David Blank-Edelman, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, gives us some great insight into what customers should be thinking about when it comes to the reliability of their cloud applications. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode274.mp3 Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/5131a3c9-afcf-42cd-bc13-8350c734bb97/videos/2abe4aa27c/   Other updates: We're excited to announce a new B-series VM size, B1ls, which has the smallest memory and lowest cost among Azure VM instances. This offering is in response to customers who were looking for entry-level offerings. B1ls has 512 MiB of memory and 1 vCPU, and it costs only $0.0052 (US East) per hour. Target workloads B1ls is best for small web servers, small databases, and development and test environments. It offers a cost-effective way to deploy workloads that don't need the full performance of the CPU continuously and burst in their performance. B1ls is available only on Linux for the best customer experience. Windows is not supported because the minimum recommended memory for the Windows OS is larger than what B1ls offers. Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage is now available. It provides an additional layer of security intelligence that detects unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit storage accounts. This layer of protection allows you to address concerns about potential threats to your storage accounts, without needing to be an expert in security. Enabling it is quick and simple. Sign up in the Azure portal, or with standard Azure APIs (REST/PowerShell) for specific storage accounts or subscriptions. Once enabled, security alerts are triggered when suspicious activity occurs, and you can view them listed in Azure Security Center. Security alerts provide details of suspicious activity and recommends actions to take to investigate and mitigate the potential threat. The identity experience framework orchestration platform of Azure Active Directory B2C (Azure AD B2C) is now available. This means that you can create your own user journeys and integrate with multiple identity providers and data sources, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) solution or loyalty system, to deliver first-class experiences. Use Azure AD B2C as a universal platform for gathering data feeds and applying that data to the user experience in your consumer applications to improve acquisition and retention. Azure AD B2C also offers several built-in templates for common user flows. Azure Availability Zones, a high-availability solution for mission-critical applications, is now generally available in UK South. Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region. Each Availability Zone consists of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. With the introduction of Availability Zones, we now offer a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% for uptime of virtual machines. Want to evaluate your cloud analytics provider? Here are the three questions to ask. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/want-to-evaluate-your-cloud-analytics-provider-here-are-the-three-questions-to-ask/ How to accelerate DevOps with Machine Learning lifecycle management https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-to-accelerate-devops-with-machine-learning-lifecycle-management/ Bitnami Apache Airflow Multi-Tier now available in Azure Marketplace https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/bitnami-apache-airflow-multi-tier-now-available-in-azure-marketplace/ How Skype modernized its backend infrastructure using Azure Cosmos DB – Part 1 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-skype-modernized-its-backend-infrastructure-using-azure-cosmos-db-part-1/ How Skype modernized its backend infrastructure using Azure Cosmos DB – Part 2 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-skype-modernized-its-backend-infrastructure-using-azure-cosm