Episode 274 - Reliability Engineering

by Evan Basalik April 11, 2019

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-cosmos-db-part-2/

How Skype modernized its backend infrastructure using Azure Cosmos DB – Part 3
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-skype-modernized-its-backend-infrastructure-using-azure-cosmos-db-part-3/

 

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Episode 273 - Application Patterns in Azure

by Sujit D'Mello April 3, 2019

Rasmus Lystrøm, a Senior Microsoft consultant from Denmark, shares his thoughts and ideas around building applications that take advantage of Azure and allow developers to focus on the business problem at hand.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode273.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/53c247e109/

 

Other updates:

Service Map: https://nnmer.github.io/azure-services-map/

Azure SQL Database's read scale-out support in the Premium and Business Critical service tiers is now generally available. 
This capability redirects the read-only client connections to one of the automatically provisioned HA replicas and effectively doubles the compute capacity of the database or elastic pool at no additional charge. This is ideal for load balancing of complex analytical workloads without affecting the primary OLTP workload.
enables you to monitor and detect abnormalities in your time series data with machine learning. The Anomaly Detector API adapts by automatically identifying and applying the best-fitting models to your data, regardless of industry, scenario, or data volume/ Custom vision available


Video Indexer has been enhanced with new features. It now automatically collects manual transcript edits into a new entry in the specific language model you use.  Use it to improve the accuracy of an out-of-the-box language model with manual edits over a period of time so it will align with your industry-specific vocabulary.

Another new feature is the ability to segment videos by semantic scenes based on visual cues. Scenes can now be used to group together a set of insights and refer to them as insights of the same context in order to deduce a more complex meaning from them. They can also be used as a unit and extracted as a clip from a longer video. Video Indexer also now has the ability to identify rolling credits at the end of a movie or TV show, which can be used by broadcasters to identify when to recommend a new program before losing the audience.


Security Center can now protect your VM scale sets.  With Security Center’s advanced threat detection capabilities, you can easily monitor the security posture of your VM scale sets with recommendations to reduce vulnerabilities and increase their overall security.
Security Center automatically discovers your VM scale sets and recommends that you install the monitoring agent to get better security assessments and enable events-based threat detection.

Azure Lab Services updates: GPU size, saving images, and connecting to on-premises resources
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azlabservices-featuresupdates-march2019/

Microsoft Azure portal April 2019 update
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-portal-april-update/

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Episode 272 - The New Azure Monitor

by Kendall Roden March 28, 2019

Shankar Sivadasan, a Senior Azure Product Marketing Manager, gives us all the details on how the trusty Azure Monitor service has evolved into the main monitoring solution in Azure.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode272.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/ac80ad036c/

Resources:

Azure Monitor overview - https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-monitor/overview
Kusto pluralsight course - https://aka.ms/KQLPluralsight
Blog post on dynamic thresholds - https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/announcing-azure-monitor-aiops-alerts-with-dynamic-thresholds/

Other updates:

Windows Virtual Desktop is the only service that delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes, while enjoying built-in security and compliance.
This means customers can now virtualize using multi-session Windows 10, Windows 7, and Windows Server desktops and apps (RDS) to Windows Virtual Desktop for a simplified management and deployment experience with Azure.


https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/larger-more-powerful-managed-disks-for-azure-virtual-machines/

New updates to Azure AI expand AI capabilities for developers
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-updates-to-azure-ai-expand-ai-capabilities-for-developers/


Azure Sphere ecosystem accelerates innovation
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-sphere-ecosystem-accelerates-innovation/

High-Throughput with Azure Blob Storage
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/high-throughput-with-azure-blob-storage/

Azure Data Box family meets customers at the edge
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-data-box-family-meets-customers-at-the-edge/

 

 

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Episode 271 - Azure Stack - Tales from the field

by Sujit D'Mello March 22, 2019

Azure Stack experts from Microsoft Services, Heyko Oelrichs and Rathish Ravikumar, give us an update on Azure Stack and some valuable tips and tricks based on their real-world experiences deploying it for customers.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode271.mp3 

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/27e2dca4a4/

Resources: • Overview (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/)
• Azure Stack documentation (http://aka.ms/AzureStackDocs )
• Download and try Azure Stack Development Kit (http://aka.ms/asdk )
• Free online Azure Stack course INF240x (self-paced with 40+ hours content + ASDK-based labs) (http://aka.ms/AzSMooC )
• Free online (recorded) Azure Stack conference sessions (http://aka.ms/AzSIgnite2018 )
• Fee-based in-classroom instructor-led Azure Stack official training course 20537B (http://aka.ms/AzSMOC )
• Azure Stack Operator certification exam 70-537 (http://aka.ms/AzSExam )
• Azure Stack MSDN forum (http://aka.ms/AzSForum )
• Azure Stack Roadmap (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/?product=azure-stack)
• Kubernetes on Azure Stack (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-stack/user/azure-stack-solution-template-kubernetes-deploy)

Other updates:

In Azure Security Center, adaptive application control in audit mode is now available for Azure Linux VMs. This whitelisting solution is also available for non-Azure Windows and Linux VMs and servers that are connected to Security Center.
In addition, you can now rename groups of virtual machine and server clusters in Security Center. They're still automatically named group1, group2, and so on. But you can then edit them to provide a more meaningful name to your machine cluster groups, to help you better represent those application control policy groups.

The network map in Azure Security Center now supports virtual network peering. Directly from the network map, you can view allowed traffic flows between peered virtual networks and deep dive into the connections and entities.

Azure Security Center can now learn the network traffic and connectivity patterns of your Azure workload and provide you with network security group (NSG) rule recommendations for your internet-facing virtual machines. This is called adaptive network hardening, and it's in public preview. It helps you secure connections to and from the public internet (made by workloads running in the public cloud), which are one of the most common attack surfaces.
It can be hard to know which NSG rules should be in place to make sure that Azure workloads are available only to required source ranges. These new recommendations in Security Center help you configure your network access policies and limit your exposure to attacks. Security Center uses machine learning to fully automate this process, including an automated enforcement mechanism. These recommendations also use Microsoft’s extensive threat intelligence reports to make sure that known malicious actors are blocked.
To view these recommendations, in the Security Center portal, select Networking and then Adaptive network hardening.


https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-boards-and-azure-pipelines-github-integration-improvements-sprint-149-update/
In the Sprint 149 Update of Azure DevOps, we added the ability to navigate to Azure Boards directly from mentions in a GitHub comment as well as adding support for Azure Boards within GitHub Enterprise.
For Azure Pipelines we enabled a new feature on GitHub pull requests that lets you run optional checks by mentioning /azp in the comment.  You can also require a comment on the pull request from repository contributor before the pipeline will run giving you the ability to review code from unknown users before building.

Achieve more with Microsoft Game Stack
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/achieve-more-with-microsoft-game-stack/

Expanded Jobs functionality in Azure IoT Central
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/expanded-jobs-functionality-in-azure-iot-central/

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Episode 270 - Hammer and Nail

by Cale Teeter March 13, 2019

Cale and Sujit talk about using a solutions-based approach when selecting Azure services instead of getting caught in the hype of new services.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode270.mp3

Resources: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/8d36dfb9b7/ 

Other updates:

Currently, Smart Detection sends email notifications by default to the Subscription Owner, Subscription Contributor, and Subscription Reader roles. These roles often include users who are not actively involved in monitoring, which causes many of these users to receive notifications unnecessarily. To improve this experience, we're making a change so that email notifications go to only the Monitoring Reader and Monitoring Contributor roles by default.


Create a transit VNet using VNet peering
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/create-a-transit-vnet-using-vnet-peering/

Stay informed about service issues with Azure Service Health
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/stay-informed-about-service-issues-with-azure-service-health/

AzCopy support in Azure Storage Explorer now available in public preview
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azcopy-support-in-azure-storage-explorer-now-available-in-public-preview/

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Episode 269 - Women in Azure

by Cynthia Kreng March 7, 2019

To commemorate International Women's Day 2019, Cynthia and Kendall talk to Chole Condon, a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, about her Azure learning journey and her experience as a woman in cloud computing.

 

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode269.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/a7656b7fd4/

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Episode 268 - ExpressRoute Roadmap

by Evan Basalik March 4, 2019

Paresh Mundade, a Senior PM in the Azure ExpressRoute team, gives the guys an update on the service and a glimpse into the roadmap of planned features.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode268.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/976fea3a84/

Links:
NPM: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/expressroute/how-to-npm
Global Reach: https://aka.ms/GlobalReach
ExpressRoute Direct: https://aka.ms/ERDirect

 

Other updates:

Stream Analytics now empowers every developer to easily add anomaly detection capabilities to their Stream Analytics jobs without requiring them to develop and train their own machine learning models. Ready-to-use machine learning models are provided right within the SQL language. This reduces the cost and complexity associated with building and training machine learning models to a simple single function call.

Latest enhancements now available for Cognitive Services' Computer Vision
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/latest-enhancements-now-available-for-cognitive-services-computer-vision/

Announcing Azure Integration Service Environment for Logic Apps
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-integration-service-environment-for-logic-apps/

Azure Stack laaS – part two
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-stack-laas-part-two/

Improving the TypeScript support in Azure Functions
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/improving-the-typescript-support-in-azure-functions/

IPFS All Hands
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDYPfzm9wGE&list=PLuhRWgmPaHtSGRSHdU9dbsukHKlihZZAe&index=2&t=0s

HoloLens 2
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/02/24/microsoft-at-mwc-barcelona-introducing-microsoft-hololens-2/

 

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Episode 267 - What the Hack?

by Sujit D'Mello February 21, 2019

Microsoft Cloud Solution Architects Gino Filicetti and Peter Laudati talk to the guys about an innovative approach to getting your team to learn Azure. They have developed a set of challenge-based hacks which allow for better retention of knowledge.

 

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode267.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/7794ec50e2/

Hack content: https://aka.ms/wth

 

Other updates:

More reliable event-driven applications in Azure with an updated Event Grid

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/more-reliable-event-driven-applications-in-azure-with-an-updated-event-grid/

We have been incredibly excited to be a part of the rise of event-driven programming as a core building block for cloud application architecture. By making the following features generally available, we want to enable you to build more sophisticated, performant, and stable event-driven applications in Azure.
The following features now GA: Dead lettering, Retry policies, Storage Queues as a destination, Hybrid Connections as a destination, Manual Validation Handshake

Azure.Source - Volume 70
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-source-volume-70/

Update 19.02 for Azure Sphere public preview now available
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-19-02-for-azure-sphere-public-preview-now-available/

Under the hood: Performance, scale, security for cloud analytics with ADLS Gen2
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/under-the-hood-performance-scale-security-for-cloud-analytics-with-adls-gen2/

BlockTalk - IPFS
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Blocktalk/?ocid=AID765057&wt.mc_id=CFID0423

 

 

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Episode 266 - Azure Kubernetes Service

by Russell Young February 15, 2019

The dynamic Sean McKenna, Lead PM for AKS, gives us all the details about the service and why and when you should use it for your cloud compute needs. Russell and Kendall get together with him @ Microsoft Ready for a great show.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode266.mp3

 Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/44d9b32072/

Other updates:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-disaster-recovery-guidance

Disaster recovery and storage account failover (preview) in Azure Storage

From <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-disaster-recovery-guidance>


Azure Cost Management for pay-as-you-go customers is now available in preview. Azure Cost Management brings the functionality of Cloudyn right into the Azure Portal so you can get visibility into your Azure spend through easy to use dashboards, create budgets, and optimize your spend so you get more value out of Azure.

Migrate from on-premises or cloud implementations of MongoDB to Azure Cosmos DB with minimal downtime by using the Azure Database Migration Service. Perform resilient migrations of MongoDB data at scale and with high reliability using Azure Database Migration Service. Provision an instance of Azure Database Migration Service from the Azure portal or via Azure CLI and create a migration project to perform the migration. 

SQL Server Migration Assistant support for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance is now generally available
Take advantage of generally available functionality in SQL Server Migration Assistant version 8.0 to migrate from Oracle, MySQL, DB2, and SAP ASE (Sybase) to the Azure SQL Database Managed Instance platform. The latest version of SQL Server Migration Assistant enables users to perform an assessment, convert the schema, and move data to the fully managed database service in the cloud

 

Update 19.02 for Azure Sphere public preview now available

New features around support for more broader enablement of device capabilities; more connectivity options, more space for applications, and some samples in the github repo on how to use bluetooth, IoT, private networking, etc.

Actuating mobility in the enterprise with new Azure Maps services and SDKs

Some services moving to GA from Public preview - Improved map canvas, and some enhanced spatial operations services for helping with analytics solutions.  New Android and Web SDK launched for developers.  Due to partnership with TomTom updates to maps will become quicker as well, as they move their map-making compute workloads to Azure as well.

Individually great, collectively unmatched: Announcing updates to 3 great Azure Data Services

 

 

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Episode 265 - Azure DevOps Server

by Evan Basalik February 8, 2019

Cynthia and Evan talk to Jamie Cool, Director of Program Management at Microsoft, who gives us all the details and potential use-cases for the Azure DevOps Server in your organization.

,

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode265.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/c9d39b86a3/

https://azure.com/devops

Other updates:

Availability Zones (AZ) is a high availability offering from Azure that protects applications and data from datacenter failures. By using AZ with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), customers will get higher reliability and resiliency for their applications running on Kubernetes. 


Node auto-repair monitors nodes in a cluster and initiates a repair process if a node fails to meet health criteria. This ensures that the nodes in a cluster are always in a healthy, running state


It is often useful to have different VM sizes and configurations within a single cluster to support a wide variety of workloads, including those that require specialized hardware like GPUs. With the support of multiple node pools, you can deploy applications to different types of VMs within a single cluster, from a single control plane, improving resource management and utilization.  You can also create, upgrade, and delete node pools individually without affecting the whole cluster.

Stay up to date with the latest and greatest of Kubernetes and get patching and security updates automatically.  Cluster auto-upgrade simplifies the task of keeping your Kubernetes service up to date by eliminating the need to do this manually, and ensures a higher level of security by automatically deploying important security fixes on a timely basis.


User-defined network policy enables secure network segmentation within Kubernetes.  It allows cluster operators to control which pods can communicate with each other and with resources outside the cluster. You can implement your network policy in AKS clusters either through Azure policy plugin or through the popular open source project, Calico.


With audit logging in AKS, customers can keep a chronological record of calls that have been made to the Kubernetes API server, a.k.a. control plane. Using these logs with tools like Log Analytics, customers can investigate suspicious API requests, collect statistics, and create monitoring alerts for unwanted API calls.   

Authorized IP ranges allows organization to restrict access to their Kubernetes control plane running in AKS to specific IP addresses or IP ranges. By restricting access to only trusted network locations, you can further protect your AKS cluster.  


Azure Monitor for containers support for AKS-engine is now available in public preview. Customers can now monitor both Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and AKS-engine by using Azure Monitor for containers.


NuGet, npm, and other Artifacts tasks support proxies - Sprint 147 Update
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/nuget-npm-and-other-artifacts-tasks-support-proxies-sprint-147-update/

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