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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.1

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 2.1

    Well hello there! After taking part of December and January off for a bit of a break, we’re back to the regular bi-weekly newsletter.

    I hope you and your family are doing well. Everything is “OK” here at SoftwareArchitect HQ. The winter has been mild so far, and I hope that continues until Spring. 🙂 As you can tell, I’m not much of a “winter sports” person. If you’re a skier, I’m sorry that this winter has not been good for that so far.

    Let’s get into the Azure news.

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    ONE.

    In Azure exam news, a few of the core Azure exams are undergoing some changes. As happens every few months, Microsoft has decided to do some minor (and no so minor) tweaks here and there to keep the exams relevant.

    The AZ-104 Azure Administrator exam had 2 new topics added relating to Blobs. Very minor changes. I’ve already updated my AZ-104 course with videos covering the new stuff.

    The AZ-303 Azure Architect Technologies exam had 1 new topic added relating to Firewall Manager. I’ve already updated my AZ-303 course with a video covering that.

    The AZ-304 Azure Architect Design exam had a couple of minor wording changes to the requirements, but nothing substantial was changed. My AZ-304 course will get some updated videos because it’s time for me to go through that course and ensure it’s entirely up-to-date.

    The AZ-900 and AZ-204 exams did not see any changes in January.

    Perhaps the most significant change has been the “merging” of the DP-200 and DP-201 exams into a single exam – DP-203. The changes here are more substantial. The DP-203 goes into Beta in February and DP-200/DP-201 retires in June.

    I have not decided how to handle these changes in the existing DP-200 course. I created a video covering the changes, here:

    TWO.

    Years ago, in my Azure courses, I used to have to explain the difference between the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) model of deployment and the Azure Service Management (ASM) model. I was able to remove that video after a year or two, once the Classic model was no longer recommended or even supported in many places.

    Well… I’m going to have to record a new video explaining deployment models again…

    There are now THREE Azure deployment models: Cloud Services (classic), Cloud Services (extended support), and ARM.

    If you’ve been using Azure for some time, you’ll remember the old Azure Service Manager (ASM) deployment model. This was referred to as the Classic model once ARM was introduced. Now in January 2021, the model has been renamed again as Cloud Services (Classic).

    Cloud Services (extended support) is a new model but is compatible with the Classic model. I view it as a bridge between the old model and ARM. Azure promises to maintain feature parity with the old Azure Service Manager (ASM) deployment model, but also add access to some new features that the Classic model doesn’t currently have.

    If you’re still running on ASM, (sorry, I mean, Cloud Services (Classic)), you have two ways of redeploying your existing Cloud Services to Cloud Services (extended support). You can deploy your services to the new model and delete the old one, OR you can upgrade the deployment “in-place”.

    No word if the Cloud Services (Classic) will ever end support. But I think they’re trying to make it REALLY easy for the leftover classic customers to run in an ARM environment. So that signals something.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/build-regionally-resilient-cloud-services-using-the-azure-resource-manager/

    THREE.

    Microsoft is expanding its presence in South America with a new datacenter region being announced for Chile.

    In addition, late last year Azure opened another datacenter in Brazil, so there are two – Brazil South and Brazi Southeast. Brazil Southeast will even support Availability Zones.

    Seems there is a new South American push from Redmond.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/updates/microsoft-to-establish-new-datacenter-region-in-chile/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    It’s been a couple of months since I sent the last newsletter. It’s very hard to cover every single thing that has changed in that time, but here are a few that caught my eye.

    • New Azure datacenter regions announced for Denmark and Chile
    • Azure Stack Edge now supports Virtual Machines and Kubernetes clusters
    • Azure Functions now supports custom handlers, allowing you to use other languages for Functions such as Go, Rust or PHP
    • App Service Environment v3 now in public preview
    • App Service Anti-Virus logs in public preview
    • New Azure Purview for data governance in public preview
    • Azure Storage Account recovery from the portal
    • Azure Digital Twins is now generally available
    • Azure Free Trial Account now has access to 5 more free services, including archive storage, container registry, load balancer, service bus, and VPN gateway
    • Cosmos DB now supports the LIKE keyword for queries

    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.

    Happy 2021!

    I recently re-recorded my AZ-900 course, and that’s currently being edited by my video editor. People who own that course on Udemy will get access to a whole new course by the end of the month.

    I started recording a new course in the past week or so. I hope to launch an AI-900 course very soon. Shh, this is a secret. If you’re interested at all in Azure AI and Machine Learning, this is a good foundational course for that.

    I will record some new videos for AZ-304 after that. That will have my attention in the month of February.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 2.1. Thanks for reading this far.

    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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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.21

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.21

    Welcome to the TWENTY-FIRST bi-weekly edition of the Azure newsletter.

    We had a fairly good November here in Toronto, with the weather staying reasonably mild for most of the month. But December 1st hit us with some snow, to remind us that winter is knocking on the door.

    I hope you are doing well, where ever you are in the world. I am glad to be connected to you.

    I hope my American friends had a good Thanksgiving, and everyone is healthy.

    As always, if you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, no problem. There’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom. I’ll be sad to see you go but also completely understand.

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    ONE.

    Now I know this is the Azure newsletter, but AWS re:Invent conference is going on right now. (Apparently, it’s a three-week conference? That’s quite ambitious.)

    It’s always interesting to see the announcements and new developments on that side of the fence.

    The significant (and relevant) news that crossed my browser screen today were comments made by AWS cloud head Andy Jassy.

    “COVID, while a period that none of us would have wished on anybody or ever want to repeat, will end up accelerating the cloud by a few years.”

    “A very large number of those companies that have been talking about moving to the cloud have shifted to having real plans around moving to the cloud and having real migration plans,” he said.

    96% of the global IT market still resides in on-premises data centers. So the opportunity is ahead of us, not behind.

    https://siliconangle.com/2020/11/30/exclusive-aws-chief-andy-jassy-wakeup-call-cloud-adoption/

    TWO.

    Microsoft has announced that they are changing the way Azure certifications are renewed. And has also extended the renewal date of certifications that will expire this year by 6 months to June of 2021.

    Now they haven’t specifically announced what that “new renewal process” is, but we are expecting that they are changing the way they’ve done it in the past – which can only be a good thing.

    I’m expecting them to make it easier to renew certifications.

    In the past, Azure has come out with new exam codes every couple of years. 70-534 became 70-535, which became AZ-300+AZ-301, which became AZ-303+AZ-304.

    Occasionally, they’d have a special “upgrade exam” you can take (AZ-302). But they haven’t done that lately.

    Anyone who passed a previous version of the exam would simply be “forced” to take an exam to renew their certification. 

    Again, we don’t know what the “new process” is, but if they are making it “easier” to renew your certification, then we should be happy about that.

    From the email: “We’re working on implementing a new approach that will allow learners who hold a valid role-based and specialty certification the ability to renew their certification. While we’re not ready to announce the renewal policy, role-based and specialty certifications currently scheduled to expire Jan 1 to Jun 30, 2021 will be extended for six additional months.”

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Well, it’s getting extremely slow. I guess that’s to be expected near the end of the year. The Azure Updates page only shows about 10 updates in the past 2 weeks. 

    • New Azure datacenter region announced for Sweden
    • Azure Policy can now be managed in GitHub
    • Azure Storage Blob Inventory now in public preview

    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 think I’ve almost fully recovered from the cold that I had. But as we get into December, I think I will take some time to rest and be with family. Wish everyone a safe, and happy, holiday. 

    Udemy is running its “Cyber Week” sales event this week. So if you’re looking for some courses to watch over the next month, here’s a link to my instructor profile page.

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

    This is the last newsletter for 2020. See you again in January!

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.21. Thanks for reading this far.

    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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  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.20

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.20

    Welcome to the TWENTIETH bi-weekly edition of the Azure newsletter. 

    I hope you are all doing well. I am feeling great. The year is almost over, and I am in desperate need of a rest. I think I will take it very easy in December before starting anything significant again in January.

    I hope you are staying safe wherever you are and spending some quality time with your family. 

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    ONE.

    You don’t often think of this, but some Enterprise software is priced per CPU. And as you need more powerful machines to run these workloads, you risk a massive increase in your software licensing costs as you add vCPUs in the bigger machine sizes.

    Microsoft is introducing new virtual machine sizes that have “constrained vCPUs”. So now you can get the latest generation Azure virtual machines, with high memory, large storage, fast I/O, but still keep a low vCPU count.

    These are under the memory-optimized category (E-series), and the new VMs are called Esv4, Edsv4, and Easv4.

    Esv4 runs an Intel processor while Edsv4 runs AMD.
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/constrained-vcpu

    TWO.

    Microsoft has rolled out .NET 5.0 support to App Services under all regions, operating systems, and app service plan tiers.

    If you’re looking to develop in .NET 5.0, it’s now available for use in Azure.

    If you look at the link below, you’ll be immediately presented with Microsoft’s challenge naming all these similar but distinct things.

    • .NET 5.0 is the next version after .NET Core 3.1 – dropping the “Core” and skipping version 4 to reduce confusion with .NET Framework 4.X (which is different)
    • ASP.NET Core 5.0 is based on .NET 5.0 – keeping the “Core” to reduce confusion with ASP.NET MVC 5
    • Entity Framework Core 5.0 – keeping the “Core” to reduce confusion with Entity Framework 5 and 6

    Follow the below link to see all of the new goodies included with this new language support:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/dotnet-five

    THREE.

    The AZ-900 exam changes that were previously announced are now live. As I mentioned, the course already has new videos covering the new topics. I’ll look to re-record that course around the end of the year.

    As previously mentioned, AZ-104, AZ-204 and AZ-303 don’t really have exam changes even though the page says they do. It’s more like clarifications on the wording. No changes to the courses will be made around those.

    The AZ-304 exam changes are going live next week.

    As always, I’ll keep everyone posted if I hear anything else.

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    It’s been a very slow couple of weeks, to be honest. No big news lately.

    • HDInsight to support Private Link (in preview)
    • QnA Maker getting deep learning upgrades (in preview)
    • Azure Data Lake Storage Premium Tier now GA
    • Azure Advisor has new recommendations to make
    • SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) VM images now available in the marketplace
    • Redis 6.0 now in preview
    • .NET 5 now in App Service
    • VPN over ExpressRoute now available

    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.

    Well, of course, yours truly had to go and catch a cold in the last couple of weeks. Don’t worry, it’s not more serious than that. But I haven’t been able to work as much as I need to to finish things up. And I haven’t been able to record any videos because of my gravelly voice.

    Hopefully, I can kick this cough and get back to being 100% again this week.

    Stay safe! Stay well!

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.20. Thanks for reading this far.

    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

    See you in two weeks!

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.19

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.19

    Welcome to the NINETEENTH bi-weekly edition of the Azure newsletter. Thank you SO much for signing up to receive this. As always, if you don’t want to receive this, don’t worry! You can click the unsubscribe link at the bottom, and we’ll remain friends!

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    ONE.

    The top story I guess is that Microsoft announced its Q3 revenue. And it was a good quarter for them. They continue to do well in the various software and services they offer, including LinkedIn, Teams, and Azure cloud.

    Microsoft Azure revenue grew 48% year-over-year.  It wasn’t that long ago (well, 3 years or so) that Azure revenue was growing 100% YoY, but 48% is still a respectable pace. We’ve seen a few growing pains over the last few months with stability, but they continue to take more than their share of the cloud space.

    By comparison, Amazon AWS grew 29% from a year ago. So Azure can still be proud of their success in this area. They’re even growing a bit faster than Google Cloud as well.

    Since these companies are not great at breaking out the specific revenue from their clouds, it’s hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison to know if Azure has overtaken AWS for the #1 cloud provider. But they continue to show strong growth.

    That’s good for “us” as this means companies will continue to value Azure skills.

    TWO.

    Microsoft keeps developing new data center regions. Last newsletter, I talked about Austria. They also announced a new data center region in Greece. This week, they’re announcing a new data center region coming soon in Taiwan.

    Microsoft announces its first Azure data center region in Taiwan

    As you know, regions are more than just data centers. They host many services including Azure and Office 365. They contain availability zones and are paired with another region for failover. 

    This brings the number of existing or planned regions in the world to 66.

    THREE.

    We’re coming to the end of the year, and Microsoft rolled out it’s “November” updates for the certification exams. Most exams saw very little or no updates.

    No or few updates:

    • AZ-104
    • AZ-303
    • AZ-204
    • DP-200
    • DP-900

    Some updates:

    • AZ-304
    • AZ-900

    Of course, the related courses will see new content relating to these updates. 

    But since we’re at the end of the year, it makes me stop and think about the state of Microsoft and Azure certifications. Microsoft made the transition from the old certifications (“70-*”) over a year ago, made some big changes to them earlier this year, and now are not making very many changes to them.

    Azure is becoming a more stable platform overall. You cannot expect a lot of big changes in areas like Virtual Machines, App Services, Networking, and Storage. The basics of those are fixed, and the only changes we can expect to see are small and incremental improvements over time.

    Database services are fairly mature as well, although there is also a lot more innovation and change going on in Big Data and Data Processing such as Data Factory, Jupyter Notebooks, and Synapse. 

    Most of the innovation and changes will come outside these core spaces. AI and machine learning, no doubt. Windows Virtual Desktop too. Teams. 

    At least, I am hoping that the core set of knowledge is starting to settle down. Microsoft can certainly upend everything next year with all new exams and all new codes. I hope they don’t. But it’s not “impossible”.

    So the future of Azure certification (AZ-*) and Database certification (DP-*) looks fairly stable to me. You can learn these skills and build on them with future skills in different areas. This knowledge becomes a solid foundation on which you can specialize in your career.

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Some interesting updates this month. 

    • Soft delete for Azure files now GA
    • Azure Database for MySQL supports up to 10 read replicas
    • SQL Server for Virtual Machines now have their own “VM agent extension” which will apparently unlock cost savings and other features
    • Azure App Service Premium Plans now have a dev/test discount
    • Azure Kubernetes Service now supports Azure Spot instances, for deeply discounted compute for low priority work
    • Azure Kubernetes Service now supports proximity placement groups, the opposite of availability sets
    • Support for PHP 7.4 ending in 1 year for app services on Windows
    • Adding support for Java 11 in Functions
    • A new region in Taiwan, coming soon

    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.

    November is here, and I’m finishing a few things before the end of the year. I am working on an exciting new “100% hands-on” type course that is not aimed at a specific exam so much as general Azure knowledge. I hope to have that out in the next couple of weeks.

    I sent out a survey to you, and placed it in a few other places such as the Facebook group and in the Udemy courses, to get your feedback and find ways I can improve going into next year. Thanks in advance to all of those who have filled that out. And I appreciate your time helping me to serve students better.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.19. Thanks for reading this far.

    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

    See you in two weeks!

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.18

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.18

    It was a relatively quiet couple of weeks in the Azure world, and then BAM! Microsoft made a couple of announcements today.

    Let’s start with one piece of bad news before we talk about two pieces of good news.

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    ONE.

    Sad to say, but Azure continues to be having a bad few weeks with platform stability.

    In the last newsletter, I mentioned an Active Directory outage that made life tough for hundreds of thousands around the globe unable to log into their apps or email on Sept 28. 

    A week later, there was a 20-minute period where network routing had major latency issues. It was long enough for people to notice being unable to connect to their apps.

    And then this week, for about 4 hours, ARM template deployments were showing weird, random errors.

    I certainly don’t remember reading complaints from users in the Facebook group as much as I have in the last couple of weeks. We usually go months without people mentioning issues like this, and then we have three in a row.

    Bad things come in threes, the old saying goes. So maybe this is it.

    TWO.

    Continuing Azure’s big expansion into Europe, they just announced a data center being built in Austria!

    Microsoft Azure announces its first region in Austria

    This brings the number of Azure regions (announced) to 65. Good to see Europe getting extensive local cloud coverage.

    THREE.

    Space, the final frontier.

    Azure Space was announced yesterday, which is a partnership with SpaceX. 

    As you know, SpaceX has been launching satellites into orbit, trying to cover the planet with WiFi.  They eventually plan to have 4,000 to 40,000 satellites. Now you’ll be able to collect your Farmville crops while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. 

    SpaceX Starlink partners with Microsoft Azure to deploy cloud computing anywhere

    Well Azure Space aims to connect remote locations into Azure. In fact, this announcement included mention of a Modular Data Center (MDC) which is “Azure in a box” that you can place in a remote location, and use Azure Space network to connect to those machines from Azure.

    As you’d expect, the military is one of the first to test this.

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Not too many Azure updates to catch my eye lately. I think Microsoft Ignite is still weighing on the product teams, and they’ve announced all the good stuff a month ago. 

    • App Service Private Endpoints is now GA
    • Azure Cognitive Services Image Captioning reaches “human parity”
    • Azure Cache premium tier supports availability zones for replicas
    • Service Fabric managed clusters in preview
    • Azure Blob Storage point in time recovery is now 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.

    Be sure and check out my two newest courses on LinkedIn Learning. My latest just went live recently. 

    Exam Tips AZ:303 Azure Architect Technologies: https://www.lynda.com/Azure-tutorials/Exam-Tips-Microsoft-Azure-Architect-Technologies-AZ-303/2976144-2.html

    Exam Tips: AZ-304 Azure Architect Design: https://www.lynda.com/Azure-tutorials/Exam-Tips-Microsoft-Azure-Architect-Design-AZ-304/2976145-2.html 

    Nothing big to announce from me. Still working on AZ-304 updates. I guess AZ-900 updates will re-surface in November and I’ll have to turn my attention back to that too.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.18. Thanks for reading this far.

    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

    See you in two weeks!

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.17

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.17

    A bunch of Microsoft certifications finally ended their beta periods and went live in the past couple of weeks. And beta scores are starting to appear on the Microsoft Certification Dashboard.

    Most notably for me, AZ-303 and AZ-304 are live. That ends the 2020 transition from the old set of exams to the new codes.

    PL-100 is also live if you’re into the Power Platform App Maker. More certification news down below.

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    ONE.

    The big news from last week was that Azure suffered a rather ugly failure with authentication services. And the culprit was a doozy. Azure Active Directory went down for about 3 hours, which meant that some people couldn’t “log in” to Azure, Office 365, Teams, or any apps that relied on Azure AD.

    America and Australia were affected more than Europe or Asia, apparently. But this was a widespread issue. Obviously, millions of people were impacted, and Microsoft is rightly taking the event very seriously.

    Microsoft has of course analyzed the root cause and published an RCA.

    https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/

    As you’ll see in the link above, a deployment meant to go to their “test” area was deployed also to production. The normal process is to deploy code to a non-customer environment, followed by an internal Microsoft-only environment, before finally being deployed to a real customer environment, but that didn’t happen due to a bug.

    They reverted the change almost immediately, but the same bug that caused the bad Azure AD deployment also required them to deploy the old version manually.

    One of those series of unfortunate incidents.

    TWO.

    If you’re in Greece, this might make you happy. Azure has announced it’s next datacenter region will be built in Greece. Opa!

    This includes training up to 100,000 people in Greece, as well as some 3D digitizations of some of Greece’s cultural treasure areas.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/updates/microsoft-plans-to-establish-new-cloud-datacenter-region-in-greece/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Microsoft Ignite was a couple of weeks ago, and I think Microsoft announced everything new about Azure that they could. So updates this time are a bit lighter:

    • Cosmos DB offering a serverless (consumption-based model) model (in preview)
    • Azure Container Registry expands to more regions, now in 38 regions
    • Shared Disks for Azure Disk Storage also expands to more regions
    • Azure Ultra Disk also available in more regions
    • Azure Advisor now makes more recommendations for performance and cloud operational improvements
    • Azure Availability Zones now available in more regions
    • Azure changing it’s certificate authority which could cause disruptions

    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 make updates to the courses in general, and AZ-304 specifically. Not much in the way of new courses or major announcements coming from me.

    Although I got my MCT, which was cool.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.17. Thanks for reading this far.

    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

    See you in two weeks!

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.16

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.16

    Ready? Set? Ignite!

    The big news going on right now is that Microsoft Ignite 2020 kicked off on Tuesday this week. With travel being restricted and meeting in person not recommended, the event has been moved from New Orleans to online.

    I’ve watched a few sessions today, and am looking through the vast catalog of sessions looking for interesting topics to spend time learning more about. 

    I’m not going to try to list out all of the announcements that were made because there were so many. But here are a few that have caught my eye.

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    ONE.

    Every year, Microsoft pushes a “Ignite Book of News” that contains all of the announcements they have made during the multi-day event. 

    Believe it or not, Microsoft is more than just “Azure”, and so if you’re into Dynamics, Teams, Power Platform, or any of the other areas, then there have been several announcements in each that you should check out.

    Of course, there are plenty of Azure announcements in there as well. I’ll highlight the ones that caught my attention at the end of this newsletter. 

    The Ignite 2020 Book of News can be found here:

    https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news/

    TWO.

    Microsoft announced a new “region” to be located in Arizona – West US 3. I think they’ve run out of creative name ideas for the US regions. We have East US (1 and 2), North Central US, South Central US and West US (1, 2 and 3). 

    What makes this new region special is that Microsoft is going to make it it’s more environmentally sustainable data center. For instance, they’re planning to reduce, reuse and replenish water in the region. The data centers won’t require water for cooling outside the hottest days of summer. They’re working on a solar plant in Arizona too. 

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-s-newest-sustainable-datacenter-region-coming-to-arizona-in-2021/

    THREE.

    I wholly recommend watching Mark Russinovich’s Inside the Azure Datacenter Architecture talk.

    Mark leads us through “end-to-end” of the Azure Datacenter. Not only the physical layer, but some of the interesting things Azure is doing to improve performance at each layer between the physical layer and the layer we see.

    He also gets a bit into “the future”, with a demo of holographic storage, and an interesting update on “DNA storage”. 

    https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/40aca11c-8e28-4914-a6d8-b3a7efb4eee1

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    There’s so much more I want to talk about. But I have to keep this brief. 

    Have a look at the Ignite Book of News and Azure Updates for some of the following interesting updates that were announced this week:

    • Cosmos DB offering a serverless (consumption-based model) model (in preview)
    • Microsoft introduces “Bicep” as an abstraction built on-top of ARM templates, to make it easier to “build” ARM templates
    • Azure Blob Storage Lifecycle Management now supports “last access time” and not just create time
    • Canada and Australia data centers are getting Availability Zones
    • Azure Orbital is a new service for connecting to satellites 
    • Azure Resource Mover is a new service that helps move Azure resources between regions (in preview)
    • Zone to Zone disaster recovery (for Azure VMs) allows customers to replicate, failover and failback their business-critical virtual machines within the same region with zones
    • .NET 5 release candidate is now available
    • Azure App Service now available for reserved instances
    • Azure App Service has a new Premium V3 plan
    • Azure App Service now supports Windows containers
    • Azure will soon introduce a “Private Marketplace” that allows organizations to curate what services are available in the Marketplace for that organization
    • Backup Center is a new centralized place to manage backups across vaults, subscriptions, locations and even tenants
    • Azure Dedicated Host also supports Virtual Machine Scale Sets
    • Azure Hybrid Benefit now supports Red Hat and SUSE customers
    • A new Azure-supported Linux distribution, Flatcar Container Linux by Kinvolk
    • Azure Automanage helps admins to automate the management of Windows Server virtual machines (VMs)
    • Global Load Balancer feature for Azure Load Balancer (in preview)

    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.

    The AZ-303 and AZ-304 exams have now come out of Beta and are now considered live. If you take those exams, you’ll get those scores immediately. If you took them in Beta, you’ll get the scores shortly.

    A reminder that AZ-300 and AZ-301 retire next week (Sept 30), and AZ-303 and AZ-304 will be the only way to achieve Azure Architect Expert.

    The AZ-304 course updates are coming along. Every day, a bit of progress is being made. That will continue into October.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.16. Thanks for reading this far.

    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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    See you in two weeks!

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.15

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.15

    Writing these newsletters every two weeks is a good way to mark the passage of time for me. The reminder pops up on my calendar, and I almost always exclaim, “Has it been two weeks already? Didn’t I send one last week?” And then I realize that, yes, two weeks have indeed passed.

    One thing that has me excited, is the “end” of the major exam update cycle for this year. It seems like Microsoft has been tweaking the exams in small ways every few months, and then doing major updates once per year. This, as you’d expect, is a lot of work for me. 

    So far, I’ve updated AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-204, and now AZ-303. Just one more to go, with AZ-304 updates beginning this week. Then, maybe, they’ll give me a couple of months break before new updates in January 2021? Fingers crossed.

    Anyways, enough about that. Here’s what has happened these past two weeks in the world of Azure…

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    ONE.

    It’s that time of year again! Microsoft Ignite is now accepting registrations and the conference itself is only a couple of weeks away. September 22-24, 2020.

    Of course, it’s entirely online and it’s free. So be sure and sign up for Microsoft Ignite if you’re interested in getting all that great content that Microsoft is planning to provide. Look through the catalog a few days in advance and see what you’re interested in. Some of the sessions fill up, yes even online.

    https://myignite.microsoft.com/home

    I’ve been to the last two Ignite’s in Orlando in 2018 and 2019. On the one hand, I’m grateful for not having to spend $5000+ to travel to the event and for the tickets. I didn’t have an employer to pay for that as most did.

    It was also a lot of walking, and a lot of time away from work. To some, that’s good. But to be able to attend the event and also have the chance to do some work will be a benefit – to me at least.

    I will miss meeting the dozens and dozens of students throughout the week. That’s probably the biggest downside to an “online-only” event to me.

    TWO.

    Microsoft and VMWare have gotten together to launch Azure Spring Cloud, which is now in general availability.

    Azure Spring Cloud is a fully-managed service for Spring Boot apps. You simply need to deploy JARs or code, and Spring Cloud will wire your apps with the Spring service runtime automatically.

    If you’re a Java developer, finally getting the simplicity of a fully managed Spring service in the cloud should be a big benefit.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-spring-cloud-a-fully-managed-service-for-spring-boot-apps-is-now-generally-available/

    THREE.

    Azure Blob Storage has finally added versioning to the service, in general availability.

    This should protect your blob container contents from accidental or malicious deletion. Much like a source control system, blob versioning automatically maintains all previous versions of an object using a version ID. You can list both the current and previous versions, as well as access and restore those previous versions.

    Azure Storage is already one of the safest places to store files with their redundancy features, soft delete option, and immutable blobs. Now, this is one more feature to protect your files from these mistakes.

    The feature is free, but you are going to pay for the additional usage of storage for previous versions. So be careful about which types of files you enable this for.
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/updates/azure-blob-versioning-is-now-general-available/

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Some updates to Azure over the past two weeks:

    • Automatic VM guest patching for critical and security patches (in preview)
    • Azure Migration now supports migrating to Availability Zones
    • Azure Storage classic metrics is retiring
    • Azure Spring Cloud in General Availability
    • AWS connector for Cost Management in General Availability
    • Azure Blob versioning in General Availability

    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 AZ-300 course has now been completely updated for the AZ-303 exam content. If you own the course, you get the updates for free. If you don’t own the course, you can buy my AZ-303 course at a great price here: http://sjd.ca/az303 

    Now I need to get to work on the AZ-304 updates.

    Something strange happened yesterday night with AZ-900. I went to check out the official landing page, and the Sept 15 changes are gone! Has Microsoft put the changes on hold? I’m trying to find out. Maybe there was a publishing error that rolled back the changes by mistake. I’ll let you know when I know.

    Thank you for reading this. I really do appreciate that you take the time every two weeks.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.15. Thanks for reading this far.

    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

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

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    See you in two weeks!

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.14

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.14

    It’s nearing the end of “summer” in the Northern Hemisphere! I can’t believe that we’re at the end of August already. I’m sure those below the equator are cheering the hotter weather, but I am not looking forward to the cold.

    Anyways, let’s not think about that. What’s been going on with Azure these last two weeks?

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    ONE.

    Chalk up another win for Team Redmond. DreamWorks, the film studio behind such movies as Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar, are moving their animation film production to Azure. That will include live-action mixed with animation.

    Article: Universal Adopts Microsoft Azure for Animation, Live-Action Production

    I sometimes use the example of “animated film rendering” when describing the use case for Azure Batch. I have no idea if Azure Batch will be involved in this new film production platform, but I finally have a real example of an animation company using Azure.

    TWO.

    I have a preoccupation with cloud-based supercomputers, and so I was excited to read that Azure is releasing a new ND A100 v4 VM series, in which each instance contains eight NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

    Each of those GPUs has 54 billion (billion, with a B) transistors, 3456 FP64 cores, 6912 FP32 cores, and 432 Tensor cores. It rings in at 16.5 teraflops of peak processing speed. NVIDIA claims it’s the biggest chip NVIDIA has ever made. And there are eight of them in one VM.

    And this system has been designed to be clustered so you can potentially get thousands of those powerful GPUs working together.

    This series promises a speed-increase of 2X to 3X over the previous NVIDIA VMs with no re-coding required.

    If you have a GPU workload and would love to see a 2X or 3X speed boost, here we go. 

    I have no idea if this is suitable for Bitcoin mining. Let me know if you try it.

    Article: Bringing AI supercomputing to customers | Azure Blog and Updates

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Some updates to Azure over the past two weeks:

    • Encryption of backup data using customer-managed keys (in preview)
    • VM backup now supports VM scale sets
    • Node-level upgrades for AKS, instead of updating the full cluster
    • Soft Delete for Storage Blob Containers (in preview)
    • Cosmos DB Serverless offer (in preview)
    • Expansion of Azure Ultra Disk to more regions
    • Azure Advisor adds more cost optimizations
    • Azure Migrate now assesses physical servers as well as AWS and GCP VMs

    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 finished another course for LinkedIn Learning. AZ-303 and AZ-304 exam tips courses coming out once their production team is ready to launch those courses.

    I’ve been recording a lot for the AZ-300 (now AZ-303) course on Udemy. I now have 4 hours of AZ-303 content in there, and I intend to record more every day until it’s done. Aiming for Aug 31. 

    Then on to AZ-304 updates.

    Azure has updated the AZ-900 course as of Sept 15, 2020 and I’ve already updated my Udemy course with new videos on that. Probably the first course anywhere to be updated for all the new topics.

    Thank you for reading this. I really do appreciate that you take the time every two weeks.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.14. Thanks for reading this far.

    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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    See you in two weeks!

  • Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.13

    Azure World Newsletter – Issue 1.13

    I hope that you and your family are continuing to do well. 2020 has been a dramatic year, no doubt. But don’t give up. Keep a positive mindset, keep learning, keep moving forward with dedication and determination.

    Let’s look at the last couple of weeks in the world of Microsoft Azure.

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    ONE.

    In a recent blog post, Microsoft introduced it’s new “Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework”. This provides customers with a set of best practices to help them build and deliver well-designed solutions using Microsoft Azure.

    Blog post:

    Introducing the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework | Azure Blog and Updates

    If your job is to design solutions for the cloud, then it’s worth looking at how Microsoft looks at application design. It’s also good if you are looking to become an Architect or take the Azure Architect Expert certification.

    The blog post references the Azure Architecture Center which contains a lot of architect resources:

    Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework – Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework introduction

    And not only that, you can take a quiz to see how your company’s architecture measures up to the standard.

    Welcome to Microsoft Assessments 

    TWO.

    We haven’t talked much about Azure Stack because it’s not really “the cloud” technically. It’s the Azure Fabric technology running in your own data center.

    But Google, AWS, and Azure are both battling it out in the on-prem world. The cloud battle is coming right into your office data center!

    Google has Anthos which allows you to run Kubernetes clusters anywhere, even in your own environment. AWS has Outposts, which extends the AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools into almost any datacenter. And since 2017, Azure Stack has been available to extend the cloud metaphor to your own machines. 

    Azure Stack has a new product, code-named Fiji.

    As you might know, Azure Stack is software that you run on your own hardware. Well, Stack Fiji is Azure-provided hardware that you install in your datacenter. We’re talking about “racks of servers provided by Microsoft” that you run in your own environment.

    Being able to install Azure hardware in your own environment is a little scary and a little cool. Yes, we’ve had Data Box for a while, but that’s temporary. Stack Fiji, when available, will be an interesting step to the true Hybrid cloud.

    Article: Microsoft readies its AWS Outposts hybrid competitor: Azure Stack ‘Fiji’ 

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    AZURE PLATFORM UPDATES.

    Some updates to Azure over the past two weeks:

    • Lifecycle Management for Azure Data Lake
    • Azure Blob Storage “object replication” is available in more regions (preview feature)
    • Azure bandwidth pricing change as of Aug 1
    • Azure file share can be backed up right from the File share blade
    • Kubernetes resource view (in public preview)
    • Azure Monitor can now monitor itself
    • Azure Advisor has a new “quick fix” feature
    • Backup compression now available for Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance
    • Azure App Service now supports .NET Framework 4.8
    • Selective disk backup for Azure VM Backups
    • Azure Database for MySQL now supports customer-managed keys and double encryption with two different algorithms
    • Azure Database for PostgreSQL now supports customer-managed keys and double encryption with two different algorithms
    • Cloud Shell now can run on a virtual network and interact with VMs that only have a private IP address (in preview)

    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 can’t believe summer is going by so fast. Mid-August already. 

    I’ve just uploaded 12 new videos (1 hour, 20 minutes) to the AZ-104 course to cover new and updated topics for the Azure Administrator certification. Thank you to all students who’ve been asking questions in that course, as Jordi and I are working hard to ensure that it is the most-updated course available on the topic.

    https://www.udemy.com/course/70533-azure/?couponCode=IBMPCDAY

    I’ve also just uploaded 5 new videos (30 minutes) to the AZ-900 course to cover new and updated topics for the Azure Fundamentals certification. Kevin and I are also trying our best to make this course the best one available anywhere to prepare you for that exam.

    https://www.udemy.com/course/az900-azure/?couponCode=IBMPCDAY
    Use coupon code IBMPCDAY at checkout for the best deal I can offer on my courses.

    WHERE TO FIND ME.

    And that’s it for issue 1.13. Thanks for reading this far.

    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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    See you in two weeks!