Cloud News 2020 / 11

The Wechsler Consulting Cloud News – November 2020 – episode talks about renewable energy in Azure data centers in Sweden, the newest feature in Azure IOT and very helpful addition to create Azure Active Directory B2C custom user journeys, which are intended to solve one of the major pain point of this service.

Highlight and Focus Topic of this month is Microsoft Pluton. A new hard- and software security solution derived from Xbox and Azure Sphere now entering the PC stage.

#WechslerConsultingCloudCampus #AzureIOT  #Azure

Azure Talk

Renewable energy in Sweden

https://azure.microsoft.com/de-de/blog/achieving-100-percent-renewable-energy-with-247-monitoring-in-microsoft-sweden

AAD B2C – User Flows

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-active-directory-identity/simple-and-secure-customization-with-b2c-user-flows/ba-p/1751709

IOT Plug and Play Bridge

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-pnp/concepts-iot-pnp-bridge

Connect any IoT sensorto Azure | Internet of Things Show | Channel 9 (msdn.com)

Azure Sphere and Cellular Connectivity

Azure SphereCellular Connectivity | Internet of Things Show | Channel 9 (msdn.com)

Cellularconnectivity + Azure Sphere: securityboundaries – Microsoft Tech Community

New IOT Pricing

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/democratizing-iot-with-iot-plug-and-play-and-new-pricing-for/ba-p/1902762

Focus Topic

Microsoft Pluton Processor

Meet the Microsoft Pluton processor – The securitychipdesigned for the futureof Windows PCs – Microsoft Security

Protect Azure Data Centers with Azure Sphere

https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/11/23/iot-security-how-microsoft-protects-azure-datacenters

Azure IOT Central – Updates

IOT Central is Microsoft’s low code, low effort, ease of use approach into the world of embedded projects. This is quite a demanding challenge, because real world problems tend to be complex and what can you do to make these simple in a tool?
Well, normally you start with defining an environment, to get rid at least of some of the parameters and thus reducing complexity. This is a valid approach, but for a tool/service vendor it carries the danger that the overlap of your defined environment to common real-world use cases of customers, is not large enough, or, as a worst case, even not existing.
Azure IOT Central, in the beginning, felt a bit like: great base features, but not enough to cover a complete project spectrum of demands.
Therefore, to me it was good for samples or a quick POC for a project. However, the IOT Central team kept improving steadily and so the product is getting more serious as we speak.

The newest update provides some very interesting features, like jobs that can be execute on devices (very important for device management), webhook improvements looking at identity management, device templates to support IOT Plug & Play as well as improvements on the dashboard.

At least for me enough new stuff to justify a closer and serious re-visiting look into IOT Central!

🙂
Alexander

.NET 5.0 is out!

… or, globally available (GA), as Microsoft tends to say.
Technically, this is absolutely great news, because the newest version of the Microsoft development runtime brings a lot of new features, fixes and performance improvements.
It also cleans out a lot of the past architectural wanderings, the .NET platform has undergone in the recent years.
A really good summary of the new features and changes can be found in the .NET Core documentation.

V5 – A new engine for .NET!


Nevertheless, I always stand in wonder, how the marketing guys find the most confusing names for new products. Must be a contest.
With .NET 5.0, this is hilarious!
It is not .NET (well classic!), but based on Core, while the ASP .NET and Entity Framework parts keep “Core” in their names and, by the way, it does not replace .NET Standard.
I give 10 out of 10 obfuscation points…..

But nevertheless, developers, this is a great runtime and SDK release, so lets get over the naming accidents.
As always! 😉

Alexander