Kendall and Cynthia talk with Sujay Talasila and Won Huh on how to think about Disaster Recovery, differences that need to be considered between Disaster Recovery and Backups, and recommended practices that users should consider.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode281.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/48a5536153

Cynthia talks with Satya Vel on the latest ARM template updates including an enhanced template export experience, best practices for ARM clients, and new capabilities that are now available on ARM templates.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode280.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/cd48c483cc/

Kendall and Cynthia talk with Matthew Henderson on the latest updates on Azure Functions including Azure Functions on Kubernetes with KEDA, PowerShell language support, and stateful entities.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode279.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/9a12088a97/

In this first show from Build 2019, Cynthia and Kendall talk with Byron Tardif and Nitasha Verma about what is new on Azure App Service and the Azure App Service Migration Assistant to migrate sites from Windows or Linux Server to a Azure App Service.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode278.mp3 

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/e8e6b273dc

Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect Nills Franssens discussed a cool approach to help customers automate the network security settings in Azure to reduce errors and improve traceability of the infrastructure.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode277.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/c30d2920e9/ 

Resources:

https://github.com /NillsF/NSG-CSV-to-ARM

https://www.slideshare.net/NillsFranssens/automating-network-firewall-rule-creation-using-powershell-and-cicd

Other updates:

Because we’re committed to delivering consistent, high performance and mission-ready solutions to Azure Government customers, we’re continually optimizing our cloud datacenter infrastructure to be more efficient and cost-effective. As part of this optimization, we’ll be retiring the Azure US Gov Iowa region on April 30, 2020, and you’ll need to migrate your resources to an alternative region to avoid service disruption. As with all changes of this type, we’re providing 12 months’ notice so you have adequate time to adjust.
We operate three additional government regions, all of which provide similar or enhanced capabilities to the US Gov Iowa region, including:
 · Access to a more comprehensive and growing portfolio of Azure services.
 · Identical comprehensive compliance and resiliency options.
 · High performance through our dedicated low-latency network.
Required action
Take these steps by April 30, 2020, to avoid disruptions to your applications and enjoy quality and feature updates:
 1. Choose from three alternate US Gov regions, located in Virginia, Texas and Arizona, for your Azure resources. We recommend the US Gov Virginia region, as it has the greatest number of available Azure services.
 2. Follow this comprehensive guidance to migrate to that region.
We encourage you to review the migration guidance at your earliest convenience and plan accordingly.

Monitoring enhancements for VMware and physical workloads protected with Azure Site Recovery
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/monitoring-enhancements-vmware-physical-azure/

Accelerate supercomputing in the cloud with Cray ClusterStor
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/supercomputing-in-the-cloud-announcing-three-new-cray-in-azure-offers/
Azure.Source - Volume 80
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-source-volume-80/
Serverless automation using PowerShell preview in Azure Functions
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/serverless-automation-using-powershell-preview-in-azure-functions/

General availability: Azure Log Analytics in CENTRAL US, EAST US 2, EAST ASIA, WEST US and SOUTH CENTRAL US
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-azure-log-analytics-in-central-us-east-us-2-east-asia-west-us-south-central-us/

Ryan Berry, an Azure Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, talks about his own YouTube Channel where they distill down complex topics into bite sized chunks to make it easy for you to quickly leverage these features to address similar requirements you may have for moving something into Azure.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode276.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/aa1007987f/ 

http://cloudsimplified.io/

Other updates:

Dual Stack IPv4/IPv6 connectivity with full IPv6 support for Virtual Networks is now available. This lets you bring your private IPv6 space into Azure and enables connectivity over IPv6 within your Virtual Networks. With this, you’re able to address IPv4 depletion, meet regulatory requirements, and expand into the growing mobile and IoT markets with your Azure-based applications.
Dual stack Virtual Network also:
 · Builds on long-established Azure VM-to-internet IPv6 connectivity.
 · Enables fully IPv6 architectures to be hosted in Azure with IPv6 connectivity between virtual machines (VMs) in a virtual network, using IPv6 network security group rules, IPv6 user-defined routes, and load balancing across VMs. 
 · Allows Azure you to define your own IPv6 address space to meet the needs of your applications or customers.
 · Provides “dual stack upgrade-in-place” where you can add IPv6 connectivity to your existing applications without re-deploying.
 · Provides maximum service deployment flexibility, so a single service instance can connect with both IPv4 and IPv6-capable internet clients.
Dual Stack connectivity will preview globally in all Azure Public cloud regions—try it out in a region that’s convenient for you.
IPv6 is used by:
 · Government or customers in highly regulated industries.
 · Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications that use the enormous number of IPv6 addresses available.
 · Customers who want native (not translated) connectivity from their Azure applications to IPv6 mobile devices. 
 · Customers who deploy service instances in Azure with dedicated per customer connectivity.
 · Customers moving to the cloud (or hybrid) struggling with the exhaustion of their IPv4 space and the inability or expense of acquiring more IPv4. 

5 tips to get more out of Azure Stream Analytics Visual Studio Tools
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/5-tips-to-get-more-out-of-azure-stream-analytics-visual-studio-tools/

AI for Good: Developer challenge!
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ai-for-good- developer-challenge/

We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Cost Management features for all Pay-As-You-Go and Azure Government customers that will greatly enhance your ability to analyze and proactively manage your cloud costs. 
These features will allow you to analyze your cost data, configure budgets to drive accountability for cloud costs, and export pre-configured reports on a schedule to support deeper data analysis within your own systems. This release for Pay-As-You-Go customers also provides invoice reconciliation support in the Azure portal via a usage csv download of all charges applicable to your invoices.

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cost-management-now-generally-available-for-pay-as-you-go-customers/>

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cost-management-now-generally-available-for-pay-as-you-go-customers/>

Derek Martin, a Technology Solutions Principal (TSP) at Microsoft talks about his approach to ensuring that customers get the foundational elements of Azure in place first before deploying anything else. He discusses why Microsoft is getting more opinionated, as a company, when advocating for best practices.

Derek's running 'notebook' of stuff he likes in Azure : https://azurenotes.tech/

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode275.mp3

Transcript: https://eus2.videoindexer.ai/accounts/e0eee289-7730-4999-978b-eb7f63be8cb5/videos/00eab8606c/ 

Other updates:

AzCopy Preview (v10) now supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 as a data source and can copy an entire AWS S3 bucket (or even multiple buckets) to Azure Blob storage.

https://blocklandcleveland.com/

David Blank-Edelman, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, gives us some great insight into what customers should be thinking about when it comes to the reliability of their cloud applications.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode274.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/5131a3c9-afcf-42cd-bc13-8350c734bb97/videos/2abe4aa27c/

Other updates:

We're excited to announce a new B-series VM size, B1ls, which has the smallest memory and lowest cost among Azure VM instances. This offering is in response to customers who were looking for entry-level offerings. B1ls has 512 MiB of memory and 1 vCPU, and it costs only $0.0052 (US East) per hour.
Target workloads
B1ls is best for small web servers, small databases, and development and test environments. It offers a cost-effective way to deploy workloads that don't need the full performance of the CPU continuously and burst in their performance.

B1ls is available only on Linux for the best customer experience. Windows is not supported because the minimum recommended memory for the Windows OS is larger than what B1ls offers.

Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage is now available. It provides an additional layer of security intelligence that detects unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit storage accounts.
This layer of protection allows you to address concerns about potential threats to your storage accounts, without needing to be an expert in security. Enabling it is quick and simple. Sign up in the Azure portal, or with standard Azure APIs (REST/PowerShell) for specific storage accounts or subscriptions. Once enabled, security alerts are triggered when suspicious activity occurs, and you can view them listed in Azure Security Center. Security alerts provide details of suspicious activity and recommends actions to take to investigate and mitigate the potential threat.

The identity experience framework orchestration platform of Azure Active Directory B2C (Azure AD B2C) is now available. This means that you can create your own user journeys and integrate with multiple identity providers and data sources, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) solution or loyalty system, to deliver first-class experiences. Use Azure AD B2C as a universal platform for gathering data feeds and applying that data to the user experience in your consumer applications to improve acquisition and retention. Azure AD B2C also offers several built-in templates for common user flows.

Azure Availability Zones, a high-availability solution for mission-critical applications, is now generally available in UK South.
Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region. Each Availability Zone consists of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. With the introduction of Availability Zones, we now offer a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% for uptime of virtual machines.

Want to evaluate your cloud analytics provider? Here are the three questions to ask.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/want-to-evaluate-your-cloud-analytics-provider-here-are-the-three-questions-to-ask/

How to accelerate DevOps with Machine Learning lifecycle management
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-to-accelerate-devops-with-machine-learning-lifecycle-management/

Bitnami Apache Airflow Multi-Tier now available in Azure Marketplace
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/bitnami-apache-airflow-multi-tier-now-available-in-azure-marketplace/

How Skype modernized its backend infrastructure using Azure Cosmos DB – Part 1
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-skype-modernized-its-backend-infrastructure-using-azure-cosmos-db-part-1/

How Skype modernized its backend infrastructure using Azure Cosmos DB – Part 2
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-skype-modernized-its-backend-infrastructure-using-azure-cosmos-db-part-2/

How Skype modernized its backend infrastructure using Azure Cosmos DB – Part 3
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-skype-modernized-its-backend-infrastructure-using-azure-cosmos-db-part-3/

Rasmus Lystrøm, a Senior Microsoft consultant from Denmark, shares his thoughts and ideas around building applications that take advantage of Azure and allow developers to focus on the business problem at hand.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode273.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/53c247e109/

Other updates:

Service Map: https://nnmer.github.io/azure-services-map/

Azure SQL Database's read scale-out support in the Premium and Business Critical service tiers is now generally available. 
This capability redirects the read-only client connections to one of the automatically provisioned HA replicas and effectively doubles the compute capacity of the database or elastic pool at no additional charge. This is ideal for load balancing of complex analytical workloads without affecting the primary OLTP workload.
enables you to monitor and detect abnormalities in your time series data with machine learning. The Anomaly Detector API adapts by automatically identifying and applying the best-fitting models to your data, regardless of industry, scenario, or data volume/ Custom vision available

Video Indexer has been enhanced with new features. It now automatically collects manual transcript edits into a new entry in the specific language model you use.  Use it to improve the accuracy of an out-of-the-box language model with manual edits over a period of time so it will align with your industry-specific vocabulary.

Another new feature is the ability to segment videos by semantic scenes based on visual cues. Scenes can now be used to group together a set of insights and refer to them as insights of the same context in order to deduce a more complex meaning from them. They can also be used as a unit and extracted as a clip from a longer video. Video Indexer also now has the ability to identify rolling credits at the end of a movie or TV show, which can be used by broadcasters to identify when to recommend a new program before losing the audience.

Security Center can now protect your VM scale sets.  With Security Center’s advanced threat detection capabilities, you can easily monitor the security posture of your VM scale sets with recommendations to reduce vulnerabilities and increase their overall security.
Security Center automatically discovers your VM scale sets and recommends that you install the monitoring agent to get better security assessments and enable events-based threat detection.

Azure Lab Services updates: GPU size, saving images, and connecting to on-premises resources
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azlabservices-featuresupdates-march2019/

Microsoft Azure portal April 2019 update
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-portal-april-update/

Shankar Sivadasan, a Senior Azure Product Marketing Manager, gives us all the details on how the trusty Azure Monitor service has evolved into the main monitoring solution in Azure.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode272.mp3

Transcript: https://www.videoindexer.ai/accounts/aca83d23-620b-46d6-beec-e920bff88847/videos/ac80ad036c/

Resources:

Azure Monitor overview - https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-monitor/overview
Kusto pluralsight course - https://aka.ms/KQLPluralsight
Blog post on dynamic thresholds - https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/announcing-azure-monitor-aiops-alerts-with-dynamic-thresholds/

Other updates:

Windows Virtual Desktop is the only service that delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes, while enjoying built-in security and compliance.
This means customers can now virtualize using multi-session Windows 10, Windows 7, and Windows Server desktops and apps (RDS) to Windows Virtual Desktop for a simplified management and deployment experience with Azure.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/larger-more-powerful-managed-disks-for-azure-virtual-machines/

New updates to Azure AI expand AI capabilities for developers
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-updates-to-azure-ai-expand-ai-capabilities-for-developers/

Azure Sphere ecosystem accelerates innovation
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-sphere-ecosystem-accelerates-innovation/

High-Throughput with Azure Blob Storage
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/high-throughput-with-azure-blob-storage/

Azure Data Box family meets customers at the edge
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-data-box-family-meets-customers-at-the-edge/