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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.07

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.07

    April 5, 2023

    Welcome to the seventh 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.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    Recently, a new service went into general availability called Azure Virtual Network Manager or AVNM. This service continues along the trend of central management of resources. AVNM enables you to manage and scale your virtual networks in Azure centrally.

    AVNM allows you to create a mesh or secure hub-and-spoke network in one operation instead of provisioning the individual resources and peer them yourself.

    When creating your Azure Virtual Network Manager, you will be asked to define the scope. You can set AVNM to a management group scope and manage the virtual networks across several subscriptions.

    It also allows you to group virtual networks into network groups. You can select and add networks to the group using static membership. Or use Azure Policy to add networks to the group using dynamic membership.

    • Key benefits:
    • Centrally manage connectivity and security policies globally across regions and subscriptions.
    • Enable direct connectivity between spokes in a hub-and-spoke configuration without the complexity of managing a mesh network.
    • Highly scalable and highly available service with redundancy and replication across the globe.
    • Ability to create network security rules that override network security group rules.
    • Low latency and high bandwidth between resources in different virtual networks using virtual network peering.
    • Roll out network changes through a specific region sequence and chosen frequency.

    More info:
    What is Azure Virtual Network Manager? | Microsoft Learn

    TWO.

    When creating Cosmos DB databases, you typically provision and pay for the resource using a metric called Request Units or RU. This, however, forces you to predict in advance how many RUs are needed in advance including how many request units each query costs and how many simultaneous queries will need to be running.

    There was a benefit to this, in that the RU was an abstraction from the system resources such as CPU, IOPS, and memory required to run the database.

    Now, Azure is introducing Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.

    As the name implies, instead of having to define request units, you now provision a MongoDB server by CPU, IOPS, and RAM.

    There is a similar dynamic on the Azure SQL Database side. You can provision a server based on tiers or provision it based on vCores.

    Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore is currently in preview mode.

    More info:
    Introduction/Overview – Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore | Microsoft Learn

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

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

    • Azure Virtual Network Manager (AVNM), now in GA
    • Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore, in preview
    • Azure Monitor Alerts now support duplicating alert rules, now in GA
    • Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage in East US 2, North Europe and West US 2, now in GA
    • Larger SKUs for App Service Environment v3, now in GA
    • Mount Azure Files and ephemeral storage in Azure Container Apps, in GA
    • Azure Image Builder Portal Functionality now available

    Much of this news at this time is about service retirements. These announcements mention services that will no longer exist and by what date.

    • AKS will stop support for Windows Server 2019 on March 1, 2026
    • Batch Service in select regions will be retired on 31 March 2026
    • Docker container runtime retirement for Windows node pools effective May 1, 2023
    • Batch custom image pools using VHD or managed images will be retired on 31 March 2026
    • ExpressRoute Public Peering will be retired on March 31, 2024
    • SQL Server connector’s V1 actions and triggers will be retired on 31 March 2024
    • Azure CDN Standard from Akamai is being retired, and services will end on 31 October 2023
    • On 28 March 2025, Azure Database for PostgreSQL Single Server will be retired, and you’ll need to migrate to Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server by that date
    • The “managed” IoT Edge solution on Azure Stack Edge will be retired on 31 March 2024
    • Implement disaster recovery strategies for your Azure App Service web apps by 31 March 2025

    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 10 hours of that 16-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 as the field changes. http://sjd.ca/chatgpt

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 4.07. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getcloudskills.ca/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottjduffy

    Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/scottduffy2/

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    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.06

    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

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    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

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    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

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 4.06. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getcloudskills.ca/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottjduffy

    Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/scottduffy2/

    LinkedIn Learning: https://www.lynda.com/Scott-Duffy/1993589682-1.html

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.05

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.05

    March 8, 2023

    Welcome to the fifth 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.

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    As I sat down to write this week’s newsletter, I did not know today (March 7) was Azure Open Source Day.

    The open-source community remains strong worldwide, and Microsoft participates in that community. Whereas twenty years ago, their motto was “embrace and extend”, it seems in the modern Satya Nadela era, Microsoft is more likely to contribute back to the open source community and support those products running in their environments.

    I haven’t seen someone spelling the word Microsoft with a dollar sign for the S in more than 5 years, which is a good sign.

    One example of this is the Hugging Face project. Hugging Face is an organization that develops and promotes open source in the world of AI. Instead of being tied into proprietary AI tools from vendors like Microsoft or Google, users can host their models and datasets on Hugging Face for others to use freely.

    Microsoft is integrating with the open-source Hugging Face models in their own Azure Machine Learning. So, users can leverage the data and models of others for free, with the support of Microsoft in their Azure Machine Learning environment.

    In fact, you can use these pre-trained models for natural language processing, vision, and the traditional ML uses instead of the Microsoft versions.

    Another of the exciting announcements that I could not find out much about was a new way of tracking lost pets.

    Today, we are excited to be showcasing a brand-new, intelligent, cloud-native application that connects owners with their lost pets using fine-tuned machine learning. Instead of printing posters, use an advanced machine learning image classification model, fine-tuned by the images on your camera roll. With this trained machine learning model, when a pet is found, you can instantly snap a photo that will match the model and connect you to the owner.

    As a pet owner, I’d love to know more about this app that makes it easy to identify who owns the lost pet you found. Sadly, Microsoft did not provide the name of the app nor a link within their blog post.

    More info:
    https://www.thurrott.com/dev/280186/microsoft-brings-more-ai-to-developers-at-azure-open-source-day-2023

    And also:
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/discover-the-latest-innovations-at-azure-open-source-day-2023/

    TWO.

    Microsoft has announced a new ML model for Cognitive Services, which is both multimodal and unified. The model is nicknamed Florence, and it has been trained with billions of images and videos. Florence is apparently a whole new approach to ML and is called a “complete rethinking”.

    Multimodal generally means an AI can work across different content types like video, audio, images, and text. And calling it unified implies that, instead of working with different machine learning models for every type of content you want to work with, this one ML model can handle all of it.

    I can see the reason why Microsoft wants a model like this. Right now, if you want to transcribe sound to text, there is one API. And then, you want to translate that to a different language, and there is another API. And if you want to use that to understand the user intent and reply helpfully (like a chatbot), that’s a third API. A unified ML model should be able to do all these things.

    Of course, that sounds incredibly difficult, which is why it’s rare.

    Single-purpose ML models have been trained to be excellent at a single task. And so far, that’s what we’ve seen in Azure AI Services and other places.

    It’s been a couple of years since Microsoft first mentioned Florence. And now, in 2023, the year of AI, they are starting to roll it out into several of their products.

    For instance, Florence is finally released as part of Vision Services in Azure’s Cognitive Services API.

    The new model is more powerful than recognizing the individual letters on an image like a traditional OCR. Florence can recognize the objects in a video as well. You could, theoretically, use it to search a video for a particular frame or the appearance of an object, such as a bike or a car.

    The main uses for this vision model appear to be helping accessibility for those who have trouble reading text embedded in an image, SEO, and content moderation.

    Reddit, for instance, will use such a model to create captions for hundreds of millions of images on their platform. And at least 40% of LinkedIn’s posts contain an image, and this will help users of that platform as well.

    With all this Generative AI and ChatGPT talk, it’s good to see that Microsoft is continuing to improve the essential ML services.

    See more:
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/announcing-a-renaissance-in-computer-vision-ai-with-microsofts-florence-foundation-model/

    And TechCrunch has a pretty lengthy write-up on the technology:
    https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/microsofts-computer-vision-model-will-generate-alt-text-for-reddit-images/

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

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

    • Azure Data Explorer Dashboards in GA
    • Azure Monitor Query client module for Go
    • Azure Percept DK will be retired on March 30, 2023
    • Azure Managed Lustre for accelerated HPC and AI workloads, in preview
    • Create disks from CMK-encrypted snapshots across subscriptions and in the same tenant
    • Customer Initiated Storage Account Conversion allows you to go from non-zonal storage to zonal redundancy via Azure Portal
    • Caching in ACR, in preview
    • Pod sandboxing in AKS, in preview
    • Online live resize of persistent volumes in AKS
    • Confidential containers on ACI, in preview
    • Azure Network Watcher new enhanced connection troubleshoot
    • Azure Monitor Ingestion client libraries for .NET, Java, JavaScript, and Python
    • Azure Virtual Network Manager Event Logging is now in public preview
    • Model Serving on Azure Databricks

    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.

    My ChatGPT course launched on Udemy. I have some work to do to add more content and deliver more value to students. So I’m “heads down” this week working on that.

    I’m also continuing to revise the AZ-900 course to give it a new visual look throughout. Luckily, there have not been many revisions in the Azure exams for a few months. I probably just jinxed myself by saying that.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 4.05. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getcloudskills.ca/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottjduffy

    Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/scottduffy2/

    LinkedIn Learning: https://www.lynda.com/Scott-Duffy/1993589682-1.html

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.04

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.04

    February 22, 2023

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

    It’s been relatively quiet in the Azure world. I think Microsoft’s attention has been taken by the launch of the Bing search engine integration with GPT search results. It’s still in limited testing, but it’s already generated a lot of buzz. Not all of it was good.

    I think fundamentally that people don’t understand how large language models chatbots work. Journalists are shocked (shocked!) that they were able to get Bing Chat to say some scary things. I contend that Bing Chat doesn’t really “know” what it’s saying. It’s basically predicting the correct response to any prompt (and includes the chat history for context).

    If Bing Chat says, “I wish you go bankrupt,” it doesn’t really want you to go bankrupt. It’s just a logical response based on the history of the conversation. But yes, the optics are bad for sure.

    Microsoft has changed Bing Chat by cutting a long conversation short to avoid these undesirable outcomes. Hopefully, that’s the end of that.

    Anyways, not much is happening on the Azure platform these days. But I did find a couple of things, which we’ll talk about below.

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

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    ONE.

    This past November, Microsoft added a feature to Azure Functions for .NET that allows you to run them as an isolated worker process.

    An isolated worker process, which is well-named, is a worker process separate from the process that runs the Function host.

    When Functions were first introduced, it only supported “integrated mode” for .NET Functions. That is, your Function code runs in the same process/context as the Function App, and that makes several things easier, such as binding APIs.

    But now with Azure Functions in .NET isolated worker processes, you can actually use a different (more recent) version of .NET than the Function App natively supports.

    For instance, if you want to use .NET 7.0 in your Function but Azure only supports .NET 6.0 with Functions, you can with isolated worker processes!

    Support for .NET Isolated Worker Processes is now available in Durable Functions.

    More info:
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/dotnet-isolated-process-guide

    TWO.

    A couple of years ago, Azure was focused on containers on their platform. They added containers to everything, cumulating in the recent launch of Azure Container Apps.

    Kubernetes (AKS) is still the star of the show, however. Recently, Azure launched a new feature for AKS to make it easier to schedule Kubernetes version updates during planned maintenance windows. They are calling this Update Scheduler.

    If you are always running on the stable release channel for Kubernetes (or rapid), you can enable auto-update to always keep your version up to the latest release. It works on the patch channel as well.

    Update Scheduler will first update the control plane and then update the nodes. This ensures you are always running on the latest version of Kubernetes. It’s a “set it and forget it” way of keeping your systems up-to-date.

    If you currently use the planned maintenance preview feature, you are encouraged to use the upgrade scheduler feature instead.

    See more:
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/auto-upgrade-cluster

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Not too much has happened in February if I’m being honest. The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Upgrade scheduler for AKS in public preview
    • Python 3.10 support for Web Apps and Functions
    • Improved geo-replication for Azure Cache for Redis
    • VBS enclaves for Always Encrypted in Azure SQL Database, in public preview
    • Azure Communication Services Chat for Bot Framework, in public preview
    • Durable Functions support for .NET isolated model
    • Azure Functions Linux Elastic Premium plan increased maximum scale-out limits

    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’m happy to announce that I’ve got a new ChatGPT course coming out. I’m just putting the final touches on it before hitting the publish button later today.

    I’ll include the details in the next newsletter. Unfortunately, the course isn’t live yet at the time you are reading this. So I will save the links and coupon until two weeks from now.

    I expect to dive more into Azure Open AI Services in the near future, so you should expect to hear more from me on that.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 4.04. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getcloudskills.ca/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottjduffy

    Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/scottduffy2/

    LinkedIn Learning: https://www.lynda.com/Scott-Duffy/1993589682-1.html

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.03

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.03

    February 8, 2023

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

    As I am about to finish this week’s newsletter, Microsoft made a big announcement relating to its OpenAI service. If you’ll recall, I talked about Azure OpenAI Service in the last newsletter, 4.02.

    Microsoft plans to integrate ChatGPT search into its Bing search engine.

    Meanwhile, Google announced a competitor to ChatGPT called Bard AI. Google is panicking and plans to add AI results to its search results, as well.

    2023 will be the year of the AI Announcements. Everything needs to have AI now. “Oh, your coffee machine doesn’t have AI? OK, Boomer.”

    I should watch what I joke about everything having AI because likely everything will have AI someday, and I am not a Boomer.

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

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    ONE.

    The major cloud vendors have all released their quarterly earnings recently. 

    One thing that is becoming clear is that the growth rate of cloud adoption appears to be slowing down. I can clearly recall five years ago when Azure was growing at 100% year over year. Even last year, it was reporting 40% annual growth. 

    Now in 2023, the growth of all big cloud vendors has dropped. They are all still growing, but the growth is slower than it has been over the last few years.

    Microsoft Azure – 31% growth

    Amazon Web Services – 20% growth

    Google Cloud – 32% growth

    Slowing growth might be expected after a decade of exponential growth. There is such a thing as market saturation, and once the cloud has been adopted by every enterprise of significant scale, it’ll be hard for cloud vendors to grow through new customer adoption. They’ll then turn to more competition, trying to take customers away from other vendors. And introducing new products to increase the spending of existing customers.

    What comes next for the cloud once this phase of hypergrowth is over? Reply to this email with your thoughts/predictions on what the next five to ten years look like.

    See more:

    https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/microsoft-msft-earnings-q2-2023.html

    TWO.

    I often talk about Load Testing as an essential tool when evaluating your readiness for a large increase in traffic.

    This is based on my experience working for a large food brand in the 2010s. This food brand would receive a large spike in traffic as they approached the American Thanksgiving holiday. For a couple of years in a row, the website could not handle the traffic. It resulted in the team (including myself) being on a phone call all day as we tried to reboot the servers, add caching to the front end, disable features, and do whatever we could do to increase the site’s capacity to handle visitors.

    The following year, we decided to avoid repeating this experience by doing load testing on the site during the summer. Every week, we gradually directed more and more fake traffic at the site, simulating the increase in visitors. We’d then analyze which component of the site was the bottleneck and optimize that part before the next week’s test. We rewrote the website menu, added API caching to avoid trips to a backend server when we already knew the answer, reducing the quantity of data the website needed to send for the main requests, and more. 

    All this to say that load testing will allow you to spend Thanksgiving with your family instead of on an 8-hour emergency phone call with your client. 

    Azure has released its Load Testing product into general availability. You can add this to your CI/CD pipeline and catch issues like this before they hit production. Even knowing the upper bounds of your system can inform your product teams about areas of improvement for future sprints.

    Also, over time, you will naturally be adding more and more to a website, and a tool like this can help inform you when the site is bloated. This can lead to removing unused code and frameworks, which is also a valuable improvement.

    For more:

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-load-testing-is-now-generally-available/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Since the last newsletter was sent at the beginning of December, a lot has happened. Here’s a summary of the highlights.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks: 

    • Classic VM retirement: extending retirement date to September 1st 2023
    • 5 GB Put Blob, in GA
    • Mount Azure Storage as a local share in App Service Windows Code, in GA
    • Application security groups support for private endpoints, in GA
    • Indirect enterprise agreement on Azure Cost Management and Billing, in GA
    • Incremental snapshots for Ultra Disk Storage, in public preview
    • Convert append blobs and page blobs to block blobs so that you can apply access tiers
    • Azure Web PubSub Premium tier, in GA
    • Azure Kubernetes Service introduces two pricing tiers: Free and Standard
    • Azure Functions support for Node.js 18
    • Microsoft Azure Load Testing is now Generally Available
    • Managed Run Command – Execute PowerShell or shell scripts on Virtual Machines and Scale Sets
    • New planned datacenter region in Saudi Arabia (Saudi Arabia Central)

    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.

    Don’t have any big announcements to make at this time. I’ll keep you updated in this section in future newsletters.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 4.03. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.02

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.02

    January 25, 2023

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

    I hope you’re doing well.

    I recently heard that the third Monday of January (this past January 15th) is called Blue Monday, and is known as the “most depressing day of the year” in the Northern Hemisphere. This claim isn’t based on anything scientific, but there is a “sounds true” appeal to the idea that we are into the Winter season now, and it’s cold in many Northern places. The Christmas holidays are now solidly over, daytime is still short, some places aren’t seeing the sun too often, and many people can’t wait for Spring.

    Of course, others love the Winter and all it entails. So that’s not universally true.

    Anyways, I hope you’re doing well, getting rest when needed, and even taking a vacation if you can. Every day that passes means the Earth is getting a bit closer to the Sun again. So Winter will be over before we know it.

    Let’s turn our attention to cloud computing and Microsoft Azure.

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    ONE.

    There has been a lot of excitement about a new AI tool called ChatGPT lately.

    On the surface, it’s just a chatbot that can craft human-sounding answers to any question. It doesn’t always tell you the right answer, but it would be difficult to determine that it was written by an algorithm and not a human.

    But when I dig a bit deeper, I am really excited about this advancement for the future of artificial general intelligence. I may have to update my AI-900 course, where I say that General AI is very far off in the future. It’s getting closer.

    I can imagine a day when this newsletter is written by AI and not by me. The technology is not ready for that today. But in 5 years? Could a computer write what I write? And could anyone tell the difference? I’m not so sure they will be able to.

    Microsoft was a big initial investor in the OpenAI company behind this technology. And now, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced that the ChatGPT will be available as part of the Azure OpenAI Service. Currently, you can use the OpenAI Service to generate images based on text, called DALL-E 2. I’ve talked about DALL-E before in this newsletter.

    I think really interesting things will happen with this technology. Especially, if you can train it for your own industry.

    I have more to say about the future of language models like GPT-3 and GPT-4. I’m actually worried about governments and large companies restricting access to this technology which will slow down the benefits of this to society as a whole. But I’ll talk about that another time.

    See more:
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/general-availability-of-azure-openai-service-expands-access-to-large-advanced-ai-models-with-added-enterprise-benefits/

    TWO.

    David Heinemeier Hansson (better known by his initials, dhh) is a bit controversial in computing. Loved by some and hated by some. But he’s a pioneer as well, and often what we see him doing with Basecamp and Hey is followed later by other companies as well.

    For instance, 37 Signals (maker of the project management tool Basecamp) famously instituted a “no politics at work” policy in 2021. The company would not take any public political stance, and employees were barred from discussing it on internal forums. Around one-third of 37 Signal’s employees resigned. The company stuck to its policy, they hired new employees to replace those that left, and it didn’t take long before the controversy was over.

    At the end of 2022, dhh posted about his company’s cloud computing bill. He claimed they spent over $3 million, mostly on AWS. $907,000 on the S3 storage service alone.

    And then he announced that the company was moving off the cloud. He was going to take that $3 million per year he was spending and buy servers with it.

    This flies in the face of the conventional cloud sales pitch that says that you can save money by moving to the cloud. Some companies don’t experience that, it seems.

    Clearly, cloud computing providers like Amazon and Azure are making a profit. AWS appears to have about 30% gross margins, which means its computing services cost it $7 to operate and they charge $10 for it. So the fact that such a profit exists means that some companies can do computing cheaper themselves than a cloud provider would charge them for it.

    dhh promises to provide a full accounting of what he’s spending on the cloud and compare it next year to what he spends on his own datacenter. So we’ll get a real-life lesson examining the cost savings of the cloud or lack thereof. Will be interesting to see.

    For more:
    https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Since the last newsletter was sent at the beginning of December, a lot has happened. Here’s a summary of the highlights.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Azure Active Directory authentication for exporting and importing Managed Disks in GA
    • Azure Automation Visual Studio Code Extension, in preview
    • Viewing SQL Server Databases via Azure Arc, in preview
    • Azure Active Directory authentication for SQL Server 2022, in GA

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

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

    COMING UP FOR ME.

    Don’t have any big announcements to make at this time. I’ll keep you updated in this section in future newsletters.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 4.02. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.01

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 4.01

    January 11, 2023

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

    I hope you had a wonderful, restful holiday season. I did. Last year at this time, I was in the midst of moving from Canada to Portugal. Now it’s a year later, and I’m happy to have had a quiet holiday and am ready to tackle 2023!

    Let’s see what has been happening in the world of Azure since we last looked.

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    ONE.

    In my first newsletter of 2022, I was talking to you about Microsoft potentially developing its own chips the way Apple has been successfully doing.

    Well, the first big news in 2023 is that Azure acquired a chip-maker named Fungible. 

    See:

    https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/09/microsoft-acquires-fungible-a-maker-of-data-processing-units-to-bolster-azure/

    Fungible creates specialized chips called “Data Processing Units” or DPUs. 

    From the article: “A DPU is a dedicated piece of hardware designed to handle certain data processing tasks, including security and network routing for data traffic. The approach is intended to help reduce the load on CPUs and GPUs for core computing tasks related to a given workload.”

    This appears to be a bit of a rescue for the company, as the rumored acquisition price is far less than the total amount of capital the company has raised from investors. This could be considered an “acqui-hire” although they seem excited about acquiring the technology, not just the people.

    I’m not sure if Microsoft intends to use this technology for its own data centers or provide this type of thing as a cloud service to its customers. I can imagine a special set of VM instances that are collectively used as a cluster of servers that use a DPU to move data between them most effectively. We’ll see how this develops.

    See also:

    https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/10/microsoft_acquires_fungible_compsable_dpus/

    TWO.

    Cryptocurrency has been through the wringer this past year. And while I have no idea if the so-called “crypto winter” will be over soon or will ever be over, Azure has made a subtle change to its terms of use that generally bans the use of its services to mine crypto.

    A couple of years ago, I recorded a video on my YouTube channel that showed how an Azure VM could be used to mine bitcoin. It wasn’t too difficult to set up with a GPU VM instance. Several services exist that allow you to sell your hashing power.

    Of course, even at that time, I mentioned that it wasn’t going to be possible to make a profit doing this. Cloud services like Azure sell their computing power at a rate that might be considered cheap for customers who host computers themselves but is considered expensive for miners.

    There was just no way for that to be a profitable thing. Except of course if you could get computing services for free somehow.

    Well, the new terms of use ban the use of Azure services for crypto mining except with written permission of Azure.

    “Neither Customer, nor those that access an Online Service through Customer, may use an Online Service: to mine cryptocurrency without Microsoft’s prior written approval.”

    We can only speculate as to the reasons for this ban. I think that one reason is what I stated above. Since it’s not easy or usual for this to be profitable, why would someone do it? They would do it if they were not paying for it. And this includes hacked customer accounts, stolen credit cards, and other methods for a crypto miner to avoid paying for the service.

    It makes sense to ban it without permission in that context. It seems ripe for fraud against Microsoft or one of their customers.

    See:
    https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-bans-cryptomining-in-azure

    And:
    https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/15/microsoft_online_services_cryptomining_ban/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Since the last newsletter was sent at the beginning of December, a lot has happened. Here’s a summary of the highlights.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Kubernetes 1.25 support in AKS, now in GA
    • Static Web Apps Diagnostics, now in GA
    • Azure Functions support for Java 17, now in GA
    • Durable Functions support for Java, now in GA
    • Azure Functions support for Python 3.10, now in preview
    • Azure Arc enabled Azure Container Apps, now in preview
    • Azure Site Recovery Higher Churn Support, now in preview
    • JSON support in Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise tiers, now in GA
    • Materialized view for Azure Cosmos DB for Apache Cassandra, now in preview
    • Updated API names for Azure Cosmos DB, now in GA
    • Build a business case with Azure Migrate, now in preview
    • Feature enhancements to Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF), now in GA
    • Azure Dedicated Host – Restart, now in GA
    • At-scale monitoring for Azure Site Recovery with Backup center

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

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

    COMING UP FOR ME.

    Don’t have any big announcements to make at this time. I’ll keep you updated in this section in future newsletters.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 4.01. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.22

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.22

    December 14, 2022

    Welcome to the twenty-second and final edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022.

    Have you been watching the World Cup at all? There have been some amazing upsets where traditionally strong teams have been ejected from the tournament early. But that also means some underdog teams, where few people expected them to go far, are making it into the semi-finals and beyond. Exciting!

    Meanwhile, time marches on relentlessly. We are about two weeks until the end of the year. 2022 is almost in the books. Time to finish off those things you said you would do this year!

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

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    ONE.

    The first version of SQL Server I ever used was SQL Server 6.0. This was a long time ago, while we were still trying to grasp how big a deal the Internet was. In the Floppy Disk era.

    Fast forward ~30 years. SQL Server 2022 was recently announced, and it apparently has the most connections to Microsoft Azure “ever”.

    Whereas you’ve been able to extend SQL Server into the cloud (SQL Server Stretch Databases) for a few years, now you can almost fully manage your on prem SQL Server environment from within Azure.

    Azure Arc allows you to manage your on prem SQL Servers in the cloud. Azure Synapse Analytics allows you to run analytics in the cloud for your on prem data. Microsoft Purview helps with governance, while Azure Active Directory takes care of access management. You can protect your on prem SQL Server using Microsoft Defender for SQL, and use SQL Managed Instance for disaster recovery.

    Naturally, many companies might be wary of increasing the connectivity between their internal corporate database and the cloud, these integrations seem more about the management of the server itself (including security and permissions) and less about exposing more of your actual data to the cloud.

    Another related announcement has to do with “pay as you go” pricing coming to SQL Server 2022. So you can use consumption-based billing for your on prem databases, instead of the traditional “fixed price per CPU” model. Consumption-based pricing can save you money.

    See more:
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/16/microsofts-sql-server-2022-is-all-about-azure/

    And:
    https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2022/11/17/manage-govern-and-secure-all-your-sql-servers-with-new-hybrid-capabilities-enabled-by-azure-arc/

    TWO.

    For years, I’ve seen people talking about the programming language golang (or just Go). If you wanted to use Go in Azure, you could have installed its runtime in a web app or a virtual machine.

    But now, Azure offers native Go support in Azure Web Apps.

    Go is an open-source language initially developed at Google. In fact, Kubernetes and Docker are both written in the Go language.

    Go is a modern programming language developed around 15 years ago, and so it avoids some of the legacy problems older languages like C++ have. But despite its relative youth, the language is fairly stable and its syntax and structure are fairly set. You’re not working with a “beta” product that is constantly changing fundamentally.

    You can now begin playing with golang apps in App Services, currently in preview mode.

    Learn more:
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/developer/go/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Day 0 support for .NET 7.0 on App Service, in GA
    • Go language support on Azure App Service, in preview
    • Python 3.10, PHP 8.1 and Node 18 in Azure App Service, in GA
    • New HPC instances available – HX series and HBv4
    • Build and deploy to Azure Container Apps without a Dockerfile from the Azure CLI, in preview
    • Azure Pipelines task to build and deploy to Azure Container Apps, in preview
    • GitHub action to build and deploy to Azure Container Apps, in preview
    • Inbound IP restrictions support in Azure Container Apps, in preview
    • Durable Functions support for .NET 7.0 isolated model, in preview
    • Azure SQL Trigger for Azure Functions, in preview
    • Additional Always Free Services for Azure Free Account and PAYG
    • Use tag inheritance for cost management, in preview

    Important retirement or migration announcements:

    • Community support for Azure Functions Proxies will end on 30 September 2025

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

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

    COMING UP FOR ME.

    In the last newsletter, I mentioned my video courses on Udemy. Those are still available, and you can use the coupon code DEC2022 to get the best discount this month.

    But one thing that might be helpful for you is Practice Labs that guide you through various aspects of Microsoft Azure.

    I offer labs for sale on my website, getcloudskills.com. To end the year, I have decided to offer something special to you for the last two weeks of December.

    • One year of access to the labs
    • A variety of labs, from easy (guided) to advanced (not guided)
    • Over 700+ labs to choose from
    • Covering Azure, AWS, Linux, and Cybersecurity topics
    • One year of access to an Azure account to practice the labs
    • One year of access to an AWS account to practice those labs
    • Buy the code today, but don’t need to activate it until you’re ready to use it
    • Limits: Maximum of 3 attempts per lab, and each lab has a limited time to complete
    • Note: activating the code starts the one-year timer
    • No refunds once the code is activated, and I am unable to extend the expiry date

    Use the link below to get those ONE YEAR of labs for only US$98.

    https://softwarearchitect.thrivecart.com/all-labs/?coupon=LABSSALE

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 3.22. Thanks for reading this far. This is the final newsletter of 2022. We’ll take a few weeks off, and see you again in 2023!

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

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

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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.21

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.21

    November 30, 2022

    Welcome to the twenty-first edition of the Azure World Newsletter in 2022.

    It’s been a busy month as we race toward the end of the year. Our American friends have finished eating their turkey, and most survived the sales pitches that filled our inboxes. The Thanksgiving season is over in America, and attention will quickly turn to Christmas.

    This will be my first Christmas in Europe, and I’ve discovered they are really into it in some places. I was in Zurich and Vienna recently, and the Christmas markets were just getting ready to open. And even in Lisbon, the trees are going up, the lights are on at night, and the year-end celebrations are starting.

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

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    ONE.

    Do you like Space? Specifically, do you like Outer Space?

    Last year, Azure introduced the Azure Orbital Ground Station. At the time, it was interesting but not super-exciting because it’s main feature was allowing you to communicate with your satellites without maintaining a ground station infrastructure. Who has their own satellite? Not many of us. And if we did, we’d already have our own ground station, I bet. I wasn’t too excited by that news.

    A couple of months ago, they announced their second space product – Azure Orbital Cloud Access. This allows you to access the cloud from anywhere. Effectively, this service ties in with both 5G and SpaceX’s Starlink service to bring fiber-speed 1-hop access to the Azure cloud from places that traditionally do not have Internet access.

    And this past month, Azure has introduced a product called Azure Orbital Space Software Development Kit (SDK). This one does seem more exciting.

    Effectively it’s a development platform for satellites.

    A satellite is like an Internet of Things (IoT) device. Azure has a long history of working it IoT devices and provides various IoT toolkits for developers to easily integrate their devices into the Azure Cloud backend. It made perfect sense so that developers could focus on the functionality of their devices and not need to worry much about how their devices communicate with the Internet or with Azure.

    And now, this same idea is available for satellites.

    “The Azure Orbital Space SDK was created to be able to run on any spacecraft and provide a secure hosting platform and application kit to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit. This “host platform” runs onboard the spacecraft including a containerized, scalable compute infrastructure with resource and schedule management capabilities.”

    There is also a virtual test harness so that developers can test their satellite programs without having an actual satellite.

    Read more:
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-azure-space-products-enable-digital-resiliency-and-empower-the-industry/
    And here:
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/any-developer-can-be-a-space-developer-with-the-new-azure-orbital-space-sdk/

    TWO.

    There were a bunch of small announcements this week, as you’ll see in the next section on Azure Updates. I’ll highlight two of them that look particularly interesting.

    One is that Azure Bastion now supports shareable links and is currently a preview feature. Until now, if you wanted to give someone access to a virtual machine and Azure Bastion was being used for access (even if it was a one-time-only access), you had to get them a portal account and grant them access to the resource using RBAC.

    Now, you can generate a shareable link to a VM, and they can access the VM this way. No portal account is required. They still have to authenticate via RDP or SSH in the normal way, and you still have to give the user those admin credentials or keys. But this does make like easier for Bastion-protected servers.

    Read more:
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bastion/shareable-link

    And another exciting update is the ability to manage tables in a Log Analytics Workspace.

    As you may know, most Azure services allow you to collect their diagnostics data into a Log Analytics workspace, among other options. You can then run various Kusto queries in the Azure Monitor service to extract and analyze data.

    Now that we can access the underlying data tables inside Log Analytics, we can customize more options regarding what data is collected and how long it’s kept.

    You can override the default workspace retention policy for data on a table-by-table basis. If you’re on the correct log data plan, you can retain data for up to 2 years for interactive retention and up to 7 years in an archive model.

    You can also customize the columns on the individual tables by adding additional transformed columns or data from another source. For example, you may wish that the day, month, and year were three separate columns of the table instead of one “date” column. You can do that by adding the additional columns and deriving the value of the new columns from the original date field. It could be handy if you write a lot of queries.

    Read more:
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/logs/manage-logs-tables

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    The following announcements were made in the last four weeks:

    • Virtual Machine software reservations, in GA
    • Azure Static Web Apps now fully supports .NET 7
    • Functions now supports .NET 7 in an isolated worker process
    • Block domain fronting behavior on newly created customer resources
    • Azure Automation supports Availability zones
    • Manage your Log Analytics Tables in Azure Portal
    • Rotate SSH keys on existing AKS nodepools, in preview
    • Azure Static Web Apps now Supports Node 18, in preview
    • Static Web Apps support for stable URLs for preview environments
    • Static Web Apps support for Gitlab and Bitbucket
    • Static Web Apps support for preview environments in Azure DevOps
    • Multivariate Anomaly Detection in Azure Cognitive Services
    • Azure Front Door zero downtime migration, in preview
    • Azure Front Door integration with managed identities, in preview
    • Encrypt managed disks with cross-tenant customer-managed keys
    • Use Azure Quota REST APIs to manage service limits (quotas), in preview
    • TLS 1.3 with Application Gateway
    • Azure SQL Managed Instance backup portability to SQL Server 2022
    • Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions, in preview
    • Azure Bastion now supports shareable links, in preview
    • Cross Subscription Restore for Azure Virtual Machines, in preview

    Important retirement or migration announcements:

    • Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Server will be deprecated 30 September 2024
    • Azure Percept DK will be retired on March 30th, 2023

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

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

    COMING UP FOR ME.

    If you don’t mind the self-promotion, I invite you to check out my Microsoft Azure courses on Udemy.

    https://udemy.com/users/scottduffy2

    As a special thank you for subscribing, I’ve created a special coupon code for my Azure and TOGAF courses on Udemy. With the coupon code NEWSLETTER, most of my courses are US $9.99 for the next four days only. Some courses are a little more, but that’s out of my control.

    Remember to use the code NEWSLETTER at checkout for special savings only for newsletter subscribers like you. And yes, you can share the code with a friend if you feel they are worthy. 🙂

    I mentioned in the last newsletter that I was speaking at the Azure Portgual User Group a couple of weeks ago. I’ve recorded that talk, and it’s available as a free course on Udemy.

    https://www.udemy.com/course/ha-in-azure/

    Enjoy!

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 3.21. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.20

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 3.20

    November 2, 2022

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

    This is traditionally the time of year when I go through my courses and make updates. In some cases, Microsoft has subtly changed the exam requirements in a couple of places and the updates are small. And in other cases, I just decide to re-record an entire section or more because the underlying technology has changed so much since the time the course was originally recorded.

    So if you’re a student in one of my courses such as AZ-900, AZ-104, DP-900, or SC-900, then you should see some updated videos in those courses in the past couple of weeks. And I’ll keep going with these updates in other courses for the next month or so.

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

    Sign up for this bi-weekly newsletter

    ONE.

    As you may know, Azure has a “Reserved Instance” system that allows users to commit to a long-term contract for rather large savings on virtual machines. You can save around 50% of the cost of a virtual machine if you commit for one or three years.

    To use reservations, you have to choose a specific instance (for example, a D8ms instance), and then you can reserve one for you to use at a discounted rate.

    Microsoft continues to innovate here and now offers Azure Savings Plan for Compute. This allows you to commit to a minimum spend per hour on all your compute services and achieve savings on the portion of spending at or below your minimum hourly spend.

    If you spend more than the minimum, you pay the normal rates. If you spend less than the minimum, you’ll be charged the minimum.

    For example, let’s say you commit to spending $5 per hour (at 720 hours per month, that’s $3,600). In return, you save money on those compute services for that $5.

    If your compute usage comes to $6 in that hour, you’ll save on the first $5 and pay the normal rate on the last $1.

    If your compute usage only comes to $4, you’ll be charged for that $5.

    It’s a new way to get savings on your compute spending by making a commitment, without having to commit to a specific instance type.

    For more: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-compute-blog/optimize-and-maximize-cloud-investment-with-azure-savings-plan/ba-p/3636447

    TWO.

    If disk speed is your thing, Microsoft has just rolled out a new high-speed disk option for storage – Azure Premium SSD v2.

    According to the official blog post, Microsoft has made significant improvements in the technology behind the service.

    They offer from 1 GB to 64 TB of general-purpose block storage in 1 GB increments. The previous SSD was limited to 32 TB. If a 64-terabyte VM disk is not exciting enough for you, they claim sub-millisecond disk latency.

    That is up to 80,000 IOPS and 1,200 MBPS throughput on a single disk.

    And you can dynamically scale up and down the performance as needed without downtime based on your application needs. So if you need a high throughput performance for a limited period, you can pay for that. And then downgrade to more affordable performance for the rest of the time.

    Scaleable performance is a real innovation. Previously, you were assigned limits based on disk size.

    For more:
    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-storage-blog/azure-premium-ssd-v2-disk-storage-general-availability/ba-p/3649038

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    The following announcements were made in the last two weeks:

    • Azure savings plan for compute, in GA
    • Auto Extension upgrade for Arc enabled services, in GA
    • Stream analytics no-code editor in Event Hubs, in GA
    • Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage, in GA
    • SFTP support for Azure Blob Storage, in GA
    • AKS will start using Ubuntu 22 instead of Ubuntu 18
    • Azure Storage — Attribute-based access control for standard storage accounts, in GA
    • Vertical Pod Autoscaler, in preview
    • Premium SSD v2 support is now generally available on AKS
    • AKS image cleaner, in preview
    • IPVS load balancer support in AKS, in preview
    • Dapr extension for AKS and Arc-enabled Kubernetes now support Dapr v1.9.0
    • V2 programming model for Azure Functions using Python, in preview
    • Azure Container Apps TCP support, in preview
    • Azure Communication Services short code functionality for SMS, in GA
    • Azure Databricks SQL Pro, in GA
    • Microsoft Azure Payment HSM Service, in GA
    • Encrypt storage account with cross-tenant customer-managed keys, in GA

    Important retirement or migration announcements:

    • Cloud Services (classic) deployment model is retiring on 31 August 2024
    • Continuous delivery setting of Azure VMSS will be retired on 31 March 2023
    • Community support for PHP 8.0 is ending on 26 November 2023
    • App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 will be retired on 31 August 2024
    • Community support for Node 16 LTS is ending on 11 September 2023

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

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

    COMING UP FOR ME.

    I’ll speak live at the Azure Portugual User Group in Lisbon on November 16. It’s an in-person event, but I hear they will try to stream it live too.

    https://www.meetup.com/azure-user-group-portugal/events/288229074/

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 3.20. 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/ 

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjduffy/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getcloudskills.ca/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottjduffy

    Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/scottduffy2/

    LinkedIn Learning: https://www.lynda.com/Scott-Duffy/1993589682-1.html

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