MICROSOFT AZURE
GENERALLY AVAILABLE: AZURE RED HAT OPENSHIFT
Azure Red Hat OpenShift was announced last year at Red Hat Summit 2018. The one-of-a-kind solution offers the best of OpenShift with 24×7 management and support from both Microsoft and Red Hat. This year, at Red Hat Summit 2019, we were told that it’s now generally available!
The fully managed service means that patching, upgrading, repairing and disaster recovery are all handled for you, leaving your application DevOps teams free to focus on operating your applications and not the underlying infrastructure.
Get started now by creating an Azure Red Hat OpenShift cluster.
INTRODUCING MLOPS
What the heck is MLOps I hear you cry. Well, Microsoft revealed all at their Build 2019 conference in May. MLOps aka DevOps for machine learning, is the practice of collaboration and communication between data scientists and DevOps professionals to help manage the production of the ML lifecycle.
- Azure Machine Learning Command Line Interface
- Management capabilities
- Code management
- Data set management
- Simplified model debugging and deployment
Source: Microsoft
AZURE COST MANAGEMENT ADDS AWS
Yes, you read that right. Microsoft’s Azure Cost Management tool now integrates with AWS to track spending across both cloud platforms. The cross-cloud support is currently available in preview and has been designed with customer’s multi-cloud strategies and need for a central cost management solution in mind. Create your first AWS connector to explore the new capabilities of Azure Cost Management, including cost analysis, budgeting and alerts.
WINDOWS SERVER CONTAINER SUPPORT AVAILABLE IN AKS IN PREVIEW
In May, Microsoft shared that the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) was the fastest growing compute service in Azure’s history. Now, Microsoft have announced that Windows Server containers can now be deployed and orchestrated in AKS enabling new paths to migrate and modernise Windows Server applications in Azure. The preview means that we’re now able to manage Windows and Linux containers side by side in the same Kubernetes cluster with the exact same APIs, tools and support.
AZURE SQL DATABASE EDGE IN PREVIEW
At Build 2019 Microsoft announced Azure SQL Database Edge to help address the requirements of data and analytics at the edge using the highly available and secure SQL engine. Azure SQL Database Edge offers:
- Develop once and deploy anywhere scenarios
- Low latency analytics
- Bi-directional data movement
- Compatibility with popular T-SQL language
- Cloud connected, and fully disconnected edge scenarios with local compute and storage
- In-database AI capabilities
Azure SQL Database Edge capabilities. Source: Microsoft
ANNOUNCING KUBERNETES-BASED EVENT-DRIVEN AUTOSCALING
While it might sound a bit of a mouthful, Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) enables any container to scale from zero to potentially thousands of instances based on event metrics like the length of a Kafka stream or an Azure Queue. It also enables containers to consume events directly from the event source instead of decoupling with HTTP. KEDA can drive the scale of any container and is extensible to add new event sources.
Source: GitHub
GET HIGH-PERFORMANCE SCALING FOR YOUR AZURE DATABASE WORKLOADS WITH HYPERSCALE
Hyperscale is a new cloud-native solution purpose-built to address common cloud scalability limits with either compute, storage, memory or combinations of all three. Best of all, you can harness Hyperscale without rearchitecting your application.
In May Microsoft announced:
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale (preview)
- Azure SQL Database Hyperscale (generally available)
ADVANCED THREAT PROTECTION FOR AZURE STORAGE NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Azure Storage 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 protect and address concerns about potential threats to your storage accounts as they occur, without needing to be an expert in security.
IN OTHER NEWS:
Azure ExpressRoute now generally available in 8 additional locations
Microsoft extends password limit from 16 characters to 256 characters
Microsoft to reduce Azure outages with Project Tardigrade
The deadline to take Microsoft Azure transition exams is fast approaching
AMAZON WEB SERVICES
AWS ANNOUNCES GENERAL AVAILABILITY OF AMAZON MANAGED BLOCKCHAIN
Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that makes it easy and cost-effective to create, manage, and scale blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. The managed service eliminates the overheard required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions.
How Amazon Managed Blockchain works. Source: AWS
AMAZON CLOUDWATCH CONTAINER INSIGHTS NOW IN PREVIEW
You can use Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, now in preview, to monitor, isolate, and diagnose your containerised applications and microservices environments. With this preview, DevOps and Systems Engineers have access to automated dashboards summarising the performance and health of their Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) and Kubernetes clusters by pod, node, namespace, and services.
AMAZON RDS FOR SQL SERVER INCREASES THE DATABASE LIMIT PER DATABASE INSTANCE UP TO 100
Starting from May, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports up to a maximum of 100 databases per database instance, a whopping increase from the original database limit of just 30. The increase allows users to consolidate databases into a single database instance and simplify database management. It’s worth noting that the Microsoft system databases don’t count toward this limit, and existing database instances can support up to 100 databases without any downtime. Find out more here.
PRICING FOR AWS CONFIG SET TO CHANGE
As of August 2019, pricing for AWS Config rules will be changing. The changes mean that come August you’ll be charged based on the number of AWS Config rules evaluations recorded, instead of the number of active rules in your account per region. The new pricing is designed to provide ‘almost all’ current AWS Config rules customers with a significant reduction in Config rules cost. Find out more about the changes you can expect here.
AWS GROUND STATION NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE
Ground Station was launched in preview back in November but last month AWS announced it’s now open to any user. The service is designed to help AWS cloud customers access and manage data from satellites. How does it work? It’s pretty simple actually… all you have to do is schedule antenna access time through AWS Management Console. You pay for the antenna time you need, and nothing more. No contracts. No hassle. Interested? Get started here.
How AWS Ground Station works. Source: AWS
INTRODUCING FRAUD DETECTION USING MACHINE LEARNING
Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning is a solution that automates the detection of potentially fraudulent activity and flags that activity for review. The solution is easy to deploy and contains an example dataset of credit card transactions. But, you can modify the solution to use your own dataset.
IN OTHER NEWS:
Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL increase max storage size to 64 TiB
Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server 2017
AWS Get IT: inspiring girls in the UK to consider a career in tech
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Izzi Fuller
Product Marketing Manager
Izzi has worked in marketing for the last five years and currently heads up the N4Stack marketing team. She spends her days buried in SEO, content writing, web editing, campaign strategy, analytics, and anything else that’s thrown her way.
In her spare time you’ll find Izzi with her two dogs, Gatsby and Dexter, lost in a book, or in a different country soaking up the sun and the sights. Find out more about Izzi here.