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Open Source Weekly: new Ansible on Azure improvements and more

For fans of Ansible’s automation capabilities, the Azure team announced significant improvements to the Ansible on Azure experience, including a new VS Code extension. Learn more about what’s new with Ansible on Azure, plus new docs, demos, and more, in this edition of the Open Source Weekly.
Updated Jenkins offer in Azure Marketplace: The Azure Marketplace now includes a secure, stable and production ready version of Jenkins. This solution template will install the latest stable Jenkins version on a Linux (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) VM along with tools and plugins configured to work with Azure, including git for source control, Azure credentials plugin for connecting securely, Azure CLI to deploy apps using scripts, and more. Visit the marketplace to learn more.
Ansible on Azure: This week, the Azure team announced some key improvements to the Ansible on Azure experience. Ansible is now available, pre-installed and ready to use, in the Azure Cloud Shell to make it really easy for anyone to get started with Ansible. The team also released an Ansible extension for Visual Studio Code that allows for faster development and testing of Ansible playbooks. You can use this extension to get code snippets for any Ansible module, get syntax highlighting and even run the playbook locally, in Docker containers, or directly in the Azure Cloud Shell.  Get more details on these improvements for devs here.
Visual Studio Code – Chrome debugging updates: The Debugger for Chrome extension allows you to debug your client-side JavaScript running in Google Chrome. This adds a new aspect to VS Code’s existing JavaScript debugging experience, where out-of-the-box you can debug your server-side JavaScript in Node.js. Having both debuggers installed allows you to do seamless full-stack JavaScript debugging. In recent months, the VS Code team has been busy improving the Chrome debugging experience and recently released three new features to make client-side JavaScript debugging in VS Code easier and more reliable. See what’s new here.
Running Ansible on Azure: Kylie Liang shows Donovan Brown how to run Ansible playbooks on Azure using Cloud Shell, a browser-based shell experience hosted in the cloud. She also demonstrates how to use the Ansible extension for VS Code to accelerate Ansible playbook development using auto-completion and code snippets, and then run it inside Docker or Cloud Shell.

AtScale on Azure HDInsight: Azure HDInsight is a fully-managed cloud service that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process massive amounts of data, using the most popular open source frameworks, including Hadoop, Spark, Hive, LLAP, Kafka, Storm, R & more. With AtScale, you can query data in-place – whether it lands in your Big Data Lake or HDInsight cluster, without additional data movement, and with OLAP and your BI tool of choice. In this video we will learn on how you can install AtScale on Azure HDInsight to build a big data application.

Community resources from Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office: Thousands of Microsoft engineers use, contribute to and release open source every day across every platform. Microsoft’s Open Source Program’s Office is committed to helping improve open source community interactions by sharing tools, services, and guidance.
2018 Women in Open Source Award: This week Red Hat announced 10 outstanding finalists for their Women in Open Source Award, selected from a record number of nominations. See the impressive list of finalists and help Red Hat select the two winners by voting here. Voting closes on February 21st and winners will be announced at the Red Hat Summit in May.

Here are some recent open source updates to docs.microsoft.com:
Run a Spark job on Azure Databricks using the Azure portal: This quickstart shows how to create an Azure Databricks workspace and an Apache Spark cluster within that workspace. If you haven’t heard of Azure Databricks, our Apache Spark-based analytics platform, check out this overview.
Ansible in Azure: With this week’s feature improvements, the Azure team has updated the docs here, outlining how to use Ansible to automate cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployments.
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