Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (December 2017)

Welcome to the December 2017 monthly edition of Luper’s Learnings.

Happy almost 2018! I hope that whatever December holidays you celebrate were/are wonderful and, at a minimum, that you got to enjoy some down time, well deserved travel or time with family and friends.

As most of you will probably be reading this after the beginning of the new year, with very full inboxes, I appreciate you taking the time to peruse this edition as it’s packed with good Azure info.

Please do keep in touch via Twitter and email.

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Here’s what I’ve learned in the last month…

I’m sure that you’ve heard this from me before… since time is running out, it bears repeating. We will be sunsetting the Azure classic portal on January 8, 2018. Current Azure classic portal users do not need to take any action—all our services and your resources will be available in the Azure portal. You can read about the latest features in the documentation.
In support of the above move, VSTS available only in the Azure portal from November 30 so no more managing Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) accounts from the classic portal as of a few weeks ago.
My teammate, Dale Kirby recently wrote a foundational blog What is serverless computing? In it he talks about Serverless Computing (duh) how it’s enabled by Azure Functions and what Serverless means for IT Pros. This got me to digging about for some additional resources on Serverless and Functions to share with you.
- Take the way back machine to March 2016 when Azure Functions were introduced.
- Test your coding skills and learn how to build solutions using Azure Functions at the same time with the Azure Functions Challenge.
- Read what Donna Malayeri had to say in September in Develop Azure Functions on any platform. Read her updates and @AzureFunctions’ updates.
- Azure Functions on IoT Edge from just a few weeks ago
- Russell Young, my UK colleague has an in-depth discussion about the growing popularity of serverless computing in Azure using services like Functions and Event Grid in Episode 207 of The Azure Podcast.
- Lastly some comparisons from 3^rd parties
  - Serverless Computing: AWS Lambda vs. Azure Functions from Bizety in January 2017
  - Microsoft Azure Functions vs. Google Cloud Functions vs. AWS Lambda: fight for serverless cloud domination continues from CloudAcademy in February 2017
  - AWS Lambda vs. Azure Functions vs. Google Functions from Cloud Zone in August 2017
Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) became generally available last month. Takeshi Numoto blogged Announcing General Availability of Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) with some details on the significant savings opportunity, particularly for Windows VMs.
Which Azure VM is right for your need? As the catalog/family/types/series of Azure VMs has grown (and grown, and grown) we’ve released a taxonomy of Virtual Machine types. The sizes for Windows & Linux virtual machines by General purpose, Compute optimized, Memory optimize and several more can be very helpful. Also, this Virtual Machine series page is useful if you want a view by series. Lastly, some insight from Firebrand Training on How to choose an Azure Virtual Machine might help.
Kay Singh’s great post Understanding the Azure B Series and CPU Credits is also helpful as you consider B series VMs for your applications.
In addition to picking the right VM, you might need a collection of identical VMs. You can deploy a Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS.) Though they have been available for a couple of years, folks don’t always remember about VMSS. This came up in a solution I was working with a partner on this month so I figured I’d share some of the readily available references and resources.
- What are virtual machine scale sets in Azure?
- Azure Virtual Machine (VM) Scale Sets on Azure Friday
- How to convert an Azure virtual machine to a VM Scale Set from Guy Bowerman (@gbowerman)
- And the article last month from Jose Moreno (@erjosito) Working with network attributes of Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
- Azure virtual machine scale sets FAQs
This next one is really cool (that’s a joke, you’ll get it as you keep reading.) Cloud storage now more affordable: Announcing general availability of Azure Archive Storage
- From 18 months ago - Introducing Azure Cool Blob Storage
- This month – how do you know what your options are? - Azure Blob Storage: Hot, cool, and archive storage tiers
- Storage Overview Pricing (Archive preview through January 2018, GA Pricing beginning 1 February 2018)
Just a month ago, we announced General availability: Visual Studio App Center. App Center lets you automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps.
As of a couple of weeks ago, Azure Active Directory Domain Services supports Azure CSP subscriptions. What does this mean?, you ask. More information is available in the just published comprehensive documentation Azure Active Directory (AD) Domain Services for Azure Cloud Solution Providers (CSP).
If you want help planning Azure Site Recovery (ASR) deployments against on-prem virtualized environments, Nitin Soneji recently published General availability of Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V.
There was an update on Azure SQL Data Warehouse: Support for SQL Operations Studio including pointers to download the tool and a quickstart.
Last month Lee Stott shared Microsoft Azure Low-priority Virtual Machines – take advantage of surplus capacity in Azure.
This month CLI 2.0 becomes the primary CLI tool for managing Azure Resource Manager–based resources while Azure CLI 1.0 remains the tool for managing Azure Service Management (ASM)–based ("classic") resources. Some more details here.
Many of our partners help customers deploy new applications and workloads into Azure. Some of those aren’t net new but existed on-premises or in a different public or private cloud before coming into Azure. In those cases, you may have performed a Lift and Shift migration to get the resources into Azure. Last month, Radu Vunvulea posted Lift and Shift - cloud migration strategy with a simple explanation of what is / isn’t lift and shift and mentioning some of the cloud benefits that you miss out on.
If you haven’t spent time yet with the Azure Security Center (our way to help you get a unified view of security across all both on-premises and cloud workloads), I’ve tracked down several interesting articles to help you take advantage of it.
- Introduction to Azure Security Center
- Short & free Microsoft Virtual Academy course - Introduction to Azure Security Center
- Channel9 - Getting Started with Azure Security Center
- Azure Security Center extends advanced threat protection to hybrid cloud workloads
- How Azure Security Center uses machine learning to enable adaptive application control
- Azure Security Center coming to Azure Government
- Azure Security Center previews new threat detections for Linux
- Tuesdays with Corey: Azure Security Center, Suspicious processes and JIT access
- Yuri Diogenes’ post Installing Azure Security Center Agent on Linux Computer
If you’ve read Luper’s Learnings over the years, you know that Tuesdays with Corey is a favorite series of mine. Since I mentioned it above, here are a number of recent episodes that you may find useful.
- Tuesdays with Corey - go TEST Scheduled Maintenance
- Tuesdays With Corey - Better ways to manage your Azure VM Infrastructure
- Tuesdays With Corey - AKS cluster upgrades and managed K8s
On the topic of recent and interesting videos, you may like these topics from Azure Friday.
- Use the Azure portal to answer your billing questions which aligns with Manage payment methods in the Azure portal allowing pay as you go customers in the United States to update, add, and remove payment methods for their subscriptions.
- Jenkins CI/CD with Service Fabric
- Azure Availability Zones
- Durable Functions in Azure Functions (goes with the serverless stuff above)
Way up above I talked about storage. Interestingly, at the end of November there was a short blurb Storage Service Encryption for Azure Backup data at rest
Wriju Ghosh’s post earlier this month Microservices Guidance Is Now Available is interesting on its own but also reminded me to remind you that the Azure Architecture Center has some really useful reference architectures, design patterns, best practice and more. Not to mention the newly published Designing, building, and operating microservices on Azure that Wriju talks about.
Doug Silva’s recent post Azure Subscription Governance – Resource Group and Naming Convention Strategies gives us some things to think about. He also pointed us to the helpful Naming conventions article in the Best Practices section of the Azure Architecture Center that I mentioned above.
No Luper’s Learnings is complete without a plug and reference to Michael Crump’s Azure Tips and Tricks. He had a few posts (70, 71 and 72) in the last week or so related to Cognitive Services.
- Azure Tips and Tricks Part 70 - Key Phrase Extraction with Cognitive Service and Azure
- Azure Tips and Tricks Part 71 - Language Detection with Cognitive Service and Azure
- Azure Tips and Tricks Part 72 - Sentiment Analysis with Cognitive Service and Azure
In the “kinda cool” zone…
- Armin Reiter who blogs periodically at https://codehollow.com/ had a post a couple of months ago that fits in nicely with the Functions and Serverless topics above - Weekly Azure billing report per mail with Azure functions.
- Your Azure Subscription comes with its own expertise in the form of Azure Advisor. A month ago there were additional updates - Azure Advisor: New dashboard, downloadable reports, and configuration
- Have you ever run into the problem where you have a non-email enabled AAD account that you want to invite as a guest to an AAD? I have! Thank much to Ty Mote for the walkthrough of a workaround in AAD Guest User Invitation Redemption (No email required!)
- My friend Simon Waight frequently has gems on his blog. This time he shared a key time saver for him and his team in Use Azure Health To Track Active Incidents In Your Subscriptions.
Cloud Shell mania --- I just can’t stop myself
- No doubt you get tired of hearing me talk about CLI and Cloud Shell so I’ll keep the excitement to a dull roar when I let you know about General availability: Bash in Azure Cloud Shell.
- Of course you already know that in addition to Bash in Cloud Shell (complete with commonly used CLI tools -- including Linux shell interpreters, Azure tools, text editors, source control, build tools, container tools, and database tools) Cloud Shell also includes language support for several popular programming languages, such as Node.js, .NET, and Python. Get all the details from Justin Luk’s recent post.
- Oh, and Shayne Boyer wrote shell.azure.com - look Mom no install!
- From Michael Crump - Azure Tips and Tricks Part 69 - Access and embed Azure Cloud Shell Anywhere
- And did you see James van den Berg’s Microsoft Azure #CloudShell Overview with #Bash CLI 2.0 and #Powershell #Azure #DevOps.
- I’m done now.

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 December 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