Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.09

May 19, 2022

Welcome to the ninth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022. 

We didn’t get too many new announcements in the past two weeks as the team at Microsoft prepares for their Build conference coming up next week. The next newsletter will probably be filled with new announcements. This one will be a bit light.

In the last two weeks, I’ve been heads-down recording videos. I completed the new 2022 version of the AZ-900 course, and I’m now almost complete with a brand new 2022 version of the AZ-204 course.

Of course, if you’ve already passed the AZ-900 exam to achieve the Azure Fundamentals certification, you never need to renew that or take that again. So these new videos are mainly for people new to Azure.

For the AZ-204 Azure Developer certification, you need to renew that online every year. So perhaps the videos can be a good refresher for students who need to renew that sometime soon.

Besides the obvious benefits to students of getting updated videos, I also benefit from this. I get to see almost every interface in the Azure Portal. And can compare the way it looked a year ago with how it looks today to notice the small (and big) differences.

Thanks so much for being a subscriber! The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these emails.


ONE.

So the Microsoft Build conference is next week, and let me tell you what I’m looking forward to.

If you haven’t signed up for Build or want to know what it’s about, the URL is:

https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/home

Registration is free. The conference is focused on code and application development. So those topics can be interesting to many of us here.

The session catalog for Build is live, and 526 sessions are being offered this year. Of course, there’s no way to attend them all or even watch them afterward. Therefore, you are forced to be a bit selective about what sessions to attend.

The first topic that I always look for is Learning (my business, after all), so I’ll be attending the Liberty Munson “Ask The Experts” talk on the benefits of certification. This might be fairly basic, given how certification has been on my mind every day for the past 7 years, but I do enjoy hearing it straight from Microsoft on what they see as the value and the future of this industry.

https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/7ea4cd22-8acf-46aa-9ed5-1e9fcab7d475?source=sessions

I usually try to find sessions by Scott Hanselman. Not just because he’s named Scott, but I’ve read his blog and watched his videos for more than 10 years. 

This year, Scott is involved in a couple of their “after hours” sessions covering the day’s themes and will probably be a good way to catch up on everything that I missed.

https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/b558d260-efae-4da5-ae31-aaca34ca2aae?source=sessions

https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/4b27b864-5854-478b-bb6a-bc64b54abb77?source=sessions

Scott Guthrie (another Scott!) is presenting a session on cloud-native app scaling, and that seems highly relevant and interesting.

https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/cf62806e-b0a6-48ca-9664-92298b049abf?source=/schedule

Beyond the keynotes and some selected topics in my interest areas, I usually jump around between talks. I’ll see what is going on right now, and out of 3-4 options, I will pick the one that interests me. If I go there, and it’s not as interesting as I hoped, I move to something else.

Be sure to post in the Azure Facebook community any sessions you’re interested in seeing!


TWO.

Microsoft has announced their new ESG initiative called “Cloud for Sustainability”. 

Microsoft Sustainability Manager launches on June 1, and brings together a set of tools to help you monitor and manage your environmental impact.

You can use the tool to track your carbon impact. You can see direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions related to your cloud usage, understand how you are avoiding future emissions by optimizing your usage, and share your findings with environmental impact reports that can be exported.

The tool then can make recommendations to further reduce your carbon emissions by moving more workloads to the cloud. 

There are videos, an ebook, and more information available on their website.

Source: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/05/17/accelerate-sustainability-progress-and-business-growth-with-microsoft-cloud-for-sustainability-starting-june-1/


AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

The number of new announcements has increased dramatically in the last two weeks. Good on the Azure team for continuing to improve the product. 

The following announcements were made in the last two weeks: 

  • Web Application Firewall (WAF) has enhancements, including new rulesets and improved performance
  • Virtual Network NAT health checks available via Resource Health
  • Azure VM insights guest health (preview) will be retired on 30 November 2022
  • Confidential computing DCsv3 and DCdsv3-series virtual machines (VMs) are in public preview
  • Azure Arc-enabled servers support for private endpoints
  • Azure Compute Gallery support for trusted launch Virtual Machines
  • Improved Azure DevOps support in Static Web Apps, in preview
  • Azure Container Apps now support log streaming and console connect, in preview
  • OCR supports 164 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision
  • Migrate Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 to Gen2 using Azure Portal
  • Additional support for managed identity authentication in Azure Stream Analytics, in preview
  • HostProcess Containers, in preview
  • Open Service Mesh extension for Azure Arc
  • AKS Private Link Service integration, in preview

Check out the Azure Updates page if any of these affect you.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/


COMING UP FOR ME.

I’ve been enjoying the good reviews for my latest AZ-900 course updates… https://sjd.ca/az900

I am filming videos for AZ-204 currently, and that course should be completely updated as of this week… https://sjd.ca/az204

I’ll attend some of Microsoft Build next week, take a few days off, and then pick another course to give some updates to. I’ll check with Jordi to see if AZ-104 needs anything, but I believe he wants me to do some stuff for AZ-305 so that’ll likely be the focus.

If you want to see updates in any of the courses, please post to social media or the Azure Facebook group and I’ll keep it in mind.


WHERE TO FIND ME.

And that’s it for issue 3.09. Thanks for reading this far. Talk to you again in two weeks.

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

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/getcloudskills/ 

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