Microsoft Previews Azure SDK for Python (Conda) Packaging System -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Previews Azure SDK for Python (Conda) Packaging System

By David Ramel
05/14/2021

Microsoft released a preview of the Azure SDK for Python (Conda), providing package, dependency and environment management, specifically in the form of open source libraries for provisioning, managing and using Azure resources from Python applications.

According to its web site, the open source Conda "quickly installs, runs and updates packages and their dependencies. Conda easily creates, saves, loads and switches between environments on your local computer."

Conda is closely associated with Python, for which it was created, though it also works with many other languages.

In a May 14 blog post, Microsoft announced the preview, saying, "Conda is the most popular platform for scientific computing. It is widely used by data scientists. It provides a packaging system, separate from PyPI, which optimizes for self-contained packages, guarantees dependency enforcement, and provides built-in execution environment isolation."

The SDK packages comes with a large collection of client libraries for specific functionality, ranging from configuration to storage to text analytics. In addition to those client libraries, others cover identity/security and management.

"We've simplified packages for Azure SDK for Python (Conda) by grouping them by services," said Microsoft's Xiang Yan, Senior Software Engineer. "E.g. we bundle azure-storage-blob, azure-storage-queue, azure-storage-file-share and azure-storage-file-datalake packages into one azure-storage package. It is not 1 on 1 mapping between conda packages and PyPI packages." PyPI, standing for the Python Package Index repository of software for Python, helps developers find and install software created and shared in the Python community.

Available via the Microsoft channel, the post includes instructions on using commands to add the Microsoft channel to Conda config and then install the packages via the command line.

"Azure SDK for Python (Conda) packages are now in preview and we be stable soon," Xiang said. "If you want to give it a try and give us feedback, you can open issues on GitHub. Your contribution will be more than appreciated."

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.