Evan and Kendall talk to Craig Wiand, a Principal Engineer in the Azure team, about the new Serial Console feature available for VMs. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode238.mp3 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/serial-console Other updates: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devtestlab/2018/07/03/save-time-by-leveraging-auto-filled-fields-at-virtual-machine-creation/ Azure Data Box Disk, an SSD-disk based option for offline data transfer to Azure, is now in preview. In Azure SQL Database, auto-failover groups are now generally available. They extend active geo-replication with the following capabilities:  • Geo-replication of a group of databases • Transparent manual or automatic group failover • Independent routing to secondary databases for load balancing of read-only workloads For more information, see the blog post.  From   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/lightning-fast-query-performance-with-azure-sql-data-warehouse/   General availability: Azure DevOps Projects Friday, July 13, 2018 Back in November, we introduced Azure DevOps Projects. It helps you get up and running with a full DevOps pipeline on Azure, from code through monitoring, in just a few minutes. We've added services along the way and incorporated a lot of your feedback. It's now generally available. Public Preview- Azure Monitor Container Health Monitoring Capability We released a public preview of the Azure Monitor container health monitoring capability at the //build conference. The Azure Monitor container health capability enables you to track the health and performance of your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster. Based on customer feedback, we're releasing new features and updates to onboarding and the portal experience.   From   https://buildazure.com/2018/07/17/new-microsoft-azure-certification-paths-coming-in-2018/  - Kendall Azure NetApp files now in public preview From Microsoft has teamed up with NetApp to enable enterprises to overcome the challenge of deploying file-based workloads to the cloud. Today we're pleased to announce the public preview of Azure NetApp Files, an Azure native service powered by NetApp's leading ONTAP technology, which has been long trusted by enterprises to meet their requirements for performance, scalability, data management, security, and hybrid capability. From Pluralsite course on Kusto Query Language which is used for Azure services https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/kusto-query-language-kql-from-scratch Azure tips and tricks: https://www.michaelcrump.net/azure-tips-and-tricks-sorted-list/