July 14, 2021
Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021.
We are now past the halfway mark of 2021. For me, the concept of time has really been distorted with all that has been going on in 2020 and 2021, and so saying “the year is half over” sounds so weird.
I can’t wait to get back to traveling, going to conferences like Microsoft Ignite, and getting back out into the community. I plan on attending way more local Microsoft and Azure events once things are back open again.
I hope you are staying safe, wherever you are in the world.
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ONE.
Today’s first item has to do with Azure App Services App Service Environments (ASE). As you know, the ASE is an Azure App Service feature that provides a fully isolated and dedicated environment for securely running App Service apps at a high scale.
Azure has introduced ASEv3 which is the latest iteration of this, and it’s now in General Availability.
There are several notable changes to App Service Environments in V3.
- ASEv3 deploys as a resource to a single subnet on your virtual network
- It can have either an internal private IP address or an external public IP address
- Being a resource on your VNet, app services have access to other resources on the same subnet without any additional configuration
- Traffic travels to ASE through an NSG so you can filter it using those access control lists
- For isolated hosts, elimination of “stamp fees”, now there’s just per app instance fees
- Ability to deploy app services into availability zones if you wish (a minimum of 9 app instances to do this, 3 per zone)
- Availability of reserved instances for Isolated V2 plans – 1- or 3-year commitments for significant savings
See the announcement for more details:
TWO.
I’ve mentioned the US Department of Defence JEDI project a few times last year. And so this is the epitaph for that program. The US DoD has announced they are canceling the project and starting the bidding process over.
If you recall, Microsoft won the single-source contract for this program, which would have amounted to $10 billion over several years. This bothered several of Microsoft’s competitors, and there was a lot of political and legal battles over it.
Despite the DoD investigating the issues and confirming that nothing was wrong in granting this project entirely to Microsoft, the delays persisted and Amazon was pressing the issue through the court systems. This could take years to resolve.
So in the end, AWS got what they wanted. They are bidding for the contract again.
Rumor is that Microsoft will win a significant share of the new contract with some of that being given to AWS as well. Because some of this money is for hardware such as Microsoft’s Hololens and Amazon cannot really compete with that part of the bid.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/06/pentagon-cancels-10-billion-jedi-cloud-contract.html
THREE.
Apparently, a flaw has been found in PowerShell 7.0 and 7.1 that could allow remote code execution. Users are recommended to upgrade to a newer version of PowerShell.
This does not affect older versions of PowerShell (like 5.1).
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/update-powershell-versions-70-and-71-to-protect-against-a-vulnerability/
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
Very few announcements in the last couple of weeks. Summer is here:
- Azure Automation Customer-Managed Keys in GA
- Azure Bastion Standard SKU public preview
- New tool to transition from Classic deployment model to Cloud Services (extended support) model
- App Service Environment v3 now GA
- Form Recognizer container support in public preview
- VM level disk bursting on more VM types
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.
Now that SC-900 has successfully launched (go check that course out at https://sjd.ca/sc900), I am starting a new course. I think many of you will be interested in it because it’s a very popular topic in IT. I will keep it a secret for a couple of more weeks and you’ll hear about it more in the next newsletter.
A bunch of Microsoft Azure exams are getting minor updates by Microsoft. And so I’ll be tweaking some of my courses to ensure that they cover the new changes. For instance, SC-900 already had its first revision. And AI-102 is seeing some changes too.
Check out my YouTube channel, where I post about exam updates and go over what topics were added and removed to each. Please subscribe!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwDGcuS41uVFS_2iDHL0h-A
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 2.13. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
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