Hi there. I hope you are keeping well. Thank you so much for signing up for this unofficial Azure newsletter. Let’s look at what has been going on in the world of Azure over the past few weeks.
ONE.
AZ-303 and AZ-304 entered their beta period last week. Microsoft had put out some discount codes, and they were snapped up very quickly. Luckily, I was able to book both of the exams for later this month.
Having this on the calendar not only motivates me to review the exam requirements but has already gotten me started on the required course revisions. I think for AZ-303, I will have to record the entire course over from start to finish. Azure has changed a lot since I originally recorded it, and a lot needs to be updated.
Keep an eye out for announcements for when that will be generally available. I’m going to aim for an August release for both updated courses. It’ll be a lot of work. But a worthy goal.
If you want to book AZ-303 as a beta exam, here’s the link for that:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-303
And the new AZ-304 beta exam is available here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-304
But please keep in mind that Beta exams are different than regular exams. They are slightly longer, you don’t get the results right away, and there are fewer study resources available. But if you want to see the exam before anyone else, feel free!
TWO.
Docker and Microsoft released the first integration between Docker Desktop and Azure Container Instances. This allows you to use native Docker commands to run your applications as Azure ACI containers.
You can use either “docker run” or “docker compose up” on your local machine to deploy a container image into Azure.
ACI, as you know, is one of the quickest ways to create a container in Azure. They are not as difficult to manage as a Kubernetes cluster, and good for simpler workloads that don’t require redundancy.
There is also an ACI extension for Visual Studio Code that provides an integrated experience working with Azure containers.
THREE.
If you’re interested in Machine Learning at all, I partnered with Aderson Oliveira to bring a new Azure ML Studio course to Udemy.
https://www.udemy.com/course/machine-learning-no-code-approach-using-azure-ml-studio/
Use the link above to get a special launch price of US $9.99 or the local currency equivalent.
This course is highly rated, at 4.5 stars. Aderson is an experienced college teacher here in Toronto. We’re excited to have you in the course if this is something you’re interested in. Use the link above to get the best price.
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
So many updates to Azure over the past month, I can’t cover it all.
- AKS supports confidential workloads through DCSv2 instances (private preview)
- Azure DevTest Labs now have access to the Shared Image Gallery for custom VM images
- Azure Load Balancer is now integrated into Azure Monitor for health monitoring
- Azure Machine Learning Studio web experience is now GA
- Neural Text to Speech added 15 new languages, for even more natural-sounding voices
- Load Balancer will support using IP addresses in the backend pool (as Application Gateways does) (preview)
- Azure Firewall Manager is now GA
- Virtual Machine Scale Sets now supports the automatic rollout of updates to custom images
- Azure Data Lake now supports immutable storage (in preview)
- Azure Monitor for Key Vault (in preview)
Nothing really jumps out as being the big announcement of the last couple of weeks, but there are some small changes in there that might be impactful for you.
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.
As usual, I have a lot on the go. AZ-104 and AZ-204 updates have been made to the appropriate courses in Udemy. So if you’re studying for those, those courses are ready for you.
I finished recording a DP-900 course for the Azure Data Fundamentals exam. It’s at the video editor right now and should be live in the next couple of weeks.
And I’ve just started recording updates to the AZ-300 course for AZ-303. I started that today, so it might take me a couple of weeks to get through that. Look for those videos to be added to the course slowly.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 1.11. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
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See you in two weeks!