Episode 169: myNewsWrap – Microsoft, GitHub and SAP

Welcome to this week's edition of myNewsWrap, news from the world of Microsoft, GitHub, SAP ... and the world in between. The focus of my newsletter is the application development and all things around that can improve our lives as developers.

Let's dive into the news and explore what came up this week that can help us to build better solutions for our customers.

Microsoft Universe

First we take a look at the Microsoft universe and what crossed my path there.

Serverless - Functions, SWA and Azure Container Apps

Apps need to run somewhere and a very convenient way to run them is serverless. What came up this week in this space?

Azure Functions and Static Web Apps (SWA)

Durable Functions: Suspend and Resume instances is GA

Dapr

Having containers is nice but everything (well ... nearly everything 😉) gets better with Dapr as an outstanding tool for app development in the container-based area. Here we go what might be worth a look:

Dapr brings microservices principles to platform engineering by Beth Pariseau
Don't miss Dapr Day next week: Dapr Day 2024 - VIRTUAL

Developer Platform

This section collects all news touching the topic of a developer platform. Fuzzy term but here you find news on topics that make the life of developers easier beyond pure development be it Infrastructure as Code, GitHub and more like the Azure Developer CLI.

Infrastructure as Code

Beyond Terraform: How We Scaled DevOps by Malcolm Edgar
HashiTalks 2024 hosted by Ned Bellavance (including ASL interpreter, nice!)
Azure Landing Zones Accelerators for Bicep and Terraform. Announcing General Availability! by Jared Holgate

GitHub

GitHub comes with a blast of new features and enhancements every week. Here are my top 3 news from GitHub that you should check out:

GitHub Availability Report: January 2024 by Jakub Oleksy
Get started with v4 of GitHub Actions Artifacts by Konrad Pabjan and Rob Herley
The architecture of SAST tools: An explainer for developers by Nicole Choi

Want to see all news around GitHub? I recommend to have a look at GitHub's blog site as well as at its change log to get the complete overview.

Azure Developer CLI

Close to my heart as essence of how to make the developer life easier is the Azure Developer CLI. What's up in this area?

Azure Developer CLI (azd) – February 2024 Release by Grace Kulin ... finally!
- Release Notes 1.6.0
- Release Notes 1.6.1

The best of the "rest"

No matter how the structure of this newsletter is crafted, there is always something that does not perfectly fit. This section is dedicated to topics that I think are worth reading but did not fit into the structure from above:

Blog post to last weeks videos on Radius: Building your first Radius application on Azure Kubernetes Service by Will Velida
Measuring Your Azure Carbon Footprint with the Carbon Optimization Service by Danny van der Kraan

🐱‍👤 SAP and Microsoft - Combining both worlds

Combining Microsoft with SAP can lead to incredible new applications. Let's enter the twilight zone (no worries the ninja cat is with us) between SAP and Microsoft and see what's up here:

And of course a channel that you should subscribe to if you are working with SAP and Microsoft is the SAP on Azure hosted by Holger Bruchelt and friends.

Further news from the SAP world

Let's check out what else happened in the SAP universe that you should check out:

SAP has a new succession plan by Martin Bayer
SAP tauscht Plattner-Nachfolger überraschend aus by Christina Kyriasoglou

Learning

One important (and imho best part) of the job of a developer is the continuous learning. Here are some interesting learning resources that go beyond vendor-specific technology:

Legacy: Wirklich ein Problem? by Eberhard Wolff
Cloud Native Weekly - S2E2 - Copa, Copacabana 🎶: Patching Container Images with Karl Cooke, Richard Hooper and Weslay Haakman
News in 2024 need AI right: Generative AI in a Nutshell - how to survive and thrive in the age of AI by Henrik Kniberg

And a bit off-topic, but as return to office is mandated again, let's look at a interesting recent publication: Return-to-Office Mandates

Golo's Corner

One great resource for becoming a better developer and reflecting about our profession is the high-quality content of the native web GmbH by Golo Roden. This week the following topics were on the list: