March 23, 2022
Welcome to the fifth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022.
Sunday was the first day of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere! I, for one, am excited to see better weather over the next couple of weeks. It’s been a bit rainy here in Portugal recently. I have also been enjoying the fact that sunsets are getting later each evening. Things are looking up, weather-wise.
I hear that the US congress has passed a bill that will make daylight-savings time permanent. I am very excited about this, I hope it happens. This will make other countries consider following their lead.
I think this ritual of moving clocks ahead in the Spring, and then moving them back again in the Autumn, is a relic of a bygone era. We’re not farmers any more, and modern society has lighting systems that can help people who need to do work outdoors before the sun rises or after the sun sets. In my view, we need to more regularly question all rituals which don’t seem to have a purpose other than “we’ve always done it that way”. Or, “now that we do this, it’s difficult to stop”.
There are a few interesting things in today’s newsletter, so I hope you enjoy it. Thanks so much for being a subscriber! The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.
ONE.
IT Management firm Flexera has come out with their 2022 State of the Cloud Report, and the results are good news for those working in the Microsoft Azure space.
Microsoft Azure has passed Amazon AWS in several categories of the latest report for the first time. This was especially true in the large enterprise space.
Azure has passed AWS is percentage of enterprises using it – 80% for Azure compared to 77% for AWS. Google placed third at 48%, and Oracle at 27% which is a steep 5% drop from last year.
As well as the number of large scale VM deployments. 71% of enterprises have more than 51 Azure Virtual Machines, while only 69% of enterprises are running more than 51 AWS Instances.
There is also a higher percentage of companies spending more than $1.2 million annually on Azure than on AWS.
With small and medium-sized businesses, AWS continues to have a lead. But that lead is narrowing. AWS dropped from 72% to 69% adoption in SMB, while Azure jumped from 48% in 2021 to 59% in 2022. That’s good news as well.
When it comes to private clouds, Azure Stack seems to have replaced VMWare as the number 1 private cloud provider. And that change has been quite significant. Suddenly, Stack is being deployed at a rapid pace.
I’ve covered the Flexera State of the Cloud Report in this newsletter in years past, so it’s interesting to see the progression as major cloud providers reach the point of saturation.
Source: https://www.flexera.com/about-us/press-center/2022-state-of-the-cloud-report-by-flexera
TWO.
It seems hackers are still finding and exploiting holes in security. And lately Microsoft has found itself the target of this more often than they should.
If you recall, last year we had the huge SolarWinds breach which affected big companies and governments, and one of Microsoft’s vendors was the pathway into those customer’s systems.
Now, someone has published some screenshots of Microsoft’s internal code directories. The source code for Bing, Bing Maps, and Cortana have apparently been accessed.
I will say, screenshots are not proof of anything substantial. It doesn’t even mean a hacker has taken the screenshot themselves; just found the image on some random file system somewhere.
Microsoft is still investigating this. It’s yet to be proven. The hacker group responsible is still relatively new, and apparently no one is even sure what their demands are other than trying to get their hacker name famous. I won’t name them. 🙂
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/21/hacking-group-claims-to-leak-microsoft-source-code/
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:
- Azure Chaos Studio can now simulate Key Vault and Cloud Services faults
- Azure Backup now supports Trusted Launch VMs, in preview
- Azure Site Recovery can now use capacity reservations to reserve compute capacity for use in a disaster recovery, in preview
- Support for Private Link is now generally available for Azure Digital Twins
- Azure App Services Premium Container SKU to be retired on June 30, 2022
- Azure Private Link support in Azure API Management, in preview
- Extended support for Microsoft .NET Core 3.1 will end on 3 December 2022
- Select Azure Dedicated Host SKUs will be retired on 31 March 2023
- Azure Cloud Services (classic) will be retired on 31 August 2024; must migrate to ARM deployment model before then
- Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack Hub, in preview
- Azure Container Registry on Azure Stack Hub, in preview
- New planned datacenter region in Finland (Finland Central), being developed
- Azure Data Lake Analytics will be retired on 29 February 2024; migrate to Synapse Analytics before then
- Azure QnA Maker will be retired on 31 March 2025
- Update your Azure App Service apps to use Microsoft .NET 6 before 3 December 2022
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 hard to believe that the year is 22% over already. A lot has happened in some respects, but not much has happened in others.
A couple of my courses need some significant refresh-en-ing (is that a word?), so I’m in the process of re-recording those before starting anything new. A lot of students are asking for AZ-800 and AZ-801 content, so I am considering creating content for that.
AZ-303 and AZ-304 are retiring as of March 31, 2022, so I’ll need to reposition some content around that. I’ll be able to clean up the AZ-305 course a little bit in April, since that course can be dedicated to AZ-305.
If you’re in any of my courses, thanks for being a student. I really do appreciate the honor.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 3.05. Thanks for reading this far.
What is your favorite platform to be on? Perhaps we can connect there.
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