Hard to believe another two weeks have passed!
I hope you’ve been safe and in good spirits since we last spoke. As you can believe, I’m seeing an increase in the number of people looking to learn cloud computing and Azure, and I’m blessed to be able to provide that to people.
It’s time to have a look at the world of Microsoft Azure.
ONE.
Perhaps the only piece of “marketing” I’ve seen about Azure lately was the announcement that the NBA and Microsoft have inked a multi-year deal that makes Microsoft the official AI, cloud and laptop provider for the league.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/16/21223932/microsoft-nba-partnership-deal-azure-surface-details
Now the really tricky bit is that basketball is currently not being played due to the pandemic. But when they start up again, perhaps we’ll be seeing teams holding Surfaces and running their plays through Azure Machine Learning.
TWO.
There were a couple of developments in the court battle between Amazon and the Pentagon and Microsoft over the JEDI contract that was awarded to Azure. We did hear from the Pentagon inspector general who claims that there was no interference in the decision that he could find. I guess the Pentagon stands by its decision and wants the contract with Azure to continue.
Then a few days later, the judge in the case put the case on hold to give the Pentagon even more time to review aspects of its decision. It sounds like the Pentagon is quite happy with its decision, but the case won’t be reviewed again until August.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/20/us_judge_deploys_freeze_beam/
World events have since eclipsed this, but it’s still brewing under the surface.
THREE.
We are still seeing restrictions on free and new Azure accounts which are impacting students’ ability to create resources and learn Azure. I have not heard of restrictions being changed or lifted as of yet.
A reminder that the updated blog post is here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-2-on-microsoft-cloud-services-continuity/
“We have placed limits on free offers to prioritize capacity for existing customers. We also have limits on certain resources for new subscriptions. These are ‘soft’ quota limits, and customers can raise support requests to increase these limits.”
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
Updates to Azure continue to rock on in April.
- Azure Security Center Free Tier getting some additional security recommendations
- Azure Support API allows you to interact with the Azure support ticket system programmatically
- Virtual Machine Scale Sets auto instance repairs now available
- SQL Server 2019 images for Linux now available in the marketplace
- Azure Monitor for VMs now generally available
- Azure Spot Instances for Kubernetes in preview
- Azure Virtual Networks now support reverse DNS lookup
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.
It’s been a good two weeks for me, work-wise.
I finished and launched a new TOGAF course for Part 2 Certification. And launched a new Azure DP-200 certification course for implementing data storage and processing.
I’m continuing to make updates to AZ-103 for the AZ-104 changes and have started a couple of more projects for LinkedIn Learning.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
Thanks for sticking it out this far! This is the end of issue 1.8! Hopefully, you found it valuable, at least a little bit!
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
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See you in two weeks!