Python 3.10 support for Azure Functions & our final episode! | Azure This Week

G'day Cloud Gurus. Welcome to Azure This Week, I'm Wayne Hoggett and I'll be taking you through what's new and interesting in the world of Azure. In this episode, we'll take a look at Python 3. 10 support in Azure Functions and Azure Static Web Apps. We'll explore a couple of security enhancements to Azure Database Services and the addition of the Azure Communication Services Chat Channel for Bot Framework. We also have an important announcement regarding Azure This Week at the end of this episode, so stay tuned for that. Let's jump in. Support for Python Version 3. 10 is now generally available for Azure Functions and in public preview for Static Web Apps. This means you can move your Functions based backend to 3. 10 now and test your Azure Static Web Apps front end. Python is one of the most popular languages in the world, both in terms of how much it is currently used and how many up and coming gurus are learning it. And in the age of artificial intelligence, there has never been a better time to learn Python. So whether you're looking to take advantage of the better error messages in the 3. 10 release, or merely looking to extend your security updates for another few years, now is the time to move to 3. 10 for your Azure Functions in production workloads and test your Azure Static Web Apps with this release. Just a reminder that Azure Functions runtime version 3 reached end of life in December last year, so you'll need to use runtime version 4 with Python 3. 10. There have also been a couple of recent security-related improvements to Azure Database Services. The first of these is Azure Active Directory Authentication for Postgres Flexible Server. To help you decide how you should authenticate access to your resources, I've developed a simple decision tree. It's fairly straightforward. Using Active Directory for authentication whenever possible is ideal because it centralizes your identity, enables additional controls, and it reduces the need to store credentials. In other Azure Database news for customers with the most stringent of security requirements, Always Encrypted with Secure Enclaves has been brought to more database SKUs by removing their requirement to run on confidential compute capable, DC-series hardware. And this has been achieved using virtualization-based enclaves. If these features interest you, check out the links below for more details. Microsoft also recently announced that Azure Communication Services Chat for Bot Framework is now available in public preview. If you're unfamiliar with the Azure Bot Service, it allows you to create and run chatbots and make them available through channels. And channels allow you to make your bots available to your customers or users in different webpages and applications. Existing channels include things like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Facebook. Azure Communication Services has been added to that ever-growing list of channels. It's got rich feature support for a range of Azure Bot Services functionality. Check it out in the links below. Now, chatbots seem to be all the rage right now, but we could never be replaced by AI, right? I mean, we do have one advantage over chat. conversational AI and that is that we never make mistakes. There really wasn't anything in that availability That wasn't very clear. get started with I O T Don't expect the next updates that will allow you to projects global Azure storage outage due to an start. Oh, Well that was awkward. Anyway, that's all we have time for this episode... in this episode of Azure This Week and Cloud Gurus, we're sad to say this is the last episode of Azure This Week, but that's because we're making room for more exciting new cloud content coming your way in 2023. So make sure you subscribe to stay up to date. As always, thanks for watching and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.