Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.06

March 22, 2023

Welcome to the sixth edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2023.

Hello again, my friends from around the world. I’m so happy you continue to subscribe and read this bi-weekly newsletter on Azure. I enjoy sitting down each week to research and write this, and hopefully, you will continue to find value in it. Feel free to invite your co-workers or others to subscribe if you think they would find it helpful.

The unsubscribe link is at the bottom if you want to stop receiving these email

ONE.

Azure Storage now has more backup and redundancy options.

Azure Storage has built-in redundancy. As you might know, behind the scenes, Azure doesn’t just keep one copy of your file in an Azure Storage account. It actually keeps three copies of your files in Locally-Redundant Storage (LRS), three copies for Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS), and six copies of your files in Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS). That architecture allowed Azure to say that they have 11 nine’s (99.999999999%) of reliability for storage. Once a file was successfully saved to an Azure Storage account, you had assurance that they would never lose it.

Of course, you had no control over that storage. You could not access those backups should a file get accidentally or maliciously deleted. It was safe, but you had no control.

Azure later introduced a data protection solution for Storage that allowed you to perform continuous backups of those files. You could perform a point-in-time restore, and copies of old versions of those files would be retained for a certain period of time. This is called an operational backup. This also included features like soft delete, change feed, and blob versioning for additional protections.

Then there was object replication, where you could basically synchronize files between two storage accounts. But of course, if files are changed, replication copies the changes, too, overwriting the old one. So it’s not a perfect backup solution.

Now Azure is introducing an additional type of protection called a vaulted backup.

The vaulted backup uses the object replication feature to copy files into a backup vault. You can schedule this to run regularly, it creates a recovery point marker, and transfers file changes to the vault. This provides an additional level of protection on the data protection features.

You can enable both features if you wish, or one or none. This vaulted backup feature is in preview mode for both Blobs and Files.

More info:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azureblobvaultedbackups/

And also:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/blob-backup-overview

TWO.

It’s been many years since Spot Instances have been available. And now Azure is making it easier for you to use them in virtual machine scale sets.

The feature is called Spot Priority Mix, which is also coincidentally a brand of dog food.

Of course, I’m kidding about that, but Spot Priority Mix doesn’t really describe what it is.

With VM Scale Sets, you can now mix regular VM instances and Spot instances in a flexible scale set. So if you need to scale up your VMSS, you can choose to have some of the additional virtual machines be spot instances.

This is a great idea and a good way for companies to save money.

Here’s a hypothetical example. Let’s say you have a large computational job that requires a bunch of servers. You’ve created a VMSS for it, with 5 virtual machines as a base number. There are always 5 VMs to support this app. When it needs to scale, it may want to add 25 more VMs to the set to make 30 total.

Now, you could absolutely add 25 standard virtual machines to the set and pay full price for that. OR you could add 5 standard virtual machines and 20 spot virtual machines. You get the 25 virtual machines you need, and you save quite a bit of money. The downside is that you might lose those spot virtual machines when someone else needs them. But that might be OK for your purposes.

Then when spot instances are available again, you scale back up into using spot instances. Maybe you’re fine with the job taking longer sometimes if you can save 25%-50% of the total cost compared with only using regular instances.

Anyways, check out Spot Priority Mix, now available in general availability, if this interests you. (Also available in your local dog food store.)

More info:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/ga-spot-priority-mix/

And also:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machine-scale-sets/spot-priority-mix?tabs=template-1

AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

The following updates to the Azure platform were announced in the last two weeks:

App Insights Extension for Azure Virtual Machines and VM Scale Sets, in GA
Azure Backup now supports transferring your Azure Blob backups to the vault, in preview
Azure Backup now supports transferring your Azure File backups to the vault, in preview
Azure Backup for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), in preview
VM Scale Sets now supports a percentage split of spot instances in the scale set, in GA
Immutable vaults for Azure Backup, in GA
Azure Cognitive Service for Vision, in preview
Illumio for Azure Firewall, in preview
Azure Static Web Apps support for A Record, in preview
Azure Firewall Basic, in GA
Performance Plus for Azure Disk Storage, in preview
Data API builder instantly creates modern REST and GraphQL endpoints for modern databases, in preview
Azure Monitor integration with Azure Container Apps, in GA
The Azure Storage PHP client libraries will be retired on 17 March 2024
Azure Database Migration Service (classic) – SQL Server scenarios deprecation
Container insights recommended alerts (custom metrics) (preview) will be retired on 14 March 2026
ASP. NET web app migration to Azure App Service using PowerShell Scripts, in GA

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’ve decided to re-record the AZ-104 course from top to bottom completely. The first 5 hours of that 15-hour course have already been re-done, and I’m continuing to update videos every day. If you’re in the course, you’ll already see the new content as I upload it as I complete it. If you’re not, why not? Get your Azure Administrator certification in 2023 with the absolute latest and best-selling course on the topic: http://sjd.ca/az104

My ChatGPT course continues to sell, and the field continues to evolve rapidly. I’ve already updated the course to talk about the new GPT-4 release, as well as the rollout of the new Bing. You can see videos in the course about both. I’ll continue to update and revise and the field changes. http://sjd.ca/chatgpt

AZ-204 announced some new requirements for April 2023. Have you seen them? You can see the video I did about that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzVy9RTl_iA