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.


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/


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.

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See you in two weeks!