November 3, 2021
Welcome to the twentieth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021.
I am so grateful to have you as a subscriber.
I’ve got the Microsoft Ignite sessions playing in the background as I write this. The online event has kicked off this week, and hopefully, you had a chance to watch some of it. You can watch the videos after the fact if there’s something that you wanted to see and missed.
I do miss attending in person. Hopefully, in 2022, we can get back to meeting each other in person.
The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.
ONE.
One of the first announcements that caught my attention at Ignite is a new serverless Container service called Azure Container Apps.
Container Apps is a new way to host containers in the cloud at scale.
While Azure Container Instances has limitations on the scaling of apps, Container Apps let you deploy code without having to worry about those limits. And because it’s serverless, you can even let it scale down to zero. Like Functions, you are only charged while it’s running. And there’s a free tier if you’re running containers that don’t need to run constantly.
TWO.
There has been a trend inside Azure for “managers”. It started with Azure Monitor for centralized logs. And Azure Security Center for centralized security. There is the “Azure Firewall Manager” to manage all of the firewall rules in one central location.
And now there is the “Azure Virtual Network Manager”. Customers can manage their virtual networks across subscriptions and help manage complex network topologies.
It’s a good trend. Instead of having 100’s of individual resources which need to be managed one by one, you now have specialized dashboards that allow you to set policies across your subscription, or across a management group.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-network-manager/
THREE.
My absolute favorite Azure service name has to be “Azure Chaos Studio”.
As the name implies, Chaos Studio helps you simulate outages so that you can see the effect that has on your applications and services.
If you ever wanted to see the effect of a Region going down on your app, you can simulate that. You can also add time delays, CPU pressure, physical and virtual memory pressure, disk I/O pressure, DNS failure, network disconnects, and 25+ other faults.
Some of these are hard to simulate yourself, so this new tool should make it easier to test your disaster recovery readiness.
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
There were a ton of other announcements. 90+ Satya said in the keynote. I can’t cover them all here. But check some of the more interesting ones out.
The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:
- Visual Studio Code for the Web in public preview
- Azure Advisor recommendations for Azure Data Explorer Clusters in GA
- Azure Backup now supports Archive Tier through Azure Portal in GA
- Azure Policy for Azure Key Vault in GA
- Azure Spot Virtual Machines “try to restore” functionality in GA
- Azure Data Explorer Insights in GA
- Multiple backups per day for Azure Files in public preview
- Gateway Load Balancer in public preview
- Metrics and Metric alerts for Azure Backup in public preview
- Multi-user authorization for Azure Backup is in public preview
- AKS node pool user start/stop feature in public preview
- Azure Cache for Redis now supports Redis 6.0
- Dapr extension for AKS in public preview
- Azure SQL Managed Instance now has a Link feature in public preview
- Provisioned throughput spending limit for Azure Cosmos DB in GA
- Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra service in GA
- Azure Cosmos DB: Partial document update now in GA
- Cost-saving recommendations in Azure Advisor for Azure Cosmos DB now GA
- Log Analytics Workspace Insights in Azure Monitor in GA
- Azure Container Apps in public preview
- Live resize of Azure Disk Storage in public preview
- Centralized management of keys for encrypting Azure disks in GA
- Provisioned throughput increase for Azure Ultra Disk Storage in GA
- Azure Service Bus large message support in GA
- New orchestration mode for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets in GA
- Autoscale public preview is now available for Azure Virtual Desktop
- Azure Chaos Studio is now in public preview
- New Azure virtual machines for confidential workloads – DCsv3 and DCdsv3
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 am watching some of the Ignite sessions this week. Work continues on the DP-300 course when that’s not going on. Getting myself set up for November which is a popular time of year for online instructors like myself.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 2.20. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/getcloudskills/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getcloudskills.ca/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottjduffy
Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/scottduffy2/
LinkedIn Learning: https://www.lynda.com/Scott-Duffy/1993589682-1.html