Microsoft Azure is one of the major public cloud providers offering various PaaS, computing, storage, analytical services, and more. Its growing popularity is mainly due to the scalability and flexibility it offers while building complex infrastructure. However, the challenge arises when one receives their month-end Azure bill and notices a significant cost spike exceeding the budget estimated.

As a result of this, organizations have started prioritizing cost management/optimization and while looking to explore new strategies, many have identified FinOps to be one of the most effective practices that can be incorporated.

So, this blog will address the most asked questions, like why one should implement it and what are the best Azure FinOps tools currently available?

In a move that will likely excite many web developers and content creators, Microsoft has recently released the public preview of their free hosting plan for WordPress on App Service. This move comes one year after they made the General Availability announcement of WordPress on App Service in August 2022.

This article delves into the specifics of this exciting announcement, breaking down the benefits, eligibility, features, and some limitations of this new venture.

In a real-world integration landscape involving several Azure Logic Apps, addressing issues before they impact critical operations or customer experiences is crucial. Rather than simply responding to incidents after they occur, proactive monitoring empowers us to take preemptive measures and ensure business continuity.

In this article, you will explore one such Azure Logic App monitoring tool, highlighting the limitations of native Azure Monitor in attaining proactive monitoring and a way to resolve them.

When building a microservice application consisting of many distributed Azure services that communicate with each other, it is vital to have a mechanism that supports observing and tracing the request flow from end to end.

Understanding this, Azure offers native tools like Application Insights to achieve distributed tracing. They help to log and track how a request flow performs through Azure services.

This article dives deep into the significance of distributed tracing, how it can be attained using Application Insights, their pros/cons, and an out-of-the-box BAM solution to get started with.

In the modern cloud era, organizations have started to shift towards the Azure cloud offerings given the less commitment towards the cost, maintenance, and agility for go-to-market.

Also, one of the significant reasons for the recent increase in the adoption was that the Microsoft BizTalk Server users started to migrate to Azure iPaaS as it integrates well with the existing workloads.

The Azure footprint of an organization will continue to grow, which will eventually add a layer of complexity in managing the Azure cloud cost.

Microsoft releases a new update (November 2022) to Azure SDK. The latest update brings new features, improvements, and fixes. In this release, Microsoft added support for Python 3.11 and marked the minimum supported Node.js version as 14.

Numerous older Azure SDK libraries that do not comply with the Azure SDK Guidelines have been retired (deprecated) and support will end in 2023, said Microsoft. To learn the highlights of Azure SDK November 2022 Update, continue reading further.

Microsoft announces the release of Windows App SDK version 1.2 (WinApp SDK), which will allow you to create widgets for Windows 11. You will need Visual Studio 2022, .NET 6+, and WinRT.Runtime.dll version 2.0 or greater to build applications using WinAppSDK 1.2.

The latest stable version of Windows App SDK comes with a set of new features. Here's what has been changed and improved in Windows App SDK (WinApp SDK) version 1.2.

Microsoft Azure VM is a flexible cloud computing service that runs on an isolated partition of its host computer, used popularly for development and testing. Its versatility and ability to allow users to deploy applications in minutes make it an indispensable asset for most business organizations.

However, without the proper Microsoft Azure monitoring tool, servers often don't perform at maximum efficiency, resulting in unnecessary downtimes and service disruption.

The massive shift from monolithic to microservices architecture has caused a considerable demand for distributed tracing. Traditional monitoring tools were designed for monolithic applications, so they primarily provide insights into application performance rather than how a request flows through the application.

However, if you are working with a microservices architecture, it is crucial to track every user request and the path of the request flow across multiple applications.

By default, the Azure Static Web Apps environments are publicly accessible. Microsoft is soon making these environments secure by introducing an option to set a password to it. Once added, visitors will require to enter that password before viewing the app.

Password protection is a user-friendly feature that provides a low level of security. It can be used in addition to Static Web Apps Authentication. To learn how to enable password protection on your Azure Static Web Apps environments, continue reading further.

Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based ETL and data integration service. It allows you to create data-driven workflows for orchestrating data movement and transforming data at scale. Using the Azure Data Factory, you can create and schedule data-driven workflows (pipelines), and publish your transformed data to data stores such as Azure Synapse Analytics for business intelligence (BI) applications.

Recently Microsoft announced February 2022 update for Azure Data Factory which added some exciting new features to the platform. Continue reading to know more about this update.

The Service Bus Queues and Topics are enterprise-level messaging technologies offered by Microsoft Azure to make messaging between services more reliable. Anyone using them for their business should be familiar with a concept known as message dead-lettering.

Now, let's begin by discussing Service Bus dead-letter Queues, how they work, and most importantly, the top choices you should consider for monitoring the same.

Azure has made tremendous growth in the last decade. This is due to the rapid cloud adoption by various enterprises and organizations around the world. When cloud expenses increase, it becomes difficult to track and understand the utilization of Azure Resources. Lack of proper documentation leads to many problems as mentioned. Nevertheless, preparing documentation itself turns into a tedious task due to the multi-tenant architecture of Azure.

Here comes the Serverless360 Azure Documentation Tool to solve challenges in documenting Azure Subscription. This article will give you an overview of what is Azure Documenter and its benefits.

Java codeless application monitoring is all about simplicity. Using the Java agent, you can monitor all of your Java applications hosted in any environment without performing any code changes. Microsoft now made the Java 3.0 agent for Azure Monitor Application Insights publicly available.

The Java agent can be enabled through just a couple of configuration changes, and it instantly enables powerful functionality and benefits. Continue reading further to know more about it.

Private Endpoints enables you to consume your app through a specific IP address located in your Azure Virtual Network (VNet), eliminating exposure to the public internet. Microsoft now made the announcement of Azure App Service support for Private Endpoints generally available.

From now onwards, you can use Private Endpoints in all Azure public regions for both Windows and Linux apps. Continue reading to know more about what you can achieve with it.

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to make you more productive with Visual Studio 2019. With the next feature release of the IDE, they are going to add Container Tools to make you more productive in creating serverless solutions.

To try out this feature before the public release, you need to install the latest preview version of Visual Studio 2019. Continue reading to know more.

Are you using the Azure Active Directory service? To increase the security of your account, Microsoft has now increased the character limit of your cloud based Azure Active Directory password.

With this rule in place, you can now configure a password for your Active Directory with much more flexibility, while keeping your account secure.

Windows Virtual Desktop Preview is a comprehensive desktop and app virtualization service running in the cloud, which provides you the ability to deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes.

The service from Microsoft has now entered into public preview. That means, you can now access this service and provide your early beta feedback to Microsoft.

If you read my previous post, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) got a new home. Microsoft rebranded it with a new name and location to give you effective ways to manage your project using Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, Azure Artifacts, Azure Repos and Azure Test Plans.

Existing VSTS users still gets the old URL. But as an organization, you can force redirect your users to the new location by following some simple steps.

Microsoft announced rebranding of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) as Azure DevOps, with a new name, new location and new services. Azure DevOps will allow you to plan smarter, collaborate better and ship faster with a set of modern dev services.

Let's learn what is Azure DevOps, what are the new Azure DevOps services and whether the Azure DevOps is available to all VSTS users.