Luper’s Learnings

Quick check... Azure VM disks - Managed or Unmanaged?

Lupes — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 08:18:15 GMT

I wanted to know quickly if a disk attached to an Azure VM is a Managed Disk or an unmanaged disk. Below is how I did it in the portal. In the portal, a Managed Disk attached to a VM will look something like the below: VM Disks Tab: Clicking on the disk name and scrolling to the very bottom I see a RESOURCE ID for the disk. Versus an Unmanaged Disk that will look like the below. Overview tab for the VM (note the blue bar): Disks tab for the VM - Notice that you’ll see the “Migrate to managed disks” option. The "(unmanaged)" at the top of the disk tab might give it away too. Lastly, clicking on the disk name exposes the VHD URI pointing to a VHD in a Storage Account (indicating Un managed disks.)

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (January / February 2018)

Lupes — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 19:14:42 GMT

Whew… has it already been over six weeks since the beginning of 2018? Hopefully the year is going well for you so far. So much going on here with Azure, partners, enablement and cool projects that I never got to send the January edition so I’m combining it with the February edition. Take a look below and let me know if you find good nuggets, have stuff to add or just want to say “Hi!” It’s definitely packed with great learnings. If you received this directly from me then you are on my list and you will continue receiving my Learnings once per month. If you would prefer to stop receiving it, please reply to me and I’ll remove you promptly. If somebody forwarded this email to you and you would like to begin receiving it from me directly each month, just email me at luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last month… I want to start by sharing an announcement that I neglected to share over the recent months. Jason Zander announced that Cray Supercomputers are coming to Azure. Customers can get a dedicated Cray XC or CS series supercomputers in Azure to run HPC and AI applications alongside their other cloud workloads directly on the Azure network. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Microsoft Build registration opened today. It usually sells out very quickly. I don’t know if there will still be spots available by the time you receive this but if Build is on your radar, check out the site and register in a hurry.
Microsoft announced quarterly results on our earnings call a couple of weeks ago. There have been some interesting follow-on articles as a result. Just a few for your reading…
- CRN wrote Microsoft Reports 'Outstanding' Results From Channel Partners As Azure And Office 365 Soar
- Really good read from Forbes - How Microsoft Revolutionized Its Sales Team--Plus 9 More Insights From CFO Amy Hood. It’s hard to count how many times “cloud”, “Azure” and “hybrid” appear in the article.
- Zacks writes Microsoft (MSFT) Reports Earnings Beat, Azure Revenue Soars 98%
- And, in a crazy interesting read for an old guy like me Here's how millennials are trading Microsoft ahead of earnings (MSFT) from Business Insider.
Two weeks ago, Corey Sanders announced the general availability of Azure Event Grid. Azure Event Grid is the first of its kind, enabling applications and services to subscribe to all the events they need to handle whether they come from Azure services or from other parts of the same application. These events are delivered through push semantics, simplifying your code and reducing your resource consumption.
Some of the recent excitement has been about storage and networking. To that end (get it?) We announced a couple of weeks ago that Virtual Network Service Endpoints and Firewalls for Azure Storage are generally available in all Azure regions include Azure Government. Virtual Network (VNet) service endpoints extend your virtual network private address space and the identity of your VNet to the Azure services, over a direct connection supporting Azure Storage, SQL DB and SQL DW (Preview.)
Since I mentioned network, it’s a good call out that last month Augmented rules for NSGs became generally available. Documentation here. And, Service tags for NSGs too.
While still thinking about networking Azure Global VNET Peering (allowing you to more simply and seamlessly connect two Azure virtual networks) is in preview.
Announced (briefly) in December then “actually” announced in January is the capability that used to exist in the classic portal allowing you to associate an existing subscription to your Azure Active Directory (AAD). It’s now available in Azure portal. Announcement and simple instructions at Change the subscription directory in the Azure portal. More details at How to associate or add an Azure subscription to Azure Active Directory.
CSP is such an important thing for me in my role. Pretty frequently I talk with partners about building and deploying solutions into Azure using CSP. A few weeks ago I posted a two part blog on this topic. Part 1 – Implementing a multi-tenant offering in Azure using CSP and Part 2 – Identifying the different use cases for partner offerings and solutions scenarios. I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, questions and comments on the topic.
While on the topic of CSP, Cloud Solution Provider agreements, price lists, and offers is a key, non technical, resource for partners who are CSPs.
Technical but really about billing - Azure Backup Storage GUID Migration. We’re changing how we report storage used by backups. No change in pricing but reporting of storage used by backup will be different.
Often bigger is better but if you have a managed disk that’s bigger than you need (costs more) you might take advantage of Mike Lapierre’s How to shrink a managed disk. Probably not for the faint of heart but might be worth it if your VMs have disks much larger than the data contained within.
If you are certified, certifiable or want to be one of the above, you should know that the 70-533, Implementing Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam is now continually being updated. The most recent updates were posted as of January 18, 2018 and are available here. The Exam Ref / prep book has been updated as well so the second edition is available as of last month.
I’m not the deepest in Data, Database and DB migrations. I understand from my extended team that the Azure Database Migration Service in public preview is incredibly useful. Last week we announced several updates to that preview. In the February updates.
Not a week goes by without a partner discussion around Azure Site Recovery, Backup and other DR topics. In January, Trinadh Kotturu announced the ability to enable backup on virtual machines during the VM create experience.
Also on the ASR topic, today we said that you and your customers can Protect machines using managed disks between Azure regions using Azure Site Recovery. Been waiting on this for a bit.
Christopher Scott posted Azure Automation: Shutting Down Custom Tagged Virtual Machines saying that his first thought was to setup a scheduled task to shutdown and startup Virtual Machines (VMs) to manage costs. He found various solutions that would do the job but didn’t have the granularity that he was looking for.
Yup, I’m going to talk about CLI, PowerShell and Cloud Shell again…
- A couple of weeks ago, we added native OpenSSH client to the PowerShell based Cloud Shell.
- I’m not an Ansible guy but it’s now preinstalled in Bash in Cloud Shell.
- Short and sweet How to create Service Principal through CLI. And the longer version.
- Guessing that I’ve shared this previously but it makes me smile every time. http://shell.azure.com gives you a Cloud Shell acting on your Azure Subscription without even having to go to the Azure Portal. Oh http://shell.azure.com/bash and http://shell.azure.com/powershell work too.
- Check out Expanded options for accessing Cloud Shell for instructions for HTML and Markdown embedding as well as VS Code integration.
Interesting walkthrough on the Azure App Service Team blog on az webapp new
SUPPORT. Your favorite topic? I know that it’s mine! Based on customer and partner feedback, two changes have been made to Azure Standard support: price drop and faster initial response time.
A project I’ve been working on recently had a need to document what disks (managed and unmanaged) exist within various resource groups and are attached to which VMs. I’ve got an early version of a PowerShell script that generates a basic report that I will try to share in the coming weeks. When I brought this up to the Storage Engineering team last week, they asked me if I knew about the Disks blade(?) screen(?) in the Azure Portal. I said that I didn’t. If you click on All services and search for Disks you’ll get to a super useful screen that shows you just about everything you could want on this topic for your Managed Disks. Do keep in mind that this does not show unmanaged disks inside Storage Accounts. I can’t wait until it’s exportable from the portal 😊.
- I’ve not included too much coverage on Kubernetes, Docker etc. in Luper’s Learnings. Those topics are definitely heating up and will be topics where I look to include more moving forward. I’ll probably lean on my extended team to contribute. To kick off on that topic, enjoy Scott Hanselman’s post Why should I care about Kubernetes, Docker, and Container Orchestration? from last week.
- Within the last few months my UK colleague Adam Raffe shared his Azure “Virtual Data Centre” lab and along with Dan Baker recorded a one hour video version of a workshop sharing his experience.
- Did you know that Microsoft has a “Chief IP Counsel?” That would be Erich Andersen. Last week he posted Microsoft Azure IP Advantage: Our first year. It’s a great look back at this key differentiator and includes an invitation for you to share your feedback on how we can continue to improve the program.
- Not usually something I’d normally stumble across or call out… Brand Detection in Microsoft Video Indexer. Whether you have an immediate use for it or just want to say “neat” watch the videos. Adds to and really speaks to some of the power inside Cognitive Services.
- Those of you who have been following Luper’s Learnings (on and off) for the past several years know that there are a few regular sites, blogs and videos that I’m a fan of. One of those is the Tip of the Day blog and in particular, things tagged Azure. Take a look at the recent posts over the past few months. You are sure to find some things in there that are great tips for you.
- Closing out, I try to highlight things that are particularly fun and / or cool. Here are the candidates for that honor this edition.
  - Show off your skills with #AzureTrivia – This contest runs until the end of June. I want to see pictures of you and your swag if you win.
  - Cool web site / app - Azure Compute Info
  - The latest (2.7) Microsoft Azure, Cloud and Enterprise Symbol / Icon Set - Visio stencil, PowerPoint, PNG, SVG came out this month. Callon Campbell, MVP (https://theflyingmaverick.com/) shared his insight on getting it installed or updated on your machine.
  - Cool article from Cameron Fuller at Catapult Delving deeper into sharing Azure dashboards
We’ll call that a wrap for now. I’ll try to get back on schedule and get you a few good pages of my Learnings in mid March. Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the January / February Luper’s Learnings. You’ve continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions.

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

Lupes — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 21:12:08 GMT

Happy almost 2018! I hope that whatever December holidays you celebrate were/are wonderful and, at a minimum, that you got to enjoy some down time, well deserved travel or time with family and friends. As most of you will probably be reading this after the beginning of the new year, with very full inboxes, I appreciate you taking the time to peruse this edition as it’s packed with good Azure info. If you received this directly from me then you are on my list and you will continue receiving my Learnings once per month. If you would prefer to stop receiving it, please reply to me and I’ll remove you promptly. If somebody forwarded this email to you and you would like to begin receiving it from me directly each month, just email me at luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last month…

I’m sure that you’ve heard this from me before… since time is running out, it bears repeating. We will be sunsetting the Azure classic portal on January 8, 2018. Current Azure classic portal users do not need to take any action—all our services and your resources will be available in the Azure portal. You can read about the latest features in the documentation.
In support of the above move, VSTS available only in the Azure portal from November 30 so no more managing Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) accounts from the classic portal as of a few weeks ago.
My teammate, Dale Kirby recently wrote a foundational blog What is serverless computing? In it he talks about Serverless Computing (duh) how it’s enabled by Azure Functions and what Serverless means for IT Pros. This got me to digging about for some additional resources on Serverless and Functions to share with you.
- Take the way back machine to March 2016 when Azure Functions were introduced.
- Test your coding skills and learn how to build solutions using Azure Functions at the same time with the Azure Functions Challenge.
- Read what Donna Malayeri had to say in September in Develop Azure Functions on any platform. Read her updates and @AzureFunctions’ updates.
- Azure Functions on IoT Edge from just a few weeks ago
- Russell Young, my UK colleague has an in-depth discussion about the growing popularity of serverless computing in Azure using services like Functions and Event Grid in Episode 207 of The Azure Podcast.
- Lastly some comparisons from 3^rd parties
  - Serverless Computing: AWS Lambda vs. Azure Functions from Bizety in January 2017
  - Microsoft Azure Functions vs. Google Cloud Functions vs. AWS Lambda: fight for serverless cloud domination continues from CloudAcademy in February 2017
  - AWS Lambda vs. Azure Functions vs. Google Functions from Cloud Zone in August 2017
Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) became generally available last month. Takeshi Numoto blogged Announcing General Availability of Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) with some details on the significant savings opportunity, particularly for Windows VMs.
Which Azure VM is right for your need? As the catalog/family/types/series of Azure VMs has grown (and grown, and grown) we’ve released a taxonomy of Virtual Machine types. The sizes for Windows & Linux virtual machines by General purpose, Compute optimized, Memory optimize and several more can be very helpful. Also, this Virtual Machine series page is useful if you want a view by series. Lastly, some insight from Firebrand Training on How to choose an Azure Virtual Machine might help.
Kay Singh’s great post Understanding the Azure B Series and CPU Credits is also helpful as you consider B series VMs for your applications.
In addition to picking the right VM, you might need a collection of identical VMs. You can deploy a Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS.) Though they have been available for a couple of years, folks don’t always remember about VMSS. This came up in a solution I was working with a partner on this month so I figured I’d share some of the readily available references and resources.
- What are virtual machine scale sets in Azure?
- Azure Virtual Machine (VM) Scale Sets on Azure Friday
- How to convert an Azure virtual machine to a VM Scale Set from Guy Bowerman (@gbowerman)
- And the article last month from Jose Moreno (@erjosito) Working with network attributes of Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
- Azure virtual machine scale sets FAQs
This next one is really cool (that’s a joke, you’ll get it as you keep reading.) Cloud storage now more affordable: Announcing general availability of Azure Archive Storage
- From 18 months ago - Introducing Azure Cool Blob Storage
- This month – how do you know what your options are? - Azure Blob Storage: Hot, cool, and archive storage tiers
- Storage Overview Pricing (Archive preview through January 2018, GA Pricing beginning 1 February 2018)
Just a month ago, we announced General availability: Visual Studio App Center. App Center lets you automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps.
As of a couple of weeks ago, Azure Active Directory Domain Services supports Azure CSP subscriptions. What does this mean?, you ask. More information is available in the just published comprehensive documentation Azure Active Directory (AD) Domain Services for Azure Cloud Solution Providers (CSP).
If you want help planning Azure Site Recovery (ASR) deployments against on-prem virtualized environments, Nitin Soneji recently published General availability of Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V.
There was an update on Azure SQL Data Warehouse: Support for SQL Operations Studio including pointers to download the tool and a quickstart.
Last month Lee Stott shared Microsoft Azure Low-priority Virtual Machines – take advantage of surplus capacity in Azure.
This month CLI 2.0 becomes the primary CLI tool for managing Azure Resource Manager–based resources while Azure CLI 1.0 remains the tool for managing Azure Service Management (ASM)–based ("classic") resources. Some more details here.
Many of our partners help customers deploy new applications and workloads into Azure. Some of those aren’t net new but existed on-premises or in a different public or private cloud before coming into Azure. In those cases, you may have performed a Lift and Shift migration to get the resources into Azure. Last month, Radu Vunvulea posted Lift and Shift - cloud migration strategy with a simple explanation of what is / isn’t lift and shift and mentioning some of the cloud benefits that you miss out on.
If you haven’t spent time yet with the Azure Security Center (our way to help you get a unified view of security across all both on-premises and cloud workloads), I’ve tracked down several interesting articles to help you take advantage of it.
- Introduction to Azure Security Center
- Short & free Microsoft Virtual Academy course - Introduction to Azure Security Center
- Channel9 - Getting Started with Azure Security Center
- Azure Security Center extends advanced threat protection to hybrid cloud workloads
- How Azure Security Center uses machine learning to enable adaptive application control
- Azure Security Center coming to Azure Government
- Azure Security Center previews new threat detections for Linux
- Tuesdays with Corey: Azure Security Center, Suspicious processes and JIT access
- Yuri Diogenes’ post Installing Azure Security Center Agent on Linux Computer
If you’ve read Luper’s Learnings over the years, you know that Tuesdays with Corey is a favorite series of mine. Since I mentioned it above, here are a number of recent episodes that you may find useful.
- Tuesdays with Corey - go TEST Scheduled Maintenance
- Tuesdays With Corey - Better ways to manage your Azure VM Infrastructure
- Tuesdays With Corey - AKS cluster upgrades and managed K8s
On the topic of recent and interesting videos, you may like these topics from Azure Friday.
- Use the Azure portal to answer your billing questions which aligns with Manage payment methods in the Azure portal allowing pay as you go customers in the United States to update, add, and remove payment methods for their subscriptions.
- Jenkins CI/CD with Service Fabric
- Azure Availability Zones
- Durable Functions in Azure Functions (goes with the serverless stuff above)
Way up above I talked about storage. Interestingly, at the end of November there was a short blurb Storage Service Encryption for Azure Backup data at rest
Wriju Ghosh’s post earlier this month Microservices Guidance Is Now Available is interesting on its own but also reminded me to remind you that the Azure Architecture Center has some really useful reference architectures, design patterns, best practice and more. Not to mention the newly published Designing, building, and operating microservices on Azure that Wriju talks about.
Doug Silva’s recent post Azure Subscription Governance – Resource Group and Naming Convention Strategies gives us some things to think about. He also pointed us to the helpful Naming conventions article in the Best Practices section of the Azure Architecture Center that I mentioned above.
No Luper’s Learnings is complete without a plug and reference to Michael Crump’s Azure Tips and Tricks. He had a few posts (70, 71 and 72) in the last week or so related to Cognitive Services.
- Azure Tips and Tricks Part 70 - Key Phrase Extraction with Cognitive Service and Azure
- Azure Tips and Tricks Part 71 - Language Detection with Cognitive Service and Azure
- Azure Tips and Tricks Part 72 - Sentiment Analysis with Cognitive Service and Azure
In the “kinda cool” zone…
- Armin Reiter who blogs periodically at https://codehollow.com/ had a post a couple of months ago that fits in nicely with the Functions and Serverless topics above - Weekly Azure billing report per mail with Azure functions.
- Your Azure Subscription comes with its own expertise in the form of Azure Advisor. A month ago there were additional updates - Azure Advisor: New dashboard, downloadable reports, and configuration
- Have you ever run into the problem where you have a non-email enabled AAD account that you want to invite as a guest to an AAD? I have! Thank much to Ty Mote for the walkthrough of a workaround in AAD Guest User Invitation Redemption (No email required!)
- My friend Simon Waight frequently has gems on his blog. This time he shared a key time saver for him and his team in Use Azure Health To Track Active Incidents In Your Subscriptions.
- Cloud Shell mania --- I just can’t stop myself
  - No doubt you get tired of hearing me talk about CLI and Cloud Shell so I’ll keep the excitement to a dull roar when I let you know about General availability: Bash in Azure Cloud Shell.
  - Of course you already know that in addition to Bash in Cloud Shell (complete with commonly used CLI tools -- including Linux shell interpreters, Azure tools, text editors, source control, build tools, container tools, and database tools) Cloud Shell also includes language support for several popular programming languages, such as Node.js, .NET, and Python. Get all the details from Justin Luk’s recent post.
  - Oh, and Shayne Boyer wrote shell.azure.com - look Mom no install!
  - From Michael Crump - Azure Tips and Tricks Part 69 - Access and embed Azure Cloud Shell Anywhere
  - And did you see James van den Berg’s Microsoft Azure #CloudShell Overview with #Bash CLI 2.0 and #Powershell #Azure #DevOps.
  - I’m done now.
Back issues of Luper’s Learnings are available via the archive at http://blogs.technet.com/luperslearnings for your convenience and perusal. Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the December Luper’s Learnings. You’ve continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions.

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

Lupes — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 17:08:43 GMT

Welcome to the November (and October) 2017 monthly edition of Luper’s Learnings. Hello Azure friends! I recognize that I’m a couple of weeks late ☹. I had hoped to get this out to you before the end of October but a vacation seems to have gotten in the way of that😊. In any case, here I am and have plenty to share with you. I’m sending this over the weekend to ensure that you have it at the beginning of your week. Either have a great rest of your weekend or, if you are reading this at the beginning of your week, I hope that you had a good weekend. Please do keep in touch via Twitter and email. If you received this directly from me then you are on my list and you will continue receiving my Learnings once per month. If you would prefer to stop receiving it, please reply to me and I’ll remove you promptly. If somebody forwarded this email to you and you would like to begin receiving it from me directly each month, just email me at luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last month…

What’s new? A few recent updates and announcements…
- Starting this past week, November 15, 2017, to be specific, both Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud Services will be available only in the Azure portal. Access from the classic portal will no longer be supported. If you were using the classic portal for OS images, please use PowerShell instead. More details at Retiring Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud Services from the classic portal
- General availability: Azure AD DS in the new Azure portal and Azure Active Directory Domain Services documentation. As a bonus, Roberto (@soyoroberto) at All Things Cloud helps us understand Domain Controller as a Service in Azure
- While on the topic of AD DS, General availability: Azure AD DS support for Resource Manager virtual networks
- Azure Content Spotlight – New Release Notes for Azure Active Directory
- Announcing automatic OS upgrades for Azure VM scale sets
- Public preview expansion: VNet Service Endpoints and Storage Firewalls and Virtual Networks
- General availability (Windows) and preview (Linux): Accelerated Networking. Ok, what is Accelerated Networking? Petri takes this question on here and you can read Yousef Khalidi’s Linux and Windows networking performance enhancements | Accelerated Networking announcement as well as a tutorial on Create a virtual machine with Accelerated Networking.
- Public preview: Python 2 support and Hybrid Runbook Workers for Linux
- Public preview: Twice the performance and unlimited columnar storage with SQL Data Warehouse
- Managed Applications are now Generally Available in the Azure Marketplace – according to Corey Sanders (@CoreySandersWA), Managed Applications, an Azure unique offering, enables you to deploy entire applications and empower your partner to fully manage and maintain the application in your environment. Gaurav Bhatnagar takes us Under the hood.
- I will probably try to get some more info to you about Azure Stack in the next edition. In the meantime, it’s worth calling out that even though Azure Stack is pretty darn new, more capabilities are being added already as you can see in General availability of App Service and Functions on Azure Stack.
Availability Zones probably require their own section. I called out some of this in the September Luper’s Learnings but want to bring it up again as there’s been so much discussion about AZs over the recent years, below are some recent and key articles, coverage, comparison and documentation to help you get your head around Azure Availability Zones.
- The announcement Public preview: Azure Availability Zones was made mid October
- Overview including current Preview regions and services supported.
- Towards the end of September, Tom Keane wrote Introducing Azure Availability Zones for resiliency and high availability. In his post he explained that “Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. Availability Zones allow customers to run mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to datacenter failures. … Availability Zones are now in preview in two regions, East US 2 in Virginia and West Europe in the Netherlands, with plans to offer preview to additional regions in the US, Europe, and Asia before the end of the year.”
- During the Preview, I would encourage you to learn about and test Azure Availability Zones. I just turned them on in my test subscription and will report back on my experience.
- To learn more about Availability Zones and sign up for the Preview, visit: http://aka.ms/az.
Do you ever wonder what the relationship is between an EA Enrollment, Azure Active Directory (AAD) Tenant and an Azure subscription? This comes up occasionally so I found the below articles to better help us understand those relationships.
- Christer Ljung, a Cloud Architect at Microsoft, Sweden posted The Holy Trinity of Azure about a year and a half ago.
- There are a number of interesting EA & Azure related short videos (most in English) on the Enterprise Azure Portal channel9 site from the past couple of years.
- Understanding resource access in Azure also helps to clarify some of these relationships
- Lastly, How to add an Azure subscription to Azure Active Directory, updated last month, is a fairly short article that talks more about the relationship between an Azure subscription and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), and how to add an existing subscription to an Azure AD directory.
Since I mentioned EA above, let me slip in a few links related to usage and billing analysis (some for EA based subscriptions but some more generic.)
- Seamless cost reporting and analysis for Enterprise customers: now in preview announced in early September, based on the Cloudyn acquisition.
- Robert Reynolds posted Use Azure Cost Management for free
- Register an Azure Enterprise Agreement and view cost data
- Prevent unexpected charges with Azure billing and cost management
- Lastly, the direct link to the Cost Management page.
My friend, Tim Tetrick, recently posted I have Azure VM performance issues, what do I do?. He’s sharing simple and great guidance from the Azure Support team.
CLI, don’t cry. While I’m a long time Microsoft and Windows guy, I’m trying to adjust my mindset to be more focused on multiple OSes and using command line & scripts (whether PowerShell or Azure CLI) more in my daily life. Here are some interesting CLI resources I’ve come across.
- Introducing the Azure CLI, Azure CLI - Getting Started, Deploying ARM Templates with the Azure CLI, and Creating a Service Principal with the Azure CLI all from Mark Heath (@mark_heath), MVP
- The Azure Podcast - Episode 202 - Cloud Shell - In-depth discussion with Azure Compute PM, Justin Luk, on the new Cloud Shell feature in the Azure Portal that serves up Bash and PowerShell command prompts right in the browser!
- Did you see Azure Cloud Shell: New CLI tools added and font-size selection? Lots of great capabilities added.
- Andy Thomas helps us tidy up with Azure housekeeping with bash and CLI 2.0
- On the verge of taking things too far, Mani Bindra (@manisbindra) helps us Setting up vscode to use the docker extension with bash for windows as terminal shell
Are you and your organization Azure DevTest Labs users? Now you can Unclaim a VM and return it to the claimable pool
More on DevTest Labs… Azure DevTest Labs: Set access rights to an environment resource group
And the last DevTest Labs word for this month Azure DevTest Labs: Kali Linux image available in your lab
In Cloud developer guidance: Microsoft Graph or Azure AD Graph? Deva (@devagnanam) answers a question he gets regularly and points us to Dan Kershaw’s post for support.
Also look at what summer intern, Glenna worked on while she was at Microsoft. My Intern Project: Microsoft Graph Bindings for Azure Functions
I had already heard about Azure Migrate but Shannon Gowen’s 30 October Tip of the Day was on Azure Migrate which reminded me to tell you about it.
- Shon Shah posted Announcing Azure Migrate filling us in on this new service that provides the guidance, insights, and mechanisms needed to assist in migrating to Azure.
- Watch the Overview Video (2 minutes) and Demo (5 minutes), try it out via the Hands-On Lab and Sign up for the limited public preview,
- The Azure Migration Center landing page for the above plus more.
CSP partners take many different approaches to making their offers available to prospects and customers. Some partners only take orders via a person and have that person provision / request resources to be provisioned via an internal order, ticketing or ERP system while other partners put the ordering / provisioning process more directly in the customers’ hands via a customer facing web storefront. There is a set of documentation, sample code and the Storefront Builder Quickstart Guide available.
While on the topic of CSP, at the very end of September, the much anticipated Azure partner shared services became available for CSP partners. It’s a new offer type for partners in the CSP program allowing partners to purchase Azure subscriptions for their own use.
Peter Taylor posted Announcing Azure Building Blocks (AZBB), a set of tools and Azure Resource Manager templates that are designed to simplify deployment of Azure resources.
- The Azure Post’s coverage - Azure Building Blocks: Simplify Resources Deployment
- AZBB repository on GitHub
- Installation instructions
- My friend Telmo Sampaio (@telmo_sampaio) talks with Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) about Azure Building Blocks 2.0 (azbb) on a recent Azure Friday.
I haven’t had the chance to spend too much time with Azure Media Services but did come across this Azure Media Services October 2017 updates post that should be both relevant and interesting to folks spending time with Media.
Since Azure Files became generally available, we’ve consistently heard from our customers that they want to embrace the power and flexibility of the cloud without giving up the locality of their on-premises file server. Klaas Langhout shared Announcing the public preview for Azure File Sync.
In the “cool tips” zone, Leon Welicki posted Get the most out of your Azure portal experience including great tips on searching, browsing, organizing and the consistency of experience across Azure services. Don’t forget Cloud Shell, ARM templates and the Azure Mobile app (you do have this installed, don’t you?)
Some customer stories that you can share
- Obungi worked with Vapiano
- Tata Consulting Services worked with Malaysia Airlines
- asos is using a variety of Azure data products and services
- Steelcase is taking advantage of our IoT platform
If you haven’t visited the Azure Roadmap page lately, do check it out as it lists services and capabilities that are in Development and In Preview.
Way up above, I mentioned Tip of the Day. Here are a few that were interesting to me.
- (Cloud) Tip of the Day: Overview of Azure Cloud Shell
- (RDS) Tip of the Day: Five more reasons why you should download the Azure mobile app (see above)
- (Cloud) Tip of the Day: Introducing Azure confidential computing
- (Cloud) Tip of the Day: Announcing Default Encryption for Azure Blobs, Files, Table and Queue Storage
I feel like the world (or at least the cloud world) continues to get smaller. As of today, Azure is available in 140 countries including 42 regions. We can help you choose where to put your stuff and you can learn more about our Global Datacenters.

In the “did I really read that?” camp - Microsoft and AWS Advance Open AI Ecosystem with Gluon Partnership and InfoQ’s coverage Microsoft and AWS Collaborate on Machine Learning.
Time to end with fun (but relevant, too.) Beginning earlier this year, Microsoft Story Labs started publishing short, Explanimators. To date, there are 5 episodes covering Blockchain, AI, Machine Reading, Mixed Reality and IoT in just a few minutes each. Check them out.

Back issues of Luper’s Learnings are available via the archive at http://blogs.technet.com/luperslearnings for your convenience and perusal. Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the November Luper’s Learnings. You’ve continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions.

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

Lupes — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 15:54:40 GMT

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. If you received this directly from me then you are on my list and you will continue receiving my Learnings once per month. If you would prefer to stop receiving it, please reply to me and I’ll remove you promptly. If somebody forwarded this email to you and you would like to begin receiving it from me directly each month, just email me at luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. 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.

- 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.

“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 http://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 http://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.

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

Lupes — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 15:39:52 GMT

Welcome to the August 2017 monthly edition of Luper’s Learnings. I’m baaaaackkkk… After a yearlong break, Luper’s Learnings is stretching its legs and getting back on the ground. As this is the first edition in 2017 and first time back in a while, I’ll keep it a bit short but… do be prepared for the next edition, post Ignite on 29 September. I’ll be watching Ignite remotely this year so will miss those of you who will be attending in person but please do stay in touch via Twitter and email. If you received this directly from me then you are on my list and you will continue receiving my Learnings once per month. If you would prefer to stop receiving it, please reply to me and I’ll remove you promptly. If somebody forwarded this email to you and you would like to begin receiving it from me directly each month, just email me at luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. Here we go with things I’ve learned since the last Luper’s Learnings… Hopefully many of you in the US experienced and survived the eclipse this week. Several of us from the partner technical team tried to get closer to totality without getting caught in traffic for days. We drove about an hour south of Seattle and experienced around 94% totality so… it never got dark. Good time, though! (I’m on the left with the Azure t-shirt on)

I had the pleasure of attending Inspire (formerly the Worldwide Partner Conference / WPC) in Washington, DC last month and spending time with a variety of partners discussing building and growing their Azure practices. I particularly focused on where they had the opportunity to deliver solutions transacted via CSP. I’m very excited to continue to work with partners in the US this fiscal year on that journey.
Above I mentioned that the next edition of Luper’s Learnings will come out at the tail end of the Ignite conference. While I had the opportunity to attend Ignite the past two years, I have other commitments this year so won’t be able to be there in person. There are still some passes available on the Ignite site if you are interested in attending. It’s 25 – 29 September (just about a month from now) in Orlando, Florida. If you do go or watch sessions remotely, I would appreciate hearing your takeaways and highlights from the conference.
Recently there has been so much news and noise around containers, orchestration etc. that I can barely contain myself in sharing a few of the highlights with you around Azure and containers.
- Just a month ago, at the end of July, there was great info about Azure Container Instances going into preview. Corey Sanders announced Fast and Easy Containers: Azure Container Instances followed by Azure Container Instances demo, Tuesdays with Corey: Kubernetes Connector for Azure Container Instances! and Tuesdays with Corey: Azure Container Instances with WINDOWS containers.
- The Microsoft Azure Cloud Cover Show spent almost ½ hour on the topic in Episode 232: Azure Container Instances.
- TechCrunch covered the ACI announcement
- John Adams posted on the Opsgility Cloud Readiness Blog, The gap is filled: How Azure Container Instances completes the PaaS hosting spectrum at last.
- Full details are available here. There’s a great table on that page helping you to decide which Azure service is the best for you depending on your container needs.
- The Azure Container Instances documentation includes 5-Minute Quickstarts, Step-by-Step Tutorials plus links to the Azure CLI usage.
Acknowledging that it’s not about ACI but still container related, David Gristwood posted a short article Getting up and going with Windows Containers on Microsoft Azure with some links to other good resources.
And, William Eastbury’s Crib Sheet: Get Started with Windows Containers and Docker shows a good path that he took to learn about containers.
Mid August we had the announcement Introducing Azure Event Grid – an event service for modern applications. While I have not had much of an opportunity to do anything with Azure Event Grid yet, I found a few nuggets to share with you.
- InfoWorld’s coverage Get started with Azure Event Grid for serverless events
- 30 minute Cloud Cover Show Episode 233: Azure Event Grid with Bahram Banisadr
- Documentation including Quickstart and tutorial

Just this week, Kumail Hussain announced the public preview of Azure Archive Blob Storage and Blob-Level Tiering. “What in the world is that?” you may ask. I’m glad you did… Last year, we launched Cool Blob Storage to help customers reduce storage costs by tiering their infrequently accessed data to the Cool tier. This announcement is of the public preview of Archive Blob Storage designed to help organizations reduce their storage costs even further by storing rarely accessed data in our lowest-priced tier yet. Furthermore, we’re excited to introduce the public preview of Blob-Level Tiering enabling you to optimize storage costs by easily managing the lifecycle of your data across these tiers at the object level.
At the beginning of this month, Richard Hay of ITPro Windows called out some of the ways that you can learn about Azure Backup and Site Recovery capabilities. His article includes on demand sessions plus instructor led content showing the differences between backup and disaster recovery, how the two approaches work together, and having a recovery plan and dealing with a recovery it becomes necessary.
I’m not going to spend a ton of time on it this month, I’ll recruit some of my colleagues to share details in coming months but I do want to mention that during the Inspire conference in July, Mike Neil announced that Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order now. Daniel Savage kicked of a series of blog posts discussing Operating Azure Stack.
If you aren’t familiar with them, keep in mind that we have a collection of Azure Reference Architectures, a set of standard configurations of Azure infrastructure services. This month, Joe Davies added New Reference Architecture for a high availability SharePoint Server 2016 farm in Azure. Others in the collection include Windows VM workloads, Linux VM workloads, SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA plus more.
You know that there’s Azure PowerShell cmdlets, the cross platform CLI but did you know that there is now a shell in the Azure Portal? It’s called Azure Cloud Shell. The official word on it from a few months ago can be found here. Russell Smith wrote about it on Petri. Scott Hanselman has a ten minute video with Rob Caron on Azure Cloud Shell from earlier this month on Azure Friday. The team wants to know how to improve Azure Cloud Shell. Share your feedback.
In Azure Network Watcher introduces Connectivity Check (Preview), Abhishek Pathak says that diagnosing network connectivity and performance issues in the cloud can be a challenge as your network evolves in complexity. We are pleased to announce the preview of a new feature to check network connectivity in a variety of scenarios when using VM.
Every so often I like to call out some of the great customer stories that are available. All of the below recent customer stories include some of our terrific partners who are delivering solutions on Azure.

Customer / Case Study	Partner	Services used
Duquesne Light Company	CEI	Azure Azure App Service Azure Redis Cache Azure SQL Database Visual Studio Team Services
Plante Moran	Rightpoint	Azure Azure App Service Intune Microsoft 365 Enterprise Office 365 Office Delve OneDrive for Business SharePoint Online Windows 10 Yammer
San Diego County Office of Emergency Services	Adoxio	Azure Dynamics CRM Online
MatrixCare	3Cloud, Crayon	Azure Machine Learning Power BI SQL Server
City of Philadelphia	Opti	Azure
Cargill	Northwest Cadence	Azure Azure Active Directory Azure SQL Database Visual Studio Team Services Visual Studio Test Professional Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin

Frequently in Luper’s Learnings I share Service Updates that stand out. Below are a few that you might be interested in.
- Azure Monitor: New capabilities for diagnostic settings
- General availability: Instant file recovery from Azure VM backups
- Preview: Azure Service Health
- As always, the ever changing list of Azure Updates is here.
A few quick hit geeky topics for you
- A few weeks ago, Marcel Zehner, Microsoft MVP and RD shared OMS welcomes the new “Azure Analytics Query Language”
- Mark Russinovich, CTO of Azure announced the Coco Framework for enterprise blockchain networks
- Raman Sharma wrote Build apps faster with Azure Serverless
- How to Setup NVIDIA Driver on NV-Series Azure VM from Michael Collier
I always like to end with fun. Here are just a couple fun things for August
- Elon Musk just made Microsoft Azure 100% cooler by association
- A is for Azure: The Alphabet in Colors – Heliotrope Fun Facts and Prompt!

Back issues of Luper’s Learnings are available via the archive at http://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 August Luper’s Learnings. You’ve continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions.

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (September 2016)

Lupes — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 09:20:55 GMT

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (September 2016) Welcome to the September 2016 monthly edition of Luper’s Learnings. Somehow, it got to be September already. We are definitely operating at cloud speed! September is such an interesting time of year. Here in Redmond the weather can’t decide whether it’s still Summer or ready to be Fall. This morning when I left the house it was 46F / 8C and the high temperature this afternoon is expected to be 79F / 26C. If that isn’t confusing I’m not sure what is. Good news is that we’ll see sun today but I’m always excited about opportunities for Cloud J! I heard from some of you over the past month and appreciate your thoughts and ideas. Please continue to send your content suggestions via Twitter and email. Here we go with things I’ve learned since the last Luper’s Learnings…

How about starting with a gift? Grab the recently updated free ebook: Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure, Second Edition from our friends @RobinDotNet and @MichaelCollier.
You’ve heard me mention Ignite a number of times over recent months. It’s coming up fast, it’s sold out and starts on 26 September. If you’ve already registered, will be attending and haven’t already received an invite for my Azure Partner Networking Happy Hour, let me know so that I can be sure to get an invite to you. I have some space left but it’s filling up fast. If you can’t be there in person, you’ll be able to experience much of the content online so be sure to Save the date to watch online.
I love being able to share this so frequently in Luper’s Learnings. You remember 10 months ago when Satya Nadella announced that Azure would be coming to local data centers in the UK? Last week that became a reality when Takeshi Numoto announced Microsoft Azure and Office 365 now available from United Kingdom datacenters.
A few months ago, there were a few Azure sessions and presenters highlighted in this post. You’ll also find that there are around 300 sessions taking place that have been tagged as relevant to Azure.
I had the opportunity to be a guest blogger on the MPN blog. My post from a couple of weeks ago talks about Using Azure to provide identity capabilities.
In the very recently mentioned blog post, I talk at a pretty high level about Azure Active Directory and Single Sign On (SSO.) Also very recently (today in my time zone) the folks at Kloud posted Azure AD Application SSO and Provisioning – Things to consider. Those Kloud guys are some deep thinking and prolific technical bloggers. I tried to count how many rich and informative blog posts they shared just in the last couple of weeks and I gave up counting. Three more that I did peruse were Azure Functions or WebJobs? Where to run my background processes on Azure?, Troubleshooting Azure Network Security Groups and Azure API Management Step by Step all posted within the last week.
To close out my very short theme on identity related items, Andrew Cobb shares with us Azure AD App Proxy and MFA – Quick Demo
On a recent call with a partner I was asked how much I know about Azure Redis Cache. Sadly, the answer was “very little” so I was nudged to find some key, current resources that would be useful to folks who want to know more about Redis Cache, what it is and how they can take advantage of it. Azure Redis Cache is based on the popular open-source Redis cache. It gives you access to a secure, dedicated Redis cache, managed by Microsoft and accessible from any application within Azure. My small collection of research is captured below.
- Way back, almost two years ago (that’s forever in cloud time), Scott Guthrie announced Redis Cache: General Availability of Redis Cache Service among other announcements in that post.
- It’s available in multiple service tiers including Standard, Basic and Premium.
- Steve Danielson updated the Azure Redis Cache FAQ in mid August. He answers the question “What is Azure Redis Cache?” plus much more.
- There’s a How to Use Azure Redis Cache guide tailored to any of .NET, ASP.NET, Node.js, Java and Python.
- In early September, Seth Juarez hosted a seven minute video on Azure Redis Cache Best Practices on Azure Friday.
- Luís Henrique Demetrio educates us on how the use of cache can increase application performance by storing strategic data in memory instead of having to obtain data for every request in his article Azure Redis Cache on ASP.NET Core.
- Lastly, in August, a customer story was posted about Atbaki, a BizSpark Plus success story, who has leveraged Redis Cache as part of their solution and mission of building a Middle Eastern social network for fans of traditional regional cuisine.
I mentioned Azure Friday above in my Azure Redis Cache learnings. A few additional, recent interesting Azure Friday episodes are below.
Azure DevTest Labs: More running VMs are supported in a single lab - Azure DevTest Labs now allows you to run more VMs (with multiple storage accounts) at the same time in a single lab with maximum performance by automatically scaling the storage accounts where lab VMs are created.
In early August, Corey Sanders announced Azure N-Series preview availability. Check out the video I mention immediately above to learn about the technology and use cases.
If you or your customers have use cases for N-Series VMs during the preview, you can express your interest here.
I’ve mentioned Azure Storage Explorer some number of times here in Luper’s Learnings. It was just updated this week. It’s free and available for Linux, macOS and Windows. Cool new stuff. Short video that tells you about it.
Every several months I like to call out some of the great customer stories that are available. All five of the below from around the world include some of our terrific partners who are delivering solutions on Azure.

Customer / Case Study	Partner	Country	Services used
Asociación Chilena de Seguridad	Metric Arts	Chile	Azure Machine Learning, Azure SQL DB
Port Authority of New South Wales	cubesys	Australia	Operations Management Suite, Virtual Machines, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Active Directory, Azure Backup, ExpressRoute
Met Office	New Signature	UK	IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, SQL DB, Cloud Services, API Management, Storage, Redis Cache, App Service, Visual Studio Team Services
Scheid Vineyards	eMazzanti Technologies	US	Azure Virtual Machines, Dynamics NAV, Azure Site Recovery
SAXA	Meister	Japan	SQL DB, Visual Studio

Azure Networking Fridays with the Azure Black Belt Team – this hour long session, every other Friday kicks off this coming Friday at 8am Pacific. Yah, I know that’s the weekend for some of you but these guys are in the US, guess we have to cut them some slack.
From time to time I like to call your attention to cool Linux and Open Source things related to Azure. Back in June there was an announcement that FreeBSD is now available in the Azure Marketplace. A couple of interesting posts that caught my eye on the Microsoft + Open Source blog
- DevOps on Azure Resources and Updates – video series, case study from the Bing engineering team and courses.
- Mark Hill’s discussion with with Bitnami Co-founder and COO, Erica Brescia on how Bitnami makes deploying open source apps in the cloud easy
- The Microsoft + Open Source blog also gave me a heads up that Hortonworks Future of Data Roadshow 2016 is going on new with more than a dozen stops coming up across North America, Asia and Europe.
- My pal Tim Walton began his multi-part blog series with Application Development: DevOps and open source solutions.
Several months ago we announced General availability of Recovery Services vault – Azure Backup support for ARM VMs. This month we added the capability for customers to manage backup policies and model them to meet their changing requirements from a single window. Enterprise-level policy management for Azure VM backup in Recovery Services vault.
Frequently in Luper’s Learnings I share Service Updates that stand out. Below are a few that you might be interested in.
I always like to end with fun. Here are my three fun things for September
- According to Microsoft by the Numbers
  - “Forty percent of Azure revenue comes from startups and independent software vendors”
  - “Microsoft’s fiber optic network could stretch to the moon and back – three times over.”
  - “Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 is on the Microsoft Cloud.”
  - “Nearly 1 in 3 Azure virtual machines are Linux.”
  - “Microsoft aims to reach an annualized commercial cloud revenue run rate of $20 billion in the 2018 fiscal year.”
- Here’s a cool use case… how about NBC and the Rio Olympics? Rio 2016 Summer Games break streaming records; Azure is ready for Olympic-size livestream events
- Corey Sanders demos improvements in the Azure Portal on Tuesday’s with Corey

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.

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (July / August 2016)

Lupes — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 16:38:04 GMT

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (July / August 2016) Welcome to the combined July / August 2016 monthly edition of Luper’s Learnings. Happy August and thank you for your patience waiting for this edition! So much has been happening at Microsoft over the past couple of months that I’ve not been as close to Azure as I usually am. We’re starting to get reconnected now J. This is very first Luper’s Learnings for Microsoft’s Fiscal Year 2017 after conferences, vacations, new fiscal year etc. I can’t wait to spend time (virtually and in person) with many of you in the coming year. Keep your content suggestions coming via Twitter and email. WPC in Toronto last month was terrific and it was great to see some of you at the conference including breakfasts, lunches, parties and drinks with fabulous Azure partners! Take a look at the blog post from TJ at AvePoint. He lists his Three Major Takeaways from Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2016. You have three minutes? Watch the highlights reel. Want to dive a bit deeper? Dozens of recorded WPC 2016 sessions are available via the WPC Gallery. I’m going to combine learnings from June and July with recent announcements to bring you the Luper’s Learnings edition below. Look for monthly editions to resume around 7 September then around 5 October just after Ignite. If you received this directly from me then you are on my list and you will continue receiving my Learnings the first week of each month. If you would prefer to stop receiving it, please reply to me and I’ll remove you promptly. If somebody forwarded this email to you and you would like to begin receiving it from me directly each month, just email me at luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. Here we go with my Learnings from the last month…

As is usually the case, at the beginning of Microsoft’s fiscal year, we see lots of new readiness offerings start to roll out and continue for the next 6 – 10 months. You’ll see a heavy dose of readiness opportunities in my content below.

I mentioned Ignite above. Take advantage of your last chance to register as it is only six weeks away and is filling up quickly. It’s the premier conference for partners to go for in person, deep dive technical training on all topics Azure. My plans are coming together for an Azure Partner Networking Happy Hour during Ignite. If you’ll be at Ignite, let me know so that I can be sure to get an invite to you. Keep watching this space for additional details. Data Platform Online is a series of online, live, and interactive training in which participants learn about Data Platform solutions and sales scenarios, as well as receive guidance on how to effectively orchestrate sales across each stage of the Data Platform sales cycle. This particular series is targeted at Sales professionals within Microsoft and partner organizations. There are sessions on six distinct topics for targeted roles to attend, each lasting one hour. Each topic will be offered on one day in September, with two delivery times to accommodate global time zones. Sessions are led by Microsoft experts, and participants learn through a combination of lecture, presentation and interactive discussions. Course topics, dates, and times (all times Pacific) below. Registration

Topic	Date / Start Times
Data Platform Online: Data Platform Modernization	September 6 - 8am & 5pm
Data Platform Online: Mission Critical Application Platform	September 7 - 8am & 5pm
Data Platform Online: Application Platform Migration	September 8 - 8am & 5pm
Data Platform Online: The new sales tools for Data Warehouse and Big Data	September 13 - 8am, 5pm
Data Platform Online: Modern Business Intelligence	September 14 - 8am, 5pm
Data Platform Online: Accelerating digital transformation through Advanced Analytics solutions	September 15 – 8am, 5pm

In addition to the Data Platform sessions, there are a series of Datacenter training sessions being delivered in the coming weeks. These sessions are online, live, and interactive sales training in which participants learn about key Microsoft Datacenter solutions and sales scenarios. The seven live sessions each last one hour and are offered on one day with two delivery times to accommodate global time zones. Full details below.

August 16, 2016 – 9 a.m., 6 p.m. Pacific Hybrid Management & Security Overview Once data is in a hybrid environment, learn how Microsoft technology helps customers manage that information while keeping it secure. Link to 9 a.m. Registration Link to 6 p.m. Registration	August 17, 2016 – 9 a.m., 6 p.m. Pacific Running Linux workloads in Microsoft Azure The latest information and updates on running Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure. Link to 9 a.m. Registration Link to 6 p.m. Registration
August 18, 2016 – 9 a.m., 6 p.m. Pacific OMS Licensing Model Changes A review of current and upcoming changes to how OMS is licensed. Link to 9 a.m. Registration Link to 6 p.m. Registration	August 22, 2016 – 9 a.m., 6 p.m. Pacific Upgrading to WS 2016 with Security and Software Defined Datacenter Capabilities A review of strategies for selling new capabilities of Windows Server 2016 in an environment in which server OS upgrades remain low on the priority list for IT Pros. Link to 9 a.m. Registration Link to 6 p.m. Registration
August 23, 2016 – 9 a.m., 6 p.m. Pacific Winning Disaster Recovery and Migration Scenarios with Azure Site Recovery Learn the unique capabilities of Azure Site Recovery that will help you win disaster recovery and secure migration business. Link to 9 a.m. Registration Link to 6 p.m. Registration	August 24, 2106 – 9 a.m., 6 p.m. Securing Customers’ Hybrid Infrastructure with OMS A review of how Microsoft Operations Management Solutions can help you secure customers' hybrid infrastructure Link to 9 a.m. Registration Link to 6 p.m. Registration
August 30, 2016 – 9 a.m., 6 p.m. Pacific Hybrid & Public Cloud Infrastructure Overview A review of updates and new information for Microsoft infrastructure supporting hybrid and public cloud scenarios. Link to 9 a.m. Registration Link to 6 p.m. Registration

Speaking of readiness, on the Born To Learn Blog, Alison Cunard announced the Microsoft Professional Degree (MPD) Program. Initially, you’ll see the Microsoft Professional Degree in Data Science. Microsoft consulted Data Scientists and the companies that employ them to identify the requisite core skills. We then developed a curriculum to teach these functional and technical skills, combining highly rated online courses with hands-on labs, concluding in a final capstone project. You can start the classes now.
In addition to Ignite and the above training, I have line of site to great technical training coming to a location near you (plus virtual) on many, many Azure related topics. I’ll try to have more details for you in the September Luper’s Learnings.
Now that I’ve gotten all that training, readiness and enablement stuff out there, be sure to check out the new Azure solutions section on the azure.com web site. It now front ends the case studies by both giving you access to those customer case studies as well as giving you a solution pivot on Azure based solutions that include things like Disaster recovery, SAP on Azure and Remote monitoring with IoT. Really cool that the listed solutions each show some customer examples and, in many cases, the partner who delivered the solution.
Did you see Dan Plastina’s announcement Announcing Azure Information Protection. Microsoft Azure Information Protection is a new service that builds on both Microsoft Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS) and our recent acquisition of Secure Islands.
Geekwire reports on the 2016 Morgan Stanley CIO survey of 100 CIOs around the world. Read their coverage - Azure rising: Microsoft will be largest Infrastructure as a Service vendor by 2019, says new Morgan Stanley survey
At WPC, you may have heard Gavriella Schuster say “…we're doubling our investment in free software, cloud services, and platforms for our partners over the next year…”. Redmond Channel Partner has a bit of coverage and the beginnings of some specifics in Scott Bekker’s What It Means for Microsoft To 'Double Investment' in IUR.
If you or others in your organization have AWS skills, take a look at the five part series, Microsoft Azure for Amazon AWS Cloud Professionals.
You know that I’m excited about OSS and Linux solutions running on Azure. Back at //build, we announced that BASH would be coming to Windows 10. I wonder if and how you can use that in combination with your Azure projects? See Step-By-Step: Enabling Bash on Windows 10 from CANITPRO.

Read Andrew Conway’s post discussing Enterprise Mobility Suite becomes Enterprise Mobility + Security and other details on AAD Premium and Azure Information Protection.
You know that a virtual machine can encounter issues caused by user configurations or host infrastructure. If you have exhausted all other options under the troubleshooting menu, we suggest redeploying your virtual machine to a new host. The original virtual machine, including the local disk, is deleted, and the configurations and associated resources are transferred to a new virtual machine of the same size on a new Azure host. As part of our commitment to provide better customer service, when a virtual machine is redeployed, we pull the logs from the original host to see if we can prevent a similar issue in the future. Full instructions are available for either Linux or Windows virtual machines.
Microsoft historically offered two synchronization tools with Azure AD: "DIRSYNC" for single forest customers and "Azure AD Sync" for multi-forest and other advanced capabilities. These older tools have been replaced with the single solution, Azure AD Connect, for all scenarios. Dirsync and Azure AD Sync are no longer being updated and have now been deprecated. These two synchronization clients will no longer be supported after April 13, 2017. Andreas Kjellman shared details, schedule and transition guidance. The clock is ticking.
Speaking of identity, recently Gartner recognized Microsoft as a Leader, positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision, in the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Identity and Access Management as a Service, Worldwide. You can access the report here. Alex Simons commented on the results and report in his blog post.
Since I connected the dots from Identity to Identity, now I’ll connect the dots from Gartner to Gartner. Brad Anderson announced “…that Gartner has recognized Microsoft with a visionary placement for Microsoft Intune and the Enterprise Mobility Suite in the Enterprise Mobility Management Magic Quadrant.” You also have access to that report here. In only its second year on the Gartner Identity and Access Management as a Service, Worldwide Magic Quadrant Microsoft was placed in the "Leader" quadrant, far to the right for our completeness of vision. Nice.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the IoT team posted Azure Logic Apps facilitates rapid integration for IoT solutions talking a bit about Logic Apps, Connectors and IoT in light of the announcement from Frank Weigel of Azure Logic Apps general availability.
If you use Azure App Service Web App, it’s possible that your web app might go down once in a while. Of course, you want to be able to answer the question, why was it down? Introducing appLens for Azure App Service Web App. It’s a self service tool to help you figure out the answer to that question.
The latest batch of updates to Azure Batch service capabilities was announced in mid June.
At Build 2016, we announced a limited preview of Azure Service Fabric on Linux, which you can use to build, deploy, and manage cloud applications by using the same core technology that Microsoft has used to build massively scalable solutions on Windows. Read Mani Ramaswamy’s blog post for details and you can now sign up for the preview to check it out.
Also in preview, New version of Azure Active Directory PowerShell cmdlets. Download AzureADPreview and read complete documentation here.
Check out the free preview of Microsoft Stream, a new business video service that democratizes access to and discovery of video at work. Anyone with a business email address can sign up for the preview in seconds and begin uploading, sharing and tagging videos in their organization. Preview announcement. Stream blog. Get started.
I’m torn between “it’s cool” and “it’s informative.” Watch this long (46 minute) episode of Cloud Cover. Haishi Bai is joined by Any Glover of Netflix to talk about Spinnaker, Netflix's open source, multi-cloud, global Continuous Delivery platform. Spinnaker is designed to be pluggable, allowing different tasks, models and targets to be incorporated into the deployment pipeline. It supports various deployment targets such as Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Platform, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry. Now with Microsoft's contribution, Spinnaker also deploys to Microsoft Azure! Check it out.
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer was updated last week. It allows you to easily work with Azure Storage from any platform, anywhere. It’s free and downloadable for Windows, Mac and Linux.
You want your share (or more) of the “greater cloud spending” that IDC predicts will exceed $500 billion by 2020? Definitely take advantage of the Cloud profitability resources and scenarios.
Lastly, from time to time I really enjoy being able to call out some Azure momentum. Here are a few highlights of services that became Generally Available in the past 60 days (I only highlighted 16 below but there were more!)
- IaaS migration from classic to Resource Manager
- Azure Security Center
- Azure Active Directory B2C
- Always Encrypted for Azure SQL Database
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse
- Service Bus Premium Messaging released to general availability
- Microsoft R Server for Linux virtual machines
- Microsoft Power BI Embedded
- HDInsight Tools for IntelliJ
- SQL Server Stretch Database
- Spark on HDInsight
- Bing APIs in Microsoft Cognitive Services
- Scale data across the globe with Azure DocumentDB multiple-region replication
- Git integration for API Management
- Azure Active Directory conditional access
- Windows 10 Enterprise State Roaming via Azure Active Directory Premium
- Plus… Two new Azure regions are generally available to customers in the United States and across the globe: West US 2 and West Central US. That brings Azure to 34 regions announced with 26 of them generally available - more than any other major cloud provider. Stay current on what regions are up and running and which services are available in those regions.

Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the July / August Luper’s Learnings. And, again, apologies for it getting to you a few days later than usual. I’d love your input for topics for the September edition let me know what they are!

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (June 2016)

Lupes — Sun, 12 Jun 2016 10:28:22 GMT

This is the last Luper’s Learnings for Microsoft’s Fiscal Year 2016. I hope that you’ve found value from these emails over the past year. Your input continues to make this a more valuable resource. Please keep the suggestions coming via Twitter and email. Thanks so much for your patience. With all the excitement closing our FY16 and planning going on for our new Fiscal Year (FY17) on 1 July, it’s taken me longer than I had planned to get this edition to you. It would be wonderful to hear from you -- both stories you have of how Luper’s Learnings has impacted you individually, your Azure partner organization or your customers as well as any suggestions you have for improving Luper’s Learnings in the coming year. Being able to talk about your stories here in Redmond enables me to continue to get time and investment to share my Learnings with you each month. Please share any short stories you have by email to luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. Thanks! Here we go with my Learnings from the last month…

Two of Microsoft’s biggest and best conferences take place within the next few months. The first, coming up just about a month from today is our Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). As I mentioned in the May Luper’s Learnings, WPC is taking place in Toronto, Canada from 10 July – 14 July. It’s generally not a conference that purely technical folks from partners attend. If, however, you’re in a role with business and commercial responsibilities as well and will be there, please make a point to say ‘hi’ as I’ll be there the whole week.
I’ve also told you previously about Ignite in Atlanta in September. It’s the premier conference for partners to go for in person, deep dive technical training on all topics Azure. Plans are just starting to come together for an Azure Partner Networking Happy Hour during Ignite. If you’ll be at Ignite watch this space for more details and, of course, feel free to reach out to me to make sure that we connect during the week of Ignite.

The news is nearly a month old at this point but there’s no end to the growth of the geographies where Azure is available. Azure CVP Takeshi Numoto announced that our Toronto and Quebec City datacenter regions became generally available and that we’ll be expanding into South Korea including a datacenter region in Seoul. I can’t recall if I’ve shared it previously... the Azure Regions page lists the regional locations where Azure is hosted in addition to a great table of which services are available by region.
Microsoft is unique among cloud vendors in our on-premises roots. That is key to what many customers are looking for, a hybrid cloud offering. In May, James Staten, Chief Strategist for Cloud + Enterprise wrote Hybrid cloud: How you can take advantage of the best of both worlds which includes a link to the Enterprise Cloud Strategy ebook I promoted here in March.
I have told you about DevTest Labs’ progression from Private Preview (October) through Public Preview (April and May). Now it’s time to tell you that Azure DevTest Labs became generally available at the end of May. DevTest Labs is your self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create dev/test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs.
- Not sure you get it? Watch this three minute video for an explanation.
- Tom Archer also published a What is DevTest Labs? article.
- A brief walkthrough -- Create custom images from a lab VM
- You can provide your feedback in the DevTest Labs Feedback Forum.
- I’m pretty sure that they above will cover what you’re looking for but do take a look at Xiaoying Guo’s detailed announcement of General Availability.
You may recall that in April, after Build, you heard about Cognitive Services. The Speaker Recognition API entered public preview in May.
Happy Birthday ARM! Azure Resource Manager (ARM) began offering support for IaaS via templates around May 2015. Today there are over 350 community contributed Azure Quickstart Templates in the catalog. You can consume and contribute at this GitHub repo. You’ll find that there’s no shortage of guidance on how to take advantage of, create and contribute ARM templates.
- Regular IT Guy – Making an ARM template from SCRATCH
- Azure and the Modern Data Center - Deployment with ARM templates and GIT
- Visual Studio ALM Rangers - How to create an Azure ARM template in Visual Studio 2015
- Tobias Zimmergren – Azure Resource Manager (8 part series, so far)
- MVA - Deep Dive into Azure Resource Manager Scenarios and Patterns
- Rick Rainey - Deploy an Azure Resource Manager Template
- Tom FitzMacken - Authoring Azure Resource Manager templates
- Nava Vaisman Levy - Resource Manager template walkthrough
- Kirk Evans - Creating ARM Templates with Azure Resource Explorer
- Microsoft + Open Source - APT fun with ARM templates
- CANITPRO - DevOps Basics: Infrastructure as Code – ARM Templates
- Paulo Marques - Azure ARM Template to deploy a new VM in a new storage account deployed at same time from a custom image
- opsgility – Introduction to Automating IaaS with ARM and PowerShell
- opsgility – Introduction to ARM Templates with Visual Studio 2015
In February, Eugene Shvets announced the public preview of Azure Search indexers for Blob storage. They have the ability to crack open and index major document formats, including PDF, Microsoft Office, HTML, JSON, and more. Now, in May, he announced that the Blob storage indexer can now parse JSON blobs and select any part of the JSON payload for indexing in Azure Search. Currently, this functionality is in preview. Read the comprehensive Indexing Documents in Azure Blob Storage with Azure Search for more info.
The Mailbag series on the Enterprise Mobility and Security Blog came to my attention recently. You’re bound to find a number of nuggets in the over a dozen posts since the series started in December. A few that caught my eye:
- Azure Subscriptions and Azure AD
- MFA Q&A, Round 4!
- Azure AD Connect Health
- PowerShell Tips and Tricks!
While we’re on the topic of Azure AD, More preview enhancements have been added for Azure AD B2C.
Azure Automation is pretty cool. Just over a month ago Chris Sanders updated his post telling us that Azure Automation and Azure Virtual Machines have released a new feature allowing you to configure Virtual Machine (VM) alerts to run Automation runbooks. In May, in addition to choose a standard task, like restarting or stopping the VM in response to an alert, you can now choose to run a custom task (Azure Automation runbook) when the alert is triggered via your custom Automation runbooks to respond to the VM alert with your own workflow steps. BTW, the Azure Automation Cmdlets reference is here.
Speaking of Runbooks… The Azure Automation Runbook Gallery has been updated and now pulls runbook content from the PowerShell Gallery in addition to Script Center.
Azure Backup became Generally Available in the Azure Portal. Now you can seamlessly back up Azure Resource Manager-based virtual machines, as well as virtual machines created from the Azure classic portal, under the newly introduced recovery services vault.
Manoj Kumar Jain announced Azure Site Recovery now has a simplified experience plus support for ARM and CSP.
I get asked pretty regularly about platform-supported migration of ASM (classic) VMs to ARM. In May we announced the public preview of this capability. Documentation including capabilities, experience and current limitations is here.
If you are using Azure Mobile Services, remember that we are transitioning from Azure Mobile Services to Azure App Service. While no action is required on your part, please note the management experience will change. You may choose to migrate prior to September 1, 2016 or wait until Azure migrates you. Announcement.
Mid-June 2016 brings compatibility level 130 for new Azure SQL databases - Azure SQL Database runs millions of databases under several different T-SQL versions, preserving backward compatibility for applications. SQL Database implements a versioning technique called "compatibility level." Use of compatibility level 130 enables developers to benefit from SQL Server 2016 query processor enhancements. The enhancements can improve your query executions by leveraging new features such as parallel plan execution, serial batch mode execution, and new query plan estimates, to name a few.
The May 2016 update to Azure SQL Data Warehouse added several features. The short list, includes AAD authentication, Large-row support, Archival compression for clustered columnstore tables. A fuller explanation is here.
SQL Database Advisor and Performance dashboard have reached General Availability in the Azure Portal.
Announcing support for PHP 7.0 in Azure App Service and notice of PHP 5.4 retirement - Back in November, we announced the availability of PHP 7 on App Service in an experimental capacity. With that announcement you were able to leverage PHP 7 (x86) on App Service using a site extension. A few weeks later, a second site extension was released which delivered PHP 7 (x64) support on App Service.
Azure Content Delivery Network from Akamai is now available. Overview of the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Via Azure Blockchain as a Service update #8 Microsoft announced that we joined the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a new trade association focused on the possibilities and potential of distributed ledgers.
If you want to experience an application running on Azure, but don’t want to create an Azure subscription or use a credit card, then you can take a free test drive without the commitment. Azure Test drives now allow you to launch a pre-configured image running on Azure with a couple of clicks, then explore, and finally decide whether it's right for you.
Are you that guy or gal who occasionally edits or deletes the wrong thing (I can hear you saying “me? I’d never do that!”) As I’ve done it a time or two, I found it pretty cool when I heard about Resource lock management becoming available in the portal. If you take a look at the documentation, you’ll see that it’s a pretty simple way to prevent critical resources from being deleted accidentally and creates an extra safety check when you do want to really delete those resources. Ok. Resource locks aren’t new as Michael Collier wrote about them a year ago but you’ll notice that he was talking about using PowerShell and ARM templates at the time. In addition to those options, those locks are now exposed and manageable in the Portal.
If you use Azure Scheduler, you’ll be interested to know about the P10 and new P20 Premium plans and related pricing.
A wee bit of news you may have heard about a few weeks ago. SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud. One of the highlights is that SAP and Microsoft announced joint plans to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA platform deployed on Microsoft Azure.
If you are doing or learning about Machine Learning, I stumbled across the 8 Best Machine Learning Cheat Sheets.
Closing out, I want to share a few recent cloud cover and Azure Friday episodes with you.
- Using Azure CDN features in the Azure Portal
- Using Azure Container Service with Docker
- Azure Web Apps introduces Local Cache
- Developer Tools for the Azure CDN
- Episode 205: Azure Functions with Chris Anderson
- Episode 206: Bot Framework with Mike Hall
- Episode 207: Netflix Spinnaker on Azure with Andy Glover, Richard Guthrie, and Arun Chandrasekhar
Fun comment / tip for the month -- en-us --- Yup. I’m that American who works in Redmond, builds these emails every month and sends them to you. Therefore, all of the URLs I copied from my Edge browser know that I speak English and that I’m in the US. I had a couple of partners point this out to me in my recent travels. Much of our content is localized for language and geography. If English isn’t your first language or you are in a country other than the US, and you want to use the many, many URLs that I share in Luper’s Learnings, I have two tips for you. First, consider replacing the “en-us” in the URLs I link to with whatever is appropriate for your language and geography (es-es for Spanish and Spain, fr-fr for French in France, pt-br for Brazilian Portuguese etc..) Second, don’t forget that many Microsoft web pages will do that for you if you scroll down to the very bottom of the page and select your language. On the azure.microsoft.com web site, the language control looks like and is to the right of “Hello from Seattle.” In the footer of the page.

Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the June Luper’s Learnings. And, again, apologies for it getting to you a few days later than usual. I’d love your input for topics for the July edition let me know what they are!

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (May 2016)

Lupes — Thu, 05 May 2016 10:10:35 GMT

Last month’s Luper’s Learnings was a bit overwhelming so I tried to scale this one down a touch. Your input continues to make this a more valuable resource. Please keep the suggestions coming via Twitter and email. Speaking of input, I do have a selfish ask for you this month. It’s amazing to see the growth in subscribers from inside Microsoft and Azure partners around the world. In addition to being able to talk about number of recipients, I would be very appreciative for you to share any stories you have of how Luper’s Learnings has impacted you individually, your Azure partner organization or your customers. Being able to talk about your stories here in Redmond enables me to continue to get time and investment to share my Learnings with you each month. Please share any short stories you have by email to luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. Thanks! Here we go with my Learnings from the last month…

In April I spent 10 days meeting with partners in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. It was very rewarding to hear about some of the great solutions that partners like Perception Group, Prisma, Lagash, Metric Arts, Netmark, Icom and many others are delivering. Don’t be offended if I didn’t mention you, I had 1:1 meetings with over 20 partners and participated in terrific 1:many events in Santiago and Bogota in addition to attending the Global Azure Bootcamp event in Mexico City on 16 April. Thanks so much to our Azure BDMs and PTSes for organizing and giving me the opportunity to meet with local Microsoft teams and our wonderful Azure partners.
Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is taking place in Toronto, Canada from 10 July – 14 July. It’s generally not a conference that technical folks from partners attend so don’t feel obligated to go if you are in a purely technical role J. If you are a partner principal, practice director or have some focus / emphasis on the commercial aspects of your company’s business and relationship with Microsoft, you might consider attending. It’s a great opportunity to meet and network with Microsoft folks from Redmond and around the world as well as a chance to meet other partners from your geography as well as many, many other countries. Registration is available here. I’ll be there so let me know if you want to connect during the conference.
Now that I’ve mentioned the non-technical conference, don’t forget that registration is also open for Ignite in Atlanta in September. I’m planning to be there as well. It’s the premier conference for partners to go for in person, deep dive training on all topics Azure. If you are technical, come join me there!
DirSync and Azure AD Sync are hitting retirement age. As you may have seen in Andreas Kjellman’s post Upgrade Windows Azure Active Directory Sync (“DirSync”) and Azure Active Directory Sync (“Azure AD Sync”), the best way to connect on-premises directories with Azure AD is using Azure AD Connect. The other, older tools have been deprecated and are less than 12 months from no longer being supported.
Dustin Miller of BCG Systems asked if we could provide some further discussion and clarification around VPN devices. He saw the article from Cheryl McGuire, About VPN devices for Site-to-Site VPN Gateway connections. I’ve spoken with Cheryl. If you are implementing a device and using S2S VPNs with Azure and have additional questions, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll see about getting her to either update the article or comment on your questions here.
- WinBeta shared Azure CTO Mark Russinovich talks open source technologies and Microsoft’s Cloud
- Redmond Magazine’s coverage
- InformationWeeks’ coverage
- Corey Sanders short video announcement
- John Gossman’s announcement that Microsoft joins the new DC/OS open source project
- Ross Gardler posted about Containers in production with Marathon v1.0
- Azure Container Service page
- DC/OS site
- Mesos’ announcement of DC/OS.
- A bit about Windows Containers from Neil Peterson.Folks can’t contain their excitement about containers running in Windows and on Azure. Lots of interest and enthusiasm for the announcement in April that Azure Container Service is now generally available
Perhaps it didn’t make your radar with all of the Build noise. Ahmet Alp Balkan announced the Docker Volume Plugin for Azure File Storage within his post Persistent Docker volumes with Azure File Storage.
I feel like I share at least one blog post almost every month from Alexandre Brisebois. He posted a very in depth article on Getting to Know Azure Mobile App
Techmike2kx posted recently on his blog New toys : #Azure Web-Based Server Management Tools , And It’s A Lot!!!!!
Trust me, if you want to know anything about Security, Privacy, Compliance and Trust related to Azure or Microsoft’s other cloud services, the new Microsoft Trust Center is your one stop shop for that info.
Watch Seth Juarez’ 25 minute discussion An Introduction to Microservices with Mark Russinovich
Though I’m not a Slacker, you can read Christopher Anderson’s post from March Using the Azure WebJobs SDK to create custom Slack integrations.
In April on the Cyber Trust Blog we announced that Microsoft Cloud App Security is generally available. Cloud App Security, based on Microsoft’s Adallom acquisition, is a comprehensive cloud-delivered service built for IT and security teams to help combat one of the top security concerns today: “service built for IT and security teams to help combat one of the top security concerns today: “How can we gain deeper visibility, stronger controls and enhanced protection for cloud apps?”
Richard Kerslak (@kerslakerichard) recently posted the incredibly informative Using Azure Automation to run VMs during office hours only – using graphical runbooks
Azure Storage now offers two access tiers for Blob storage (object storage), so that you can store your data most cost-effectively depending on how you use it. Read the in depth documentation on Azure Blob Storage: Hot and Cool Access Tiers and get details on pricing here. Sripasad Bhat’s blog post Introducing Azure Cool Blob Storage might be interesting to you as well.
At //Build there was much discussion about intelligent bots. Adding color to the announcements was Jeff Hollan’s post Bot Framework made better with Azure.
You might be interested in a free eBook, Beaming up to the cloud: Mission briefings for open source IT leaders on hybrid cloud, auto-scaling, and microservices including hybrid distribution, smart scaling, and microservice architectures.
As I’ve told you in the past, the best place to keep up with Azure Service updates is this site or the RSS feed. A number of interesting Service Updates from the past month or so are below.
- Mobile Apps iOS Client SDK v3.1.0 released
- Active geo-replication available on all Azure SQL Database service tiers
- General availability: Azure Cool Blob storage
- Azure IoT Suite security articles added
- Azure App Service SSL certificates available for purchase
- Global search in the Azure portal
- Azure DevTest Labs: Introducing formulas to create VMs productively
There are any number of ways for you and your customers to get support on Azure including Azure Support for Customers (several different options) and Advanced Support for Partners. Remember that @AzureSupport is there for you on Twitter as “The official Microsoft Azure account for improving customer experience by connecting the Azure community to the right resources: answers, support, and experts”
Not sure if you have ever wondered but I’ve been curious What is an Azure elastic database pool? Sidney Higa updated this article just last week.
On the Cloud Practitioners’ Blog, Michael Gibson of 10^th Magnitude is joined by Brian McGinnis, Microsoft Azure BDM to talk about ISVs: Do More with Azure, The Manhattans Project
I love to read about the awesome things that customers are using Azure for. Every 2 – 3 months I include a list of some cool customer stories that are publically referenceable. In the table below, you’ll see 18 customer stories from March and April from customers with locations in 15 different countries. All of them have some component of Azure in their solution and many of them received help from terrific partners like you. All published Azure case studies (more than 900 of them) can be found here.

Customer & story	Country	Partner
Aurelium	Belgium	aurelium
Sanoma Corporation	Finland & Netherlands
Rolls-Royce	UK
Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation	Russia
Habib University	Pakistan
dunnhumby	UK
Vigilant.IT	Australia	Vigilant.IT
NLogic	Canada	BDO Solutions
Motif Engineering	China, India & US	Bitscape Infotech
CBC/Radio-Canada	Canada
Docusign	US
hhpberlin – Ingenieure für Brandschutz GmbH	Germany	Colt Technology Services
Chatime Malaysia	Malaysia
Jet.com	US
University of Phayao	Thailand	Lannacom
HRT, a Croatian radio and TV broadcaster	Croatia	Span
Barry University	US	iam cloud
GoDataDriven	Netherlands	Xpirit

What are the teams talking about as being “In Development?” Of course, the broad Cloud Platform roadmap usually has interesting things on it on the Recently Available and Public Preview tabs as well.
You know that I always like to include a fun story or something interesting about the competition. In mid April, TechRepublic posted AWS and Microsoft Azure at the center of IT's most exciting change in decades. According to the article, “When asked, ‘Which IT mega-vendor will be most critical and indispensable to your organization's IT environment in the future, and why?,’ Amazon Web Services, far and away today's market share leader, doesn't sit atop the heap.” You’ll see that CIOs answered almost 47% in favor of Microsoft compared to 13% for AWS.
And, finally… I REALLY need to read Understanding Azure—a guide for developers. Or maybe, I’ve got the Azure part but just need the developer part. Hmmm… If you are or you know a developer who could use a free eBook about relating Azure to you / them, check it out.

Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the May Luper’s Learnings. I’d love your input for topics for the June edition let me know what they are!