announcement

Joe Carlyle

Achievement Unlocked: Microsoft MVP

This is a blog post you may have read in one form or another before. I myself have read several of them recently, delighted for others in the community being recognised for their contributions (round of applause for 1 month veterans Gregor Suttie and Richard Hooper 😀 ). However, it’s not a post you imagine yourself writing.

However, as of September 1st, I have had to figure out how to put the shock, privilege and delight into a single post.

On my way home from my annual (successful) NFL Fantasy draft, I received my “Congratulations!” email. I genuinely think I read it 10-15 times, line-by-line to make sure I was reading it correctly and honestly it was one of the most bizarre but exciting feelings I’ve had in my career.

For those who don’t know what an MVP is, here is what Microsoft have to say:

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, or MVPs, are technology experts who passionately share their knowledge with the community. They are always on the “bleeding edge” and have an unstoppable urge to get their hands on new, exciting technologies. They have very deep knowledge of Microsoft products and services, while also being able to bring together diverse platforms, products and solutions, to solve real world problems. MVPs make up a global community of over 4,000 technical experts and community leaders across 90 countries/regions and are driven by their passion, community spirit, and quest for knowledge. Above all and in addition to their amazing technical abilities, MVPs are always willing to help others – that’s what sets them apart.

I will try follow this up with a “road-to” style post, but for now I just want to say thank you to all those who supported, interacted and helped along the way. Long may the learning and tech fun continue!

Joe Carlyle

Azure Compute Updates at Ignite

If you thought there were a lot of networking updates at Microsoft Ignite, you won’t believe how many there were when it comes to Azure Compute. Here I will try to round-up those I am most excited about. Some of the features announced have been on a wish list of mine for quite a while…I’m looking at you Managed Disks!

First up, several new VM sizes have been announced. The ND and NV series has been updated in preview. This series offers powerful GPU capabilities and is now running cutting edge tech from NVIDIA.

HPC can often have several blockers on-premise but is easily workable in Azure, building on this, Microsoft have added two new ranges to the H series offering. HB an HC series will be in preview before the end of the year. These allow for staggering amounts of compute power and bandwidth.

Storage is sometimes overlooked when considering VM performance, that is something Microsoft are attempting to correct with the announcement of Ultra-SSD Managed Disks in preview. These disks will offer sub-millisecond latency, and can hit up to 160,000 iOPS on a single disk. There were no typos there, fastest disks available in any cloud.

Standard SSDs and larger sizes across the board were also announced. This allows greater flexibility in performance and cost management when designing and deploying solutions.

As mentioned earlier, my wish list item, Managed Disks can now be moved between resource groups and subscriptions. This finally allows better management and flexibility with deployments. This update allows you to also move managed images and snapshots. We had access to the private preview of this functionality and it works exactly as expected.

Not directly Compute, but important in relation to it is the announcement of Windows Virtual Desktop. Azure is already the only cloud where you can run Windows 10 workloads and this service is going to improve on the deployment and management of them. Essentially, Azure will run the RDS Gateway and Broker service for you. You will have full control and responsibility of the infrastructure this will connect too and which applications and desktops are presented. We’ve chatted to the Product Team here at Ignite and they are excited for people to get their hands on the preview and really test it out. My favourite piece of functionality is that the service will be agent-less when using Windows 10 to connect which should make deployment and adoption as painless as possible for admins!

Finally, to encourage older workload migration, Microsoft announced that if you migrate Windows Server or SQL Server 2008/R2 to Azure, you will get three years of free extended security updates on those systems. This could save you some money when Windows Server and SQL Server 2008/ R2 end of support (EOS).

So many announcements, so little time. Expect more detailed posts on most if not all of the above piece over the coming weeks and months.

Joe Carlyle

Azure Networking Updates at Ignite

To say there have been a lot of Azure announcements at Ignite is an understatement. Several important services have hit GA and several exciting new services have been announced. Rather than re-list them all (I’ll link through at the end), I am going to highlight those I am most excited about, and think will be relevant to most clients.

Below is a graphical overview of the new approach to Azure networking, which contains four pillars, Connect, Protect, Deliver and Monitor.

azurenetworkingfalludpate

Starting with Connect, two ExpressRoute related announcements immediately grabbed my attention. Microsoft now offer 100Gbps connectivity speeds via ExpressRoute Direct which is the fastest cloud connectivity available.

Helping customers with geo-distributed offices, ExpressRoute Global Reach was announced, allowing customers to connect offices using their existing circuits. Additional to this concept, Azure Virtual WAN is now GA. With that move, Microsoft also added new preview features including P2S VPN and ExpressRoute connectivity shown below:

vwanfeatures.png

The final announcement in Connect that really will make a difference to clients is Public IP Prefix. This means that you can now request a range of static IP addresses for your resources that you will “own”. This will make white-listing and administration of your public presence a lot simpler.

Moving to the Protect pillar, Azure Firewall has now moved to GA. Which is a great service for those looking to have control over their breakout point in Azure without deploying and maintaining an NVA.

Rounding out Protect, Service Endpoint Policies. These allow more granular control over access to Azure resources over your vnet service endpoint. See previous post on endpoints for more.

From the Deliver pillar, the announcement of Azure Front Door in preview is the big one. AFD is a global entry point for you applications that is scalable and secure. The ability to scale and level of integration with existing services will make this widely used by customers with a large public facing presence.

There are also updates to Application Gateway which improve performance, introduce redundancy and increase the level of integration with over services.

From the final pillar, Monitor, the main announcement is Virtual Network TAP in preview. This allows for continuous mirroring of VM traffic to a collector, without any agents. This the first of these services in a public cloud and will allow for greater analytics and granularity of environment traffic.

For the entire round-up from Microsoft, head here.