Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (September 2017)

Welcome to the September 2017 monthly edition of Luper’s Learnings.

Here we are at the end of September. With Ignite coming to a close today, I have lots and lots to share with you.

Grab a cup of coffee, other beverage or, perhaps even a snack as you settle in for this jumbo edition of Luper’s Learnings. Remember to stay in touch via Twitter and email.

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Here’s what I’ve learned in the last month…

• Let the Ignite recap begin!
  • For starters, you should know that even if, like me, you weren’t able to be at the conference in Orlando in person this year, you still have access to thousands of hours of recorded sessions here. In particular, there are over 100 sessions tagged as related to Azure.
  • If you didn’t get a chance to watch it live, or recorded since Monday, take a look at Satya’s keynote.
  • Scott Guthrie authored the all up New Azure advancements remove cloud barriers for enterprises at Ignite 2017
  • Yousef Khalidi CVP, Azure Networking summarized the Azure Networking announcements for Ignite 2017 which included Virtual Network Service Endpoints, DDoS Protection for Virtual Networks, Simplifying Networking Security management, Performance, Monitoring, New Load Balancer: 10x Scale, advanced analytics, Availability Zones, HA Ports and plenty more.
  • You may have seen many announcements, posts etc. about Azure Availability Zones. Here are pointers to some.
    • Tom Keane - Introducing Azure Availability Zones for resiliency and high availability
    • Overview of Availability Zones in Azure (Preview)
    • Azure Resiliency
    • Azure Regions and Availability Zones by Chris Pietschmann
    • On the Linux Academy Blog, Azure at Microsoft Ignite, Day 2: Migrate, Availability Zones, and Planned Maintenance for VMs

• • Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances allow you to reduce costs—up to 72 percent on pay-as-you-go prices—with one-year or three-year terms on Windows and Linux VMs. When you combine the cost savings inherent to Azure Reserved VM Instances with the added value of the Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can save up to 82 percent.
    • Announcing Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (RIs)
    • The official Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (Coming Soon) product page
    • Azure gets more affordable with reserved instances and new cost management features from TechCrunch
  • Back in July, Mike Neil said that Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order now. At Ignite we announced that some of the hardware partners have started shipping validated systems this week. Good opportunity to share some additional Azure Stack info with you.
    • Azure Stack product page & How to buy Azure Stack
    • Azure Stack Operator Documentation
    • Security and Compliance in Azure Stack
    • Proactively monitoring cloud operations with Microsoft Azure Stack
    • TechTarget’s take is Microsoft Azure Stack has finally arrived -- or has it?
    • Jeffrey Schwartz of Redmond Channel Partner wrote Azure Stack Shipments Begin, While Azure Portal Gets a Boost
    • And a session from Ignite on YouTube - Microsoft Azure Stack business continuity and disaster recovery
    • Now I’m at the edge of overdoing it on Azure Stack. I don’t have the hardware to deploy my own. How about some options for deploying Azure Stack in Azure 😊. DEPLOY AZURE STACK DEVELOPMENT KIT ON AN AZURE VM and Install Azure Stack in Azure. If you decide to go down this path a) be prepared to pay for the big VMs and b) be aware that your default limit for number of CPU Cores per subscription may block you from proceeding. Take a look at Azure Subscription Resource Limits and Quotas and contact support if you need an increase.

• • You know, there’s so, so much more that happened at Ignite. If you were there, please let me know some of your highlights. I’ll close out my Ignite specific section with a summary of summaries. Take a look at the sites below if you want to know more about Ignite than what I’ve mentioned.
    • Microsoft helps customers digitally transform their businesses with cloud, AI and mixed reality — while also advancing the next frontier of computing
    • 12 Big Announcements from Microsoft Ignite from PCMAG
    • OneDrive Announcements at Ignite 2017
    • CRN’s 8 Key Announcements At Microsoft Ignite 2017

• “At the core, Hit Refresh is about us humans and the unique quality we call empathy, which will become ever more valuable in a world where the torrent of technology will disrupt the status quo like never before.” – Satya Nadella. Hit Refresh, by Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, is about individual change, about the transformation happening inside of Microsoft and the technology that will soon impact all of our lives—the arrival of the most exciting and disruptive wave of technology humankind has experienced: artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It’s about how people, organizations and societies can and must transform and “hit refresh” in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas and continued relevance and renewal. The book just came out this week. I got my copy and will have read it before I send you the October Luper’s Learnings. If you get your copy and read it, I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts! Learn more at https://www.hitrefreshbook.com.
• Attention current and soon to be partners transacting via CSP: the long anticipated Azure CSP documentation was very recently published as part of Azure documentation. You can find it here. This Azure CSP documentation provides answers to the most popular questions about Azure specifics in Cloud Solution Partner (CSP) model, including:
  • Which Azure services are available (and not available) in CSP
  • How to move existing Azure EA customers to CSP
  • What the Azure partner experience looks like inside Partner Center (with videos)
  • How support of Azure CSP customers should work
  • Azure billing in CSP
  • And much more – 81 articles in total!
• A couple of weeks ago, Mark Russinovich shared that Microsoft Azure is the first cloud to offer new data security capabilities with a collection of features and services called Azure confidential computing in his post Introducing Azure confidential computing.
• Corey Sanders posted Introducing B-Series, our new burstable VM size a new Azure VM family that provides the lowest cost of any existing size with flexible CPU usage.
• Alex Simons announced Fewer login prompts: The new “Keep me signed in” experience for Azure AD is in preview. He says that “A common request we get from our customers is to reduce the number of times users are prompted to sign into Azure AD.” He also shows what the new experience looks like and asks for your feedback.
• Now that I’ve opened the Azure AD door, I have a few more related things to share…
  • Just a few weeks ago (right before we learned about the Equifax breach), Alex Simons shared How we secure your data in Azure AD
  • At the end of August Prashant Khandelwal posted a 20 minute video on Enable Multi Factor Authentication for users in Azure Active Directory.
  • Take a few minutes to read the comprehensive Cloud App Discovery enhancements in Azure Active Directory and Conditional access in Azure Active Directory articles which were both updated just a couple of days ago.
  • As always, Azure Active Directory documentation is here, very near all of the other Azure documentation.
  • Gianluca Bertelli posted Azure AD Delegation scenario explaining a delegation scenario where we need to access to an external resource impersonating the signed-in user.
• My colleague Jose Miguel Parrella posted his Three reasons to deploy Red Hat workloads to the Azure cloud where he talks about security, hybrid, management and support.
• Azure Functions rocks. In addition to my opinion, the Azure App Service team demonstrated Processing 100,000 Events Per Second on Azure Functions.
• I’ve pointed out Ricardo Niepel’s Azure Platform site in previous editions. The good news is that the official Azure Interactives experiences are now available in Beta. Let me know what you think!
• In Azure Web App on Windows, some PHP extensions that are available in default PHP but not enabled. See Yi Wang’s article explaining how you can install or enable them.
• Blockchain is getting more and more press lately and not just because of Bitcoin. David Branscome, Partner Technical Architect published Understanding the basics of blockchain and real-world applications to help us get our heads around it.
• Ben Kliger Senior Product Manager posted Announcing the Just-In-Time VM Access public preview, part of Azure Security Center.
• Ralf Wigand from Microsoft Germany blogged about how to use a great new feature called Azure Instance Metadata that gives you information about the metadata of a VM from within the VM.
• On the PFE Field Notes blog, John Knightly posted  Using Azure Automation, OMS and Storage Tables to capture Configuration Data of Azure VMs Part One.
• In early August, David McGhee shared Cloud First – Mapping Strategy to Microsoft Azure Services. David says that he pieced it together from public statements at the recent Build conference so that the team talks strategy, rather than technology, first with our partners.
• On his new The Adventures of RUN-CMD blog,  Joel Vickery posted Testing RPC ports with PowerShell (and yes, it’s as much fun as it sounds). Let’s hope that he gives us more posts in the coming months.
• In early August my mate Simon Waight blogged  MOVING FROM AZURE VMS TO AZURE VM SCALE SETS – RUNTIME INSTANCE CONFIGURATION
• I’ve written about Azure Site Recovery (ASR) previously. Last week, Pishoy Bous shared Use Case: Region to Region Azure Site Recovery on the Azure Government Cloud blog.
• Have you ever needed to Move resources to new resource group or subscription? There’s still some opportunity for improvement but this is a good guide on the how (and how not) to accomplish that with some fascinating discussion in the comments.
• Since today is Friday, I must share some of my recent favorite Azure Friday episodes.
  • PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell
  • Virtual Machine Planned Maintenance
  • Azure Service Health
  • Try Azure Cosmos DB for Free
• In the “did you know” area… Did you know that regularly on the Azure blog the Marketplace team posts a list of New offers in Azure Marketplace? I just ran across this and was excited to learn that there were 31 listed  in the September post (in addition to the 14 listed in August.)
• Also, I can’t recall if I’ve newly discovered or just re-discovered it but I’ve found Shannon Gowen’s Tip of the Day blog really useful. Some special tips:
  • (Cloud) Tip of the Day: Online training for Azure Data Lake
  • (RDS) Tip of the Day: Plan Backup and Disaster Recovery for Azure IaaS Disks
  • (Cloud) Tip of the Day: Nested Virtualization in Azure
• Apparently I’m on a roll with tips. Michael Crump’s Azure Tips and Tricks - The Complete List is up to 24 tips and  has some really good stuff on it. A few of my favs
  • Azure Tips and Tricks Part 6 - Add and Reorder Favorites in the Azure Dashboard
  • Azure Tips and Tricks Part 7 - Use the Table Parameter in the Azure CLI
  • Azure Tips and Tricks Part 12 - Easily Start, Restart, Stop or Delete Multiple VMs
  • Azure Tips and Tricks Part 15 - Underlying Software in Azure Cloud Shell
• This month’s Geeky stuff comes from Satya’s Ignite keynote. Who would have thought that Quantum computing would take center stage and be such a big deal this week? If you didn’t have your mind blown already, watch the section of the keynote (beginning at 53:45) with the amazing brains talking about Microsoft’s work in this area.
  • Microsoft’s Empowering the quantum revolution site
  • Redmond Channel Partner’s coverage
  • Barron’s says Microsoft Ignite’s Biggest Surprise: Quantum Computing
  • One more unrelated geeky item… I’ve been using the Azure CLI in Cloud Shell. You may prefer PowerShell and be glad to read PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell (Preview) is now publicly available in Azure Portal (see related Azure Friday episode above.)
• I always like to end with fun. Here are just a couple fun things for September. I hope that you made it down this far!
  • Did you notice this week that Azure seems to have gotten a nifty logo, tag line and video?

• • Suresh Kumar posted Celebrating the completion of the most advanced subsea cable across the Atlantic.  Marea, Spanish for tide, is a joint project between Microsoft, Facebook and global telecommunication infrastructure company Telxius. Lying more than 17,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, Marea is the most technologically advanced subsea cable to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and the first cable to connect Virginia and Spain, landing in Virginia Beach and Bilbao.
  • techradar shared Leaked Microsoft Whiteboard app boasts some slick new stylus tricks. This app comes with the Surface Hub and was in preview via the Windows Store but isn’t currently available there. I’ll keep my eyes open for it to come back as it’s a great way to whiteboard if you have a screen with a pen!

Back issues of Luper’s Learnings are available via the archive at https://blogs.technet.com/luperslearnings for your convenience and perusal.

Whether you’ve read this on Friday, over your weekend or at the beginning of the week, thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the September Luper’s Learnings. You’ve continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions.