Microsoft Ignite 2018 announcements and news

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…