Dr. Ranveer Chandra, the Chief Scientist of Azure Global, talks about his ground-breaking work to democratize AI in the agricultural industry.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode312.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/21b00130fc/?location=EUS2

Resources:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/farmbeats-iot-agriculture/

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/microsoftfarmbeats.microsoft_farmbeats?tab=Overview

Other updates:

Microsoft Sustainability Calculator provides insights into IT carbon emissions

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/microsoft-sustainability-calculator-provides-insights-into-it-carbon-emissions/

Cross Team Dashboard
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/create-dashboards-without-a-team/

Azure Active Directory support in Azure Database for MySQL
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-active-directory-support-in-azure-database-for-mysql/

Jason Stevens, a Software Engineer in the Commercial Software Engineering group at Microsoft, explains how Pivotal software can be deployed on Azure and gives us fascinating insights into some of the magic behind the scenes that makes it happen.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode311.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/c1d626922f/?location=EUS2

Resources:

https://www.cloudfoundry.org/
https://pivotal.io/partners/microsoft-azure
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/pivotal/

Other updates:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security/solving-tls1-problem

Azure Lab Services—Virtual machine shutdown for Windows users

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-lab-services-virtual-machine-shutdown-for-windows-users/>

Azure Lab Services—Multiple owners for lab and lab management

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-lab-services-multiple-owners-for-lab-and-lab-management/>

Azure DevTest Labs—Browser connect now generally available

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-devtest-labs-browser-connect-now-generally-available/>

Learning from cryptocurrency mining attack scripts on Linux
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/learning-from-cryptocurrency-mining-attack-scripts-on-linux/

In this round-table discussion, Cynthia, Kendall, Cale, Evan and Sujit weigh-in on what Azure features they are most excited about for 2020.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode310.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/8c5dfae1ef/

Resources:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/load-balancing-overview

Other Updates:

Azure SQL Database Gen 4 hardware approaching end of life in 2020

To address customer security and manageability requirements, managed instance, a deployment capability of Azure SQL Database, is transitioning from a manual to service-aided subnet configuration.

Advancing no-impact and low-impact maintenance technologies
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/advancing-noimpact-and-lowimpact-maintenance-technologies/
Azure Lighthouse: The managed service provider perspective
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-lighthouse-the-managed-service-provider-perspective/
Tips for learning Azure in the new year
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/tips-for-learning-azure-in-the-new-year/

Paulo Renato, a Principal Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft works with large GISVs and he tells us about the massive scale to which these customers have to consume Azure and how best to manage this consumption.

Resources:

Azure Architecture Center: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/;
Azure Security Fundamentals: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/;
Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-adoption-framework/

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode309.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/c9c5ebea80/?location=EUS2

Other updates:

Proximity placement groups—an Azure Virtual Machine logical grouping capability to decrease inter-VM network latency—is now available.

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/proximity-placement-groups-are-now-available/>

Azure Private Link support in AKS now in preview

https://aka.ms/aks/docs/private-cluster

Microsoft recently announced plans to establish a new cloud datacenter region in Qatar to deliver its intelligent, trusted cloud services and expand the Microsoft global cloud infrastructure to 55 cloud regions in 20 countries. The new region is anticipated to be available starting with Microsoft Azure in 2021, and Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to follow.

New enhancements for Azure IoT Edge automatic deployments
"https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-enhancements-for-azure-iot-edge-automatic-deployments/"https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-enhancements-for-azure-iot-edge-automatic-deployments/
Better performance with bursting enhancement on Azure Disks
"https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/better-performance-with-bursting-enhancement-on-azure-disks/"https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/better-performance-with-bursting-enhancement-on-azure-disks/

Announcing the preview of Azure Spot Virtual Machines
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-preview-of-azure-spot-virtual-machines/"https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-preview-of-azure-spot-virtual-machines/

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/11/25/what-is-a-cryptocurrency-anyway/

Jie Feng, a Senior PM in the Azure Data team, gives us the low-down on the new Data Share service that went GA at Ignite. She provides use-cases for the service, tells us how it works and how to access it.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode308.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/2442844626/?location=EUS2

Resources:

Demo videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/azure-data-share
Product website: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/data-share/
Documentations: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-share/

Other updates:

Azure Sphere guardian module simplifies & secures brownfield IoT
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-sphere-guardian-module-simplifies-secures-brownfield-iot/
Introducing maintenance control for platform updates
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/maintenance-control-for-platform-updates/
Networking enables the new world of Edge and 5G Computing
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/networking-enables-the-new-world-of-edge-and-5g-computing/
Building Xbox game streaming with Site Reliability best practices
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-xbox-game-streaming-with-site-reliability-best-practices/

Evan talks about a recent support case he worked on and how it's easy to blame Azure for everything that goes wrong when moving to the Cloud.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode307.mp3

Transcript:

Other updates:

Support to assess physical servers is now available in Azure preview, in addition to existing support for VMware and Hyper-V servers. The appliance for physical servers can be installed on an existing Windows server. This feature can be used to assess virtual machines where there is no access to the hypervisor, as well as virtual machines on any cloud. For more details, refer to the documentation

Azure HDInsight now supports the use of service tags to simplify inbound network security group (NSG) rule management. Azure service tags group multiple IP addresses under a single user friendly tag. Administrators need to only create rules by referring to the tags while Microsoft takes the responsibility of keeping the IP addresses up to date. Administrators maintaining Azure HDInsight clusters can now benefit from this manageability improvement.

Now in preview for the East US and UK South regions only, Azure Database for MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL provides support for service health notifications for planned maintenance.

Web Application Firewall—New bot protection rule now in preview
Updated: December 09, 2019
A new bot protection ruleset (Microsoft_BotManagerRuleSet_1.0) is now in preview for Azure Web Application Firewall with Azure Front Door service. Adding to this updated ruleset are three bot categories—good, bad, and unknown. There are multiple bot groups within each category. Bot signatures are managed and dynamically updated by Web Application Firewall service. The default action for bad bot groups is set to Block, for the verified search engine crawlers group it’s set to Allow, and for the unknown bot category it’s set to Log. Customers may overwrite the default action with Allow, Block, Log, or Redirect for any type of bot groups. 
For more details, see bot protection overview. 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/new-bot-protection-rule-set-in-public-preview-for-web-application-firewall-waf-with-azure-front-door-service/

Senior PM and all-round identity guru Jef Kazimer talks about the various Identity solutions in Azure and gives us some great tips and tricks in utilizing Azure AD effectively to safeguard our Azure resources.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode306.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/390d93117c/?location=EUS2 

Resources:

http://aka.ms/azureadblog
http://aka.ms/enableMFA
http://aka.ms/resilientaad

Other resources:

Monitor health of Kubernetes clusters:
• Managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Azure Container Instances
• Self-managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Stack or on-premises
• Azure Red Hat OpenShift

From <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/insights/container-insights-overview>

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/understand-kubernetes-cluster-health-with-azure-monitor-for-containers/

Azure DevTest Labs : Azure managed identities to deploy lab environments
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-devtest-labs-azure-managed-identities-to-deploy-lab-environments/

Introducing Azure Cost Management for partners
As a partner, you play a critical role in successful planning and managing long-term cloud implementations for your customers. While the cloud grants the flexibility to scale the cloud infrastructure to the changing needs, it does become challenging to control the spend when cloud costs can fluctuate dramatically with demand.

GitHub Actions for Azure is now generally available
GitHub Actions make it possible to create simple yet powerful workflows to automate software compilation and delivery integrated with GitHub. These actions, defined in YAML files, allow you to trigger an automated workflow process on any GitHub event, such as code commits, creation of Pull Requests or new GitHub Releases, and more.

Democratizing agriculture intelligence: introducing Azure FarmBeats
At Microsoft Ignite, we launched the preview of Azure FarmBeats, a purpose-built, industry-specific solution accelerator built on top of Azure to enable actionable insights from data.
Azure Migrate—Assessment of imported servers is now supported in preview

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/assessment-of-imported-servers-now-supported-in-preview/>

Senior PM Andrew Liu from the Azure Cosmos DB Team, is back on the show to share his passion for Cosmos DB and gives us all the service updates announced at Ignite 2019.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode305.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/ce89868c53/?location=EUS2

Other updates:

Autoscale for Azure HDInsight is now generally available across all regions for Apache Spark and Hadoop workloads. This feature makes it possible to operate your big data analytics workloads in a more cost-efficient and productive way, so you can drive higher use of your HDInsight clusters and pay only for what you need.

Support is now available for up to 16 TB of storage and up to 20,000 IOPS in Azure Database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL.

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2019/11/07/new-in-azure-synapse-analytics-cicd-for-sql-analytics-using-sql-server-data-tools/
The highest requested feature for Azure Synapse Analytics is now available—SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) Database projects. This release includes support for SSDT with Visual Studio 2019, along with native platform integration with Azure DevOps, providing built-in continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) capabilities for enterprise level deployments.

Partner Development Manager Rob Davies gives us insights into how we should optimize Azure resources in our subscriptions.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode304.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/05e62b9782/?location=EUS2

Resources:
Nerdio’s overview of cloud Cost Models: https://getnerdio.com/academy/8-reasons-to-move-your-data-center-to-microsoft-azure/

US Datacenter Optimization (Rob’s team): https://aka.ms/usdco

Other updates:

Ignite announcements: https://news.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/prod/sites/563/2019/11/Ignite-2019-Book-of-News.pdf   87 pages of announcements - 175 separate announcements!
Ignite sessions https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions

Enterprise Grade Hyperledger Fabric on AKS
https://forms.microsoft.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180BHbR7qjd5hfTu5PodOg2ZvLp7BUMElGTFRCSjdaTzNGMzcwRjJDUUROVkYzUS4u
Blockchain Data Manager
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/data-manager
Azure Blockchain Tokens
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/tokens/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/tokenization-establishing-digital-representations-of-val-ue-as-the-medium-of-exchange/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/web-apps-migration-experience-now-available-in-azure-migrate/

New Azure Dav4-series and Eav4-series virtual machines (VMs) based on AMD EPYC™ are now available. They are ideal for general purpose and memory intensive workloads.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-kubernetes-service-aks-support-for-authenticated-ips-is-now-available/
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for authenticated IPs is now availableAzure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for authenticated IPs is now availableAzure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for authenticated IPs is now available

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-kubernetes-service-aks-support-for-azure-availability-zones-is-now-available/
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for Azure Availability Zones is now available

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-spot-vms-are-now-in-preview/

Azure generation 2 virtual machines (VMs) are now generally available

Azure Sphere will be generally available in February 2020. General availability will mark our readiness to fulfill our security promise at scale, and to put the power of Microsoft’s expertise to work for our customers every day.
Azure Sphere’s mission is to empower every organization on the planet to connect and create secured and trustworthy IoT devices. To deliver on this, we’ve made several strategic investments and partnerships that make it possible to meet our customers wherever they are on their IoT journey. General availability will be an important milestone for Azure Sphere as we continue our work to give our customers and partners greater opportunities to securely shape the future. 

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-sphere-announces-ga-timing-for-2020/>

Azure Serial Console is coming to Government Cloud, with the same functionality and same GUI.

Vijay Sistla, a Principal PM in Azure Backup, gives us a sneak peak at some exciting announcements that will be announced at Ignite 2019 next week.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode303.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/8b7ebb582c/?location=EUS2

Other updates:

Azure Event Grid is now available on Azure IoT Edge

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/service-map-available-in-south-central-us-west-us-central-us-north-central-us-east-asia-and-central-india-regions/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/new-azure-iot-central-features-available/