It was a relatively quiet couple of weeks in the Azure world, and then BAM! Microsoft made a couple of announcements today.
Let’s start with one piece of bad news before we talk about two pieces of good news.
ONE.
Sad to say, but Azure continues to be having a bad few weeks with platform stability.
In the last newsletter, I mentioned an Active Directory outage that made life tough for hundreds of thousands around the globe unable to log into their apps or email on Sept 28.
A week later, there was a 20-minute period where network routing had major latency issues. It was long enough for people to notice being unable to connect to their apps.
And then this week, for about 4 hours, ARM template deployments were showing weird, random errors.
I certainly don’t remember reading complaints from users in the Facebook group as much as I have in the last couple of weeks. We usually go months without people mentioning issues like this, and then we have three in a row.
Bad things come in threes, the old saying goes. So maybe this is it.
TWO.
Continuing Azure’s big expansion into Europe, they just announced a data center being built in Austria!
This brings the number of Azure regions (announced) to 65. Good to see Europe getting extensive local cloud coverage.
THREE.
Space, the final frontier.
Azure Space was announced yesterday, which is a partnership with SpaceX.
As you know, SpaceX has been launching satellites into orbit, trying to cover the planet with WiFi. They eventually plan to have 4,000 to 40,000 satellites. Now you’ll be able to collect your Farmville crops while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.
Well Azure Space aims to connect remote locations into Azure. In fact, this announcement included mention of a Modular Data Center (MDC) which is “Azure in a box” that you can place in a remote location, and use Azure Space network to connect to those machines from Azure.
As you’d expect, the military is one of the first to test this.
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
Not too many Azure updates to catch my eye lately. I think Microsoft Ignite is still weighing on the product teams, and they’ve announced all the good stuff a month ago.
- App Service Private Endpoints is now GA
- Azure Cognitive Services Image Captioning reaches “human parity”
- Azure Cache premium tier supports availability zones for replicas
- Service Fabric managed clusters in preview
- Azure Blob Storage point in time recovery is now 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.
Be sure and check out my two newest courses on LinkedIn Learning. My latest just went live recently.
Exam Tips AZ:303 Azure Architect Technologies: https://www.lynda.com/Azure-tutorials/Exam-Tips-Microsoft-Azure-Architect-Technologies-AZ-303/2976144-2.html
Exam Tips: AZ-304 Azure Architect Design: https://www.lynda.com/Azure-tutorials/Exam-Tips-Microsoft-Azure-Architect-Design-AZ-304/2976145-2.html
Nothing big to announce from me. Still working on AZ-304 updates. I guess AZ-900 updates will re-surface in November and I’ll have to turn my attention back to that too.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 1.18. 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!