.Net Foundation On .NET, 26 Nov 2019

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From YouTube: Exploring the new Azure .NET SDKs for .NET

Description

Azure SDK Releases
https://azure.github.io/azure-sdk/index.html?WT.mc_id=ondotnet-c9-cephilli

Previewing Azure SDKs following new Azure SDK API Standards
https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/previewing-azure-sdks-following-new-azure-sdk-api-standards?WT.mc_id=ondotnet-c9-cephilli

Open Telemetry
https://opentelemetry.io/

Azure Monitor Docs
https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-monitor/overview?WT.mc_id=ondotnet-c9-cephilli

In this episode, we're joined by Adrian and Alex from the Azure SDK team who have come to talk to us about the new iteration of Azure SDKs they've been working on. They'll discuss things like what's different with this batch of SDKs, support for distributed tracing, and even give us a demo of what the .NET SDK looks like.

[01:04] - Why were the new SDKs created?
[03:43] - What were the areas of focus during development?
[09:15] - Comparing the new .NET libraries with the previous
[13:46] - Support for distributed tracing
[16:13] - What will be the first batch of services?

#azuredotnetsdk #dotnet #csharp

A

In this episode of the on.net show,, we're going to have some folks joining us from the azure sdk team to show us how we can make use of these new sdks they're, building to leverage azure services and some of our apps. check. It out.

A

Hey, everyone. welcome to another episode of the on.net show, and today I have some special guests with me from the azure sdk team.

A

So why do we start off with you folks, just introducing yourselves and let me know what exactly it is that you do on the team.

B

I'm adrian. I'm a program manager for the sdk team dealing with architecture.

C

I'm alex., I'm leading manager on the.net side of the sdk for azure.

C

got you., so your team, specifically not only just does.net sdks,.

A

But your team is responsible for all the azure sdks., so we're talking about .net, we're talking about python,, java and javascript, like all of those things are underneath that umbrella, right? yep. pretty much every single.

B

Language, if it's got an azure sdk,, it will fall into our group eventually,, but right now, you're right..

B

Those four languages are what our focus is.

A

Got you. okay., so we that sdks for azure for a long, time, right?.

A

But I'm sure you guys are here to talk about some new sdks.

A

So what do we talk about? Firstly, one,: why did you need to create these new sdks, right?, because I'm wondering what's wrong with the old ones., so we went out to a lot of customers.

B

And we talked to them about the problems that they were having,.

B

The issues and how we could improve,.

B

And we came up with certain things that were fairly universal across them.

B

Firstly, there wasn't a one-to-one relationship.

B

Between what service offered and the individual languages.

B

So a feature might be available in .net,, but not in python, for example..

B

So we wanted to unify the experience so.

B

That it didn't matter which language you wrote, in,.

B

You would get the same experience..

B

The second thing was that there were a lot of.

B

Niggling issues in the.net world for example, dependency, management., one sdk, would use json.net of.

B

One version and a different service sdk would use a different version, and reconciling that was problematic for people.

B

So those were the biggest reasons.

B

Why we did this and what we did was we came up with a plan.

B

To produce a unified, azure sdk so that, if you used.

B

A service sdk or service client library.

B

As we call them now from this unified azure sdk,.

B

You would get the same experience across all the services that were in that set.

B

got you and what I really love about. That.

A

Is in modern day software development,.

A

What I always find from our customers is: there's, never usually just one programming language in a solution or in a company.

A

Right. I've worked with folks that have been using ruby and python together or using php and c# together, or.net and python together.

A

We always want to find a way that we could have.

A

That common knowledge shared back and forth between the two.

A

So it sounds to me like if I'm a python guy or if I'm a java, guy,.

A

And I have the knowledge of the sdks,.

A

I can assume that very similar patterns would exist between these different sdks.. So the time that it takes me to ramp up to be productive would be a little bit. Less, right?.

A

Yeah., even across services.

B

There's certain things that you do regularly like paging, for example.

B

You shouldn't have to learn a new paradigm, every single time you go to a new service just for what is in essence, a list operation.

B

Got you. sure that makes sense.

A

So I know earlier we were talking about a couple pillars of areas of focus for these sdks.

A

Can we talk about those a little bit?? Can you touch on those a little bit?.

B

Yeah, absolutely. we've actually got a set of guidelines.

B

There's a set of general guidelines that we use to develop per language guidelines..

B

Then we've got guidelines for every single language that translate.

B

Those general guidelines into the language of choice to make sure that it's idiomatic.

B

got it. .net of course, has very strong idiomatic sense.

B

Of what it takes to produce a good library.

B

sure. aside from the idiomatic usage,, we have approachable as a big pillar, and that really means that as a developer,.

B

You should be able to get started and you should be able to understand the concepts from the service relatively easily.

B

So that really translates into a great documentation experience, starting from the quickstart that you use to learn how to integrate the library all the way through.

B

To how do I do this thing that I'm doing in the code.

B

Yeah. to be able to translate the concepts from one library to another.

B

So the paging one is the one I always come out to, but streaming data. Or how do you do error handling,.

B

How do you do logging, those should common concepts across the library.

A

That makes sense because and as a developer,, these are things that I have to write, over, and over, and over again.. So it's really good to hear the framework and the libraries just have this built-in,.

A

So I could leverage the work and also to have that consistency across these different sdks that you're building.

B

Yeah., so the second pillar is dependability, and this really comes down to one core tenant that we have.

B

We are doing the final breaking change to end all breaking changes, and we are committing to know breaking changes from this point. On.

B

That's a big one.

A

So that means when you're, using the unified, azure sdk,.

B

You can write it with one library,. You can upgrade the library for all of the security updates and keep up to date and we won't break you.

B

Awesome., so when you think about how important that.

B

Is for people to actually get those security updates just by a recompile of their program.

B

Sure. that becomes a seriously big effort.

A

Right., that's awesome.. I know, again, for a lot of folks that think about just keeping up to date, and upgrading, and those types of things,.

A

It becomes a process, right?, because now I got to put this through my cicd environment..

A

I got to have qa look at it,. I got to make sure that I can verify the software before we put it out to our different customers.

A

right.. So just the fact that we can have that reassurance that I don't know what these microsoft folks are going to do.. They got to change some stuff and all hell's going to break loose.

A

Yeah., so just knowing that we have that consistency is extremely important.. Yeah. we've all been there when new library.

B

Has broken and we just died on the vine.

B

Got you., I know there.

A

Are some other things that we wanted to talk about through, for instance, the consistency and also the ability to diagnose some of these things? Too, right?.

A

With those core tenants of what we or what you talked about, whenever you built this library.

C

Yeah. absolutely., as adrian mentioned,, one of the first things we did is we developed a set of guidelines that we wanted to follow and those guidelines were going to help people.

C

Understand our product and be able to use it across in a consistent way.. We also wanted to take some of those guidelines and.

C

Codify it in a way that our developers can build sdks and configure them in a way,, and to do that, we've created this core library.

C

We call azure.core that implements some of those guidelines and code.

C

Things like we try, logging and distributor tracing are all coded in the library, and it is the library that makes the communication between the other code and the service code, and handles all the heavy lifting for the sdk.

C

Another thing that we heard from customers that is very pinpoint is authentication..

C

Setting up your authentication is not trivial thing to do.

A

C

We took this opportunity to create a library called azure identity that has.

C

Abstracting that away from our customers and makes the customers use the sdk without having to think too.

C

Much about authentication and we have talks going into more details for both azure core and azure identity coming up.

C

So another thing that we wanted to.

C

Do is in the same line of consistency,.

C

We have all the packages that we have.

C

the agents that were coming up in your packages..

C

We want to make them in a consistent way., so all the packages will have the same, prefix, all start with azure.

C

and you can go and search on nuget or your other package manager, and they all look the same and it's easy to find.

C

sure and you had a slide about that. Too, right, didn't you?.

A

C

Didn't you want to show us really quickly? sure., so this is our slide where you can find.

C

Our guidelines are all open, source.

C

They're, all on open, source, everything is on github.. We have design guidelines where we can go and read about how we've designed an introduced. Our packages.

C

You can get packages on nuget.org, which is the default nuget package manager, for.net.

C

Our source code and docs are all available in the open, as well.

C

I have a demo that I'm going to show later and you'll be able to look at the source code for that as well.

C

sure.. That sounds great.

C

I'll. Come back to the coding part of this thing, where I wanted to show how.

C

Some of these guidelines can transfer directly into the code.

C

And how we can make it so much easier for customers-student to use these libraries..

C

So I'm going to show you a small asp.net core app that we wrote.

C

That is basically a cloud clipboard..

C

You can type some text in here,, you save it, and then it.

C

Will have a list of clips that you can share with your friends and do all that..

C

So let me jump into the code and show you how this was all put together.

C

yeah, that sounds great.

C

I'm going to contrast the before and after, how we used to have to do this before our libraries come in and how you could do it later.

C

the setup of this library.

C

Is mvc application and you have to figure out,?

C

How am I going to make my service client.

C

Available inside the application to be used in the code.

C

So, in order to do that,, you had to create an azureservicetokenprovider, retrieve a token from that, create a token credential using that, pass that to a storage, credential, finally, create a cloudblobclient and then add that as a singleton in your application., that's the code that you had to do and write for your application to authenticate.

C

With azure and retrieve all the information., with the new version of our libraries,.

C

Now that becomes a single line of code.

C

What it does is, it says,, please add a azure server client, and this is the add, a blob service client, and configure it with this service uri.

C

in the background,. What we do is, we use the default. Azure credential object, that's part of.

C

Azure identity to discover the right credentials for you to use.

C

You'll be able to write this code once and you'll be able to run it on your local def box, as well as in production, without making any changes to this.

C

the code behind azure identity will take care of figuring out the credentials from the environment that you're in. got you.. So what you're, showing us right now on.

A

The screen is at the top when we're looking at v11,.

A

That is the current or the currently released version of the sdks that are available today,, that people are using already., then what we're looking at now at line 46 is the new hotness,.

A

The easier mode that we're enabling, with these new set of sdks that I believe are in preview, today.

A

yes. got you. okay.

C

Another consistency part that we wanted to address.

C

Is making sure that the code that you write is taking advantage of the rights or the latest set of features that are available in your language, to make you more productive and make you write less code.

C

sure.. So as adrian mentioned,, iterating and paging over a set of items is a pretty complex, task.

C

As you saw in the beginning of the demo,, I was listing out the blobs that are available on the storage and the container., so the code that I had to write in the v11 of it was this code, get the service,.

C

Find the container for this particular user and have two nested loops;.

C

One that iterates over the pages and one that iterates over the items in the page..

C

So this is a non-trivial amount of code and it's easy to get wrong.

C

sure.. So taking advantage of the async iterators in the new language feature in c sharp,.

C

We can collapse those lines to these few lines.

C

Where you get blob container client,.

C

Which there's a container and then you iterate in a asynchronous fashion over the items and you return them.

C

This is available across all of our libraries that support paging, and it's again, part of our consistency model for how we get.

C

The same features and same behaviors in the product.

C

Got it. so I'm guessing.

A

These libraries are targeting a certain version: of.net standard,, so are these.net standard, 2.0, libraries?.

C

Yes, they're. got it.

C

one of the other things that I like to mention,. There are two more things. one is,. All of this code is using our azure core library as a core library,.

C

And that library will handle retries and a bunch of other heavy lifting underneath it,.

A

And also does the distributed tracing efforts.

C

So when you're looking at your application- and you make a call to a service, that service might make additional calls in the background, and with the distributed tracing,, you can get a feel for what call did it end up? Making.

C

If we look at a simple example,.

C

This is how you would look at your application..

C

This is a request for the blobs that we just saw.

A

You can drill in as a customer.

C

As a developer,, you can drill into it and understand or figure out what is taking so long..

C

You have information here to come up with, who called what and what responses that I got,.

C

How long it took, and I can further diagnose my library on my application.

A

Got you. so what you're, showing us right now on the screen is azure monitor,, right?

A

again,, one of the services that we have inside of azure today..

A

Is there anything special that I had to do to wire up inside of.

A

My sdk or inside of my code for us to collect this, or this just happens, automatically?

A

it pretty much happens. Automatically.

B

You do have to wire up the standard. Azure monitor, exporter.

B

The distributed tracing is based on open telemetry,.

B

Which is an open standard now., the way that works, is, you emit in your library or your application., you emit spans, which say, this is where this operation started,.

B

This is where it ends, and you get this hierarchy of spans, and may just get emitted to the open, telemetry system.

B

got it.. Then there's an exporter that says, export the data that I'm receiving to my store of choice.

B

So it doesn't have to be azure monitor,. It could be whatever you choose to do, and azure monitor supports open, telemetry.

B

okay., that's awesome., because I know,.

A

In terms of asp.net applications,, I'm pretty familiar with using something like application, insights and then I'd have an instrumentation key and now,.

A

It instruments my code,, what is my page views or my service course, my dependencies and these types of things., so you're saying now with this,. I don't really have to do a lot of that stuff,.

A

It will just automatically happen to me, or would I still have to give it the key?.

B

You still have to give it a key to do the exporter to the right place.

C

Got it. okay. that makes sense., but all of this is wired across our sdks and you can even use or user code can participate in the same spans that can get exported to azure monitor.

A

Okay., that sounds pretty good., so really quickly, just to summarize,.

A

So we spoke about these new sdks that are coming,.

A

Where we spoke about some of the reasons why we've created these new sdks.

A

we've seen some really cool and interesting demos to just really quickly about how these things might work.

A

One thing you may want to know about: is, azure has tons of different services that are there..

A

Are we doing new sdks for all of these services, or do we have a core set that we're trying to focus on right? Now??

A

We have a core set that we're trying to focus on right, now.

B

They are storage, event hubs,, the new app configuration service., cosmos., cosmos. cosmos is important.. Cosmos is important,, yes. key vault.

C

B

We'll be expanding that list over time.

B

got you. sounds great., awesome. hey, thank.

A

You-All for coming on the show,, I really appreciate it.. I think what we'll do is, we'll make sure that all of these resources and any blog posts or to-dos or github repository,.

A

We'll make sure to add them to the show notes, so that everybody could check them. Out. thanks a lot. awesome. thank you-all for watching.. This has been another episode of the on.net show..

A

We've learned how we can take advantage of these new azure sdks for.net that this team is building for us.