Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (November 2017)
Welcome to the November (and October) 2017 monthly edition of Luper's Learnings.
Hello Azure friends! I recognize that I'm a couple of weeks late ☹. I had hoped to get this out to you before the end of October but a vacation seems to have gotten in the way of that😊. In any case, here I am and have plenty to share with you. I'm sending this over the weekend to ensure that you have it at the beginning of your week. Either have a great rest of your weekend or, if you are reading this at the beginning of your week, I hope that you had a good weekend.
Please do keep in touch via Twitter and email.
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Here's what I've learned in the last month…
- What's new? A few recent updates and announcements…
o Starting this past week, November 15, 2017, to be specific, 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. More details at Retiring Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud Services from the classic portal
o General availability: Azure AD DS in the new Azure portal and Azure Active Directory Domain Services documentation. As a bonus, Roberto (@soyoroberto) at All Things Cloud helps us understand Domain Controller as a Service in Azure
o While on the topic of AD DS, General availability: Azure AD DS support for Resource Manager virtual networks
o Azure Content Spotlight – New Release Notes for Azure Active Directory
o Announcing automatic OS upgrades for Azure VM scale sets
o Public preview expansion: VNet Service Endpoints and Storage Firewalls and Virtual Networks
o General availability (Windows) and preview (Linux): Accelerated Networking. Ok, what is Accelerated Networking? Petri takes this question on here and you can read Yousef Khalidi's Linux and Windows networking performance enhancements | Accelerated Networking announcement as well as a tutorial on Create a virtual machine with Accelerated Networking.
o Public preview: Python 2 support and Hybrid Runbook Workers for Linux
o Public preview: Twice the performance and unlimited columnar storage with SQL Data Warehouse
o Managed Applications are now Generally Available in the Azure Marketplace – according to Corey Sanders (@CoreySandersWA), Managed Applications, an Azure unique offering, enables you to deploy entire applications and empower your partner to fully manage and maintain the application in your environment. Gaurav Bhatnagar takes us Under the hood.
o I will probably try to get some more info to you about Azure Stack in the next edition. In the meantime, it's worth calling out that even though Azure Stack is pretty darn new, more capabilities are being added already as you can see in General availability of App Service and Functions on Azure Stack.
- Availability Zones probably require their own section. I called out some of this in the September Luper's Learnings but want to bring it up again as there's been so much discussion about AZs over the recent years, below are some recent and key articles, coverage, comparison and documentation to help you get your head around Azure Availability Zones.
o The announcement Public preview: Azure Availability Zones was made mid October
o Overview including current Preview regions and services supported.
o Towards the end of September, Tom Keane wrote Introducing Azure Availability Zones for resiliency and high availability. In his post he explained that "Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. Availability Zones allow customers to run mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to datacenter failures. … Availability Zones are now in preview in two regions, East US 2 in Virginia and West Europe in the Netherlands, with plans to offer preview to additional regions in the US, Europe, and Asia before the end of the year."
o During the Preview, I would encourage you to learn about and test Azure Availability Zones. I just turned them on in my test subscription and will report back on my experience.
o To learn more about Availability Zones and sign up for the Preview, visit: http://aka.ms/az.
- Do you ever wonder what the relationship is between an EA Enrollment, Azure Active Directory (AAD) Tenant and an Azure subscription? This comes up occasionally so I found the below articles to better help us understand those relationships.
o Christer Ljung, a Cloud Architect at Microsoft, Sweden posted The Holy Trinity of Azure about a year and a half ago.
o There are a number of interesting EA & Azure related short videos (most in English) on the Enterprise Azure Portal channel9 site from the past couple of years.
o Understanding resource access in Azure also helps to clarify some of these relationships
o Lastly, How to add an Azure subscription to Azure Active Directory, updated last month, is a fairly short article that talks more about the relationship between an Azure subscription and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), and how to add an existing subscription to an Azure AD directory.
- Since I mentioned EA above, let me slip in a few links related to usage and billing analysis (some for EA based subscriptions but some more generic.)
o Seamless cost reporting and analysis for Enterprise customers: now in preview announced in early September, based on the Cloudyn acquisition.
o Robert Reynolds posted Use Azure Cost Management for free
o Register an Azure Enterprise Agreement and view cost data
o Prevent unexpected charges with Azure billing and cost management
o Lastly, the direct link to the Cost Management page.
- My friend, Tim Tetrick, recently posted I have Azure VM performance issues, what do I do?. He's sharing simple and great guidance from the Azure Support team.
- CLI, don't cry. While I'm a long time Microsoft and Windows guy, I'm trying to adjust my mindset to be more focused on multiple OSes and using command line & scripts (whether PowerShell or Azure CLI) more in my daily life. Here are some interesting CLI resources I've come across.
o Introducing the Azure CLI, Azure CLI - Getting Started, Deploying ARM Templates with the Azure CLI, and Creating a Service Principal with the Azure CLI all from Mark Heath (@mark_heath), MVP
o The Azure Podcast - Episode 202 - Cloud Shell - 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!
o Did you see Azure Cloud Shell: New CLI tools added and font-size selection? Lots of great capabilities added.
o Andy Thomas helps us tidy up with Azure housekeeping with bash and CLI 2.0
o On the verge of taking things too far, Mani Bindra (@manisbindra) helps us Setting up vscode to use the docker extension with bash for windows as terminal shell
- Are you and your organization Azure DevTest Labs users? Now you can Unclaim a VM and return it to the claimable pool
- More on DevTest Labs… Azure DevTest Labs: Set access rights to an environment resource group
- And the last DevTest Labs word for this month Azure DevTest Labs: Kali Linux image available in your lab
- In Cloud developer guidance: Microsoft Graph or Azure AD Graph? Deva (@devagnanam) answers a question he gets regularly and points us to Dan Kershaw's post for support.
- Also look at what summer intern, Glenna worked on while she was at Microsoft. My Intern Project: Microsoft Graph Bindings for Azure Functions
- I had already heard about Azure Migrate but Shannon Gowen's 30 October Tip of the Day was on Azure Migrate which reminded me to tell you about it.
o Shon Shah posted Announcing Azure Migrate filling us in on this new service that provides the guidance, insights, and mechanisms needed to assist in migrating to Azure.
o Watch the Overview Video (2 minutes) and Demo (5 minutes), try it out via the Hands-On Lab and Sign up for the limited public preview,
o The Azure Migration Center landing page for the above plus more.
- CSP partners take many different approaches to making their offers available to prospects and customers. Some partners only take orders via a person and have that person provision / request resources to be provisioned via an internal order, ticketing or ERP system while other partners put the ordering / provisioning process more directly in the customers' hands via a customer facing web storefront. There is a set of documentation, sample code and the Storefront Builder Quickstart Guide available.
- While on the topic of CSP, at the very end of September, the much anticipated Azure partner shared services became available for CSP partners. It's a new offer type for partners in the CSP program allowing partners to purchase Azure subscriptions for their own use.
- Peter Taylor posted Announcing Azure Building Blocks (AZBB), a set of tools and Azure Resource Manager templates that are designed to simplify deployment of Azure resources.
o The Azure Post's coverage - Azure Building Blocks: Simplify Resources Deployment
o AZBB repository on GitHub
o My friend Telmo Sampaio (@telmo_sampaio) talks with Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) about Azure Building Blocks 2.0 (azbb) on a recent Azure Friday.
- I haven't had the chance to spend too much time with Azure Media Services but did come across this Azure Media Services October 2017 updates post that should be both relevant and interesting to folks spending time with Media.
- Since Azure Files became generally available, we've consistently heard from our customers that they want to embrace the power and flexibility of the cloud without giving up the locality of their on-premises file server. Klaas Langhout shared Announcing the public preview for Azure File Sync.
- In the "cool tips" zone, Leon Welicki posted Get the most out of your Azure portal experience including great tips on searching, browsing, organizing and the consistency of experience across Azure services. Don't forget Cloud Shell, ARM templates and the Azure Mobile app (you do have this installed, don't you?)
- Some customer stories that you can share
o Tata Consulting Services worked with Malaysia Airlines
o asos is using a variety of Azure data products and services
o Steelcase is taking advantage of our IoT platform
- If you haven't visited the Azure Roadmap page lately, do check it out as it lists services and capabilities that are in Development and In Preview.
- Way up above, I mentioned Tip of the Day. Here are a few that were interesting to me.
o (Cloud) Tip of the Day: Overview of Azure Cloud Shell
o (RDS) Tip of the Day: Five more reasons why you should download the Azure mobile app (see above)
o (Cloud) Tip of the Day: Introducing Azure confidential computing
- I feel like the world (or at least the cloud world) continues to get smaller. As of today, Azure is available in 140 countries including 42 regions. We can help you choose where to put your stuff and you can learn more about our Global Datacenters.
- In the "did I really read that?" camp - Microsoft and AWS Advance Open AI Ecosystem with Gluon Partnership and InfoQ's coverage Microsoft and AWS Collaborate on Machine Learning.
- Time to end with fun (but relevant, too.) Beginning earlier this year, Microsoft Story Labs started publishing short, Explanimators. To date, there are 5 episodes covering Blockchain, AI, Machine Reading, Mixed Reality and IoT in just a few minutes each. Check them out.
Back issues of Luper's Learnings are available via the archive at http://blogs.technet.com/luperslearnings for your convenience and perusal.
Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the November Luper's Learnings. You've continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions.
Steve Luper
Cloud Solution Architect | US One Commercial Partner
Microsoft Corporation
Mobile: +1-425-281-8847 | Office: +1-425-705-5432
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052 USA
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