesting articles on topics such as Data Lakehouse, Federated Learning, DevSecOps on Azure and how Microsoft evolved Azure App Service. Finally, take a look at Duck DB and Mermaid. Have fun!

---

Podcasts

Hanselminutes

Episode 853: Redpoint’s Erica Brescia supports Tech Founders
Erica Brescia co-founded Bitnami, and later joined GitHub as COO. She’s also on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation. This week she talks to Scott about how VC works, where the money comes from, how one moves from idea to funded, and how companies like Redpoint help support founders.

Towards Data Science

Episode 124: Synthetic data could change everything
What if I could generate an anonymized set of medical records or financial transaction data that captures all of the latent relationships buried in a private dataset, without the risk of leaking sensitive information about real people? That’s the mission of Alex Watson, the Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Gretel AI, where he works on unlocking value hidden in sensitive datasets in ways that preserve privacy.

.NET Rocks

Episode 1807: ALM for Power Platform with Kartik Kanakasabesan
How does Power Platform fit into your application lifecycle management? Carl and Richard talk to Kartik Kanakasabesan about his work on Power Platform to treat it like every other development approach. Kartik talks about how PowerApps create straightforward forms-over-data solutions that work well on phones, tablets, and PCs. The conversation digs into how developers in the C# and Visual Studio space can work with Power Platform developers, including building back-end services, creating front-end components, and working with existing source code and deployment pipelines. The result is what Kartik calls fusion development, where everyone works together to build solutions effectively!

The Azure Podcast

Episode 435: HPC on Azure
The team catches up with Bill Paxson and Rob Futrick to learn about Azure HPC and the unique way in which the Microsoft Support team is supports HPC customers

---

Data & AI

The rise of the data lakehouse: A new era of data value
Query accelerators such as data lakehouses consolidate the data warehouse and data lake into a single system of insight that enables enterprises to accelerate analysis and maximize data value at a reduced cost.

Azure Data Explorer: Log and telemetry analytics benchmark
Azure Data Explorer (ADX), a component of Azure Synapse Analytics, is a highly scalable analytics service optimized for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. It provides users with an interactive query experience that unlocks insights from the ocean of ever-growing log and telemetry data. It is the perfect service to analyze high volumes of fresh and historical data in the cloud by using SQL or the Kusto Query Language (KQL), a powerful and user-friendly query language.

Practical Federated Learning with Azure Machine Learning
In December 2021 we published several assets to support Medical Imaging with Azure Machine Learning. The great interest and numerous inquiries have surprised us very much. It once again makes clear that AI applications are becoming increasingly important in medical practice. With Federated Learning, we are today introducing an exciting new addition to our portfolio, which has great significance inside and outside healthcare to protect data and intellectual property.

Duck DB
There are many database management systems (DBMS) out there. But there is no one-size-fits all database system. All take different trade-offs to better adjust to specific use cases. DuckDB is no different. Here, we try to explain what goals DuckDB has and why and how we try to achieve those goals through technical means. To start with, DuckDB is a relational (table-oriented) DBMS that supports the Structured Query Language (SQL).

---

Cloud Architecture

A Guide to Navigating the AKS Enterprise Documentation & Scripts
The goal of this blog is to serve as Guidance on Microsoft AKS Enterprise Documentation. Microsoft has created a set of resources that can simplify and accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes. This is a set of resources that help you build out landing zones for AKS and some for Azure. These resources live in the Azure Architecture Center (AAC). The AAC is where you get guidance for architecting solutions on Azure using established patterns and practices.

DevSecOps in Azure
Security is a prime concern for businesses that access or store any sort of customer or client data. The DevSecOps approach utilizes security best practices from the beginning of development, shifting the focus on security away from auditing at the end and towards development in the beginning using a shift-left strategy.

---

Microsoft News

Announcing Microsoft Dev Box Preview
Today, we’re excited to announce the preview of Microsoft Dev Box is now available to the public. Microsoft Dev Box is a managed service that enables developers to create on-demand, high-performance, secure, ready-to-code, project-specific workstations in the cloud. Sign in to the Azure portal and search for “dev box” to begin creating dev boxes for your organization.

A Heavy Lift: Bringing Kestrel + YARP to Azure App Services
In 2021, a group of engineers across multiple teams, including .NET and Azure, got together to transition the App Service Frontend fleet to Kestrel + YARP. As we celebrate the completion of this major lift and collaboration, we decided to write down the journey and describe some of the challenges of completing such a change to a live service, the wins we achieved, and the future work enabled by this transition. We hope you enjoy it.

---

Cool Stuff

Mermaid
Mermaid lets you create diagrams and visualizations using text and code. Mermaid is a JavaScript based diagramming and charting tool that uses Markdown-inspired text definitions and a renderer to create and modify complex diagrams. The main purpose of Mermaid is to help documentation catch up with development. Diagramming and documentation costs precious developer time and gets outdated quickly. But not having diagrams or docs ruins productivity and hurts organizational learning. Mermaid addresses this problem by enabling users to create easily modifiable diagrams, it can also be made part of production scripts (and other pieces of code).

---

Have a great week!

Photo by Ravi Singh on Unsplash