This week marks 52 years since the initial ARPANET was completed with four nodes between
UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, SRI and University of Utah. This eventually evolved into the
internet we know today. This week I have a new tool to optimize your app performance,
FSLogix profiles get a boost, and the newly named Microsoft Defender for cloud gets a
ton of updates. I'm Lars Clint, and this is Azure This Week, a show the users all
eight marzel wanes to engage the retro encabulator fan speed.
I've done a talk on how to test for the cloud and Azure in particular,
on a few occasions. The talk is about all the terrible excuses cloud engineers have for not
testing their cloud work, as well as all the ways that you can test it. One of the hardest things to
keep track of is testing when thousands of users are using your application at the same time.
Now this is called load testing, and has always been tricky. After all it isn't that
easy to get 10,000 of your closest friends together to test and visit your new Hello,
Kitty image recognition service. This week, Azure announced Azure Load Testing, which well
load tests your app. You start a high-scale load test by using the Azure portal. You can then
see your live updates of the client and server-side metrics while the test is running.
Azure specific insights show how scenarios impact all the parts of your application, and
you can compare test results across different load tests to understand behavior changes over time.
So why should you care? You might ask. Isn't this Azure's problem to scale in time? Well sort of.
Azure is responsible for making sure resources are available and that SLAs are met. Fixing
your bugs and database bottlenecks is not their responsibility. With load testing you can know
which bits of your application might underperform, break, or blow up when it takes off. You can even
integrate the load testing into your existing continuous integration and continuous delivery
flow for automation goodness. You can access the preview now using your existing Azure account.
If you’d like to learn more about cloud development, including how to optimize
performance in the cloud, check out ACG’s free plan. It gives you access to free courses and
quizzes, plus learning paths and original series content. This month for example,
Introduction to Azure Security and Cloud Security Fundamentals are both free all month. And you
don’t even need a credit card to sign up. I’ll include links in the description below.
FSLogix enhances and enables user profiles in Windows remote computing environments.
It allows you to roam use a data between remote computing sessions,
optimize file I/O between hosts and clients, eliminate roaming profiles and simplify
application management among other things. This week FSLogix profiles, hard to say,
for Azure AD-joined VMs in Azure Virtual desktop, was released in public preview. Now because I
don't really know what all that means, I thought I'd bring in our resident FSLogix expert. Wayne?
Thanks, Lars. And you're spot on. I really do love FSLogix. Having a background in desktop
virtualization. I've seen all types of profile management solutions, and FSLogix is by far my
favorite. It's speed and ease of management is second to none. So what's so good about this new
Azure AD support for FSLogix profiles? Well, up until now, you needed to domain-join the storage
you're using for FSLogix. This also meant that you probably needed to deploy domain controllers in
Azure, but Microsoft recently added the ability to join your Azure virtual desktop hosts to Azure AD,
but you still needed domain controllers for FSLogix profiles. But now with FSLogix
support for Azure AD, you no longer need domain controllers in Azure to run Azure Virtual Desktop
with FSLogix profiles. You're still going to need some domain controllers on-premises, but that may
change soon too. I'm very much looking forward to trying this new feature out. Back to you Lars.
Thanks Wayne.
That was exactly what I was going to say too.
Microsoft loves a name change as much as well...Microsoft. In case you missed it,
the latest is Azure Security Center now being called Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
And perhaps to cement that name change, a whole range of updates were announced this week.
Ready? Native CSPM for AWS and threat protection for Amazon EKS and AWS EC2. Yes! Another Azure
service that works with AWS. Expanded security control assessment with Azure Security Benchmark
v3. Microsoft Sentinel connector's optional bi-directional alerts synchronization. And
this is really handy for getting the alerts back into Sentinel for someone to action.
Microsoft Threat and Vulnerability Management added as vulnerability assessment solution.
Inventory display of on-premises machines applies different templates for resource name.
And finally two new updates in preview, which are prioritizing security actions by data sensitivity
and Snapshot export for recommendations and security findings.
Okay, I'm done. There are more updates though, as well that you can find using
the link in the description. That is all I have for you this week. Check out some of the
many other free original series we have on the ACG platform, such as Cloud Provider Comparisons,
Certification guides and Programming Languages for the Cloud. There is much learning to be
done. As we say on the A Cloud Guru team, when you have no clue what a piece of news
that looks important actually does, but then you realize that the expert is right next to you,
"Seek and you shall cloud." We'll see you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.