The Azure Podcast

Cale and Sujit talk about one of the unsung heroes of Azure, the Monitor service. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode211.mp3 Indexed audio: https://www.videoindexer.ai/media/ed4588081e/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/monitoring-and-diagnostics/monitoring-get-started   Other updates: Augmented rules for network security groups (NSGs) simplify the security definition for virtual networks, so you can define larger, more complex network security policies with fewer rules. Multiple ports, multiple explicit IP addresses, service tags, and application security groups can all be combined into a single, easily understood security rule.  From You can use application security groups to configure network security as natural extension of an application’s structure, by arbitrarily grouping virtual machines and defining network security policies based on those groups.  You can reuse your security policy and scale without manual maintenance of explicit IP addresses. The platform handles the complexity of explicit IP addresses and multiple rule sets, so you can focus on your business logic.  From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/security-overview#application-security-groups Manage and Auto-scale your IoT solution with a predictable IoT Cloud https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/iot-hub-dotnet-autoscale/ Azure Security Center and Microsoft Web Application Firewall Integration https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-security-center-and-microsoft-web-application-firewall-integration/

Evan talks about the hot issue of the CPU vulnerability that's been addressed by Microsoft in Windows on Azure and on-premises. He discusses the reason for the reboots of all the Azure servers and how customers can alleviate the impact of these reboots. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/securing-azure-customers-from-cpu-vulnerability/ Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode210.mp3 Indexed audio: https://www.videoindexer.ai/media/3869c863fb/   Other updates: Preview version 12.0.0-beta of the Azure SDK for Go is now available to help you use Azure services from Go applications. To get it, run `go get -u github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-go/...` or use dep. The Azure Container Networking Interface (CNI) plug-in is now generally available for Kubernetes clusters deployed using acs-engine. You can use the plug-in to deploy and manage your own Kubernetes cluster with native Azure networking capability, by default. Azure CNI allows your containers to be part of an Azure virtual network and leverage the rich set of capabilities that a virtual network offers.

As part of our Partner Spotlight series, we have Dan Garfield from CodeFresh.io and Jessica Deen, a Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft talking about DevOps in a Kubernetes world. Good timing too considering we recently did a show on Kubernetes! https://codefresh.io/ Kubernetes Guides - https://codefresh.io/kubernetes-guides/ Docker Guides - https://codefresh.io/docker-guides/ Brief Description of Codefresh - Codefresh is a DevOps platform built for Kubernetes. It includes CI/CD, a free private Docker registry, and on-demand test environments. It's available as SaaS, or run it on your own infrastructure. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode209.mp3    

We chat with Kendal Roden, an Azure Consultant at Microsoft, about the journey she went through, graduating from college to getting ramped up on Azure and working on real engagements with customers. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode208.mp3 Indexed media: https://www.videoindexer.ai/media/8ce4dda768/ Other updates: Automation runbooks available in action groups to take actions from alerts An Azure Automation runbook is a new action type available in Azure action groups.  When you create an action group, you can select to run an Automation runbook in addition to any other actions that you configure. You can choose a built-in runbook that's supplied by Azure for common tasks, or you can choose a custom runbook that you've created in your Automation account. This capability greatly extends the possible actions that you can take when an alert (activity log alert or near-real-time metric alert) triggers an action group on an Azure resource. For example, you can use a runbook that will gather additional troubleshooting information from the affected resource and then send it for review. Or the runbook can take immediate remediation actions to fix the issue or limit its extent. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/automation-runbooks-available-in-action-groups/ To provide a single, streamlined experience for Azure portal users, we will be sunsetting the Azure classic portal on January 8, 2018. Microsoft releases quantum computing development kit preview https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/quantum/2017/12/11/announcing-microsoft-quantum-development-kit Cloud storage now more affordable: Announcing general availability of Azure Archive Storage https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/cloud-storage-now-more-affordable-announcing-general-availability-of-azure-archive-storage/ How cloud speed helps SQL Server DBAs https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-cloud-speed-helps-sql-server-dbas/

In this special All-UK episode, Russell Young has an in-depth discussion with Christos Matskas, a Senior Azure PFE in the UK, about the growing popularity of serverless computing in Azure using services like Functions and Event Grid. Social Media: https://cmatskas.com  https://twitter.com/christosmatskas Resources on Azure bits: - Architecture best practices: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-best-practices - Function Proxies: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-proxies - Functions Runtime: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-runtime-overview - Durable Functions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/durable-functions-overview - Functions & Containers: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2017/11/15/functions-on-linux-preview/ DDDScotland: http://dddscotland.org   Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode207.mp3 Indexed audio: https://www.videoindexer.ai/media/5bd125a054/ Other updates:   Enabling Storage Service Encryption at rest for all new data coming to Azure Backup from on-premises and in cloud   In DevTest Labs, you can post announcements to notify users about recent changes or additions to your lab, and custom images with licensing terms are now enabled   Azure Migrate service launched in preview https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/launching-preview-of-azure-migrate/   Provides guidance, insights and mechanisms to help you migrate to Azure (IaaS)   Readiness of an azure VM Right sizing of VMs Cost PLUS - Enables ASR and Database Migration Service (SQL). Free of charge, supported for production environments.   Azure Advisor - new dashboard and some new functionality (best practices advisor) gives recommendations on high availability, security, performance and cost across your subscription   Elastic DB tools for Java (support for cross shard query, aimed at multi-tenant SaaS apps), routing of data to correct shards based on keys and shard map management.   Location Based Services public preview - geospatial services for mapping, iot, logistics, asset tracking type solutions.  Services include mapping, routing, search, time zones and traffic (partnering with TomTom).  RESTful service APIs plus a javascript mapping control - cost all managed to your subscription   Able to run Azure CLI within VS Code now directly   Azure functions runtime preview 2 - functions as a service on-prem if you want, and on Windows Nano containers.   B and M series now GA - lowest cost by giving flexible vCPU - good for small web servers, small db's, dev/test environments that have spikey workloads/util.  Build up credits when cpu usage is low, to be spent when you spike.  M Series are the largest VMs, up to 128 vCPUs, 4TB RAM, hyper-threading.   Great for SAP HANA and SQL Hekaton   Iot Hub device provisioning now GA Sunset of classic portal, Jan 8th 2018    

The guys talk about the rise of Kubernetes and discuss the architecture and how it can be run in Azure. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode206.mp3 Indexed audio: https://www.videoindexer.ai/media/6cc89f6458/ Resources: https://kubernetes.io https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube   Other resources: Azure Developer eBook by Barry Luijbregts and Michael Crump https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/developer-guide/   Beginning November 30, 2017, you will need to use the Azure portal to manage your Visual Studio Team Services accounts, instead of using the Azure classic portal.   P15 size for Azure Managed Disks generally available Azure Managed Disks is the recommended disk storage offering for use with Azure Virtual Machines for persistent storage of data. Managed Disks provides secured disk storage as well as simplified management and industry-leading durability and availability. P15 disks are 256 GB Premium Managed Disks that provide:   ✓ 1,100 input/output operations per second (IOPS) per disk. ✓ Throughput of 125 MB per second. The P15 disk size is now available in all Azure regions. Learn more about Managed Disks on the overview and pricing webpages. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/managed-disks/ Azure Analysis Services integration with Azure Diagnostic Logs https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-analysis-services-integration-with-azure-diagnostic-logs/ Last week in Azure: Migrating VMWare environments to Azure, and more https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/last-week-in-azure-week-of-2017-11-20/ Announcing Azure Location Based Services public preview https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-location-based-services-public-preview/ Automatic tuning introduces Automatic plan correction and T-SQL management https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/automatic-tuning-introduces-automatic-plan-correction-and-t-sql-management/  

Extremely informative discussion with Ronit Reger, a Senior PM in the SQL Team, about this new service they put out for SQL Azure to make is easier for customers to find out if their database is vulnerable to attacks. A must-have for anyone using SQL in Azure. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode205.mp3   Vulnerability Assessment on Azure SQL Database - Getting Started Blog announcing the release of Vulnerability Assessment Channel 9 video demonstrating the use of Vulnerability Assessment Indexed audio: https://www.videoindexer.ai/media/8f24adeb2c/ Other updates: Announcing General Availability of Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) Takeshi Numoto CVP, Cloud + Enterprise Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) are generally available for customers worldwide, effective today. Azure RIs enable you to reserve Virtual Machines on a one- or three-year term, and provide up to 72% cost savings versus pay-as-you-go prices. Azure RIs give you price predictability and help improve your budgeting and forecasting. Azure RIs also provide unprecedented flexibility should your business needs change. We’ve made it easy to exchange your RIs and make changes such as region or VM family, and unlike other cloud providers, you can cancel Azure RIs at any time and get a refund. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-azure-reserved-vm-instances-ris Transforming your VMware environment with Microsoft Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/transforming-your-vmware-environment-with-microsoft-azure/ Azure Advisor - your personalized best practices service got better https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-advisor-got-better/ Last week in Azure: News from Connect(); 2017, Azure Virtual Data Center, and more https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/last-week-in-azure-week-of-2017-11-13/ Azure SQL Databases Disaster Recovery 101 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-sql-databases-disaster-recovery-101/ Time to migrate off Access Control Service https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/time-to-migrate-off-access-control-service/  

A great throwback discussion to one of the earliest (and most robust) of Azure Services, the Classic Cloud Service, with Adam Modlin, a Senior App Dev Consultant at Microsoft. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode204.mp3 Indexed audio: https://www.videoindexer.ai/media/9918c9efc2/  Other updates: Both Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud Services will be available only in the Azure portal. Access from the classic portal will no longer be supported. If you were using the classic portal for OS images, please use PowerShell instead. For details on how to get started in the Azure portal, refer to the Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud Services documentation. New features for Virtual Machines in the Azure portal include:  • Ability to add classic disks to a VM  • Ability to add classic images to a VM   New features for Azure Cloud Services in the Azure portal include:  • Deployment-related operation logs  • Ability to update one or more roles at a time   Fv2-Series VMs: ✓ Are powered by the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors, code-named Skylake. ✓ Are ideal for compute intensive workloads such as scientific modeling, advanced analytics, engineering simulations, and machine learning inference. ✓ Are available in seven sizes, the largest of which has 72 vCPUs and 144 GB of random-access memory (RAM). ✓ Will support Azure Premium Storage disks by default and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based Azure accelerated networking capabilities for ultra-low VM-to-VM latencies. ✓ Have newly added Skylake processor capabilities that will provide up to twice the performance boost to vector processing workloads on both single and double precision floating point operations. Fv2-Series VMs are now generally available in the West US 2, East US, Southeast Asia, and West Europe regions. G-Series VMs provide a high-performance foundation for database workloads that require high compute performance and large amounts of RAM to support in-memory database operations. G-Series VMs are now generally available in the UK South region. GA pricing will begin on January 1, 2018. Usage prior to January 1, 2018, will be billed at preview rates. Learn more about Azure Virtual Machines on the overview and pricing webpages. Azure Container Registry lets you store and manage images for all types of container deployments including DC/OS, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Azure services such as App Service, Batch, Service Fabric, and others. Using Container Registry, you can: ✓ Keep container images near deployments to reduce latency and cost. ✓ Simplify your registry access management using Azure Active Directory. Managed tiers generally available Container Registry is now generally available in Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers. By using managed tiers, you can easily move between Basic, Standard, and Premium, and Container Registry will manage caching of storage accounts to meet the throughput and API calls. By choosing Premium, you’ll have higher throughput because Container Registry replicates and manages images across multiple (encrypted at rest) storage accounts. Geo-replication available in preview eo-replication enables Container Registry to function as a single registry, while being available for local operations in the replicated regions. As images are used across many Azure services, you can benefit from a single management plane while maintaining network-close, fast, and reliable image pulls. Geo-replicated registries provide the following benefits ✓ Network-close registry access from regional deployments ✓ No additional egress fees, as images are pulled from a local, replicated registry in the same region as your container host Azure Batch is a platform service for running large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) apps efficiently in the cloud. Batch schedules compute-intensiv

Our very own Cale Teeter was in Cancun, Mexico for DevCon3 and he gives us all the Blockchain/Azure updates that were announced there. DevCon3 https://davidburela.wordpress.com/2017/11/02/devcon-3-report-day-1-core-systems/ https://davidburela.wordpress.com/2017/11/03/devcon-3-report-day-2-core-systems/ https://davidburela.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/devcon-3-report-day-3-dapp-development/ https://davidburela.wordpress.com/2017/11/06/devcon-3-report-day-4-p2p-tech/ Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode203.mp3   Other updates: Azure Government Secret Taking the next step forward in meeting the mission-critical and data needs of our U.S. Government customers, we are announcing expansion plans to make Azure Government Secret available to support government agencies and partners who have Secret classified data. Azure Government Secret will deliver multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and cloud capabilities to U.S. Federal Civilian, Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and U.S. Government partners working within Secret enclave   Blockchain for Azure Government We have launched Blockchain for Azure Government, which will support a wide array of our Azure blockchain and distributed ledger marketplace solutions. These solutions automate the deployment and configuration of blockchain infrastructure across multiple organizations, allowing our customers to focus on government transformation and application development.   Unified security management with Azure Security Center To help our customers address their security challenges, we’re bringing Azure Security Center to Azure Government. Security Center offers unified security management and advanced threat protection for hybrid cloud workloads, enabling government agencies to take on evolving security threats. Learn more about Security Center.   Expanding High Performance Computing in Azure Government In today’s data-driven government, High Performance Computing (HPC) is increasingly being mainstreamed to apply to a broader range of problems. To address this demand, we’re extending our existing public sector HPC offerings, including the NC-series and Azure Batch, to include the H-series virtual machines. Azure H-series virtual machines, with InfiniBand and Linux RDMA technology, are designed to deliver cutting-edge performance for complex engineering and scientific workloads such as weather prediction and climate modeling, trajectory modeling, and other memory-intensive projects. By the end of the year, customers will be able to take advantage of this expanded offering in Azure Government   New Virtual Desktop Infrastructure options in the cloud To reduce on-premises infrastructure, many government customers are considering moving their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to the cloud. Today, we’re announcing new options with Azure Government, giving customers more flexibility in handling VDI requirements. With Citrix VDI on Azure Government, customers can now extend existing Citrix environments and deploy Windows 10 desktops into Azure Government from Citrix Cloud. Learn more about new VDI options. Managed Applications are now Generally Available in the Azure Marketplace https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/managed-applications-are-now-generally-available-in-the-azure-marketplace/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/topics/last-week-in-azure/      

In-depth discussion with Azure Compute PM, Justin Luk, on the new Cloud Shell feature in the Azure Portal that serves up Bash and PowerShell command prompts right in the browser! Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode202.mp3   Resources:   Product page – http://aka.ms/azshell Docs – http://aka.ms/cloudshell Feedback – http://aka.ms/cloudshell/feedback Try It in Docs – http://aka.ms/tryitdoc   Other resources and updates: By November 30, 2017, you should plan to rely fully on the new administration experience for portal-based administration of Azure Active Directory. We recently announced that the Azure AD experience in the classic Azure portal (https://manage.windowsazure.com) will be retired on November 30, 2017. You are receiving this email because you or another user in your organization recently used that experience. Elastic Query between SQL Data Warehouse and SQL Database Monday, October 30, 2017 Azure SQL Data Warehouse now supports Elastic Query between SQL Data Warehouse and Azure SQL Database.  This improvement enables users to connect to SQL Data Warehouse through SQL Database with the remote query execution capabilities of Elastic Query. Users can now offload their hot/more recent data into SQL Database to support high concurrency and reporting while maintaining the power of SQL Data Warehouse MPP.   To learn more about Elastic Query concepts, check out the Elastic Query concepts documentation. To get started connecting SQL Database with SQL Data Warehouse, complete the Elastic Query tutorial. From Public preview expansion: VNet Service Endpoints and Storage Firewalls and Virtual Networks Friday, October 27, 2017 The public previews for Virtual Network Service Endpoints and Firewalls and Virtual Networks for Azure Storage have been expanded to include all regions in the Azure public cloud. From