As 2018 draws to a close we'll take a look at all the new products, features and announcements we have seen through the year, and what we hope to see in 2019.

ARM template functions allow you to perform simple operations directly on in your templates to transform values in your deployment. In this article we'll look at some less commonly used templates that can be really useful

Pod Identity allows you to assign Azure Managed Identities to Pods in your Kubernetes cluster. Using Managed Identity greatly simplifies the approach to granting your applications access to Azure resouces.

Learn how Azure Container Instances can be used to run scripts as part of your ARM template deployments.

A cheaper alternative for processing your SmartThings data in Azure for storage in Cosmos DB and reporting in Power BI.

A recent update to the ARM schema means you can now create Blob containers in your template. We're still waiting for tables, queues and shares, but this is a start. Unfortunately, the ARM reference docs don't seem to have been updated to show how to do this, so I'll show you how.