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Scott Duffy – Page 8 – SoftwareArchitect.ca
AZ-305 new exam and Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification changes are coming.
Let’s talk about what Microsoft announced in October as changes to the Azure Architect Expert certification. People who have already passed Azure Architect Expert need not be worried as nothing has changed for them. But if you’re in the process of studying for AZ-303 or AZ-304, what should you do? In this video, I talk about that.
What is Azure AD Identity Protection? | AZ-104 Exam Topic
This video is an excerpt from my best-selling #AZ_104 exam course on Udemy.
Identity Protection is a tool that allows organizations to accomplish three key tasks: automate the detection and remediation of identity-based risks, investigate risks using data in the portal, and export risk detection data to your SIEM.
Read the whole post here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/identity-protection/overview-identity-protection
Thousands of students have purchased this course to help them to prepare for and pass the AZ-104 exam. Here’s the link for you to check it out.
Welcome to the nineteenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021.
I am so grateful to have you as a subscriber.
A reminder that Microsoft Ignite 2021 is coming up on November 2-4, and registration is now open. It’s a conference I used to enjoy going to in-person, and get a lot out of it online.
An unnamed Microsoft Azure customer in Europe was recently attacked with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack at an amazing 2.4 terabits per second. And survived. This is the highest volume Azure has ever seen – 140% higher than the previous record from 2020.
According to an announcement by Microsoft, around 70,000 sources in the USA, Vietnam, Taiwan, and others (a botnet) sent a massive UDP flood attacking an Azure customer with UDP packets across a wide range of ports in an attempt to overwhelm the network and take the target website offline. The attack lasted just 10 minutes.
But thanks to Azure’s DDoS platform protection, the attack was not successful.
Azure’s Architect Expert certification is undergoing a change in 2022.
The current Azure Architect Expert certification requires two exams – AZ-303 and AZ-304. In the future, the exam will also require two exams – AZ-104 and AZ-305.
Many of us already have the AZ-104 exam because it’s the Azure Administrator certification test. So if you get Azure Administrator, getting the Architect certification only requires one additional exam.
If you already have the Azure Architect Expert certification, this news doesn’t affect you. You’re certified, and in a year you’ll need to renew in the normal way.
If you are currently studying for one or both of the AZ-303 and AZ-304 exams, you’ll have some time to pass both before it’s too late. Those exams expire in March 2022. So you have 4 or 5 months to pass the existing tests, and in that way, this news may not affect you either.
But if you have already passed AZ-104, and want to take the shortcut by passing AZ-305, you can wait a little. The exam goes into Beta in November 2021. Beta exams are not scored right away, so it’ll take a few weeks to find out if you passed.
Or you can wait until early 2022 when the exam is live, and pass AZ-104+AZ-305 or AZ-303+AZ-305.
As you can expect, I’ll be all over this for the next few months, updating my courses. Stay tuned for news on that.
Also in exam news, Microsoft seems to be coming up with more specialty exams. The first of these is an Azure Cosmos DB Developer specialty certification.
This makes sense, as Cosmos DB is an important central component of Azure data skills. Some of the existing exams (like DP-300) focus on the relational data side, and so it’s good to see Cosmos DB getting some certification attention.
So the new DP-420 exam will focus on the non-relational side of databases. This is an exciting new release for developers who want to prove their expertise with certification.
I had a lovely trip away at the end of September and the beginning of October. I’m now ready to get back to work.
I have a number of courses in various stages of development. This week, I’ve been spending time working with Jordi on a DP-300 Administering Relational Databases on Azure certification course. There’s a lot of work to go on that, but videos are being produced and uploaded to Udemy. The course is slowly coming together.
I’ll hold off talking about the other courses since it’s better for me to focus on one thing at a time. Now that we’re halfway through October, there are only two more months left in the year and I need to buckle down and complete everything I have underway.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 2.19. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
Welcome to the eighteenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021.
I am so grateful to have you as a subscriber.
A reminder that Microsoft Ignite 2021 is coming up on November 2-4, and registration is now open. It’s a conference I used to enjoy going to in-person, and get a lot out of it online. https://myignite.microsoft.com/home
The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.
Virtual Machine Scale Sets is getting some cool new features.
Microsoft is calling it “flexible orchestration mode”, and gives you more power when it comes to how VMs scale up and down.
For instance, there is a new “AI Prediction” option for scaling. Instead of relying on specific metrics or specific dates/times, you can leave it to AI to predict when to expand and contract the scale set. Is there anything AI can’t do? I think not!
You can also include spot instances and regular instances in the same scale set. A cool way to save some money depending on your workload.
And it also includes “automatic instance repair”, where “unhealthy” VMs are automatically replaced.
This is in public preview now. Check out Flexible Orchestration if this is interesting to you.
On-demand capacity reservations for Virtual Machines are also now in public preview.
The idea here is that you know that you’re going to be needing a certain number of VMs in a short period of time. Let’s say you are going to need 2500 VMs in a few days’ time.
And let’s also say that those VMs are critical for your business. You are launching a big promotion, spending millions on advertising, and you will need to be able to spin up the extra capacity for this event.
You can reserve those VMs in advance.
Before now, you could deploy those VMs a few days early (and pay for that) just to ensure they are available for use. This is wasteful both in terms of the money spent on computing power you’re not using, and the management overhead of running so many VMs for all those extra days. Even if they’re stopped, there is cost and overhead to that.
Unlike Reserved Instances, you don’t have to commit to a 1- or 3-year term for this. The reservations can be canceled at any time for no extra cost.
This is a rather niche service for people who absolutely need VMs in the future and are willing to pay a little something to reserve the capacity in the region and availability zone that they wish to use. Without having to pay for all the extra stuff like storage and operating system licenses.
I’m actually going on vacation for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, I’m not tempting fate too much and Microsoft doesn’t take this opportunity to change all their exams next week.
Stay safe everyone, and I wish you all the best!
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 2.18. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
A quick video to show that there are really no changes to either AZ-900 or DP-900 in October 25, 2021… despite the Azure landing page showing there to be.
There are some exam changes coming later this month, but nothing to worry about. Most of them are just wording changes in the requirements that do not affect the actual exam. I still don’t know why Microsoft does it this way.
Welcome to the seventeenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021.
Here in Toronto, the kids are heading back to school this week and the temperatures are a bit cooler. It’s funny how the weather changes in a single day. One day, stifling heat. And the next, you can easily be without air conditioning. I expect the stifling heat will return later this month. But you really miss it that first week that it’s gone.
Thanks so much for subscribing. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.
Microsoft is rolling out support for Availability Zones in App Service Plans. It’s in general availability as of now.
As you know, Availability Zones gives us increased availability within a region. Of course, you can deploy your applications across multiple regions (using an App Gateway for instance) to get global availability. But now we can get increased availability inside the same region.
There are some very specific requirements in order to use Availability Zones with App Services.
You must be running on Premium V2 or V3 level plans
Minimum of 3 instances (one for each zone)
Must be running in a supported region
Must be a NEW app service plan
Must be deployed using ARM templates
Currently, converting a pre-existing App Service Plan to support availability zones is not supported. So if you want to take advantage of this, you must recreate the service plan and redeploy.
It’s also only supported in the “new portion” of the data center, so that’s why you need to be on Premium V2 or V3 in order to get this new feature.
The last requirement is interesting. It’s currently not supported in the Azure Portal or with either of the command-line SDKs. So you must deploy this using ARM templates. Hopefully, they add that function to those interfaces soon.
I probably should mention the vulnerability that was discovered in Cosmos DB a couple of weeks ago.
Apparently, it was not actually used by “bad guys” (as far as Microsoft can tell), but security researchers discovered a way to access any Cosmos DB account through an exploit in Jupyter Notebooks functionality.
The researchers were able to gain privilege escalation through Notebooks, which gave them the ability to get the “access keys” of any other Cosmos DB account. Which as you know, gives you full read/write access.
Around 30% of customers received an email from Microsoft telling them to regenerate their Cosmos DB access keys. But the security researchers suggest that every Cosmos DB customer regenerates their keys.
If you’re in a position to do so, I’d look to regenerate your access keys. Maybe this is a good opportunity to make it easy for yourself to update the keys by putting a reliable process in place to do so and testing that process. Like changing a password, you can do that every few months on a schedule.
My SC-300 course is now live. It’s available for students in Udemy Business, or you can pick it up using the link below. It’s rated 4.96 stars right now. This course covers the exam SC-300: Microsoft Identity and Access Administrator. Passing that exam gets you Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate certification.
I now turn my attention to something people have been asking me to create for years. Another security-related exam, AZ-500. I hope to have that out this month. So stay tuned to this space in future newsletters for updates.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 2.17. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
Welcome to the sixteenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021.
We’re coming to the end of August, can you believe it? I actually like fall weather in Canada. September and October are some pleasant months. If you’re ever planning to come visit Canada, fall is a great time to do it.
When November comes, it starts to get colder and jackets are required. That’s when the weather stops being so nice. So I have to enjoy it before then.
Thanks so much for subscribing. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.
>>> BACK TO SCHOOL PRACTICE LABS SPECIAL:
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This code is limited to 100 uses. So grab it before it’s gone.
Microsoft has announced the next Microsoft Ignite for fall 2021, from November 2-4.
I know it’s a bit early to start thinking about Ignite. And you can’t register for it yet. But the dates are announced, so you can add it to your calendar and tell your boss you won’t be available for those days.
Microsoft has released its quarterly updates to the exams. Several exams are seeing minor updates as of September 24, 2021. So you have some time to adjust before then, and none of the changes are major.
AZ-104 has added a single new requirement. So the changes are minor.
AZ-303 has added Bicep to the exam requirements, so there are some interesting changes there.
AZ-304 and AI-102 saw only wording changes, with nothing else changing.
AZ-900, DP-900, AI-900, SC-900, AZ-204, DP-100 : no changes, so far.
Of course, I will make changes to the relevant courses before then.
AZ-303 seems to have the most changes to its objectives of any exam I’ve seen:
I personally took the AZ-700 exam in beta within the last couple of weeks, and the exam was interesting. To say the least.
The exam had a lot of questions that followed a common format. Such as, “you have a Virtual Network named VNET1, which has two Subnets attached named SUBNET1 and SUBNET2. SUBNET1 uses NSG1 while SUBNET2 uses NSG2. There is also a gateway subnet named GATEWAYSUBNET with a network gateway named GATEWAY1….”
My brain gets a headache by the end of the first paragraph on a question like this, and there are three more paragraphs to read. For some reason, I just can’t keep all of the details in my head at the same time when they are written out as a paragraph like this. And of course, we can’t scribble notes on a piece of paper so we can’t organize them in a way that helps.
By the time the question asks “What is the result of trying to connect to VM1 using VM2 over port 80?” I’ve forgotten all of the details of what network VM1 belongs to and all of the various details of what security restrictions VM1 has on it.
Anyways, long story short, this exam was tougher than I expected. Time was a factor. 59 questions over 120 minutes averages to around 2 minutes per question. And I can’t even read a question like the above in 2 minutes, let alone answer it.
The few people I have talked to that took AZ-700 described similar experiences of running out of time and finding the questions more difficult than expected.
Oh well. I hope Microsoft Worldwide Learning gets valuable feedback on the questions that work and the questions that don’t. Maybe it’s me. Or maybe it’s the exam. We’ll see in the fall when those exam scores come back…
The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:
Azure Defender for SQL now GA for Azure SQL Virtual Machine
Private Link for Azure Managed HSM now GA
ExpressRoute Global Reach has 2 new locations
Global disaster recovery via Azure Site Recovery in GA
Azure VPN client for macOS
Azure Migrate can containerize apps for AKS and App Service in preview
Azure VMs can now auto-upgrade extensions
GitHub Codespaces in GA
Azure Blob storage Inventory now in GA
Azure Cosmos DB: Continuous backup with point in time restore now in GA
Application Insights auto-instrumentation of .NET apps on Linux in public preview
AKS support for Kubernetes 1.21 in GA
Azure Archive Storage events for easy rehydration of archived blobs in GA
Azure Blob storage – Last access time tracking now in GA
Windows 11 public preview is now available on Azure Virtual Desktop
Apply settings inside machines using Azure Policy’s guest configuration in public preview
This past fortnight, there were a TON of announcements of services being retired. Be aware of the following services and version numbers going away in the next couple of years.
Select Azure Cognitive Search skills will be retired on 31 August 2024
Upgrade to Text-to-Speech Neural Voice by 31 August 2024
Update Java SDK 3.x to Java SDK 4.x by 31 August 2024
Tomcat 7 reached End-of-Life on 23 March 2021
Migrate your Azure IoT Central apps to version 3 before 1 March 2022
Basic and Standard A-series VMs will retire on 31 August 2024
HB-series Azure Virtual Machines will be retired by 31 August 2024
H-series Azure Virtual Machines will be retired by 31 August 2022
NC-series Azure Virtual Machines will be retired by 31 August 2022
NC v2-series Azure Virtual Machines will be retired by 31 August 2022
NV-series and NV_Promo Azure Virtual Machines will be retired by 31 August 2022
Azure AD B2C redirect URL login.microsoftonline.com will be retired on 31 August 2022
Version 2.x of the Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK will be retired on 31 August 2024
Community support for PHP 7.3 is ending on 6 December 2021
Azure Data Factory Compute Optimized data flows will be retired on 31 August 2024
Cloud Services (classic) deployment model is retiring on 31 August 2024
Machine Learning Studio (classic) will retire on 31 August 2024
Log Analytics agent in Azure Monitor will retire on 31 August 2024
Transition to new work item integration in Application Insights by 31 August 2022
Be sure and check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.
I was hoping to have launched my next course on SC-300 exam by the time this newsletter goes out. Unfortunately, I may be a few days delayed on that. Oh well. In the next newsletter, I’ll provide a discount link to my SC-300 course.
Coming up after that, I want to finish up some more practice test questions for AZ-700 based on my experience taking the exam in beta. And maybe I’ll need a nap after that.
Thanks for reading this far!
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 2.16. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
Welcome to the fifteenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021.
As I sit here to write this newsletter, I can’t help but feel extremely grateful that you’re subscribed to this list. I have the privilege of writing this newsletter every two weeks in an email that gets sent to tens of thousands of you, recording courses that guide thousands of students around the world, and virtually connecting with many of you over Twitter, Facebook, and through Udemy. Thank you for being here.
Thanks so much for subscribing. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.
Ransomware has been in the news a lot in the past couple of years. From entire American cities that have been taken over by it (Baltimore 2018), core energy infrastructure such as a gas pipeline (Colonial Pipeline), schools, hospitals, and companies all over the world have been taken hostage by these hackers demanding payment to unlock their devices.
These attacks appear to be increasing every year. It’s clear something more needs to be done.
Microsoft is adding Fusion ransomware detection to Azure Sentinel. This tool can detect attacks in place, and alert you to help prevent them from succeeding.
It does this of course through pattern matching (machine learning). According to the article, “The Fusion system will correlate data from Azure Defender (Azure Security Center), Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Cloud App Security and Azure Sentinel scheduled analytics rules.”
Over time, Azure continues to chip away at AWS’ global cloud market share.
According to the most recent revenue reports from Amazon and Microsoft, Azure has grown to take 22% of the global market share for cloud “infrastructure” services. Meanwhile, over the past 4 years, AWS has maintained about a 31% market share.
Now surely the overall market is growing, so market “share” is a bit misleading.
But it’s interesting nonetheless to see these two Internet giants slowly approach market parity. Interesting to me, at least.
Google Cloud Platform is also “standing still” while maintaining an 8% market share.
I’ve been saying for years that the trend is “multi-cloud”, where big companies use the best services from both top vendors (and perhaps all three).
Azure has been releasing various services that happily co-exist with AWS, including Azure Arc, Application Gateways, Azure Monitor, Cost Optimization, Service Fabric and others that can integrate with servers running in AWS.
Have you gone through any Azure Certification renewals yet?
I’ve gone through a few already. I actually thought the process was pretty good. Here are my top 10 tips on the certification renewal process. If you have a renewal coming up – or a few – hopefully these tips make it seem easier than it seems.
Microsoft will send (several) emails to your registered email address to remind you of the renewal. The ones that I’ve seen are 180-days and 90-days. I’m sure they send more, but I haven’t let the certifications get that close to expiry yet.
Passing the certification renewal adds one year to the expiry date of your certification, regardless of when you take the renewal assessment. Waiting to take the assessment until the expiry date doesn’t add more time, and taking the assessment early doesn’t penalize you.
Taking the assessment is free. If you fail, you can re-take it once more in the first 24 hours, and once per 24 hours after that.
If you fail, Microsoft suggests some MS Learn modules for you to take before retrying.
The assessment tests focus on “new exam objectives” since you took the exam. So in some ways, these assessments might be more difficult than you expect. Instead of getting 1 or 2 questions about a topic on a real certification exam, you might find 6 or 7 questions about the same topic on an assessment.
You can see the assessment topics on the certification renewal page, before starting the assessment. So you can see the list of topics and do a little studying beforehand to prepare before starting the assessment for the first time.
Unlike a real certification test, there is no time limit to finish the assessment. You can take minutes or you can take hours.
There is no proctor, no ID required, and nobody is watching you.
You get your results right away, pass or fail. Microsoft puts up a little fireworks to congratulate you if you passed and tells you your new certification expiry date.
Don’t be afraid to fail. Just take the assessment without much preparation the first time, to get a feeling for it. There is no penalty for failing and you’ll be much better prepared to take the exam the second time. And who knows, you just might pass the first time without preparation.
Those are my tips for the exam renewal process. Below is a video I made a few weeks ago, talking about my experience with it.
My AZ-700 course launched 2 weeks ago and has been very popular. Thanks to all of you who have taken the course. Your reviews mean the world to me!
I am writing some practice test questions for AZ-700 and will add them to the course. I’ll also have a full “practice test” course available at some point on Udemy.
Thanks for reading this far!
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 2.15. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
I make videos for a living teaching almost every aspect of Microsoft Azure to anyone who wants to learn it. And I really enjoy doing that. Just the other day, I finished recording a new course. And at the end of it, I was feeling a deep satisfaction about what I had created.
I won’t lie though. Part of the fun I have is using Azure itself. As a teacher, I have an excuse to create new compute, networking, and storage services repeatedly. I create them, I play with them, and I delete them.
I say all this to encourage you to do the same.
You should be in the Azure Portal (or command line) – creating, playing with, and deleting resources. Do it once, and then do it again.
You learn so much by using Azure hands-on.
I can’t count the number of times where I go to do something, and it doesn’t work. Why didn’t it work? Why is Azure returning an error? Why can’t I find the exact feature or function that I am looking for?
That’s when learning happens!
That’s when I become a better teacher. I become a better teacher by playing with Azure myself and discovering the little hidden secrets.
Isn’t It Expensive?
Yes, it can get expensive. I sometimes pay $100s of dollars per month for my Azure bill.
That’s a true copy of my Azure subscription invoice history for one of my subscriptions.
What usually happens is that I leave a service running longer than I expected to.
Like recently, I started an Azure Bastion service. So I was using Bastion to access a private virtual machine running on one of my Azure Networks.
Bastion runs at $0.19 per hour. That’s $4.80 per day. Or $150 per month.
Needless to say, after a couple of weeks, I relented and deleted Bastion. I’d need another solution to access that machine.
How Do You Play With Azure Without Spending $100s?
One option for you is to use a Free account. Azure gives you $200 to spend in the first 30 days. That costs you nothing, and you can learn a lot in 30 days.
But the time runs out after 30 days, and you can only have one free account. Or you’re only supposed to have one free account.
So what else can you do?
You can purchase a lab package with access to Azure hands-on labs that come with the Azure resources you need to learn.
My site, getcloudskills.com, sells packages of labs that include the time on Azure required to use them.
What are Hands-on Labs?
Hands-on labs allow students to practice what they’ve learned on their own time without having to rely on instructors or other resources. Students can use these labs as an opportunity to test out new skills before applying them in the classroom. In addition, it gives students more control over how much time they spend practicing each topic.
How Does Your Hands-On Lab Package Work?
When you buy the All Labs package, you get over 700 labs to choose from. That’s a lot! You can find labs on almost anything that you want to learn.
Each lab has an expected amount of time to complete. So let’s say that we think it will take you 1 hour to finish a single lab. We give you an hour of Azure time (included in the price) to complete that lab.
You can try each lab up to 3 times. So that means, you can spend up to 3 hours practicing the same skill, in this example.
And there are over 700 labs. So this means that there are THOUSANDS of potential hours you can be spending learning Azure, AWS, Linux, and other skills.
I can’t say it’s an unlimited number of cloud hours, but I can’t imagine anyone doing every lab and running out of attempts. (In order to make 2,100 attempts in a year, you need to be completing 7 labs per day!)
Buy One Year of Labs for Azure, AWS, Linux, Cybersecurity and More!
What I can offer you is a pretty good deal.
For less than the cost of what I pay for Azure services in one month, you can get a whole year to play with Azure.
This package comes with over 700 pre-built labs that you can follow along with. Some are basic labs, intermediate labs, and some are expert labs with very little guidance.
For only $125, you get 700 labs with 1 year of cloud services to test them with.
I also have individual exams if you’re looking for more focused labs to specific learning requirements, that can be bought individually. Check out the site for more details.
