Deprecated: strtr(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /chroot/home/a40b7614/774635bdc8.nxcli.io/html/wp-content/plugins/moosend-email-marketing/vendor/moosend/website-tracking/src/Utils/Encryption.php on line 8 Deprecated: urlencode(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /chroot/home/a40b7614/774635bdc8.nxcli.io/html/wp-content/plugins/moosend-email-marketing/vendor/moosend/website-tracking/src/Payload.php on line 202 Scott Duffy – Page 7 – SoftwareArchitect.ca

SoftwareArchitect.ca

Author: Scott Duffy

  • Az-900 Updates 2022 – Latest Exam Changes

    Az-900 Updates 2022 – Latest Exam Changes

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

    Microsoft has announced some exam objective changes for their AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam, and they’re fairly significant. In this video, I tell you about what has been added to the exam. And more importantly, what has been removed. If you’re planning on taking AZ-900 this month or next, you HAVE to watch this.

    Az-900 Updates 2022 – Latest Exam Changes

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

  • AI-102 Exam Changes for May 2022

    AI-102 Exam Changes for May 2022

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

    Microsoft recently announced changes to the AI-102 exam for May 2, 2022. In this video, I quickly review the changes and talk about the implications.

    AI-102 Exam Changes for May 2022

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

  • Azure Virtual Machine Creation Step By Step Tutorial

    Azure Virtual Machine Creation Step By Step Tutorial

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

    This is the latest step-by-step tutorial on creating a Windows Virtual Machine (VM) in Azure. In this video, using the latest Azure Portal UI, I go through the steps required to create a Windows VM in Azure. I explain each of the fields, and what the impacts of those decisions are. By following this video, you should be able to create a Windows Virtual Machine in Azure.

    Azure Virtual Machine Creation Step By Step Tutorial

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.04

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.04

    March 9, 2021

    Welcome to the fourth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022.

    Of course, we must first acknowledge that there have been some very distressing world events unfolding since the last newsletter. As I write this, it’s still a rapidly changing situation in Ukraine. It is estimated that 1.5 million people have had to flee their homes, and no doubt thousands have died in just the last two weeks.

    If you’ve been personally touched by these events – have had to flee yourself or have family/friends trapped in a war zone – my heart goes out to you. My heart aches thinking about the tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine.

    Alongside the human tragedy we see on the nightly news, we’re likely entering a new era of “cyber war” in which powerful state hackers try to take down or impede critical infrastructure on the other side. Be ready to patch systems once new vulnerabilities are discovered.

    The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    Recently, a security researcher reported a rather serious bug in Azure, and the team has patched the issue.

    Security team Orca reported a bug with Azure Automation to Azure on December 6, which apparently would have allowed scripts to “gain full control over the resources and data of a targeted account”. Basically, a classic privilege escalation exploit.

    This flaw only affected customers that used Managed Identities for authorization for Azure Automation jobs running in Azure Sandbox.

    There’s no evidence, according to Azure, that this was used in the wild by any malicious actors. But this just shows once again that, due to the complexity of these systems, there are thousands of possible vectors that need to be protected against.

    Microsoft responded within a few days of the report by ensuring tokens were only used to access the Sandbox that they legitimately had access to.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-computing-microsoft-fixes-azure-flaw-that-could-have-allowed-access-to-other-accounts/

    TWO.

    Microsoft is trying to lay a case for migrating databases on-premises into the cloud, and they’ve taken an interesting angle with it.

    They’re saying that companies intentionally provision databases larger than they need to be. Some of this is to leave room for future growth. And there is also some built-in skepticism in the estimates causing DBAs to add buffer themselves to save from future performance problems that may not even happen.

    Their recently released white-paper even went on to say that database servers sometimes get left behind when it comes to hardware refresh budgets. So administrators know that they should request a larger server than they need now, because it could be years before the company budgets money again for database hardware.

    So what results is some fairly obvious waste that could be turned into cost-savings from migrating to the cloud.

    Imagine a brand new database server is provisioned to be twice as big as it needs to be, to accommodate the future growth expected over the next couple of years. As well, even the estimate is made to be a bit high because a two year projection can turn into three or four years before the hardware is upgraded.

    Microsoft estimates that around “85% of Oracle workloads” are actually over-provisioned. The cloud implementations would only use a fraction of the CPU power given to it on-prem.

    Oracle is pretty good at blocking it’s customers because it’s licensing costs is not optimized to virtual CPU environments.

    Oracle also has it’s own cloud, and I’m sure they’d MUCH rather you migrate to their cloud than to Microsoft.

    If you’re interested in the white paper, a link to it can be found in this Register article.

    https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/07/oracle_cloud_migration_microsoft_advice/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks: 

    • You can now export Log Analytics workspace data
    • Direct enterprise agreement (EA) customers now have expanded access to Cost Management and Billing within the Portal
    • App Service has now enhanced options for hosting WordPress, in Preview
    • Azure Backup can now backup Azure Files multiple times per day
    • Subscribe to daily, weekly, or monthly email updates of your saved cost views in Azure Cost Management, 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.

    I’ve now got all my studio equipment set up in Portugal, and can more easily produce video content. It’s taken a while to get to this point, but I’m excited to be working from my new home office.

    I’ll continue updating existing courses, and should be in a better position to talk about new courses in the coming weeks.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 3.04. 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

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.03

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.03

    February 23, 2021

    Welcome to the third edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022.

    Once again, two weeks have passed. It’s hard to believe. For me, 2022 is progressing pretty quickly. The year is 14% over at this point, which is one-seventh of the year. I need to get moving on some of my goals for 2022! Thanks again for subscribing.

    The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    A research paper at Microsoft caught the attention of Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet. It talks about it’s AI project code-named Singularity. 

    The paper was named, “Singularity: Planet-Scale, Preemptive and Elastic Scheduling of AI Workloads” which alludes to the size of this AI project. 

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.07848.pdf

    Singularity promises to scale AI workloads to hundreds of thousands of servers (GPUs and FPGAs, etc) in an efficient manner. These workloads are usually the training of an AI model which can take hours, days or even weeks depending on the job.

    This reminds me of the idea of Azure Batch Service – an orchestration layer that distributes discrete workloads to hundreds or thousands of VMs. Singularity takes the same concept but for the new types of AI workloads. 

    Singularity is focused on optimizing for the performance of the entire job. 

    If you’re interested in the future of “planet-scale” AI training, the link is above. If you want to read Mary Jo Foley’s article, this is the link here:

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-goes-public-with-details-on-its-singularity-ai-infrastructure-service/

    TWO.

    Over the last year, Microsoft has been working hard to improve the experience for customers running SQL Server in a Virtual Machine.

    In my Azure courses, I used to be able to say “if you choose to run SQL Server in a VM, that’s IaaS. You’re completely on your own. You are responsible for patching the software and the OS. You are responsible for backups. All of the work you did for SQL Server on-premises has to also be done in the cloud because you’re running SQL Server inside a VM.”

    But that’s not true anymore.

    Over the last year or two, you can now do some management of SQL Server in a VM from the Azure Portal. There is actually an Agent that runs in the virtual machine that allows the Azure Portal to interact with the SQL Server instance.

    In the Azure Portal, now you can schedule Automated Patching. Important or Critical SQL Server updates can be installed automatically during a predefined maintenance window.

    You can also schedule Automated Backups from the Portal. These are database-level backups that take into account things such as always-on availability groups. It also supports point-in-time recovery. Backups for SQL Server in a VM now have features that used to be reserved for Azure SQL Database.

    In the past week, Azure has released an update that allows you to manage the tempdb storage settings from the Portal.

    Pulling some of these management settings from SQL Server into the Portal makes it easier to manage these databases at scale, and improves the experience for database administrators. While still keeping the compatibility of running SQL Server in a virtual machine instead of the platform option.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/virtual-machines/windows/sql-server-on-azure-vm-iaas-what-is-overview

    A reminder that the AZ-303 and AZ-304 exams expire at the end of March.

    Those exams together get you the Azure Architect Expert certification. Going forward, you’ll need AZ-104 and AZ-305 to get that certification. You can also get it with AZ-303 and AZ-305.

    AZ-305 is out of beta, and if you took it in beta you should have your results by now. You get that from the Microsoft MCP dashboard. 

    Two exams in beta now are AZ-800: Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure, and AZ-801: Configuring Windows Server Hybrid Advanced Services. These are Windows Server exams, but focus on the hybrid element. 

    AZ-800: “Administrative tools … such as Windows Admin Center, PowerShell, Azure Arc, and IaaS virtual machine administration.”

    AZ-801: “Administrative tools … such as Windows Admin Center, PowerShell, Azure Arc, Azure Automation Update Management, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Azure Security Center, Azure Migrate, and Azure Monitor.”

    Check out the new exams below:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-800

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-801

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/virtual-machines/windows/sql-server-on-azure-vm-iaas-what-is-overview

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks: 

    • Azure Site Recovery can now keep up to 15 days of recovery points instead of just 72 hours
    • Azure Bastion now supports file transfer via the native client, in preview
    • OCR now supports 164 languages including Arabic and Hindi, in preview
    • Azure AKS now support tags
    • Azure Automanage for Windows Server now supports reboot-less updates (hotpatch)
    • Azure Monitor now has predictive autoscale for VM Scalesets, in preview
    • Virtual Machine level disk bursting supports additional VM types
    • Automatically delete a VM and its associated resources simultaneously
    • Application Gateway mutual authentication
    • Cost Management anomaly detection for subscriptions, 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.

    Not much change in my status from two weeks ago. I’m recording some videos, and putting them on Youtube. As well, updating some courses where the content needs a refresh. No new courses to announce just yet.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 3.03. 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

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.02

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.02

    February 9, 2021

    Welcome to the second edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022.

    I hope everything is well with you. I very much appreciate that you read these emails from me, and I just want to say “Thank You”.

    The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    When I was a teenager, I was fascinated with supercomputers like the Cray-1. I think at one point I had a poster of a Cray in my bedroom. True geek credentials +1. (There was a poster of a Lamborghini Countach next to that, so it’s not like I had a bedroom wall full of computer posters.)

    We don’t hear a lot about supercomputers these days (although you can get access to a Cray using your Azure account if you need one). But we do hear about quantum computers.

    If you’re not familiar, the great power of a quantum computer is that can (potentially) solve traditional computing problems in a fraction of the time that a powerful computer can today. I say “potentially” because we’re still at the experimental phase of this technology. If it can be proven reliable, and the potential is realized, it would have major implications for many fields including finance and cryptography.

    Azure actually provides quantum computing from four different vendors. And they are offering up to $500 credits from each of them to anyone who wants to try it.

    I believe quantum computers have their own programming language, so it’s not like you can just run your existing Web App on that hardware. So there’s a technical challenge to do that.

    Microsoft Offering Free Credits to Try Out Azure Quantum

    There do not seem to be any prerequisites for getting the credits. So if you’ve always wanted to try programming for a quantum computer, now’s your chance.

    TWO.

    Over the last year, Microsoft has been working hard to improve the experience for customers running SQL Server in a Virtual Machine.

    In my Azure courses, I used to be able to say “if you choose to run SQL Server in a VM, that’s IaaS. You’re completely on your own. You are responsible for patching the software and the OS. You are responsible for backups. All of the work you did for SQL Server on-premises has to also be done in the cloud because you’re running SQL Server inside a VM.”

    But that’s not true anymore.

    Over the last year or two, you can now do some management of SQL Server in a VM from the Azure Portal. There is actually an Agent that runs in the virtual machine that allows the Azure Portal to interact with the SQL Server instance.

    In the Azure Portal, now you can schedule Automated Patching. Important or Critical SQL Server updates can be installed automatically during a predefined maintenance window.

    You can also schedule Automated Backups from the Portal. These are database-level backups that take into account things such as always-on availability groups. It also supports point-in-time recovery. Backups for SQL Server in a VM now have features that used to be reserved for Azure SQL Database.

    In the past week, Azure has released an update that allows you to manage the tempdb storage settings from the Portal.

    Pulling some of these management settings from SQL Server into the Portal makes it easier to manage these databases at scale, and improves the experience for database administrators. While still keeping the compatibility of running SQL Server in a virtual machine instead of the platform option.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/virtual-machines/windows/sql-server-on-azure-vm-iaas-what-is-overview

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Now that we are into February, it seems that Azure engineers are back from their winter breaks and releasing new features again. 🙂

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now supports Zone-Redundant Storage disks
    • Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server is now available in China
    • Azure Cost Management has a new tabbed experience in preview mode
    • Azure Key Vault service throughput limits have been increased for each vault
    • Azure Maps now has historical weather, air quality and tropical storm data
    • Azure PostgreSQL can now keep backups up to 10 years
    • Azure Monitory supports testing of action groups
    • Azure Container Apps can be deployed to virtual networks, in preview mode
    • Azure Functions now supports PowerShell on Linux
    • Azure Cache for Redis active geo-replication in enterprise tiers
    • New SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines setup-like experience when deploying from the Marketplace
    • Automated backup enhancements for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
    • Enhanced storage configuration with tempdb for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines

    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.

    Not much to talk about at the current time. I’m currently getting settled in Portugal, and am getting in touch with the local Azure and Microsoft MVP communities. I’m starting a couple of interesting projects, but that will take some time to develop into something worth talking about.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 3.02. 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
  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.01

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.01

    January 26, 2021

    Welcome to the first edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022. 

    I started the year with some good news. I was awarded the Microsoft MVP for Azure award in 2022. It’s a great honor to be recognized for my work with the Azure community. I am thankful to the Microsoft employee who nominated me, and to the tens of thousands of you who are in this wonderful Azure community. I hope to do even more in 2022 to bring lots of up-to-date Azure knowledge to you on a regular basis.

    I am writing this newsletter from my new home office in Portugal. I can’t say we’re 100% completely set up, as there is still a lot of work to do. But being able to record videos again feels like a big accomplishment. (You have to celebrate the little stuff too!) So I’ve been taking your feedback on things that need fixing and updating course videos this week. If you see something in one of my courses that can use a refresh, please let me know in the Q&A section of the course.

    It’s been a couple of months since I sent a newsletter, and so this edition will cover that period.

    The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    If you’ve been paying attention to Apple over the past few years, one of the more interesting moves was when they started making their own computer chips. While the common wisdom at the time was to standardize on commodity hardware like Intel x86, Apple decided to go the other way with it and make their own chips. 

    After all, it’s better to let the chip companies focus on making chips, since they are the world’s experts at it, right?

    Apple had been making its own chips for the iPhone for years (the A-series). But recently they started making chips for their personal computers. The M1 chip is surprisingly much faster than the previous Intel chips they were using. The low power usage alone doubles the battery life of a Macbook. That’s an amazing improvement by making their own chips.

    And so it might come as no surprise that other companies now want to make their own chips.

    Azure recently hired chip designer Mike Fillipo from Apple, who has also previously worked at Intel and ARM. The rumor is that they are going to be making their own Azure server chips.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-12/microsoft-recruits-key-apple-engineer-to-work-on-custom-chips

    Now if Azure can get a competitive advantage over AWS and Google Cloud by moving off the Intel and AMD chipsets and onto their own custom chips, that can be worth billions of dollars to Microsoft. And of course, ultimately reduce costs to the end-users.

    Of course, the rest of Azure’s hardware is custom-designed already. There have been some interesting talks by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich on how the Azure datacenter is designed if you’re interested.

    TWO.

    Microsoft released it’s Q2 earnings yesterday, and they beat Wall Street expectations. Unfortunately, the Azure Cloud growth has slowed to a 46% annual growth rate. It was 48% annually last quarter.

    https://www.thestreet.com/markets/microsoft-stock-slumps-as-azure-growth-clouds-q2-earnings-beat

    Obviously, the pandemic has changed the trajectory of cloud adoption. Initially, it accelerated it. I remember reading a quote from an Azure VP that said that they saw adoption accelerated by a few years in 2020. Everyone needed to move their apps to the cloud, to enable their employees to work from home without complicated VPN setups. 

    But now that adoption has largely occurred, and so it’s not surprising that growth has slowed.

    I don’t want to make this an us vs them type competition, but it’s worth nothing that Amazon AWS has been growing at under 40% since 2019, and so Azure is still growing at a slightly faster pace. Actually, it’s fair to say that the “competition” between Azure and AWS has largely been silent (except for the occasional big government contract dispute) since both businesses are massive and prevalent throughout all major enterprises. We’re reaching a saturation point.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Since the last newsletter was sent at the beginning of December, a lot has happened. Here’s a summary of the highlights.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Azure Communication Services now supports short codes in SMS, in Preview
    • AKS node image auto-upgrade now in GA
    • AKS auto-certificate rotation now in GA
    • Create AKS clusters without local user accounts now in GA
    • Azure is renaming “action rules” to “alert processing rules” which is clearer
    • SQL Server IaaS Agent extension for Linux SQL VMs now in GA
    • Virtual Machine restore points now in public preview
    • Availability Zones now generally available in India Central 
    • Immutable storage with versioning for Blob Storage now in GA
    • Azure Communication Services interoperability with Microsoft Teams
    • Azure Storage: Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) conditions with principal attributes now in public preview
    • Azure Storage: Secure access to storage account from a virtual network/subnet in any region now in public preview
    • Automated key rotation in Azure Key Vault is now in public preview
    • Soft delete for blobs capability for Azure Data Lake Storage now in GA
    • Azure Policy support for Azure Site Recovery now in GA
    • Azure Ultra Disk Storage in West US 3 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.

    I don’t have any new courses on the immediate horizon, but it’s a good time to go back to all of my existing courses and give them a refresh. I’ve already begun recording and editing videos for AZ-104, AZ-304, and others. Rest assured that I remain focused on the latest exam objectives for each exam code, and ensuring my courses contain up-to-date material.

    If you have ideas for Microsoft exams that could use a course, feel free to post them in the Facebook group (link below) or tag me on Twitter (also below). I’m always looking for new ideas on new ways to help students.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 3.01. 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
  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.22

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.22

    December 1, 2021

    Welcome to the twenty-second edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021. 

    This is the last Azure World newsletter of the year. When I started writing these two years ago, my only intention was to get in regular communication with you, by providing you the major news from Azure over the past couple of weeks. In this time, the newsletter has now grown to over 20,000 subscribers including you. I am genuinely grateful that thousands of you read this every two weeks and I hope to continue to serve you in 2022.

    In 2022, I will be writing these newsletters from a new geographical location. I am moving from my current home in Toronto, Canada to my new home in Lisbon, Portugal. This is a new adventure for me and my family. Nothing should change for you as a newsletter reader or student. However, support might be delayed over the holiday period.

    The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    Microsoft focuses on improved service resilience in 2022.

    There have been a few service outages in the past year, and certainly, this is one of the big challenges Azure faces in the coming years to keep its uptime promises to its customers. What’s the point of moving to the cloud when the entire operation can go down for an entire day and there’s nothing you can do about that?

    So Microsoft is working harder to ensure its key services operate without interruption. They recently increased the Service Level Agreement guarantee for Azure Active Directory (AAD) from 99.9% to 99.99%. 

    In September 2020, and again in April 2021, Azure Active Directory suffered a multi-hour outage after a bad deployment on their side. This left applications that rely on AAD being unable to log in including the Azure Portal, Teams, Exchange, and user apps that rely on it.

    So having them double down on the availability of these services to hopefully prevent outages in the future is a smart step.

    One of their strategies for backup is to have a cache of Azure authentications. This way, if AAD was to go down for any length of time, most users will still be able to log in using the cached copy of their credentials. Microsoft claims this will help in 93 percent of cases, making the outage less severe.

    Azure CTO Mark Russinovich addressed this in a recent blog post.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/advancing-service-resilience-in-azure-active-directory-with-its-backup-authentication-service/

    TWO.

    Azure launches a fully-managed load testing service.

    This makes perfect sense. It wasn’t too long ago when I was working on a big project that was expecting a huge amount of traffic around US Thanksgiving. We prepared the site for months for that big week. Not only adding some more servers, but doing proper load testing and finding out where the bottlenecks of the application were and fixing them.

    Load Testing is critical, and having an official Azure Load Testing product is overdue.

    Sure, Visual Studio Team System had some built-in testing features, but you really need to spin up a lot of external servers to really drive traffic to your site in an authentic way. Not just one machine simulating hundreds of users.

    Azure DevOps also had some load testing features, but that had been deprecated earlier this year. Now we know what they planned to do as a replacement.

    “Azure Load Testing is a fully-managed Azure service that allows developers and testers to generate high-scale load with custom Apache JMeter scripts”, says the announcement.

    If you have an application that has the potential to have to scale quickly, it’s in your best interests to do some load testing. You’ll reveal things that you didn’t know. And some of the mitigations are quite easy to implement, such as web caching and CDN. 

    For instance, for that project a few years ago, we fixed a lot of code bugs, cached a lot, disabled logins for that period, and got ourselves to the point where the hardware load balancer we were using was the bottleneck. When internet components outside your application become the bottleneck… that’s a whole new level of problems but at least it’s not your application or database.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-load-testing-optimize-app-performance-at-scale/

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    It’s been a quiet two weeks. Since Ignite was at the beginning of November, most of the announcements have been made and now it’s time for Microsoft to implement

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Some VPN Gateway SKUs can now support up to 100 S2S/Vnet-to-Vnet connections, up from 30
    • New planned data center region in Belgium called Belgium Central (p.s. I love Belgium)
    • Azure Scheduler will be retired on 31 January 2022
    • OpenID Connect authentication now supported for App Service and Azure Functions
    • Application Gateway now supports wildcard characters for multi-site listeners
    • VPN Gateway NAT now 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.

    That’s it for the Azure World newsletter for 2021.

    I want to thank you so much for signing up for this, and I wish you and your family a happy, safe, and peaceful end of the year.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 2.22. 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
  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.21

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.21

    November 17, 2021

    Welcome to the twenty-first edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021.

    I am so grateful to have you as a subscriber.

    In the blink of an eye, another two weeks have passed. I guess I’ve been completely busy with a few things, including the launch of a new course and preparing my courses for the upcoming holiday period.

    The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    The AZ-305 Azure Architect Design beta has become available this week. There are a limited number of coupons that will allow you to take that exam at a discount while it’s in Beta.

    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-blog/exam-az-305-beta-prove-your-skills-as-an-azure-solutions/ba-p/2147115

    As you might recall from a previous newsletter, Microsoft has re-architected how the Azure Architect Expert certification is earned.

    Up until March 31, 2022, you can earn the Azure Architect Expert certification by passing both AZ-303 and AZ-304. You can also earn it by passing AZ-303 and AZ-305. Both AZ-303 and AZ-304 exams expire on March 31, 2022.

    No worries if you’ve already passed those exams. Your active certification is not affected by the expiry of the exams.

    You can also earn Azure Architect Expert certification by passing AZ-104 and AZ-305. This means that some people can get Expert certified with one fewer exam than the old requirements. Less studying, less cost.

    If you weren’t planning to get the Azure Administrator certificate, then you now have to do that under the new requirements.

    Sign up for the beta of AZ-305 if you’re interested. See if the coupon is still valid for that. And rest assured that I’m updating my AZ-304 course with the new content. I’ve already started on that.

    TWO.

    The new Microsoft Azure Region in Sweden is now active. This was announced a year ago.

    There was a rumor that the rack hardware was provided by IKEA. (Sorry, that’s the best joke I could come up with at the moment. I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately.)

    The Swedish data center was built using sustainable principles, using 100 percent carbon-free energy. They are investing in renewable energy projects with some partners around that too.

    Interesting tidbit. The backup generators for the new data center use diesel fuel made with 50% renewable raw material. So even in an emergency, Microsoft will be reducing the harm to the environment in its energy usage.

    The facilities are cooled with outside air 100% of the year, and rainwater is captured to provide water to the facility.

    https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-opens-new-azure-cloud-region-in-sweden/

    THREE.

    I am pleased to finally launch my new DP-300 Azure Data Administrator exam preparation course on Udemy.

    If you are one of the first readers to see this newsletter, I’ll offer a limited number of free spots using this link:

    https://www.udemy.com/course/dp300-azure/?couponCode=FIRST100

    The first 100 students to click the above link can get the course for free as a thank you for reading this newsletter every couple of weeks. If you missed the free link, you can still get the course at its launch price of US $9.99.

    https://www.udemy.com/course/dp300-azure/?couponCode=LAUNCH10

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    There were a ton of other announcements. 90+ Satya said in the keynote. I can’t cover them all here. But check some of the more interesting ones out.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Bastion Standard SKU in GA
    • Trusted launch for Azure Virtual Machines in GA
    • API Management and Event Grid integration
    • Azure Virtual Network Manager in preview
    • Managed Identities for Azure Automation in GA
    • Azure OpenAI service brings GPT-3 to Azure, in preview
    • Azure Site Recovery supports failover for multiple IP configurations
    • ExpressRoute supports Azure Virtual Desktop Shortpath RDP over Private Peering
    • Static Web Apps now supports .NET 6 Blazor apps
    • .NET 6.0 in Azure Functions now GA
    • Azure Functions Runtime 4.0
    • PowerShell on Linux for Azure Functions in preview
    • Azure Bastion native client support in preview
    • Azure Web PubSub is now in GA
    • App Service support for .NET 6 is now in GA
    • Multi subnet support for SQL Server in a Virtual Machine
    • Azure Archive rehydration priority can be altered after requested
    • VM Applications – deploy applications to VMs and VM Scale sets
    • Microsoft Azure Sweden region now GA
    • Availability Zones for the East Asia region
    • SFTP support for Azure Blob Storage is now in preview
    • Virtual Machine Selector tool lets you find the VM instance type that meets your needs
    • Azure SQL bindings for Azure Functions 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.

    I’m going to take a break for a little while now that US Thanksgiving is here. I will continue to keep an eye on the courses on Udemy to ensure they’re up to date, including the AZ-305 additions to AZ-304. But don’t expect much from me in the next 2 weeks.

    The next newsletter, on December 1, will be the last one of the year.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 2.21. 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

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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.20

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.20

    November 3, 2021

    Welcome to the twentieth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021. 

    I am so grateful to have you as a subscriber. 

    I’ve got the Microsoft Ignite sessions playing in the background as I write this. The online event has kicked off this week, and hopefully, you had a chance to watch some of it. You can watch the videos after the fact if there’s something that you wanted to see and missed.

    I do miss attending in person. Hopefully, in 2022, we can get back to meeting each other in person.

    The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    One of the first announcements that caught my attention at Ignite is a new serverless Container service called Azure Container Apps.

    Container Apps is a new way to host containers in the cloud at scale.

    While Azure Container Instances has limitations on the scaling of apps, Container Apps let you deploy code without having to worry about those limits. And because it’s serverless, you can even let it scale down to zero. Like Functions, you are only charged while it’s running. And there’s a free tier if you’re running containers that don’t need to run constantly.

    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/apps-on-azure/introducing-azure-container-apps-a-serverless-container-service/ba-p/2867265?ocid=AID3042118

    TWO.

    There has been a trend inside Azure for “managers”. It started with Azure Monitor for centralized logs. And Azure Security Center for centralized security. There is the “Azure Firewall Manager” to manage all of the firewall rules in one central location. 

    And now there is the “Azure Virtual Network Manager”. Customers can manage their virtual networks across subscriptions and help manage complex network topologies. 

    It’s a good trend. Instead of having 100’s of individual resources which need to be managed one by one, you now have specialized dashboards that allow you to set policies across your subscription, or across a management group. 

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-network-manager/

    THREE.

    My absolute favorite Azure service name has to be “Azure Chaos Studio”.

    As the name implies, Chaos Studio helps you simulate outages so that you can see the effect that has on your applications and services.

    If you ever wanted to see the effect of a Region going down on your app, you can simulate that. You can also add time delays, CPU pressure, physical and virtual memory pressure, disk I/O pressure, DNS failure, network disconnects, and 25+ other faults. 

    Some of these are hard to simulate yourself, so this new tool should make it easier to test your disaster recovery readiness.


    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-governance-and-management/announcing-the-public-preview-of-azure-chaos-studio/ba-p/2893050

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    There were a ton of other announcements. 90+ Satya said in the keynote. I can’t cover them all here. But check some of the more interesting ones out.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Visual Studio Code for the Web in public preview
    • Azure Advisor recommendations for Azure Data Explorer Clusters in GA
    • Azure Backup now supports Archive Tier through Azure Portal in GA
    • Azure Policy for Azure Key Vault in GA
    • Azure Spot Virtual Machines “try to restore” functionality in GA
    • Azure Data Explorer Insights in GA
    • Multiple backups per day for Azure Files in public preview
    • Gateway Load Balancer in public preview
    • Metrics and Metric alerts for Azure Backup in public preview
    • Multi-user authorization for Azure Backup is in public preview
    • AKS node pool user start/stop feature in public preview
    • Azure Cache for Redis now supports Redis 6.0
    • Dapr extension for AKS in public preview
    • Azure SQL Managed Instance now has a Link feature in public preview
    • Provisioned throughput spending limit for Azure Cosmos DB in GA
    • Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra service in GA
    • Azure Cosmos DB: Partial document update now in GA
    • Cost-saving recommendations in Azure Advisor for Azure Cosmos DB now GA
    • Log Analytics Workspace Insights in Azure Monitor in GA
    • Azure Container Apps in public preview
    • Live resize of Azure Disk Storage in public preview
    • Centralized management of keys for encrypting Azure disks in GA
    • Provisioned throughput increase for Azure Ultra Disk Storage in GA
    • Azure Service Bus large message support in GA
    • New orchestration mode for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets in GA
    • Autoscale public preview is now available for Azure Virtual Desktop
    • Azure Chaos Studio is now in public preview
    • New Azure virtual machines for confidential workloads – DCsv3 and DCdsv3

    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 am watching some of the Ignite sessions this week. Work continues on the DP-300 course when that’s not going on. Getting myself set up for November which is a popular time of year for online instructors like myself.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 2.20. 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