June 29, 2022
July 13, 2022
Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022.
Fewer announcements are coming out of Redmond, Washington these days as we head into summer. There is a Microsoft Partnership conference coming up (Microsoft Inspire) from July 19-20, but I am not expecting any big announcements from that.
We also seem to be heading into some economic uncertainty. Many countries are fighting high inflation with increasing interest rates, and that has the intention of reducing economic activity. Many startups have already announced hiring freezes and some are even going towards layoffs.
That said, there still appears to be a surplus of open positions, and so as some companies let people go, hopefully, others are still in the hiring mood. There is an opportunity for smaller startups to pick up some good people without having to compete with the Facebook, Google, and Microsoft names in the marketplace.
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ONE.
Who would have guessed that the global “supply chain” problems would affect cloud computing? If you did, you win a prize.
Some Azure data centers in Washington State, as well as across Europe and Asia, are claiming that they are having capacity issues due to supply issues. They will prioritize serving existing customers over new customers in those areas.
Additional reporting claims there are similar issues in the UK for Cosmos DB not accepting any new customers.
If you’ll recall, when the pandemic started, there was a faster than expected migration to the cloud which caused capacity issues across Azure. Microsoft implemented policies to prioritize certain customers including hospitals since space was limited.
And now we see similar issues reappearing. Not specifically from the demand for “work from home” as in 2020, but problem has switched to the supply side. There appears to be a lack of some server components.
This article from The Register isn’t definitive and is more based on interviews with various customers and off-the-record sources. But there might be some capacity issues on the horizon. Azure launched a new capacity reservation feature a couple of months ago so that you can reserve space in your favorite region or data center if you know you need a VM in the near future.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/04/azure_capacity_issues/
TWO.
Walmart and Amazon have had a great rivalry. I remember a few years ago, Walmart declaring that they would never use Amazon AWS. Amazon is rather famous for spying on its retail competition and using private information to compete against them. And Walmart doesn’t want to give any more profit to its biggest retail rival.
So Walmart was wise to avoid Amazon cloud, and insist on its partners also not using AWS as well. Azure was a big beneficiary of that.
Fast forward to 2022, and now Walmart is moving away from Azure as well. Where is it going?
Its own private cloud.
This too makes sense. Walmart is big enough to run its own hardware. It doesn’t need a third-party with specific server expertise. It can save money doing things itself.
And maybe one day, we’ll all have the option to sign up for a virtual machine from Walmart. Where the lowest price is the law.
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
Now that July is here, the pace of announcements has slowed. We still saw a few interesting things. The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:
- Additional 5000 storage accounts per subscription, in preview
- Multiple backups per day for VM, in preview
- Multi-user authorization for recovery service vaults, in GA
- Backup policy now supports smart tiering to archive tier, in limited preview
- Confidential virtual machines now support ephemeral OS disks, in preview
- Container Insights supports Windows Server 2022, in preview
- Azure Active Directory authentication for Application Insights, in GA
- Azure Active Directory authentication for exporting and importing Managed Disks, in preview
Check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/
COMING UP FOR ME.
I’m going to take a few days off next week for a little birthday trip. I’ll travel to an undisclosed spot which I’ll tell you about when I get back. 🙂
I’m still working on the final videos of a new AZ-500 course. I was hoping to have that done by the time you are reading this, but it’s worth the extra wait to get the final videos done.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 3.13. 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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