In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the releases of their new Azure SDKs for Azure Storage, Cosmos DB, Event Hub, and Key Vault. With the preview release of the new SDKs, Microsoft aims to address the problem developers face when building applications for the cloud: the inconsistency between many supporting libraries.
The cause of this problem arose after years of the rapid evolution of Azure. By releasing the SDKs, Microsoft is beginning their initiative to modernize their portfolio and simplify integration, with software both within Microsoft and externally.
Peter Marcu, principal group software engineering manager at Microsoft, stated in the blog post the objectives for the SDKs:
- Create easy-to-use APIs with productivity on par with the best libraries of the language ecosystems
- Provide APIs that are idiomatic to the language and ecosystem they are used in
- Evolve over time in a very compatible fashion
- Focus as much on documentation and samples, as on APIs
- Change how we create the libraries at their core
The new SDKs are currently available in four languages: Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and .NET. Furthermore, each code library will be compliant with a new set of Azure client SDK design guidelines and respective language-specific guideline. In a tweet, Marcu also said that the language Go can receive support in the future.
In the blog post, Marcu states that the guidelines can help developers apply patterns learned in one library into the others – the same applies to APIs they build with the libraries. Furthermore, Microsoft improved the usability testing for each library by bringing developers into the lab and observing them as they worked through different use cases.
Developers, on the one hand, can benefit from the libraries by the ease of use, documentation and consistency through the guidelines. However, the libraries, on the other hand, come with the backdraw of Microsoft making breaking changes to get a better foundation. As Marcu states:
We believe aligning on that foundation will help meet the productivity goals outlined above, and once it’s set, we intend to provide a high degree of compatibility.
The SDKs are available on GitHub, and each library will include a standard set of features such as identity and authentication, logging, error handling, networking retries and more.