Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.14

July 12, 2023

Welcome to the fourteenth 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.

Data encryption over the wire (in transit) is always an interesting topic, and I saw an announcement from Microsoft about something that caught my eye.

Microsoft is testing the encryption of traffic on a virtual network level. It’s called Azure Virtual Network encryption and is in preview mode.

Currently, a lot of traffic is already encrypted between various Azure services. For storage accounts, HTTPS-only traffic is the default setting. When data is traveling between Azure data centers over the Microsoft internal network, that traffic is also encrypted. When you set up a VM, you obviously have control over whether it communicates with the outside world using an encrypted channel (HTTPS, SSH, SFTP, etc). So a lot of this exists already.

But there is a feature in preview mode that currently encrypts traffic traveling between virtual machines on a virtual network over a private IP address.

This feature is limited to a very short list of VM instance sizes over Accelerated Networking interfaces. It’s also only available in a few regions currently.

If traffic encryption is important to you, even between two virtual machines on the same virtual network, then you may want to investigate this. Of course, it would take a really sophisticated hacker to have access to Microsoft’s internal networks to sniff the traffic if it was unencrypted, but the world is full of sophisticated hackers, unfortunately.

For more:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/virtual-network-encryption-overview

TWO.

One of the new services announced at Microsoft Build was the Dev Box.

The Microsoft Dev Box service is a set of ready-to-go, cloud-based workstations for developers. Instead of having to configure your local laptop or desktop with all the tools you need to do development, you can just connect to a remote computer with everything ready to go. This means that you can go anywhere from the office, to home, to a cafe, to a client’s office – and have your full development environment already set up and ready to use.

This also allows you to have different dev spaces for different projects. One Dev Box can be data engineering focused, with tools for working with machine learning models, large amounts of data, and powerful GPU and memory configuration that data engineering usually needs. While another Dev Box can be focused on front-end web development, with all the tools you like to use to create that code.

Dev Box is now generally available.

For more on this:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/dev-box/

AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

As we enter the summer in North America, the pace of updates starts to slow down.

The following updates to the Azure platform were announced in the last two weeks:

Azure Native New Relic Service, now in GA
Sensitive Data Protection for Azure Application Gateway WAF logs, in preview
Azure Monitor Agent Health, in preview
Azure Monitor Logs improved table-level RBAC, in preview
Azure Virtual Network encryption, in preview
Azure Load Balancer cross-region support, now in GA
Azure Managed Lustre, now 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.

The first course I ever created on Udemy was on the topic of TOGAF 9.1 certification. That course was the first step to becoming a full-time online teacher and is why I currently have the privilege of helping nearly 1 million students worldwide with topics such as TOGAF and Microsoft Azure.

I’m excited to share with you all that I am currently developing a new course on TOGAF version 10, designed to equip you with the most relevant and updated enterprise architecture principles. My goal is to have this course launched by the end of July, offering you a comprehensive understanding of this robust framework. As I work towards preparing this material, I’ll also be taking a short vacation to recharge. In the interim, I hope each of you gets the chance to relax, embrace the sunshine, and enjoy your summer safely. Looking forward to rejoining you all soon with this empowering new knowledge tool.