May 3, 2023
Welcome to the ninth 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.
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ONE.
Azure Storage Mover is exactly what it sounds like – a migration service that helps you move your files and folders to Azure Storage.
There are a few existing solutions for moving files to Azure Storage. They include the upload feature in the Azure Portal, azcopy command line tool, Azure File Sync, and Storage Explorer. And now, we have Azure Storage Mover as a specific tool for this exact purpose.
One of the challenges of mapping a traditional “folder structure” to Azure Blob Storage is that it’s non-hierarchical. So how do you represent folders that contain other folders and may (or may not) contain files in a Container model?
Storage Mover will prepend the file’s path to the blob name so that its position in the hierarchy is preserved. And empty folders will be represented by empty blobs. The metadata of files and folders is preserved in the blob’s metadata.
Storage Mover is a hybrid cloud service in that it’s a cloud service with an on-premises element. So, of course, you need to install an agent app in your environment to synchronize files. And that can be scheduled and repeated occasionally.
See more:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage-mover/service-overview
TWO.
Running apps inside of containers provides a lot of benefits for the deployment of applications, but does come with some restrictions. Oftentimes, the app is sandboxed in AKS and is dependent on outside resources that it can’t control.
For example, you can’t deploy an app into AKS until the Azure resources it depends on have previously been deployed.
This problem can be solved using the Azure Service Operator (ASO) project. ASO is an open-source project that you can find on GitHub. This allows the deployment process of an AKS container to also deploy Azure resources as well.
Now, of course, any app can interact with the Azure Resource Manager by REST API with the correct credentials, and interact with the underlying Azure resources in this manner. Or you could install the bash CLI into the container and use that to issue commands to Azure. That’s not an elegant solution.
ASO simplifies this by adding a couple of conveniences. First, it lets you interact with Azure resources using familiar Kubernetes tooling and primitives, like issuing kubectl commands.
For instance, you can define resources like resource groups, CosmosDB databases, SQL databases, and more inside a YAML file, and use kubectl apply to get those resources provisioned.
Microsoft recently announced that version 2.0 of the project has reached a stable milestone.
If this interests you, you can find more about it here:
https://azure.github.io/azure-service-operator/
AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.
The following updates to the Azure platform were announced in the last two weeks:
- Azure Storage Mover, in GA
- Azure Service Operator (ASO) v2, now available
- Azure Active Directory workload identity with AKS, in GA
- OpenCost for AKS cost visibility
- Azure CNI Overlay for Linux, in GA
- App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 will be retired on 31 August 2024
- Cognitive Services Custom Commands feature is being retired on April 30, 2026
- Support has ended for Gen 4 hardware on Azure SQL Database
- Cross-region service endpoints for Azure Storage, in GA
- Support for Azure VMs using Premium SSD v2 in Azure Backup, in preview
- API Management Authorizations, in GA
- TCP support for Azure Container Apps, in GA
- Session affinity for Azure Container Apps, in preview
- Inbound IP restrictions for Azure Container Apps, in GA
- Operation Abort in AKS, in GA
- Azure Monitor alerts now suggest signals to alert on, in GA
- Centrally Managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server, in GA
- Azure Advisor VM/VMSS right-sizing recommendations with a custom lookback period
- Microsoft Azure is available from the new cloud region in Poland
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 continue to work on my existing courses, to ensure they contain all of the latest information and match the requirements of each exam. I know that my courses are not all perfect in this regard, but I am looking at the courses that have not been updated in a while to ensure they still match each of the published exam objectives.
If there are any videos (or courses) that you think need updating, I absolutely appreciate your suggestions. Simply reply to this email, and I’ll collect those suggestions for priority updates.
WHERE TO FIND ME.
And that’s it for issue 4.09 Thanks for reading this far. Talk to you again in two weeks.
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