AzureR updates: AzureStor, AzureVM, AzureGraph, AzureContainers

Some major updates to AzureR packages this week! As well as last week's AzureRMR update, there are changes to AzureStor, AzureVM, AzureGraph and AzureContainers. All of these are live on CRAN.

AzureStor 3.0.0

There are substantial enhancements to multiple-file transfers (up and down). You can supply a vector of pathnames to storage_upload/download as the source and destination arguments. Alternatively if you specify a wildcard source, there is now the ability to recurse through subdirectories; the directory structure in the source will be reproduced at the destination.

There are revamped methods for getting storage properties and (user-defined) metadata for storage objects.

You can now use Azurite with AzureStor, by creating a service_specific endpoint (file_endpoint, blob_endpoint, adls_endpoint) with the Azurite URL. AzureStor will print a warning, but create the endpoint anyway.

For other changes, see the NEWS.md file.

AzureVM 2.1.0

You can now create VM scalesets with attached data disks. In addition, you can specify the disk type (Standard_LRS, StandardSSD_LRS, or Premium_LRS) for the OS disk and, for a Linux Data Science Virtual Machine, the supplied data disk. This enables using VM sizes that don't support Premium storage.

AzureGraph 1.1.0 and AzureContainers 1.1.2

These packages have been updated to use the new Microsoft Graph operations, introduced last week, for managing app passwords. As a security measure, app passwords can no longer be manually specified; instead they are auto-generated on the server using a cryptographically secure PRNG.

In AzureGraph, the az_app$update_password() method is defunct; in its place are add_password() and remove_password(). Similarly, in AzureContainers the aks$update_service_password() and aks$update_aad_password() methods no longer accept a manual password as an input.

If you use Graph, and in particular if you use AzureContainers to deploy Azure Kubernetes Service clusters, you should update as soon as possible, as the old versions are incompatible with the new Graph API.

If you run into any problems, please open an issue at the GitHub repo in question.