Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.08

April 19, 2023

Welcome to the eighth 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 emails.

ONE.

One of the interesting announcements that came out in the past two weeks is around new tiers for Azure App Service Premium V3.

For instance, there is an App Service P0v3 tier. P0 is obviously smaller than the existing P1 tier and offers 1 vCPU and 4GB of memory.

The P0v3 app service plan (for Linux) can cost around $73/month on a pay-as-you-go pricing, and the price falls to as low as $33 per month if you have Azure Reservations.

The Premium V3 tier of app services includes increased disk space (250 GB) and can be scaled up to 30 instances compared with the standard tier.

There are also new “memory-optimized” versions of the Premium V3 app service plans, called P*mv3, labeled as P1mv3, P2mv3, P3mv3, and so on. This allows you to have additional memory for your apps without having to scale to more cores, similar to the way memory-optimized VMs work.

For example, the regular P1v3 service plan comes with 8GB of RAM, while the new P1mv3 plan comes with 16GB. So you can see how this can be used to save you money. You can continue to use P1 plans without having to upgrade to P2. The P1mv3 plan only costs around $20 per month more than the regular P1v3 plan.

TWO.

There’s a bit of a trend in Microsoft Azure to offer two different pricing options for many popular services. You can either pay a fixed-price per month for dedicated computing services, or opt to pay for consumption in a serverless option.

The concept of serverless in cloud computing is simply the ability to pay “per execution” or “per query” for a cloud service, instead of paying by the hour. You lose control over the underlying hardware (CPU speed, RAM, etc) and gain a promise from Azure of a certain level of performance.

Many services offer serverless options alongside the “fixed-price plan” option. Functions can be serverless or in an app service plan. AKS has a serverless option. As well as Azure SQL Database, and Cosmos DB. Azure Container Apps now joins the list of having both options.

Azure Container Apps was serverless when it launched, and now you have the option for a dedicated pricing plan. Under the dedicated pricing plan, you can make some basic selections up front for the type and size of the workload you intend to run. You can deploy as many apps as you want to that dedicated compute platform, scale it as required, and place limits on the scaling to control costs.

If you are interested in more information, check out this link:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-container-apps-offers-new-plan-and-pricing-structure/

AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

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

New (cheaper) General-Purpose VMs – Dlsv5 and Dldsv5
Private Application Gateway v2, in public preview
IP Protection SKU for Azure DDoS Protection, in GA
Support for Azure VMs using Ultra disks in Azure Backup, in preview
NGINXaaS – Azure Native ISV Service (NGINX as a service), in GA
Enable Trusted launch on your existing Azure Gen2 VMs, in preview
App Configuration geo-replication, in GA
Azure Container Apps supports user-defined routes (UDR) and smaller subnets, in preview
Static Web Apps support for Python 3.10, in GA
Azure Cosmos DB serverless container with 1 TB storage, in GA
Azure Container Apps offers a new plan and pricing structure, in preview
Improved scaling model for Azure Functions with Target Based Scaling, in GA
Azure CNI Overlay, in GA
Azure App Service – New Premium v3 Offerings, in GA
Retirement notice: transition to the Authentication methods policy for Azure Active Directory

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.

All of my Azure courses on Udemy are on sale, for a limited time. For the next 4 days, you can use the code HOTSPRING at checkout and get one of my Azure or TOGAF courses for as low as US$9.99.

I recently launched a new practice test for the SC-900 Microsoft Security Fundamentals exam, and am working on a practice test for another course that will launch in the coming week or two.