AZURE NEWS

N4STACK LAUNCHES AZURE SERVICE TILES IN LINE WITH MICROSOFT’S CAF

Last month we launched the Azure Service Tiles, a best practice approach to Azure migration in line with Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). The Service Tiles are designed to overcome the challenges customers face when adopting Azure, helping those that are new to Azure, and those that have already begun their move to the cloud, to have a smooth transition. 

Azure Service Tiles. Source: N4Stack 

ENABLE REMOTE WORK FASTER WITH NEW WINDOWS VIRTUAL DESKTOP CAPABILITIES

This unprecedented global health crisis has dramatically increased the speed of which organisations are enabling remote working, and many have turned to Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), built on Azure. With an increasing number of users comes increasing numbers of feedback and Microsoft have taken that feedback on board to release several new capabilities including: 

• Simple deployment and management with the Azure portal 
• Enhanced security and compliance 
• Support for cross-platform operating systems 

Read more about the latest WVD capabilities here. For more new features have a read of the WVD Spring Update features. 

MICROSOFT AND DOCKER COLLABORATE ON NEW WAYS TO DEPLOY CONTAINERS ON AZURE

As part of the collaborative press release, Docker announced that developers can now use native Docker commands to run applications in Azure Container Instances for a seamless experience when building cloud native applications. Developers can look forward to the following productivity benefits: 

• Easily log into Azure directly from the Docker CLI 
• Trigger an ACI cloud container service environment to be set up automatically with easy to use defaults and no infrastructure overhead 
• Switch from a local context to a cloud context to quickly and easily run applications
• Simplifies single container and multi-container application development via the Compose specification allowing a developer to invoke fully Docker compatible commands seamlessly for the first time natively within a cloud container service
• Provides developer teams the ability to share their work through Docker Hub by sharing their persistent collaborative cloud development environments where they can do remote pair programming and real-time collaborative troubleshooting 

You can read more about the partnership here. 

MICROSOFT INTRODUCES A MORE COST-EFFECTIVE WAY TO USE AZURE COSMOS DB + NEW CAPABILITIES

To resolve the issue of developers not using Cosmos DB when building web apps for small numbers of users due to pricing, Microsoft has announced Azure Cosmos DB serverless, a new pricing model that offers per-operation compute pricing ideal for noncritical, intermittent and small workloads with moderate performance requirements. Consumption-based pricing bills customers for the total resources (request units) used for each discrete database operation. 

Alongside the announcement, Microsoft also shared several new capabilities in Cosmos DB that will be available in summer 2020: 

• Recover data from a specific period and restore at any time with point-in-time backup and restore 
• Access Version 4 of Azure Cosmos DB’s Java SDK 
• Use new delete functionality in Azure Cosmos DB change feed 
• General availability of Azure Cosmos DB autoscale provisioned throughput (previously called autopilot), which offers SLA-backed single-digit millisecond latency and 99.999% availability guaranteed 
• Bring their own keys for enhanced end-to-end encryption of their data 

ANNOUNCING THE GENERAL AVAILABILITY OF AZURE SPOT VIRTUAL MACHINES

Azure Spot Virtual Machines (VMs) provide access to unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts. Spot VMs offer the same characteristics as a pay-as-you-go VM, the difference being pricing and evictions. Spot VMs can be evicted at any time if Azure needs capacity. 

The workloads that are ideally suited to run on Spot VMs include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following: 

• Batch jobs 
• Workloads that can sustain or recover from interruptions 
• Development and test 
• Stateless applications that can use Spot VMs to scale out, opportunistically saving cost 
• Short lived jobs which can easily be run again if the VM is evicted 

Azure Spot VM pricing. Source: Microsoft 

 For more information on pricing, deployment and best practices, have a read of Microsoft’s announcement. 

AZURE ARC ENABLED KUBERNETES IN PREVIEW

In November, Microsoft announced the preview of Azure Arc, a set of technologies that unlocks new hybrid scenarios for customers by bringing Azure services and management to any infrastructure across datacentres, edge, and multi-cloud. In May, they announced the delivery of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes in preview for customers. With this, anyone can use Azure Arc to connect and configure any Kubernetes cluster. 

Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes. Source: Microsoft 

 You can read more about the benefits, and how to get started, here. 

IN OTHER NEWS: 

Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB is now in preview  

Microsoft makes single sign-on (SSO) free for all Azure AD customers 

AKS introduces uptime SLA 

Microsoft and Red Hat extend Azure integration with OpenShift 

Microsoft offers $200k in Azure Sphere hacking challenge 

Over 150 million people now using passwordless methods to sign in to their accounts 

Announcing the general availability of Windows Server containers and private clusters for Azure Kubernetes Service

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