June 14, 2023
Welcome to the twelfth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2023.
Hello again, my friends from around the world. I’m so happy you continue to subscribe and read this bi-weekly newsletter on Azure. I enjoy sitting down each week to research and write this, and hopefully, you will continue to find value in it. Feel free to invite your co-workers or others to subscribe if you think they would find it helpful.
The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.
ONE.
Late last week, I saw a post on the Azure User Group Facebook group about being unable to access the Azure Portal. Accessing the “Preview Portal” seemed to be the easy way around that at the time. This outage apparently also affected Entra Administration and Intune.
CLI and PowerShell continued to work, Microsoft has said.
This week, the preliminary root cause of the outage is being blamed on a “traffic spike.” Coincidentally, a known hacking group has claimed responsibility for a Denial of Service attack. Microsoft hasn’t confirmed if the claims are accurate.
This is a reminder that you should have alternate ways to manage your Azure resources ready to go before becoming completely reliant on a single method. If accessing your resources is essential to your work, having the command line tools (and modules) already installed and tested will save you time when another method suffers even a short outage.
All cloud providers are going to have these issues from time to time, especially if it’s caused by a malicious actor. But you can follow some of the steps in the Root Cause Report below to prepare yourself for these things that happen occasionally.
See the root cause report here:
https://azure.status.microsoft/status/history/
And an interesting blog here:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-azure-portal-outage-was-caused-by-traffic-spike-/
TWO.
Amazon AWS has had its own distro of Linux for almost as long as I can remember. So when you deploy an EC2 instance in AWS, you are offered Amazon Linux as the default and have to specifically choose a different distro if that’s what you need.
After a couple of years of testing, first privately and then publicly, Azure now has its own version of Linux too. Azure Linux is now in general availability.
This makes sense from a couple of viewpoints.
One, Microsoft needs a standard version of Linux for its own projects. Instead of every team choosing a different distribution vendor, or the company standardizing on one of the vendors, they created their own Common Base Linux (CBL) that can then be the standard for all their internal projects.
Azure Linux is also specifically designed for the Azure cloud and to run container workloads. They can ensure that this version of Linux runs on their own platform better than any other vendor.
Azure Linux is mainly used for containers. If you’re going to run your own workloads in a Linux VM, you probably have a specific version that you are developing against and reasons to choose one distro over another. But for containers, the container itself is the platform you are developing for. You’re generally not going to care which distro its deployed to.
You can read about Azure Linux for Containers in this blog post:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-infrastructure-blog/introducing-the-azure-linux-container-host-for-aks/ba-p/3824101
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
Two weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d summarize all the exciting things announced at Microsoft Build. So this update contains four weeks’ worth of announcements. Here we go!
The following updates to the Azure platform were announced in the last four weeks:
- New 99th percentile latency metric for Redis Cache, in preview
- Azure Pipelines task to build and deploy to Azure Container Apps, in GA
- Azure Cache for Redis now supports Azure AD authentication, in preview
- Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in Azure Container Apps, in preview
- Init containers in Azure Container Apps, in preview
- Azure Bastion now supports shareable links, in GA
- Azure Center for SAP solutions, in GA
- Policy analytics for Azure Firewall, in GA
- Azure Monitor for SAP solutions, in GA
- Azure Container Storage, in preview
- App Service now supports Custom Error pages in public preview
- Seamlessly upgrade your Application Gateway V2 WAF configuration to a policy, in GA
- A dozen or so new features for Azure ML in GA
- Another dozen or so new features for Azure ML in Preview
- Azure Cosmos DB burst capacity, in GA
- Azure Cosmos DB computed properties, in preview
- Azure Linux support in AKS, in GA
- Kubernetes marketplace, in GA
- Multi-cluster update support in Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager, in preview
- Free managed TLS certificates for Azure Container Apps, in preview
- Secrets volume mounts for Azure Container Apps, in preview
- GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps, in preview
- Linked backends for Azure Static Web Apps, in GA
- Materialized views for Cosmos DB NoSQL API, in preview
- Azure Cosmos DB hierarchical partition keys, in GA
- Azure Cosmos DB all versions and deletes change feed mode, in preview
- Azure Cosmos DB serverless container with 1 TB storage, in GA
- Microsoft Azure Deployment Environments, in GA
- Confidential containers on Azure Container Instances (ACI), in GA
- Time-travel for Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB, in preview
- New Azure App Service plans (Premium V3 and Isolated V2)
- Reservation utilization alerts, in preview
- Network observability add-on for AKS, in preview
- App Service automatic scaling in the Portal, in preview
- Exactly Once Delivery to Event Hub Output, in GA
- Azure Stream Analytics is Launching a New Competitive Pricing Model
- Azure AI Content Safety, in preview
- Azure Files geo-redundancy for standard large file shares, in preview
- Data mapping designer in Azure Logic Apps (Standard), in preview
- Azure Load Balancer per VM limit removal, in GA
- 8TB memory Mv2 Virtual Machine, in GA
- Multiple backups per day for Azure Virtual Machines, in GA
- Private Link support for Application Gateway, in GA
- Azure Container Instances(ACI) Spot containers, in preview
- Azure Front Door upgrade from standard to premium, in GA
- Azure Front Door Migration from classic to standard/premium, in GA
- Azure Front Door integration with managed identities, in GA
Be sure and check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/
COMING UP FOR ME.
My friend and co-instructor Paulo Nelson Dichone has just created a new course on Azure Bicep.
If you’re interested in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and the new recommended way to store your Azure infrastructure in a code repository like Git or GitHub, check out this new course on Azure Bicep.
This is on Udemy (of course) and is already part of the Udemy Business collection. So check it out and see if this interests you.
Special launch-week pricing (US $9.99) with the link until Friday, June 16.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 4.12 Thanks for reading this far. Talk to you again in two weeks.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
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