The Build announcement I got from Build 2017 Day 1
This year is my second year at Build. Most announcement during Build are given on Day 1. This blog post is a summary of announcement that I heard of during my sessions.
The sessions I followed on day 1 are:
- Keynote
- DevOps for every Team
- Asp.Net Core 2.0
- Continuous Delivery on Microsoft Azure
- Azure Compute: New Features and roadmap
Keynote
Information about the keynote and the announcements made their I have already shared in the following blog post:
Build 2017 announcements that effect your work
DevOps for every Team
DevOps was one of the buzz words of Build 2017. At the keynote every attendee got a folder regarding the DevOps sessions. This session was not a real DevOps sessions but showed more the capabilities Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery options within Visual Studio Team Services. Most of the functionalities for this are build completely within the Azure Portal itself.
Key facts from this session were:
- From the Continuous Delivery tab within the Azure Portal you can now also create a new VSTS account and setup Continuous Delivery.
- You can branch within Git version control from a work item.
- WhiteSource extension for build templates that does an Open Source Security check.
- Create a new Git version control project within Visual Studio Team Services based on a Team Foundation Source Control.
- New Release Pipeline visualization.
- Package management support.
- Deployment groups to support deploying to machines within the same role.
- This functionality also adds the ability to set to which machines the new version needs to be deployed to check the release,
- Release Plans for VSTS is General Available and is included within your subscription
Asp.Net Core 2.0
The Asp.Net Core 2.0 sessions was a really good and funny session from Scott Hanselman and Daniel Roth about the announced preview of Asp.Net Core 2.0. Within this session they showed the new capabilities and possibilities of .Net Core 2.0. Executable can be downloaded from the following place:
https://www.microsoft.com/net/core/preview#windowscmd
Note: Installation Preview 3 of Visual Studio 2017 can be done side by side your production version.
Key facts were:
- More functionality build in to the runtime of .Net Core 2.0 examples are:
- Diagnostics logging.
- Configuration, can be added by default dependency injection.
- Preview of .Net Core 2.0 25% faster than the 1.1 version. Improvements are mostly made during Startup.
- Razor Pages can be created and used within .Net Core 2.0.
- Environment configuration. For example for your configuration files. (appsettings.dev.json)
- Azure Active Directory B2C integration.
Continuous Delivery on Microsoft Azure
The session was about the Continuous Delivery options for Microsoft Azure. Options that were shown are the default options that are within Visual Studio 2017, command line and VSTS. The other features and announcements were more summarized and described shortly below.
Azure IaaS DevOps with VSTS
- Deployment Groups
- Agent Based deployments based on tags
- Scale set deployment
- VHD based deployments using Packer.
- Integration into the Azure Portal //Coming soon
- Azure Key Vault //Coming soon
- Consume keys during your deployment
Besides the above announcement Microsoft is also focusing on Container DevOps and announced a lot of things as you can see in the below picture.
Another great announcement that will be coming soon was Pipeline as Code this basically is a definition file of your release pipeline based on YALM.
Azure Compute: New Features and roadmap
During this session new features and roadmap information was given about everything about Azure Compute divided into three sections: Infrastructure, Containers and Platform, were mainly two of them were very important to my opinion.
Infrastructure
A lot of new IaaS sizes were announced were two of them were special. The Dv3 en Ev3 were discussed and shown especially because they support nested virtualization. Nested virtualization is the virtualization of machines within a virtual machines. Besides that Corey Sanders gave a demonstration of Azure PowerShell within the Azure Portal that is coming soon and is in preview. The best feature of Azure PowerShell within the Azure Portal was the ability to browse your Azure subscriptions and resources in a file based format using the “dir” and “cd” commands. If your would like to sign up for the preview go to:
Another announcement was a new service called: “Instance Metadata Service” that runs on the virtual machines within Azure that is a rest Api on: https://169.254.169.254 and shows information of the machine for example maintenance windows and scheduled reboots.
Platform
An announcement for platform was about Azure batch called Low Priority Batch VMs which are evitable instances which will give you to 80% discount. It really means that Microsoft can get back instances of that you define as Low Priority Batch VMs in order to use for other type of usage that will result in a large discount for you.
The preview of the Azure Function Runtime was also an announcement that makes it possible to run the Azure Function runtime almost everywhere like within Azure IoT Edge. You can download it from here: https://aka.ms/azafr
Last but not least they announced a feature that Seals azure services as a sealed app in other to distribute them and keep management over the applications that is called Azure Managed Applications (should be available today).