MICROSOFT AZURE
ANNOUNCING THE PREVIEW OF AZURE SPOT VIRTUAL MACHINES
Azure Spot Virtual Machines provide access to unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts. The catch? They can be evicted anytime if Azure needs capacity. To ensure organisations don’t suffer as a result of this Azure has suggested workloads that are ideally suited to run on Spot Virtual Machines. These include, but are not necessarily limited to:
- Batch jobs
- Workloads that can sustain and/or recover from interruptions
- Development and test
- Stateless applications that can use Spot Virtual Machines to scale out, opportunistically saving cost
- Short-lived jobs which can easily be run again if the Virtual Machine is evicted
For more information on pricing, deployment, handling evictions, and best practices click here.
MICROSOFT OPENS 35 DAY WINDOW FOR AZURE CUSTOMERS TO POSTPONE IMPACTFUL HOST UPDATES
Azure’s preview of a maintenance control feature for Azure VMs gives more control to customers with highly sensitive workloads for platform maintenance. Using this feature, customers can control all impactful host updates, including rebootless updates, for up to 35 days.
Azure frequently updates its infrastructure to improve the reliability, performance, and security, or to launch new features. Almost all updates have zero impact on your Azure VMs however some very sensitive workloads may require full control of all maintenance activities. This new feature will benefit those customers who deploy this type of workload.
How the maintenance control feature works. Source: Microsoft
SAP HANA BACKUP USING AZURE BACKUP IS NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE
In December Azure shared the general availability of Microsoft Azure Backup’s solution for SAP HANA databases in the UK South region. Azure Backup is Azure’s native backup solution which allows you to seamlessly backup and restore SAP HANA databases running on Microsoft Azure VMs and leverage enterprise management capabilities that Azure Backup provides. Benefits include:
- 15-minute RPO: Recovery of critical data of up to 15 minutes is possible.
- One-click, point-in-time restores: Easy to restore production data on SAP HANA databases to alternate servers. Chaining of backups and catalogues to perform restores is all managed by Azure behind the scenes.
- Long-term retention: For rigorous compliance and audit needs, you can retain your backups for years, based on the retention duration, beyond which the recovery points will be pruned automatically by the built-in lifecycle management capability.
- Backup Management from Azure: Use Azure Backup’s management and monitoring capabilities for improved management experience.
PROXIMITY PLACEMENT GROUPS NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE
Back in July Azure announced the preview of Azure proximity placement groups to enable customers to achieve co-location of Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources with low network latency. Last month Azure informed us that these proximity placement groups are now generally available, ensuring that your IaaS resources (virtual machines, or VMs) are physically located close to each other with the additional of new features and best practices for success.
Additional capabilities include:
- More regions, more clouds
- Portal support
- Move existing resources to, and from, proximity placement groups
- Supporting SAP applications
- Measure VM latency in Azure
Azure Proximity Placement Groups. Source: Microsoft
SQL SERVER ON AZURE IS FASTER, AND CHEAPER, THAN ON AWS
Over a million on-premises SQL Server databases have moved to Azure, representing a massive shift in where customers are collecting, storing, and analysing their data. This may be largely down to the fact that a recent study comparing performance between SQL Server on Azure VMs and SQL Server on AWS EC2 found that Azure was up to 3.4 times faster and up to 87% cheaper!
Have a read of Microsoft’s announcement or the GigaOm report for more information.
Performance and price-performance comparisons from the GigaOm report. Source: Microsoft
IN OTHER NEWS:
Microsoft is a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q3 2019
Azure Advisor announces new recommendation category
New enhancements for Azure IoT Edge automatic deployments
Azure founders reflect on Microsoft’s first decade as a public cloud vendor
Microsoft and Oracle extend multi-cloud partnership to Canada
Azure AD Connect cloud provisioning now in public preview
2019 Highlights…
Azure DevOps Server 2019 brings the power of Azure DevOps into your dedicated environment
Azure Backup for SQL Server VMs – an enterprise scale, zero-infrastructure solution that eliminates the need to deploy and manage backup infrastructure
Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008/R2 came to an end
Windows Virtual Desktop allows you to work in a secure manner no matter where you are
Azure Sentinel acts as intelligent security analytics for your entire enterprise
Azure Arc – new hybrid capabilities enable Azure services to run anywhere
Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure – proven guidance from Microsoft to accelerate your cloud adoption journey
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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.