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Google Cloud named a Leader in the 2020 Forrester Wave for API Management Solutions

APIs are a critical component of any enterprise’s digital transformation strategy. They can drive customer engagement, accelerate time to market of new services, power innovation and unlock new business opportunities. Therefore, choosing the right API management platform is critical to running a successful API program, and research from industry analyst firms like Forrester Research can help enterprises evaluate and choose the right solution.Today, we’re proud to share that Google Cloud has been recognized by Forrester as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020. We believe this recognition is a testament to our continued strategic investments in product innovation and laser-sharp focus on the success of our customers. Today, six of the top 10 healthcare companies, seven of the top 10 retailers, five of the top 10 financial services companies and six of the top 10 telecom providers trust Apigee to drive their digital transformation efforts. Moreover, many global organizations that were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic continued to invest in Apigee as they doubled-down on their digital strategy. In this report, Forrester assessed 15 API management solutions against a set of pre-defined criteria. In addition to being named a leader, Google Cloud received the highest possible score in the market presence category, and the strategy category criteria of product vision, and planned enhancements, and current offering criteria such as API user engagement, REST API documentation, formal lifecycle management, data validation and attack protection, API product management, and analytics and reporting.“As a long-standing player in the market, Google Cloud has rich resources for educating customers and prospects on API business potential, including using them to create new ecosystem models. This shows in the product’s rich set of API product and pricing definition features,” according to the Forrester report. Forrester also noted that Google Cloud has deepened its integration of Apigee with other Google Cloud capabilities such as reCAPTCHA, machine learning and Istio-based service mesh. Forrester also noted that Google Cloud’s reference customers expressed high satisfaction with Apigee API management. We believe this reflects why large global brands like Nationwide Insurance, Philips, Pizza Hut, ABN Amro, Ticketmaster and Change Healthcare etc. partner with Google Cloud to drive their digital transformation programs. “What I’ve really appreciated about Apigee isn’t just the functionality in the developer portal, but the guidance they provided on how we should roll out our API strategy and how we can think strategically about digital transformation using APIs,” said Rick Schnierer, AVP, One IT Applications Business Solutions, Nationwide Insurance.You can download the full The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020 report here (requires an email address).To learn more about Apigee, visit the website here.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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New Azure SQL Learning Tools help reduce the global technology skills gap

Microsoft’s learning solutions pave the way toward data-centric jobs of the future

"It’s been forecasted 800 million people need to learn new skills for their jobs by 2030. In this time of change, people are hungry to learn, gain new skills, and grow their economic opportunity.”—Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Across Microsoft, we are helping a new generation of technology workers develop the right level of skills. Recently, Microsoft announced the availability of new virtual learning programs. These programs, focused on technical topics, are already helping people enhance their digital expertise and, for some, are providing a foundation for success in a new career path.

Building upon this goal, we're excited to announce the Azure Data team’s latest additions to these educational programs.

Our all-new content will help beginners being introduced to Azure as well as SQL experts learn how to understand the benefits of Azure SQL. Since SQL Server and Azure SQL share the same engine, these new set of tools builds upon familiar content. This means SQL Server professionals can become Azure SQL professionals with just a little bit of help, such as:

Microsoft Learn learning path: This six-course Azure SQL fundamentals learning path provides a built-in lab environment for you to learn at your own pace without a subscription.

YouTube/Channel9 series: We offer more than 60 videos to help beginners learn more about Azure SQL. Viewers can experience on-demand training through Microsoft Developer and Azure SQL playlists on YouTube and Channel9.

GitHub content: Learners and educators can dig into open-source code in a scenario-driven GitHub workshop, where forking and redelivering is encouraged. You can access this content by visiting the SQL Server workshops page and selecting “Workshop: Azure SQL”.

Learn Live in the Azure SQL Bootcamp: In this four-day series of live sessions, Microsoft SQL experts Anna Hoffman and Bob Ward will help you get ramped up and support you as you learn. You can sign up for Azure SQL Bootcamp here to join us.

Azure SQL’s rapid adoption creates new opportunities

Azure SQL adoption is accelerating at a dramatic growth rate and will continue on this trajectory for the foreseeable future. Azure SQL unlocks new opportunities for our customers to optimize costs, build resiliency, and promote agility with AI-based features, rapid scaling capability, and much more.

A few weeks ago, a Morgan Stanley report noted, “The key insight of [the] 2nd edition of our New Stack monthly is that the relational database, commonly viewed as outdated for the digital era, is not only not dead but is seeing a resurgence reflecting strong growth in cloud. MSFT is a key beneficiary with the top share in cloud and overall".

It’s a terrific time to join the Azure SQL community and fine-tune your technical skills. If you have questions about the benefits, opportunities, or process of making a move from SQL on-premises to SQL in the Cloud, we can lend a hand to guide you. Our new learning materials answer these questions and go into greater technical depth. On Twitter, you can follow us @AzureSQL and get more involved in the community with the #AzureSQL.

Kudos due to our SQL community 

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge a few members of our team who gathered feedback from customers, took that information to heart and developed our new curriculum. First, a heartfelt thank you to Anna Hoffman, Data Scientist, for your dedicated efforts to providing customers the latest content and for enabling more scalable platforms to deliver it. I’d also like to thank Bob Ward, one of our SQL visionaries, who has invested over 26 years driving SQL development. Last but not least, I’m grateful to Buck Woody, who has written hundreds of articles about databases to help educate future data experts.

Jumpstart your journey

In these uniquely challenging times, it is more important than ever for Microsoft to equip our SQL community with new tools and resources to help you succeed. Whether you are a SQL expert, or someone just starting, I encourage you to visit our latest resources and find out how you can jumpstart your journey to learn about Azure SQL.
Quelle: Azure

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Announcing preview of Java Message Service 2.0 over AMQP on Azure Service Bus

Azure Service Bus simplifies enterprise messaging scenarios by leveraging familiar queue and topic subscription semantics over the industry-driven AMQP protocol. It offers customers a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) offering with deep integrations with Azure services to provide a messaging broker with high throughput, reliable latency while ensuring high availability, secure design, and scalability as a first-class experience. We aim to offer Azure Service Bus for customer workloads on most application stacks and ecosystems.

In keeping with that vision, we’re excited to announce preview support for Java Message Service (JMS) 2.0 over AMQP in Azure Service Bus Premium tier. With this, we empower customers to seamlessly lift and shift their Java and Spring workloads to Azure while also helping them modernize their application stack with best in class enterprise messaging in the cloud.

As enterprise customers look to lift and shift their workloads to Azure, they may take the opportunity to modernize their application stack by leveraging cloud-native Azure offerings. This is more appropriate for components on the data plane, storing or moving data, which benefit from moving away from an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) hosted setup to a more cloud-native PaaS setup.

With databases and data stores, the establishment of standardized APIs and protocols has paved the way for seamless migration, wherein the application is agnostic of the actual provider or implementation of this standardized API and with negligible or configuration only code changes, the applications can move from their current on-premises provider to Azure’s fully managed PaaS offering with expected behavior.

The enterprise messaging ecosystem has been largely fragmented compared to the data ecosystem until the recent AMQP 1.0 protocol standardization in 2011 that drove consistent behavior across all enterprise message brokers guaranteed by the protocol implementation. However, this still did not lead to a standardized API contract, perpetuating the fragmentation in the enterprise messaging space.

The Java Enterprise community (and by extension, Spring) has made some forward strides with the Java Message Service (JMS 1.1 and 2.0) specification to standardize the API utilized by producer and consumer applications when interacting with an enterprise messaging broker. The Apache QPID community furthered this by its implementation of the JMS API specification over AMQP. QPID-JMS, whether standalone or as part of the Spring JMS package, is the de-facto JMS implementation for most enterprise customers working with a variety of message brokers.

Connect existing applications with Azure Service Bus over AMQP

With the feature list supported with this preview (with full parity planned by general availability), Azure Service Bus supports all Java Message Service API contracts, enabling customers to bring their existing applications to Azure without rewriting the application. Here is a list of JMS features that are supported today:

Queues.
Topics.
Temporary queues.
Temporary topics.
Subscriptions.

Shared durable subscriptions.
Shared non-durable subscriptions.
Unshared durable subscriptions.
Unshared non-durable subscriptions.

QueueBrowser.
TopicBrowser.
Auto-creation of all the above entities (if they don’t already exist).
Message selectors.
Sending messages with delivery delay (scheduled messages).

Seamless migration from on-premises or IaaS hosted JMS provider to Azure Service Bus

To connect an existing JMS based application with Azure Service Bus, simply add the Azure Service Bus JMS Maven package or the Azure Service Bus starter for Spring boot to the application’s pom.xml and add the Azure Service Bus connection string to the configuration parameters.

With configuration only code changes, as shown above, customers can keep their business logic agnostic of the message broker and avoid any vendor lock-in.
  

Simple pricing, painless deployments, and scalable resourcing

By leveraging Azure Service Bus JMS support, customers can now avoid the overhead of procuring licenses, managing an enterprise messaging broker on their own IaaS Compute, simplify cost management with a fixed price per messaging unit, and by leveraging automatic scale up and down provisioning to address variability in workloads.

Integrate with other Azure offerings to further modernize your application stack

You can also leverage Azure Service Bus’s integration with other Azure offerings to modernize and simplify the application stack. Here are some ways on how you can do that.

Azure Logic Apps: Utilize Azure Logic Apps connectors for Azure Service Bus to replace various critical business workflows with a simple low-code pay-as-you-go Serverless offering.
Azure Functions: Utilize Azure Functions triggers for Azure Service Bus to replace custom applications with a simple pay-as-you-go serverless PaaS offering.
Azure Monitor and Alerts: Utilize Azure monitor and alerts to keep an eye on the Azure Service Bus Namespace, Queue, Topics, and Subscriptions level metrics.
Azure KeyVault: Utilize integration with Azure KeyVault to encrypt the data on the namespace with a customer-managed key.
Virtual Networks and Private endpoints: Secure access to Azure Service Bus using Virtual network service endpoints. Connect with a cloud-hosted service via an address hosted on your private network using Private endpoints.

Get started today

Get started today by provisioning a Service Bus namespace with JMS features and migrating your existing Java and Spring applications from Active MQ to Service Bus.
Quelle: Azure