Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.20

Welcome to the TWENTIETH bi-weekly edition of the Azure newsletter.

I hope you are all doing well. I am feeling great. The year is almost over, and I am in desperate need of a rest. I think I will take it very easy in December before starting anything significant again in January.

I hope you are staying safe wherever you are and spending some quality time with your family.

ONE.

You don’t often think of this, but some Enterprise software is priced per CPU. And as you need more powerful machines to run these workloads, you risk a massive increase in your software licensing costs as you add vCPUs in the bigger machine sizes.

Microsoft is introducing new virtual machine sizes that have “constrained vCPUs”. So now you can get the latest generation Azure virtual machines, with high memory, large storage, fast I/O, but still keep a low vCPU count.

These are under the memory-optimized category (E-series), and the new VMs are called Esv4, Edsv4, and Easv4.

Esv4 runs an Intel processor while Edsv4 runs AMD.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/constrained-vcpu

TWO.

Microsoft has rolled out .NET 5.0 support to App Services under all regions, operating systems, and app service plan tiers.

If you’re looking to develop in .NET 5.0, it’s now available for use in Azure.

If you look at the link below, you’ll be immediately presented with Microsoft’s challenge naming all these similar but distinct things.

.NET 5.0 is the next version after .NET Core 3.1 – dropping the “Core” and skipping version 4 to reduce confusion with .NET Framework 4.X (which is different)
ASP.NET Core 5.0 is based on .NET 5.0 – keeping the “Core” to reduce confusion with ASP.NET MVC 5
Entity Framework Core 5.0 – keeping the “Core” to reduce confusion with Entity Framework 5 and 6

Follow the below link to see all of the new goodies included with this new language support:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/dotnet-five

THREE.

The AZ-900 exam changes that were previously announced are now live. As I mentioned, the course already has new videos covering the new topics. I’ll look to re-record that course around the end of the year.

As previously mentioned, AZ-104, AZ-204 and AZ-303 don’t really have exam changes even though the page says they do. It’s more like clarifications on the wording. No changes to the courses will be made around those.

The AZ-304 exam changes are going live next week.

As always, I’ll keep everyone posted if I hear anything else.

AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

It’s been a very slow couple of weeks, to be honest. No big news lately.

HDInsight to support Private Link (in preview)
QnA Maker getting deep learning upgrades (in preview)
Azure Data Lake Storage Premium Tier now GA
Azure Advisor has new recommendations to make
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) VM images now available in the marketplace
Redis 6.0 now in preview
.NET 5 now in App Service
VPN over ExpressRoute now available

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.

Well, of course, yours truly had to go and catch a cold in the last couple of weeks. Don’t worry, it’s not more serious than that. But I haven’t been able to work as much as I need to to finish things up. And I haven’t been able to record any videos because of my gravelly voice.

Hopefully, I can kick this cough and get back to being 100% again this week.

Stay safe! Stay well!