I'm back. Thank you, Landon, for covering for me last week. Now this week,
I have some excellent Azure updates for you, including new DDoS features,
Azure Purview is in GA, and Azure Functions 4.0.
That is a full schedule for a weekly show, so enough of me waffling.
Unless you want to hear joke? Okay. A penguin, a helmsmen,
and a software developer walks into a bar, the penguin...
And then the penguin says that is an awkward moose.
How good is that? Ah, all right. On with Azure.
Distributed denial of services attacks are one of the most crude,
and most common ways to take down a site on the internet.
You get thousands and thousands of machines to hit the same site at the same
time, the server behind it runs out of resources,
and everyone is denied service.
It is simple to do if you are so inclined and can be very effective.
In February, 2018,
GitHub was the target of a DDoS attack with packets sent at a rate of
126.9 million per second.
That is equivalent to 1.3 terabytes per second.
Due to DDoS protection measures, the attack only lasted 20 minutes though.
And speaking of protecting against DDoS,
this week Azure Firewall Manager got new DDoS management capabilities.
This comes in the form of Azure DDoS Protection Standard for virtual networks.
This feature provides enhanced mitigation features to defend against DDoS
attacks and will automatically protect all public IP addresses
in virtual networks out of the box.
This also plays into the enhanced network security monitoring screen,
which has been updated for Azure Firewall Manager.
These features are now out in preview, and you can try them out today.
Be a cool SysAdmin, stop getting DDoS'ed.
If you want to know more about cloud security,
if you're unsure where to start your cloud learning journey,
why not check out ACGs free plan option?
It gives you access to free courses, quizzes, learning paths,
and original series content. And you don't even need a credit card to sign up.
We've included a link below. If you haven't heard of Azure Purview,
it is the multi-cloud data management and data governance service on Azure.
The idea is that Purview takes your data regardless of if it's housed on
premises in servers like SQL server and Oracle, in different clouds,
like AWS S3, or in SaaS applications like Salesforce.
Purview then looks at all your data ingredients,
comes up with a delicious recipe and bakes a beautiful governance and compliance
cake. You get automated data discovery, sensitive data classification,
insights into the location and movement of sensitive data across your hybrid
landscape, and then find valuable data through a data catalog.
Azure Purview's automated data classification uses more than 200
pre-built and custom classifiers to detect sensitive data types,
such as business terms, government IDs, names, location data,
and more. These could both be a value to business processes,
but also to implement adequate governance to protect user data and more.
Purview is out in general availability now. Delicious compliance cake!
Something that kind of slipped through the Azure news net a couple of weeks ago
was the preview release of Azure Functions 4.0.
The serverless darling of the Azure world, Functions,
they are immensely popular and continue to power tons of cloud
applications...you can totally weigh applications.
Anyway, the main feature that might spur you to upgrade your existing Functions,
or try out version 4.0 is the support for .NET 6,
but also node.js 14, Python 3.7, 3.8, 3.9,
Java 8 and 11, PowerShell 7.0 and your favorite custom handlers.
The link in the description has some quick start guides to get you started with
4.0. There's also a list of planned breaking changes,
which you'd want to watch out for. So go on, give it a try.
What's the worst that could happen?
Before I wrap up,
I wanted to mention that the introduction to Azure Security course is free all
this month on the A Cloud Guru platform.
This course is a great way to get the right start to Azure security.
To check it out, hit the free plan sign up link below.
As we say on the A Cloud Guru team,
when it's that time of the year where you have to evaluate your
internal data governance, but we're out of ingredients,
"Seek and you shall cloud".
So see you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.