Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (May 2018)

Welcome to the May 2018 monthly edition of Luper's Learnings.

Happy May! We're supposed to be well into Spring now in the Northern Hemisphere but here in Seattle it's a bit lagging ☹. I hope that your weather is treating you well and that it's ALWAYS cloud-y.

Take a look below and let me know if you find good nuggets, have stuff to add or just want to say "Hi!" It's definitely packed with great learnings.

Please do keep in touch via Twitter and email.

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

Microsoft Build was held this week in Seattle. While I didn't attend, I kept my eye on things and watched some of the sessions remotely. It's a really big conference with hundreds of sessions and thousands of attendees. If you have something I have missed that you'd like me to share or dig into, please let me know. I've captured some of the Build highlights here.
- The Day 1 Build keynote beginning with Satya Nadella, CEO spoke about the future of AI in the intelligent edge and the intelligent cloud. Also, Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise discussed the world-class tools and platforms that help bring the intelligent edge to life.
- Sam George, Partner Director, Azure IoT spoke about Microsoft's big push to enable developers to build IoT solutions that not only improve how businesses operate but also create real-world impact, from the intelligent cloud to the intelligent edge. More info in his post Unlocking the IoT promise—from the intelligent cloud to the intelligent edge
- On Tuesday there was an announcement about the Microsoft & Red Hat expanded partnership: Red Hat and Microsoft co-develop the first Red Hat OpenShift jointly managed service on a public cloud
- Yousef Khalidi, CVP, Azure Networking posted Azure Networking May 2018 announcements yesterday which includes news about Azure DDoS Protection, VNet Service Endpoints, Azure DNS enhancements, Global VNet Peering and more.
- Corey Sanders (now CVP) announced Azure Container Instances now generally available just before Build. His announcement includes details of new, lower prices too.
- Kubernetes on Azure: Industry's best end-to-end Kubernetes experience where Gabe Monroy talks about Azure Kubernetes Service and some big improvements to the Kubernetes experience on Azure. (A bit more on Kubernetes can be found below.)
- GeekWire posted on Mark Russinovich's Build presentation - Azure CTO Mark Russinovich touts security during deep dive into the tech behind Microsoft's cloud. You can watch Mark's session here.
- Gaurav Malhotra announced that Secure credential management for ETL workloads using Azure Key Vault and Data Factory
- A few popular sessions - App Modernization with Microsoft Azure (Corey Sanders), The Microsoft AI platform: a State of the Union (Joseph Sirosh), Microsoft IoT Overview, Vision and Roadmap (Sam George), Secure and power the intelligent edge with Azure Sphere and Pair Programming Made Awesome with Visual Studio Live Share
- Back in August 2017 Microsoft unveils Project Brainwave for real-time AI. This week at Build it went into Preview.
- Mark Russinovich's update on Azure confidential computing
- Azure Database Migration Service now generally available It's designed to enable seamless database migrations with minimal downtime from a variety of sources to the Azure data platform.
Today, Gavriella Schuster announced the immediate availability of Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (RI), as well as the upcoming availability of Windows Server and SQL Server subscriptions, through the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.
Microsoft Inspire (formerly the Worldwide Partner Conference – WPC) is being held in Las Vegas from July 15 – 19. It is the largest event for Microsoft partners and draws roughly 18,000 attendees from over 140 countries together for a week of networking, creating leads and partnerships, and in-depth learning on business-building strategy.
If you are technically focused, perhaps missed Build and not planning to attend Inspire, Microsoft Ignite is likely for you. It's being held September 24 – 28 in Orlando, Florida.
If you have visited the www.azure.com web site lately, you may have noticed that the Products section has a new approach that includes Azure services organized in categories, featured services, the ability to easily Search within the list plus easy visibility to the over 100 Azure products.

Our documentation team published a Decision tree for Azure compute services that can be used as a starting point to select computing services for applications. It sits within the Azure Architecture Center that I've called out before.
Nearly every week my team is facilitating Azure Boot Camp events somewhere around the US. One of the topics that is of high interest and always sparks discussion is Identity. edX offers a number of free Azure related courses including the self paced, Microsoft Azure Identity - Continue your learning journey as you go from a traditional Active Directory-based infrastructure to Azure Active Directory (AD) - Microsoft's multi-tenant cloud based directory and identity management service.
You are certainly aware that Azure SQL Database has been generally available in Azure for some number of years now. It's the intelligent, fully managed relational cloud database service that provides the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility. In March, Tobias Ternstrom announced general availability of Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL with built-in high availability, a 99.99% availability SLA, elastic scaling for performance, and industry leading security and compliance to Azure.
Last edition I promised some interesting Kubernetes content. Below I've gathered a number of relevant resources. Hopefully in an upcoming edition I'll also get one of my colleagues to weigh in with some additional Kubernetes perspectives.
- For starters check out Deep dive on Kubernetes for container orchestration from my teammate, @alihussain.
- Ali Mazaheri shared Managing Azure Kubernetes Managed Service (AKS) using Cabin app!
- Container-native developer experiences, Part 1 – Overview
- Container-native developer experiences, Part 2 – Draft
- Container-native developer experiences, Part 3 – Brigade
- The Azure Podcast - Episode 215 - Kubernetes Innovations
The Azure announcements and updates never seem to stop. Some of those that I found interesting (apart from the Build info above) are below.
- Public preview: Automatic OS image updates in virtual machine scale sets
- Abhave Sharma announced that ExpressRoute monitoring with Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is now generally available. It allows you to Monitor connectivity to Azure VNETs, over ExpressRoute, Get end-to-end visibility into the ExpressRoute connections, Understand bandwidth utilization and more.
- If you are a fan of Azure Backup (and who isn't) you may be interested to learn that Application consistent backup for Linux VMs using Azure Backup is generally available
- Sonia Gupta shared that Recovery Services vault limit increased to 500 vaults per subscription per region. You may know that Recovery Services Vaults enable Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery and were previously limited to a 25 vault limit.
- Sonia also told us that Azure Backup now supports storage accounts secured with Azure Storage Firewalls and Virtual Networks.
- General availability: Azure Availability Zones in select regions. Read more about AZs, the GA region list, Preview region list and which Azure services support AZs.
Way back in December, Lili Cheng posted an announcement Announcing the General Availability of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding, enabling developers to build better conversational bots
I mentioned it above in the Build section but want to give Azure Sphere a small shout out here. Azure Sphere is a solution for creating highly-secured, connected MCU (IoT microcontroller) devices, providing you with the confidence and the power to reimagine your business and create the future. Read more about how Microsoft brings together a Secured MCU, Secured OS and Cloud Security.
Over the coming weeks, we'll be hosting a series of live, online hands-on learning experiences on topics ranging from Azure BOT Service + Cosmos DB to Getting Started with Azure Security to Build Real World Data Management Solutions. Check out and/or share these Immersion Experiences with your customers.
As a fan of Azure Friday, (and who isn't) I try to include some highlighted shows from time to time. Below are some that are particularly interesting from recent months.
Keeping up is hard to do… You may have noticed that a reasonable number of the Build announcements and other content from above incorporates "what's new", "what's enhanced" and "what's updated" in Azure. Did you know that there have been over 130 of those type of announcements made in the past ~60 days? An average of about two per day. The Azure Updates site and corresponding RSS feed are incredibly useful places to keep an eye on to stay current.
Closing out on the "wow, that's cool front…"
- Guessing that you hear about this from me so often that you may have tuned it out…The Azure regions page a) has a great graphic on it representing our 50 regions (as of today), b) explains regions, geographies and Availability Zones, c) has a great link to Azure Products available by region
- I have pointed you to the Azure Mobile app previously. Now it's generally available.
- Not so long ago, my UK colleague, @azuredan released a nearly three hour video called Build a Company in a Day or BACIAD. Be sure to grab the accompanying files.
- You've seen me write about the customizability of the Azure Dashboard previously. My colleague @rkuehfus recently blogged Jazzing up your Azure Dashboards. Also see Upload/download Azure dashboards.

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 May Luper's Learnings. You've continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions. Now it's time for me to head out on holiday through the first week of April. Look forward to catching up when I return!

If this issue of Luper's Learnings was forwarded to you by a friend or colleague and you would like to receive it directly, just let me know and I'll

Steve Luper

Cloud Solution Architect | US One Commercial Partner
Microsoft Corporation

Mobile: +1-425-281-8847 | Office: +1-425-705-5432