MICROSOFT AZURE

 

MICROSOFT SEES 775% INCREASE IN CLOUD SERVICES

Due to the recent Government advice to work from home where possible, Microsoft have shared some pretty impressive usage increases with us including a whopping 775% increase in cloud services, with more than 44 million daily users on Microsoft Teams, and a Windows Virtual Desktop usage growth of 3 times it’s usual usage! You can have a read of their other observations here. 

 

ANNOUNCING GENERAL AVAILABILITY OF INCREMENTAL SNAPSHOTS OF MANAGED DISKS 

Following the preview back in September, Microsoft Azure have now announced the general availability of incremental snapshots of Azure Managed Disks. Incremental snapshots are a cost-effective, point-in-time backup of managed disks. Unlike current snapshots, which are billed for the full size, incremental snapshots are billed for the delta changes to disks since the last snapshot and are always stored on the most cost-effective storage. 

You can have a read of the full announcement in more detail here. 

 

ANNOUNCING THE GENERAL AVAILABILITY OF AZURE MONITOR FOR VIRTUAL MACHINES 

In March Microsoft Azure announced the general availability of Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs), which provides an in-depth view of VM performance trends and dependencies. You can access Azure Monitor for VMs from the Azure VM resource blade to view details about a single VM, from the Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) resource blade to view details about a single VM scale set, and from Azure Monitor to understand compute issues at scale. 

Azure Monitor for VMs brings together key monitoring data about your Windows and Linux VMs, allowing you to: 

• Troubleshoot guest-level performance issues and understand trends in VM resource utilisation 
• Determine whether back-end VM dependencies are connected properly and which clients of a VM may be affected by any issues the VM is having 
• Discover VM hotspots at scale based on resource utilisation, connection metrics, performance trends, and alerts 

 

Azure Monitor Performance View. Source: Microsoft 

 

NEW CAPABILITIES AND BENEFITS ADDED TO AZURE DEDICATED HOST 

In 2019 Microsoft Azure announced the general availability of Azure Dedicated Hosts. Last month they gave us a rundown of the latest capabilities that have been added. These include benefits such as: 

• Save costs with Azure Dedicated Hosts reservations 
• Maintenance control for platform updates supports Azure Dedicated Hosts 
• More options with new SKUs 
• Resource Health Activity Log Alerts for Dedicated Hosts 

For more information on the new capabilities and benefits click here. 

 

 

UPDATES TO AZURE COST MANAGEMENT + BILLING 

As an Azure user you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management + Billing comes in. Designed to help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimise costs to empower you to do more with less, it’s the perfect tool for anyone with financial constraints. 

So, without further ado, below is a list of the latest improvements and updates to Azure Cost Management + Billing: 

• Invoice improvements to Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) subscriptions 
• Save more when you prepay for Azure Cache for Redis 
• Save up to 33% on Cosmos DB multi-master accounts 
• Develop, test, and run small workloads with the Cosmos DB free tier 
• Take advantage of EventGrid Premium tier for free while in preview 

Read the full blog for more information of each of the above cost-saving options, and for information on documentation updates, new videos and learning opportunities, and upcoming changes to Azure usage data.  

 

 

 

AZURE CONTAINER REGISTRY PRIVATE LINK SUPPORT PREVIEW FOR VIRTUAL NETWORKS 

Azure Container Registry has announced preview support for Azure Private Link, a means to limit network traffic of resources within the Azure network. With Private Link, the registry endpoints are assigned private IP addresses, routing traffic within a customer-defined virtual network. Private network support has been one of the top customer asks, allowing customers to benefit from the Azure management of their registry while benefiting from tightly controlled network ingress and egress. 

 

Source: Microsoft 

 

 

 

N4STACK ADD MORE GOLD COMPETENCIES TO MICROSOFT PARTNER STATUS 

Our priority here at N4Stack is to help our customers with their application and data modernisation. That’s why we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to achieve technical accreditations that have helped us achieve Gold Competency in Data Analytics & Application Development. 

 

IN OTHER NEWS: 

Microsoft releases COVID-19 assessment bot to quickly assess symptoms and risk factors 

 

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