announcements Archives

IT Pro announcements from Microsoft Build

20/05/202003/09/2020
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

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…