Sometimes working on advanced technologies comes with the peril of NDAs … which limit what I can talk about… but it is nice to see yet another of our projects feature in Keynote speech by Satya Nadella, this time at Microsoft //BUILD 2018. Proud to be the lead architect working on advanced Machine Learning solutions and pipelines at Jabil.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-grid/overview
Azure Event Grid generally available
Easily subscribe and react to interesting events happening in any Azure service or in your own apps with Azure Event Grid, a fully managed event routing service. Event Grid removes the need to continuously poll by reliably routing events at high scale and low latency. In addition, take advantage of the rich coverage and reactive event model enabled by Event Grid in your serverless architectures. These features were added as part of the general availability (GA) release:
| ✓ | Richer scenarios enabled through integration with more services: Azure Storage General Purpose v2 accounts were added; Azure IoT Hub and Azure Service Bus were added as new event publishers; and Azure Event Hubs was added as a new destination for events. |
| ✓ | Availability in more regions: It’s now available in the following regions: West US, East US, West US 2, East US 2, West Central US, Central US, West Europe, North Europe, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, with more coming soon. |
| ✓ | Increased reliability and service-level agreement (SLA): We now have a 24-hour retry policy with exponential back off for event delivery. We also offer 99.99 percent availability with a financially backed SLA for your production workloads. |
| ✓ | Better developer productivity: New management and data plane SDKs help make the development process smoother. |
Event Grid is now generally available. GA pricing will be effective for billing periods beginning on or after April 1, 2018. Learn more on the overview and pricing webpages or via the Azure Blog.
The Azure Data Architecture Guide:
The guide is structured around a basic pivot: The distinction between relational data and non-relational data.
Relational data is generally stored in a traditional RDBMS or a data warehouse. It has a pre-defined schema (“schema on write”) with a set of constraints to maintain referential integrity. Most relational databases use Structured Query Language (SQL) for querying. Solutions that use relational databases include online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP).
Non-relational data is any data that does not use the relational model found in traditional RDBMS systems. This may include key-value data, JSON data, graph data, time series data, and other data types. The term NoSQL refers to databases that are designed to hold various types of non-relational data. However, the term is not entirely accurate, because many non-relational data stores support SQL compatible queries. Non-relational data and NoSQL databases often come up in discussions of big data solutions. A big data architecture is designed to handle the ingestion, processing, and analysis of data that is too large or complex for traditional database systems.
Within each of these two main categories, the Data Architecture Guide contains the following sections:
This guide is not intended to teach you data science or database theory — you can find entire books on those subjects. Instead, the goal is to help you select the right data architecture or data pipeline for your scenario, and then select the Azure services and technologies that best fit your requirements. If you already have an architecture in mind, you can skip directly to the technology choices.
Traditional RDBMS
Concepts
Scenarios
Big data and NoSQL
Concepts
Scenarios
Cross-cutting concerns
Azure offers a rich data and analytics platform for customers and ISVs seeking to build scalable BI and reporting solutions. However, customers face pragmatic challenges in building the right infrastructure for enterprise-grade production systems. They have to evaluate the various products for security, scale, performance and geo-availability requirements. They have to understand service features and their interoperability, and they must plan to address any perceived gaps using custom software. This takes time, effort, and many times, the end-to-end system architecture they design is sub-optimal.
ref: https://github.com/Azure/azure-arch-enterprise-bi-and-reporting/blob/master/README.md
Azure Cosmos DB, Azure DW, Machine Leaning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, TensorFlow, SQL Server, ASP.NET Core… are just a few of the components that make up one of the solutions we are currently developing.
Have been under a social media embargo, until today, but now that the Microsoft Ignite 2017 keynote has taken place, I am able to proudly say that the solution our team has been working on for some time was part of the Keynote addresses.
During the second keynote lead by Scott Guthrie, Danielle Dean a Data Scientist Lead @Microsoft discussed at a high level, one of the solutions we are developing at Jabil, which involves advanced image recognition of circuit board issues. The keynote focused in on the context of the solutions data science portion and introduced the new Azure Machine Learning Workbench to the packed audience.
Tomorrow morning there is a session – “Using big data, the cloud, and AI to enable intelligence at scale” (Tuesday, September 26, from 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM, in Hyatt Regency Windermere X)… during which we will be going into a bit more detail, and the guys at Microsoft will be expanding on the new AI and Big Data machine learning capabilities (session details via this link).
Many database systems have features allowing change data capture or mirroring, for use with live backups, reporting, data warehousing and real time analytics for transactional systems… Azure Cosmos DB has such a feature called the Change Feed API, which was first introduced in May 2017.
The Change Feed API provides a list of new and updated documents in a partition in the order in which the updates were made.
Microsoft has just recently introduced the new Change Feed Processor Library which abstracts the existing Change Feed API to facilitate the distribution of change feed event processing across multiple consumers.
The Change Feed Processor library provides a thread-safe, multiple-process, runtime environment with checkpoint and partition lease management for change feed operations.
The Change Feed Processor Library is available as a NuGet package for .NET development. The library makes actions like these easier to read changes from a change feed across multiple partitions and performing computational actions triggered by the change feed in parallel (aka Complex Event Processing).
Judy Shen from the Microsoft Cosmos DB team has published some sample code on GitHub, demonstrating it’s use.
Aravind Ramachandran, Mimi Gentz and Judy Shen also just published an article Working with the change feed support in Azure Cosmos DB on the Azure docs site a few days ago…
2017-7-24
Azure Cosmos DB is a fast and flexible globally replicated database service that is used for storing high-volume transactional and operational data with predictable single-digit millisecond latency for reads and writes. This makes it well-suited for IoT, gaming, retail, and operational logging applications. A common design pattern in these applications is to track changes made to Azure Cosmos DB data, and update materialized views, perform real-time analytics, archive data to cold storage, and trigger notifications on certain events based on these changes. The change feed support in Azure Cosmos DB enables you to build efficient and scalable solutions for each of these patterns.
With change feed support, Azure Cosmos DB provides a sorted list of documents within an Azure Cosmos DB collection in the order in which they were modified. This feed can be used to listen for modifications to data within the collection and perform actions such as:
- Trigger a call to an API when a document is inserted or modified
- Perform real-time (stream) processing on updates
- Synchronize data with a cache, search engine, or data warehouse
Changes in Azure Cosmos DB are persisted and can be processed asynchronously, and distributed across one or more consumers for parallel processing. Let’s look at the APIs for change feed and how you can use them to build scalable real-time applications. This article shows how to work with Azure Cosmos DB change feed and the DocumentDB API.
Note
Change feed support is only provided for the DocumentDB API at this time; the Graph API and Table API are not currently supported.Use cases and scenarios
Change feed allows for efficient processing of large datasets with a high volume of writes, and offers an alternative to querying entire datasets to identify what has changed. For example, you can perform the following tasks efficiently:
- Update a cache, search index, or a data warehouse with data stored in Azure Cosmos DB.
- Implement application-level data tiering and archival, that is, store “hot data” in Azure Cosmos DB, and age out “cold data” to Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Store.
- Implement batch analytics on data using Apache Hadoop.
- Implement lambda pipelines on Azure with Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB provides a scalable database solution that can handle both ingestion and query, and implement lambda architectures with low TCO.
- Perform zero down-time migrations to another Azure Cosmos DB account with a different partitioning scheme.
Lambda Pipelines with Azure Cosmos DB for ingestion and query
You can use Azure Cosmos DB to receive and store event data from devices, sensors, infrastructure, and applications, and process these events in real-time with Azure Stream Analytics, Apache Storm, or Apache Spark.
Within web and mobile apps, you can track events such as changes to your customer’s profile, preferences, or location to trigger certain actions like sending push notifications to their devices using Azure Functions or App Services. If you’re using Azure Cosmos DB to build a game, you can, for example, use change feed to implement real-time leaderboards based on scores from completed games.
…
Read more at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/cosmos-db/change-feed
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Cosmos DB is of significant interest to myself for projects I have been engaged in for the past couple of years which use MongoDB and MEAN in several ways. Scaling for us has always been a bit of a pain with MongoDB, and Cosmos DB on Azure looks to be relieving a lot of the headaches we have had.
MEAN stands for MongoDB, Express, Angular and Node.
I am not the author of these – this is a reference list to a YouTube series by John Papa introducing MEAN with Cosmos DB on Azure. I would normally just link directly to the creators blog or post for a series such as this, but it seems to be offline just now so I thought I would share a full list of current videos here – hopefully the original link will work again soon – which is https://johnpapa.net/angular-cosmosdb-1/.
John builds a lot of apps with MongoDB, Express, Angular and Node (MEAN). MongoDB just works so well with these, but recently he has been using Cosmos DB on Azure in its place because it’s easy to use, scale, is super fast, and he does not have to change how he codes.
Creating a Node.js and Express App along with the Angular CLI. Then create a web API endpoint and try it out.
The A in MEAN stands for Angular. This video shows how to build an Angular UI that talks to the Express API, with GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.
Using the Azure CLI, to create the Cosmos DB account to represent a MongoDB model database and deploy it to Azure. Then view what we created in the Azure portal.
How to connect to the MongoDB database with Azure Cosmos DB, using Mongoose, and query it for data.
You can subscribe to John’s YouTube series at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnXt_I6OfBWU9JiDNewZm11-7eFQf70M or follow him on twitter @John_Papa
New update for Azure SQL Data Warehouse…
Reduce troubleshooting time with the upgraded Resource Health check for SQL Data Warehouse.
This upgrade considers the health status of all components of the SQL Data Warehouse architecture, which includes each SQL database distribution and the SQL Data Warehouse engine on each compute node. Login and heartbeat signals of each component are emitted at least once every 2 minutes, providing you a low-latency, holistic view of the health status of your data warehouse. If your instance is Unavailable, we will provide the reason along with recommended actions that you should perform.
The Resource Health check can detect unavailability reasons, such as when your instance is pausing, scaling, or upgrading. This feature also detects when there are any connection issues, whether they are user connections or inner SQL database connections.
You check the health of SQL Data Warehouse by signing in to the Azure portal and clicking the Resource Health blade.
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed system that supports the document, graph, and key-value data models which Microsoft have classified as a multi-model database service for mission-critical systems.
It also supports both the API for MongoDB and the DocumentDB API for creating, querying, and managing resources.
If you would like to understand how to answer any of the following questions: –
Interaction model using the standard HTTP methods
Then take a look at Azure Cosmos DB REST API for full details first published on 18th July 2017 which covers these topics.
If interested in performing CRUD operations using REST, see Common tasks using the Azure Cosmos DB REST API.
If interested in performing CRUD operations using C# and REST, see the REST from .NET Sample on GitHub which can help you out.
If interested in more details of the MongoDB API, then see Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB: API for MongoDB which covers the benefits of using Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB applications.
MongoDB wire protocol
… and finally if looking for help getting started then the following MongoDB quick starts will help you out: –
and also: –
Kirill Gavrylyuk stops by Azure Friday to talk Cosmos DB with Scott Hanselman.
Watch this quick overview of the industry’s first globally distributed multi-model database service followed by a demo of moving an existing MongoDB app to Cosmos DB with a single config change.
For more information, see: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cosmos-db/
Paul Bunting • Software Architect 