Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.
In this video, I discuss the certification renewal process for Azure. The new process has just rolled out in March 2021, and I have a few certifications ready to be renewed. I’ll try them, and let you know how it goes.
Azure Certification Renewal
Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.
Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.
You might think it’s a simple question that has a simple answer. “You can’t get support for code on a Microsoft Docs web page.” But that’s not true! In my experience, most Azure documentation is actually supported by one or more people.
In this video, I show you how to ask a question, and flag issues you find with Azure Documentation. And if you’re feeling up to it, you can actually contribute to improving Docs yourself.
What To Do If You Find a Problem With Microsoft Docs Tutorials?
Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.
The world of technology is a big space. There are literally thousands of technical topics to choose from, to find something you can be interested in. Some topics are big, and some small. Some with a large community, and some with a small one. You don’t ever have to settle for working on something that bores you or that you hate. The world is so large, that you can choose to work on something that you actually like.
I like Azure.
Which is a good thing, because I have to think about it every single day. But why do I like it?
The first reason may sound a bit strange. However, I can’t think of any suitable analogy outside of cloud computing for the sheer amount of things you can choose to do.
Do you need a server? How big – you have 200 sizes to choose from? Here you go. A database? Which one? Here you go. More storage? Check. Networking in dozens of global locations? Check. Machine Learning models? Check. Firewall? Here you go. And so on, and so on.
I could probably list 100+ distinct services that you can create within an Azure environment, but there are probably 1000. Literally, every computing service you can imagine is available to you. And every month, more are being imagined and invented.
How much would you pay for a powerful Linux server? Thousands? Hundreds? How about pennies per hour. Pennies per hour.
Any company of any size can afford to run a small server in the cloud. They can experiment with some idea, or develop a new app, without wasting tens of thousands of dollars.
Think of the innovation that is happening in small and solo-founder businesses! The things that are being created that were never going to be created if servers were not cheap.
I actually like the Azure Portal. Compared to what I have seen of AWS, I think Microsoft has done a better UI design of their platform that Amazon has. Not everything has to be “command line”. Having a pretty UI that makes it easy to do what you want to do counts for something, to me.
Microsoft has always done an amazing job at developer and community relations. Azure is fully part of the Microsoft culture in that respect. Microsoft has their online events (Build and Ignite), a community of MCTs, a community of MVPs, employees who are active in the community, and all sorts of friendly, helpful people that aim to help.
I am not here to bash other platforms, but I have not seen those communities. I am not aware of them, and they seem to be smaller. I am willing to bet that the Azure (and Microsoft) communities are working at a scale and quality that the other competitors can only dream about.
This probably shouldn’t be last, but if you watch some of the announcements coming out of Azure, you’ll notice that they are coming out with things that are not always playing it safe.
For instance, I haven’t yet had a chance to play with Azure Quantum, but the idea of being able to run my computing workloads in a Quantum Computing environment is interesting.
Microsoft is also pushing cloud services down to the “edge”, so that you can have Azure Machine Learning models processed on Azure devices in your own datacenter even.
And not to mention the way they are using Azure Arc to intergrate Azure environments, with hardware you own, and hardware in other cloud computing providers.
These are just three examples of innovation, but there are many more. Azure seems to be inventing new technology all the time. Instead of just being complacent with the platform that they have.
Well that’s it. These are the reasons I like Azure.
I’m not saying you need to like it too, or that there are not great things about other platforms.
Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.
Talking about the latest changes to the AZ-204 exam. The official objectives PDF has been quietly revised.
AZ-204 March 2021 updates, Revised
Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.
It is March 29, 2021, just after 12:30 PM. And I suddenly decided to start blogging more.
I’m going to push myself to blog twice per week on technology, certification, and Azure-related topics.
I can’t promise that every blog post will be long and amazingly insightful. But there is a certain peace that comes from writing. Allowing thoughts in your brain to form, come together, and then get expressed is a brilliant creativity exercise. And one that I should do more often.
Creating videos is fun. Creating courses is fun. Interacting with my students on Udemy and in my Azure Facebook group is fun. And so I’ll simply have another outlet for my creative expression here.
Of course, we’re talking Azure. So it’s not like I’m posting Ever Given-Suez Canal fan fiction. (I’m fully aware this moment-in-time cultural reference will go stale and be forgotten about next week.) But writing is creativity. Or at least, it should be.
What I SHOULD do, if I was smart, is figure out to get GPT-2 to write Azure blog posts. But I’m not that smart. I’m going to have to use the organic matter inside my skull (my brain) to do this for the foreseeable future.
The tone of these posts will be more conversational, and less formal. I hope you don’t mind. If you’re looking for really dry, factual content on Microsoft Azure, check out their Docs website.
Alright, let’s do this!
Welcome to the fifth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021. Thanks so much for subscribing.
We are approaching the end of March, which means the year is almost one-quarter over. It feels like the year is just getting started! Sorry! Didn’t mean to get you down so early in the newsletter, but it’s true. Writing these newsletters just always reminds me of how quickly time passes because it seems like I only wrote the last newsletter a week ago! But it’s been two weeks!
Now on to the newsletter! As always, if you don’t want to receive this anymore, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom. No worries!
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft introduced Azure Percept during their Ignite conference.
Percept is “edge computing” hardware and technology, in that it extends some Azure services (in this case, intelligent IoT applications) into your own data center.
These intelligent IoT applications are powered by Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning Services.
Cognitive Services are those pre-built machine learning models that Azure offers by API – including vision, voice, text, knowledge management, and chat-bots. The Azure Machine Learning services allow to you train and deploy your own machine learning models based on your own training data set.
Azure Percept – I like the name – is a combination of actual hardware that you install at the edge, a development kit, and various cloud-based development tools.
Forbes published an interesting article on it here, if you want to learn more.
Or you can go to the Azure Percept documentation and see a video about it with this link:
https://aka.ms/getazurepercept
On March 15, Azure suffered an embarrassing outage when Azure AD went down for a few hours. As the authentication provider, Azure AD is the bridge you have to cross to access many services including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Xbox Live, and many third-party applications that rely on it.
This highlights one of the downsides of the centralized nature of the cloud. We usually try to plan around regional outages but have to rely on Microsoft to do all the work to keep the global services up and running.
Microsoft later explained that the issue was caused by an error that affected the rotation of signing keys. As a security practice, Microsoft regularly updates its cryptographic keys. This means creating new ones and removing the old ones.
Well, Microsoft needed to keep the old keys for a migration purpose, yet the automation that swaps the keys deleted the old key anyways.
It’s not really an excuse, anyway. For something so critical such as Azure Active Directory, that just needs to always work. There needs to be a way for it to know it’s not working and quickly get back to a state where it works again. Now deleting the keys is a complex problem no doubt, because you can’t just roll back code to a prior version. And keeping a backup of security keys kind of defeats the purpose of deleting the old security keys.
But maybe there needs to be a two-stage delete or something. I’m sure they’re working to improve the system.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-latest-cloud-authentication-outage-what-went-wrong/
Encouraging news for those looking for signs of normality starting to return in 2021. It looks like it’s back to work for some people at Microsoft’s Redmond campus.
Last year, Microsoft said it was targeting July 2021 for when it’s offices will be fully open. But that happens in stages, and next week will be a new stage.
Microsoft is moving from “strongly encouraged to work from home” to “encouraged to work from home”.
I guess this means that offices will be open for those who want to go in, as opposed to being actively shunned away. That’s good news, I guess.
No word yet on when or if they’ll resume conferences and in-person events. But that might be a while.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/03/22/the-philosophy-and-practice-of-our-hybrid-workplace/
So we are now a couple of weeks after Ignite, and the number of new announcements has died down significantly. Here are a bunch that caught my eye from the last couple of weeks.
Be sure and check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/
It’s been relatively quiet here. With the weather improving, I’ve been taking the chance to be outside more. It’s a good season for walking here in Canada.
And that’s it for issue 2.5. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
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Welcome to the fourth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021. Thanks so much for subscribing.
Microsoft Ignite was last week, and I caught several of the sessions over the two days. In the certification space, there were not too many exam-update announcements. I was glad about that. I was sure they’d introduce more changes, but I am not complaining.
Microsoft summarizes all of their announcements from Ignite into a website called “The Book of News”. You can read about every announcement and product update that they made last week here.
https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-march-2021-book-of-news/
If you registered for the Cloud Skills Challenge, don’t forget that you still have some time (until the end of March) to finish that and earn a free exam voucher.
Now on to the newsletter! As always, if you don’t want to receive this anymore, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom. No worries!
The top story has to be Ignite. I linked to the Book of News above. It’s well worth a read if you want to see all of the announcements in one place.
Microsoft is getting better at online events, I think. The event went off without a hitch, from my perspective at least. I was able to view all of the sessions that I wanted to. Never saw an issue with lag or tech issues. It all just worked.
That must be difficult. So kudos to the team (must be a lot of people) who pulled that off.
I wonder when Ignite will be in person again. And if so, if it will be scaled down with many more sessions online. Microsoft can now do a worldwide event with over 100,000 attendees with no issues. Sure, they don’t charge $2,500 for tickets, but there are also no logistics to deal with in terms of busses, lunches, and t-shirt sizes.
One of the most talked-about announcements was the demonstration of the Microsoft Mesh – their Mixed Reality experience. This is their Hololens and augmented reality experience. Microsoft is pushing the technology forward with “Object Anchors”, eliminating the need for a physical printed marker having to be in place for an AR to render something in its place.
Azure Arc was also expanding. It was one of the big announcements from the last Ignite, and Microsoft announced some additional capability there.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/02/microsofts-azure-arc-multi-cloud-platform-now-supports-machine-learning-workloads/
Time to say goodbye to more Azure services.
In the last 2 weeks, Microsoft has announced that almost two dozen Azure Services are being retired in 2022 and 2024. Instead of listing them all at the bottom, I figure I’d bring them to your attention here. If you rely on any of these services, you had better start thinking about the effort required to migrate them to their replacements.
Services/features retiring this year:
Services/features retiring in 2022:
Services/features retiring in 2024:
Those are just the ones announced in the last 2 weeks. Of course, there are more services being retired this year and next which were previously announced.
For me, what’s interesting here is the end of AzureRM Powershell. I can’t imagine how many people have dozens or hundreds of scripts that still rely on that old module. You have a couple of years to plan the migration of that.
A lot of the old monitoring tools are finally retiring. They have been running alongside the new tools in the Portal for a while. But there’s now an end date on those. Network Performance Monitor and the Classic Alerts stand out as two interesting ones. And Classic Application Insights too.
And it seems some of the SAP HANA hardware is being decertified by HANA and you’ll have to move those apps to more modern servers in the next few months.
If you remember, the US Department of Defence awarded Microsoft the JEDI contract in 2019. This contract was supposed to modernize the US military and was one of the largest single contracts ever awarded, worth about $10 billion over 10 years if all the options were taken.
The big controversy was that it’s “single source”, which means that a single vendor was chosen instead of multiple winners each getting a piece.
Amazon AWS has been protesting it voraciously, and their latest court challenge seems to have pushed the government to the edge of its patience.
The government is threatening to cancel the contract because fighting Amazon in court would take several years to defend if it’s allowed to continue. A contract that is meant to modernize the military is now delayed by over a year with no end in sight.
Would be a shame if this ended like this. Not because I think Microsoft Azure is better than Amazon AWS in any regard, but because using the court system to tie up a decision for years is poor sportsmanship when you lose a fair contest.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/microsoft-s-us-10b-pentagon-deal-at-risk-amid-amazon-fight-1.1572730
There were SO MANY announcements made in the past couple of weeks. After having a short period where there were less than a dozen, we now have several pages of announcements to choose from.
I tried to choose a few that felt significant, where it would affect many people who read this. Here are a bunch that caught my eye from the last couple of weeks.
Be sure and check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/
Lots of things have happened recently. If you’re a student in one or more of my courses, you might be interested in this:
And that’s it for issue 2.4. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/
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LinkedIn Learning: https://www.lynda.com/Scott-Duffy/1993589682-1.html
Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.
Microsoft announced some AZ-204 changes and I have the first look at that.
There have been some topics removed and some percentage weighting changes. Not huge changes. Another relief.
AZ-204 March 2021 Changes! First look!
Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.
Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.
Microsoft announced some AZ-104 changes ahead of this years Ignite 2021, and I have the first look at that.
Nothing much to fear. Some things get moved around. A couple of new topics added. Could have been much worse. 🙂
AZ-104 March 2021 Changes! First look!
Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.
Welcome to the third edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021. Thanks so much for subscribing. I was expecting it to be a quiet couple of weeks before the Microsoft Ignite conference kicks off, but I was wrong. There are a few announcements being made, and I’m sure we’ll learn more next week.
I do intend to watch quite a few sessions, especially the ones on certification (which is my interest, of course). If you haven’t signed up for Microsoft Ignite, it’s online and it’s free. Go check that out if you want to watch some interesting sessions covering lots of Azure and Microsoft-related topics. https://myignite.microsoft.com/home
Once again, Microsoft is offering a Cloud Skills Challenge where you can earn a free exam voucher if you’re interested in that.
Now on to the newsletter! As always, if you don’t want to receive this anymore, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom. No worries!
This Solarwinds hack story keeps getting deeper and deeper.
To me, the depth and scope of this hack have been fascinating to watch.
If you haven’t been following the news, hackers found a way to add code into a network monitoring tool called Solarwinds Orion. This allowed them to get access to a wide array of private computer networks, including inside the US government.
Microsoft President Brad Smith called the attack the “largest and most sophisticated” ever.
Well, it was not just the US government having its sensitive secrets exposed, even a small portion of the source code for Azure was accessed during the hack. The hackers were searching for secrets in code, and Microsoft does not allow secrets in their internal code.
“There was no access to the vast majority of source code. For nearly all of the code repositories accessed, only a few individual files were viewed as a result of a repository search.”
Microsoft views this as a reinforcement of their “zero trust” mindset.
Hopefully, thousands of companies and organizations have strengthened their security posture to protect against a future attack.
https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2021/02/18/microsoft-internal-solorigate-investigation-final-update/
Azure Quantum is now in Public Preview.
Wait, what? Quantum computing is now available for anyone to play with?
Can you mine bitcoin with it? Someone will certainly try! You can now spin up a Quantum computer in Azure and deploy your bitcoin miner to solve challenging math problems in fractions of a second.
OK, OK, it doesn’t work quite like that. But you do have access to Honeywell and IonQ’s Quantum computers in Azure. They are making available a system that allows you to write code in Q#, their Quantum programming language. If you can make a bitcoin miner out of that, go to it. Quick, before anyone realizes the impact of this.
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/quantum/2021/02/01/azure-quantum-preview/
Azure Purview is a brand-new feature in public preview.
It allows you to have a unified view of your data governance – across Azure, on-premises, and even on other cloud platforms. You can create and visualize a map of your data landscape.
Purview has a data discovery component so that it can find where your data lives. You can also mark data as sensitive.
Using this map, you can then enable semantic search to help you discover where your data lives. Think of this as not searching the data itself, but searching the metadata. It’s a data catalog.
And, finally, you can track how your data travels from the source to other parts of your organization. Do you want to know how your customer’s contact information gets updated in various apps, you can find that path.
Here’s an overview of Purview:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/services/purview/
Lots of public previews this week. And a few “service retirement” announcements too! I guess Microsoft is prepping for some announcements at next weeks’ Microsoft Ignite conference, and some of this stuff can’t wait. Still, there should be some interesting announcements next week.
Here are a few that caught my eye from the last couple of weeks.
Be sure and check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/
Lots of things have happened recently. If you’re a student in one or more of my courses, you might be interested in this:
And that’s it for issue 2.3. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/getcloudskills/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getcloudskills.ca/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottjduffy
Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/scottduffy2/
LinkedIn Learning: https://www.lynda.com/Scott-Duffy/1993589682-1.html