Azure Bicep
Nordic Infrastructure Conference is back! This is NICs tenth anniversary, and I am glad to say I am once again able to speak at this conference.
This year I have one session on Azure Bicep, where I will go through (almost) everything you need to know in order to be productive + some bonus tricks and real world scenarios from working with Bicep.
As always with NIC, there’s less slides and more demos!
Community
Nordic Virtual Summit is a free, community-based, virtual event focusing on everything Microsoft Cloud. With more than 40 speakers delivering content on Security and Compliance, Azure and Automation, and Endpoint Management. I am sure this will be one great event whether you work with infrastructure and/or client management.
2 Days of Quality Content – 100% Virtual – Community-Driven – World Class Speakers – Microsoft MVPs
I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at Nordic Virtual Summit. On Wednesday, 02/10 I have a session on how you as an IT Pro can use Azure to perform automated tasks based on events. Being able to adopt some principals from the developer world to better handle operational tasks is a very good idea. And I will show you how.
Conferences
Microsoft Build is Microsoft prime developer conference, where Microsoft Ignite is the conference for your traditional IT pros. However, the traditional IT pro role has changed significantly in recent years, and Build is therefore interesting to us, and a lot of great “infrastructure” announcements were released at Build this year. Below I have picked out a few announcements I find most interesting.
Azure resource manager templates are very powerful. However, one of its Achilles heels is its verbosity. At build we got a small sneak peek on how Microsoft is looking in to improve ARM template language. Sign up here to get more information.
I have deployed a lot of templates in recent years. And when I first saw a preview of the new what-if command I was thrilled. The ability to check what impact your template would make is a very important feature that is now available.
I’m not sure I like this one- the ability to actually write PowerShell or CLI scripts within ARM templates via Deployment Script is now in Public Preview.
ARM templates tend to be very complex already. And while this feature will solve a lot of issues, I am pretty sure we can manage to create a lot of new ones as well. I suggest a very humble approach to this feature.
Azure Peering service generally available. Providing the fastest route from on-premises to your Azure resources. At first this looks like a new name for Express Route, but Azure Peering is not private. Instead it uses the largest ISPs around the world to quickly get you on Microsofts backbone.
Azure Arc was introduced at Microsoft Ignite in 2019. At build, Microsoft announced Arc for kubernetes in preview. With Arc for Kubernetes, we are able to use management tools in Azure like Azure policy and Azure monitor. For clusters running on-premises or in another cloud, public or private. For companies using for example RedHat OpenShift on-premises, and AKS in Azure. You can have a unified experience for both environments.
Read more about Azure Arc for kubernetes here
Azure AD now has a feature called ‘external identities’ in public preview. I’m not sure about all the news. But it seems to be a revamped Azure AD B2c. I will look more in to it later.
Azure Security Center is updated with a secure score API. To me this is great as integration to internal portals will be much easier. In other news, the ability to suppress alerts is now publicly available!
More Azure AD news can be found here
I will continue to update this list throughout Build and hopefully test drive some of the new features. In the meantime, you can find the complete list of Build 2020 announcements in the book of news