Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.6

Welcome to the sixth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2021. Thanks so much for subscribing.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to start off by talking about a personal milestone. In the past few days, the 500,000th unique student has just signed up for one of my courses on Udemy. Since I’m unable to track that person down to thank them individually, I’d like to extend my sincere gratitude to all students in any of my courses.

I set a personal goal 5 years ago to reach one million students with my training, and I can’t believe I’ve reached the halfway mark already. I’m going to have to set a bigger goal.

Seriously, thank you to everyone. Including you. Especially you. You’re the best!

Now on to the newsletter! As always, if you don’t want to receive this anymore, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom. No worries!


ONE.

Well, this is the second newsletter in a row in which we have to discuss an Azure outage.

This one was particularly weird. Even the Azure Status page went down (status.azure.com), and a new status page needed to be created (status2.azure.com) to say that the Status page was down.

It’s not a good sign when your status page needs a status page of its own.

On April 1, access to Azure websites seemed to be down for about an hour. Not as lengthy as the problem in March. But still unusual.

The cause of this outage was a DNS problem and it affected the Azure Portal, Microsoft 365, Xbox Live, and some other services. It sounds almost like their DNS system was attacked and, because of a bug in the code, the attack was surprisingly successful. They patched the bug, and that will stop this from happening again.

I may be reading too much into it. They didn’t specifically call it an attack. Just a surge in “anomalous” DNS traffic.

https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/


TWO.

This next article is not specifically Azure-related, but Microsoft recently won a $22 BILLION deal with the US Army for their Hololens Augmented Reality (AR) device.

This makes total sense. If the device can be reliable in the field, equipping soldiers with devices that can provide various statuses’ on screen in real-time would be a tactical edge. I mean, it’s basically moving closer to a Call of Duty style interface. You know the location of your team, their direction, and distances. You know your heart rate and some other bio stats. Some visual data augments your view so that you can do the job you’re required to do.

This contract is twice as large as the JEDI contract would have been.

Obviously, the Hololens is the front-end to a bunch of AI and cloud services in the backend. Good job, Microsoft.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2021/04/06/why-microsoft-won-the-22-billion-army-hololens-2-ar-deal/?sh=58a0e6605d43

THREE.

If you are a developer, Microsoft has announced its Build 2021 conference for May 25-27. Once again, it will be completely online. And completely free.

https://arstechnica.com/technopaedia/2021/04/2021-microsoft-build-conference-dates-confirmed-may-25-27/

Microsoft Build is “where developers, architects, start-ups, and students learn, connect, and code together, sharing knowledge and expanding their skill set, while exploring new ways of innovating for tomorrow.”

I haven’t seen a good list of the types of topics that will be covered, but clearly, they’re aiming for developers with this content.

Registration isn’t open yet, but when it is open, it will be on their Build page here:

https://mybuild.microsoft.com/


AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

A few new things this week. Nothing too Earth-shattering to me, but maybe something important has been announced that affects you.

  • Backup for Azure Managed Disks
  • Azure Communication Services (video, voice, SMS, chat, and other telephony) is not general availability
  • Encryption scopes (ability to manage encryption keys at the blob or container level) is now generally available
  • AKS node image auto-upgrade now in public preview
  • Insights and workbooks for Cosmos DB in public preview
  • Kubernetes v1.20 support in AKS now available
  • Azure Static Web Apps now integrates with Azure DevOps for deployments in preview
  • Azure Private Link for Redis Cache now available
  • Azure Backup for Azure Dedicated Host now available
  • Azure Monitor for Windows Virtual Desktop now available
  • Azure Cloud Services (extended support) now generally 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.

Continue to enjoy the improving weather. And continue to create new courses and content to help students learn Azure.

  • My course for DP-100 Azure Data Scientist is LIVE! If you want to get lifetime access to that, here’s a link that you can use for a discount: https://www.udemy.com/course/dp100-azure/?couponCode=APR2021
  • Please share if you know someone that might find it useful.
  • I had another blog article go live on Udemy’s website. It’s called “How to Pass the AZ-104 Exam”. If you’re interested, here’s the link to that: https://blog.udemy.com/azure-administrator-az-104/
  • The next course I am working on, which is turning out great, is AI-102 Designing and Implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution. Taking a slightly different approach with this course. It’s going to contain a lot of code and code examples. If you enjoy coding and want to play with Azure Cognitive Services, this course will be right up your alley.

WHERE TO FIND ME.

And that’s it for issue 2.6. Thanks for reading this far.

What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.

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