Conferences Archives

IT Pro announcements from Microsoft Build

20/05/202027/05/2020
by Martin Ehrnst

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

ARM language improvements

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.

What-If analysis

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.

PowerShell or CLI inline in the templates

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 infrastructure

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 enabled kubernetes

Azure Arc provides a range of capabilities for managing servers, Kubernetes, and Azure data services across clouds, datacenters, and edge locations.

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.

Azure Security and Azure AD

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

Build 2020 book of news

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

Community

Speaking at NIC 2020 vision

17/01/202017/01/2020
by Martin Ehrnst

Nordic Infrastructure Conference, or NIC for short. It is a leading technology conference in the Nordics

If you have been to NIC previously, you already know that the conference is packed with great speakers from the entire industry. It doesn’t matter if you work with Microsoft Azure or AWS. Technology is the focus of NIC Conf.

Whether you are an IT pro, looking to step up your automation game. or just interested in new technology, I encourage you to attend my session about Azure serverless.

The two-day conference is held on February 6 and 7, Oslo Norway. Are you coming?

Azure

Microsoft Ignite 2019 announcements and news

04/11/201913/11/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

It is Monday morning and Ignite announcements are coming in fast. The releases itself aren’t that groundbreaking as previous years, but looking at them from 10.000 feet they represent something very interesting in my opinion.

At Microsoft Ignite in 2015, we were pitched that everyone should run in the public cloud only.
Over the years, Microsoft has invested heavily in the hybrid scenario, introducing Azure stack and other services. With the announcements from Ignite 2019, I feel like we are completing the circle. Azure Arc lets us manage on-premises as we do with Azure, using ARM. Azure Functions are getting more hybrid/local benefits, and the same goes for many of the other services.

Below you can find what I find particularly interesting. Expect this list to evolve and change throughout the week.

For all announcements from Ignite 2019 read the Microsoft Ignite Book of news

Azure Arc

If you think Microsoft all over your infrastructure already. Azure Arc extends Azure management to any cloud and on-premises. I am really looking forward to testing this out! ARM templates on-premises?

Azure Monitor

Azure monitor itself doesn’t get any new features. But all other services get better integration with Azure Monitor. Prometheus support is GA, and hybrid monitoring for containers (kubernetes) is announced as a preview.

Azure Functions

As with the announcement of Azure Arc. Support for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud continues to evolve with Azure Functions. Premium support is now GA, as well as PowerShell. With Powershell support in functions, and Premium plan with hybrid support. I am keen to hear about the future of Azure Monitor.

Azure Cost Management for CSP

Finally. If you know the struggle you are probably as excited as I am, that Azure Cost Management now is available for CSP subscriptions. This means that we can provide cost management seamlessly across all subscription models, and leverage the same APIs

Tags for subscriptions

A long-awaited feature. The ability to add tags to subscriptions is finally available.

Azure

Ignite 2019 session tips

04/11/201904/11/2019
by Martin Ehrnst

Ignite 2019 is just around the corner, and we have a lot to look forward to. According to the session builder, there are almost 2000 sessions to choose from. Even Monday has 321!

In this post, I will share what I think you should look out for and what sessions to attend.

Keynotes

First things first. Monday is packed with keynotes. Satya Nadella’s vision keynote will tell us how Microsoft sees the future and sets the mood for the coming week. We can also expect a few announcements coming as well.

After the vision keynote, each product team has their own technology keynote. These are usually really good and packed with demos.
For Ignite 2019 I am not sure which I will attend. But it will be one of these two:

Breakout sessions

One hot tip that I have, is the ability to chose a learning path. This lets you add all breakout sessions within the learning path, and with that have consistency in your sessions. If you’re going à la carte, I think these sessions look interesting.

Hallway sessions

Ignite 2019 have a great option called Expert Connect. Here you can schedule to meet subject matter experts and discuss your real-world challenges.

Personally, I have cut down on the number of sessions that I attend each day. And instead, I am prioritizing side meetings and the occasional “hallway session”.
Most of the breakout sessions are available on-demand when you get home.
If you want to meet, let me know!

Community

Microsoft Ignite 2018 announcements and news

25/09/201827/09/2018
by Martin Ehrnst

Microsoft Ignite is Microsofts largest conference focusing on the new industry trends and technology from Microsoft and their partners. You can read more about Ignite here

The conference kicked off with Satya Nadella in the Monday morning keynote. From my personal perspective, this was a more down to earth keynote than previous ignite, with customer stories that you actually believe exists. Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe are lauching a new open data initiative letting customers create richer common data models for your next generation applications.
At the end, Satya announced a new initiative that enabeles humanitarian and non profit organization with AI technology.

Where Satya’s commercial keynote might come off as a tad boring for the IT pros and developers. We got all the news and announcements in the technical keynote hosted by Scott Guthrie and Julia White. Later in the day, VP Corey Sanders hosted what came off as the infrastructure keynote, and it was quite the show, a lot of demo’s going a little deeper in to the announcements mentioned earlier in the morning.

You will find a complete list of announcements from Microsoft Ignite in the book of news.

Below I have list on the announcements that I personally find interesting. I will make sure to update throughout the week, when I come across something new.

Azure Infrastructure

Azure Express Route direct
Direct connectivity to Azure. Up to 100Gbps
Azure Express Route global reach
Link existing connections and communicate on Azure’s back bone
New managed disk sizes
Ultra SSD pushing 160k IOPs
Windows server 2019 Azure network adapter
In server 2019 you can create a secure network adapter that creates a tunnel too your Azure network. Perfect for edge devices or hybrid infrastructure where Express Route might be over kill.
Azure VM image builder

Azure Management

Azure blueprints.
Azure blueprints is essentially your ARM template for deploying new subscriptions. It let’s you define policys, resources that you want to deploy as your baseline.

Even if i see this as big news, I feel like there are a few competitive solutions for this. Azure Deployment manager being one of them
Please let me know what i don’t understand.
Azure Resource Graph
Querying at scale for your resources.

Integration and automation (dev)

Azure Functions v2.0 generally available
Containerized and supposedly 50% faster compared to v1 functions
Event Grid
A few features around filtering and event life time.
Logic App in Visual studio code
Azure Data Explorer
This is the PaaS offering for querying and analyzing large data sets. It’s the same technology that is used in Application insights and Log Analytics

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is generally available
Custom Metrics
To provide unified monitoring. Azure Monitor now supports custom metrics and custom events
Azure Monitor for resource groups
I love this. Now we can define monitoring at the resource group level and enable ‘application status’ monitoring based on all resources within the group. Probably doing a separate post on this.
Azure Monitor for Azure VMs
Enables guest operating system monitoring
This is where it begins to look like SCOM – see this tweet from Kevin Green. I’m gonna get some more information on this later.
Alerts can now be added based on resource type
Azure Active Directory Logs in Azure monitor

Operations Manager (SCOM)

SCOM 2019 and 1901 are announced for Q1 2019
A revised HTML5 dashboard
Customizable email notfication (HTML)
New alert management capabilities
SquaredUp management pack tuning
This one is great for all SCOM admins. Expect a dedicated post later.

Other

In other news..

Azure digital twins
This one is cool. It maps out digital buildings based on IoT devices.

Summary

The message about moving all workloads to Azure is still there, but the tone has shiftes slightly from previous years, and for the time being, the hybrid model is an acceptable solution.
I know that American companies are the base of Azure customers. And based on the pitch we get, it feels like these companies are running physical servers under their desks. This is not the case in other parts of the world and if you are virtualized on premises and your hardware is up to speed. I don’t think migrating VMs as is (lift and shift) is the correct path…

IT Pro announcements from Microsoft Build

Azure Resource Manager templates

ARM language improvements

What-If analysis

PowerShell or CLI inline in the templates

Azure infrastructure

Azure Arc enabled kubernetes

Azure Security and Azure AD

Build 2020 book of news

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Speaking at NIC 2020 vision

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Microsoft Ignite 2019 announcements and news

Azure Arc

Azure Monitor

Azure Functions

Azure Cost Management for CSP

Tags for subscriptions

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Ignite 2019 session tips

Keynotes

Breakout sessions

Hallway sessions

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Microsoft Ignite 2018 announcements and news

Azure Infrastructure

Azure Management

Integration and automation (dev)

Azure Monitor

Operations Manager (SCOM)

Other

Summary

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