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SoftwareArchitect.ca

Author: Scott Duffy

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.17

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.17

    A bunch of Microsoft certifications finally ended their beta periods and went live in the past couple of weeks. And beta scores are starting to appear on the Microsoft Certification Dashboard.

    Most notably for me, AZ-303 and AZ-304 are live. That ends the 2020 transition from the old set of exams to the new codes.

    PL-100 is also live if you’re into the Power Platform App Maker. More certification news down below.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    The big news from last week was that Azure suffered a rather ugly failure with authentication services. And the culprit was a doozy. Azure Active Directory went down for about 3 hours, which meant that some people couldn’t “log in” to Azure, Office 365, Teams, or any apps that relied on Azure AD.

    America and Australia were affected more than Europe or Asia, apparently. But this was a widespread issue. Obviously, millions of people were impacted, and Microsoft is rightly taking the event very seriously.

    Microsoft has of course analyzed the root cause and published an RCA.

    https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/

    As you’ll see in the link above, a deployment meant to go to their “test” area was deployed also to production. The normal process is to deploy code to a non-customer environment, followed by an internal Microsoft-only environment, before finally being deployed to a real customer environment, but that didn’t happen due to a bug.

    They reverted the change almost immediately, but the same bug that caused the bad Azure AD deployment also required them to deploy the old version manually.

    One of those series of unfortunate incidents.

    TWO.

    If you’re in Greece, this might make you happy. Azure has announced it’s next datacenter region will be built in Greece. Opa!

    This includes training up to 100,000 people in Greece, as well as some 3D digitizations of some of Greece’s cultural treasure areas.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/updates/microsoft-plans-to-establish-new-cloud-datacenter-region-in-greece/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Microsoft Ignite was a couple of weeks ago, and I think Microsoft announced everything new about Azure that they could. So updates this time are a bit lighter:

    • Cosmos DB offering a serverless (consumption-based model) model (in preview)
    • Azure Container Registry expands to more regions, now in 38 regions
    • Shared Disks for Azure Disk Storage also expands to more regions
    • Azure Ultra Disk also available in more regions
    • Azure Advisor now makes more recommendations for performance and cloud operational improvements
    • Azure Availability Zones now available in more regions
    • Azure changing it’s certificate authority which could cause disruptions

    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.

    I continue to make updates to the courses in general, and AZ-304 specifically. Not much in the way of new courses or major announcements coming from me.

    Although I got my MCT, which was cool.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.17. 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

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    See you in two weeks!

  • Free MS Ignite Certification Voucher

    FYI. This is a reminder in case you missed the news. Or like me, started a challenge and didn’t complete it.

    You still have 9 days to complete the Ignite Cloud Skills Challenge to get the free certification voucher.

    https://aka.ms/IgniteCloudSkillsChallenge

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.16

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.16

    Ready? Set? Ignite!

    The big news going on right now is that Microsoft Ignite 2020 kicked off on Tuesday this week. With travel being restricted and meeting in person not recommended, the event has been moved from New Orleans to online.

    I’ve watched a few sessions today, and am looking through the vast catalog of sessions looking for interesting topics to spend time learning more about. 

    I’m not going to try to list out all of the announcements that were made because there were so many. But here are a few that have caught my eye.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    Every year, Microsoft pushes a “Ignite Book of News” that contains all of the announcements they have made during the multi-day event. 

    Believe it or not, Microsoft is more than just “Azure”, and so if you’re into Dynamics, Teams, Power Platform, or any of the other areas, then there have been several announcements in each that you should check out.

    Of course, there are plenty of Azure announcements in there as well. I’ll highlight the ones that caught my attention at the end of this newsletter. 

    The Ignite 2020 Book of News can be found here:

    https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news/

    TWO.

    Microsoft announced a new “region” to be located in Arizona – West US 3. I think they’ve run out of creative name ideas for the US regions. We have East US (1 and 2), North Central US, South Central US and West US (1, 2 and 3). 

    What makes this new region special is that Microsoft is going to make it it’s more environmentally sustainable data center. For instance, they’re planning to reduce, reuse and replenish water in the region. The data centers won’t require water for cooling outside the hottest days of summer. They’re working on a solar plant in Arizona too. 

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-s-newest-sustainable-datacenter-region-coming-to-arizona-in-2021/

    THREE.

    I wholly recommend watching Mark Russinovich’s Inside the Azure Datacenter Architecture talk.

    Mark leads us through “end-to-end” of the Azure Datacenter. Not only the physical layer, but some of the interesting things Azure is doing to improve performance at each layer between the physical layer and the layer we see.

    He also gets a bit into “the future”, with a demo of holographic storage, and an interesting update on “DNA storage”. 

    https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/40aca11c-8e28-4914-a6d8-b3a7efb4eee1

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    There’s so much more I want to talk about. But I have to keep this brief. 

    Have a look at the Ignite Book of News and Azure Updates for some of the following interesting updates that were announced this week:

    • Cosmos DB offering a serverless (consumption-based model) model (in preview)
    • Microsoft introduces “Bicep” as an abstraction built on-top of ARM templates, to make it easier to “build” ARM templates
    • Azure Blob Storage Lifecycle Management now supports “last access time” and not just create time
    • Canada and Australia data centers are getting Availability Zones
    • Azure Orbital is a new service for connecting to satellites 
    • Azure Resource Mover is a new service that helps move Azure resources between regions (in preview)
    • Zone to Zone disaster recovery (for Azure VMs) allows customers to replicate, failover and failback their business-critical virtual machines within the same region with zones
    • .NET 5 release candidate is now available
    • Azure App Service now available for reserved instances
    • Azure App Service has a new Premium V3 plan
    • Azure App Service now supports Windows containers
    • Azure will soon introduce a “Private Marketplace” that allows organizations to curate what services are available in the Marketplace for that organization
    • Backup Center is a new centralized place to manage backups across vaults, subscriptions, locations and even tenants
    • Azure Dedicated Host also supports Virtual Machine Scale Sets
    • Azure Hybrid Benefit now supports Red Hat and SUSE customers
    • A new Azure-supported Linux distribution, Flatcar Container Linux by Kinvolk
    • Azure Automanage helps admins to automate the management of Windows Server virtual machines (VMs)
    • Global Load Balancer feature for Azure Load Balancer (in preview)

    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 AZ-303 and AZ-304 exams have now come out of Beta and are now considered live. If you take those exams, you’ll get those scores immediately. If you took them in Beta, you’ll get the scores shortly.

    A reminder that AZ-300 and AZ-301 retire next week (Sept 30), and AZ-303 and AZ-304 will be the only way to achieve Azure Architect Expert.

    The AZ-304 course updates are coming along. Every day, a bit of progress is being made. That will continue into October.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.16. 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

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    See you in two weeks!

  • Ignite, Cloud Skills Challenge, and Free Courses

    Ignite, Cloud Skills Challenge, and Free Courses

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    In this short video, I talk about Microsoft Ignite that is going on. And particularly the Cloud Skills Challenge.

    The challenge is found here:
    https://aka.ms/IgniteCloudSkillsChallenge

    If you complete one of the challenges, Microsoft will send you a free exam voucher. And guess what… You might need to watch some more training before taking the exam.

    [free coupons expired, sorry]

    Happy learning!

    Scott

    P.S. I’m also celebrating my 400,000th student on Udemy this week, which is also another good reason for this post! Thank you!

    Ignite, Cloud Skills Challenge, and Free Courses

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.15

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.15

    Writing these newsletters every two weeks is a good way to mark the passage of time for me. The reminder pops up on my calendar, and I almost always exclaim, “Has it been two weeks already? Didn’t I send one last week?” And then I realize that, yes, two weeks have indeed passed.

    One thing that has me excited, is the “end” of the major exam update cycle for this year. It seems like Microsoft has been tweaking the exams in small ways every few months, and then doing major updates once per year. This, as you’d expect, is a lot of work for me. 

    So far, I’ve updated AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-204, and now AZ-303. Just one more to go, with AZ-304 updates beginning this week. Then, maybe, they’ll give me a couple of months break before new updates in January 2021? Fingers crossed.

    Anyways, enough about that. Here’s what has happened these past two weeks in the world of Azure…

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    ONE.

    It’s that time of year again! Microsoft Ignite is now accepting registrations and the conference itself is only a couple of weeks away. September 22-24, 2020.

    Of course, it’s entirely online and it’s free. So be sure and sign up for Microsoft Ignite if you’re interested in getting all that great content that Microsoft is planning to provide. Look through the catalog a few days in advance and see what you’re interested in. Some of the sessions fill up, yes even online.

    https://myignite.microsoft.com/home

    I’ve been to the last two Ignite’s in Orlando in 2018 and 2019. On the one hand, I’m grateful for not having to spend $5000+ to travel to the event and for the tickets. I didn’t have an employer to pay for that as most did.

    It was also a lot of walking, and a lot of time away from work. To some, that’s good. But to be able to attend the event and also have the chance to do some work will be a benefit – to me at least.

    I will miss meeting the dozens and dozens of students throughout the week. That’s probably the biggest downside to an “online-only” event to me.

    TWO.

    Microsoft and VMWare have gotten together to launch Azure Spring Cloud, which is now in general availability.

    Azure Spring Cloud is a fully-managed service for Spring Boot apps. You simply need to deploy JARs or code, and Spring Cloud will wire your apps with the Spring service runtime automatically.

    If you’re a Java developer, finally getting the simplicity of a fully managed Spring service in the cloud should be a big benefit.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-spring-cloud-a-fully-managed-service-for-spring-boot-apps-is-now-generally-available/

    THREE.

    Azure Blob Storage has finally added versioning to the service, in general availability.

    This should protect your blob container contents from accidental or malicious deletion. Much like a source control system, blob versioning automatically maintains all previous versions of an object using a version ID. You can list both the current and previous versions, as well as access and restore those previous versions.

    Azure Storage is already one of the safest places to store files with their redundancy features, soft delete option, and immutable blobs. Now, this is one more feature to protect your files from these mistakes.

    The feature is free, but you are going to pay for the additional usage of storage for previous versions. So be careful about which types of files you enable this for.
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/updates/azure-blob-versioning-is-now-general-available/

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Some updates to Azure over the past two weeks:

    • Automatic VM guest patching for critical and security patches (in preview)
    • Azure Migration now supports migrating to Availability Zones
    • Azure Storage classic metrics is retiring
    • Azure Spring Cloud in General Availability
    • AWS connector for Cost Management in General Availability
    • Azure Blob versioning in General Availability

    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 AZ-300 course has now been completely updated for the AZ-303 exam content. If you own the course, you get the updates for free. If you don’t own the course, you can buy my AZ-303 course at a great price here: http://sjd.ca/az303 

    Now I need to get to work on the AZ-304 updates.

    Something strange happened yesterday night with AZ-900. I went to check out the official landing page, and the Sept 15 changes are gone! Has Microsoft put the changes on hold? I’m trying to find out. Maybe there was a publishing error that rolled back the changes by mistake. I’ll let you know when I know.

    Thank you for reading this. I really do appreciate that you take the time every two weeks.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.15. 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

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    See you in two weeks!

  • AZ-104 Hub and Spoke Network Topology Hands-On Example – Follow Along

    AZ-104 Hub and Spoke Network Topology Hands-On Example – Follow Along

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    I recorded this for my AZ-104 course. But decided to upload here for you as well.

    In this video, I walk through the official Microsoft AZ-104 hands-on labs, for lab #6.

    This lab sets up a hub-and-spoke network topology.

    We create three virtual networks with VMs in them, use VNet peering to connect them. Then we set up proper routing, modify the Windows OS to handle the routing.

    AZ-104 Hub and Spoke Network Topology Hands-On Example – Follow Along

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

  • Connecting to Virtual Networks Using Network Gateways, Part 2

    Connecting to Virtual Networks Using Network Gateways, Part 2

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    In this video, I demonstrate Vnet to Vnet connection using gateways, part 2.

    Connecting to Virtual Networks Using Network Gateways, Part 2

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

  • Connecting Two Virtual Networks Using a Network Gateway, Part 1

    Connecting Two Virtual Networks Using a Network Gateway, Part 1

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    In this video, I demonstrate Vnet to Vnet connection using gateways. Part 1.

    Connecting Two Virtual Networks Using a Network Gateway, Part 1

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.14

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.14

    It’s nearing the end of “summer” in the Northern Hemisphere! I can’t believe that we’re at the end of August already. I’m sure those below the equator are cheering the hotter weather, but I am not looking forward to the cold.

    Anyways, let’s not think about that. What’s been going on with Azure these last two weeks?

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    Chalk up another win for Team Redmond. DreamWorks, the film studio behind such movies as Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar, are moving their animation film production to Azure. That will include live-action mixed with animation.

    Article: Universal Adopts Microsoft Azure for Animation, Live-Action Production

    I sometimes use the example of “animated film rendering” when describing the use case for Azure Batch. I have no idea if Azure Batch will be involved in this new film production platform, but I finally have a real example of an animation company using Azure.

    TWO.

    I have a preoccupation with cloud-based supercomputers, and so I was excited to read that Azure is releasing a new ND A100 v4 VM series, in which each instance contains eight NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

    Each of those GPUs has 54 billion (billion, with a B) transistors, 3456 FP64 cores, 6912 FP32 cores, and 432 Tensor cores. It rings in at 16.5 teraflops of peak processing speed. NVIDIA claims it’s the biggest chip NVIDIA has ever made. And there are eight of them in one VM.

    And this system has been designed to be clustered so you can potentially get thousands of those powerful GPUs working together.

    This series promises a speed-increase of 2X to 3X over the previous NVIDIA VMs with no re-coding required.

    If you have a GPU workload and would love to see a 2X or 3X speed boost, here we go. 

    I have no idea if this is suitable for Bitcoin mining. Let me know if you try it.

    Article: Bringing AI supercomputing to customers | Azure Blog and Updates

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Some updates to Azure over the past two weeks:

    • Encryption of backup data using customer-managed keys (in preview)
    • VM backup now supports VM scale sets
    • Node-level upgrades for AKS, instead of updating the full cluster
    • Soft Delete for Storage Blob Containers (in preview)
    • Cosmos DB Serverless offer (in preview)
    • Expansion of Azure Ultra Disk to more regions
    • Azure Advisor adds more cost optimizations
    • Azure Migrate now assesses physical servers as well as AWS and GCP VMs

    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.

    I’ve finished another course for LinkedIn Learning. AZ-303 and AZ-304 exam tips courses coming out once their production team is ready to launch those courses.

    I’ve been recording a lot for the AZ-300 (now AZ-303) course on Udemy. I now have 4 hours of AZ-303 content in there, and I intend to record more every day until it’s done. Aiming for Aug 31. 

    Then on to AZ-304 updates.

    Azure has updated the AZ-900 course as of Sept 15, 2020 and I’ve already updated my Udemy course with new videos on that. Probably the first course anywhere to be updated for all the new topics.

    Thank you for reading this. I really do appreciate that you take the time every two weeks.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.14. 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

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    See you in two weeks!

  • AZ-900 Exam Updates – SEPT 2020

    AZ-900 Exam Updates – SEPT 2020

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    Well, it’s that time again!

    Microsoft has updated the requirements for the Azure Fundamentals Exam, AZ-900. Here’s what you need to know!

    If you’ve already passed, you have nothing to worry about. Azure Fundamentals certification is for life.

    Here are the differences between the existing exam and the new one coming on September 15, 2020.

    AZ-900 Exam Updates – SEPT 2020

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.