Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Azure This Week.
It's just me this week and Ignite is over, but there's still plenty of news.
Today, we are talking new Azure infrastructure capabilities,
Azure Trusted launch for virtual machines, new Azure Arc capabilities.
There's plenty to cover, and before we start,
I'd like to invite you to our brand new community hub on Discord.
We'll be launching study hours,
office hours to chat with the ACG team and a way for you to connect with the ACG
community, including myself.
An invite to the server will be in the show notes of this episode.
Let's dive into some Azure news.
Azure has announced a couple of new infrastructure capabilities to improve the
agility, scalability, and reliability of infrastructure to apply to Azure.
These include new MSV,
two machines enabling customers to achieve up to 20% increase in CPU
performance and access up to 192 virtual CPU's
and four terabytes of memory. Available now in preview.
Coming soon to preview new Azure dedicated skews that let customers run a
broader range of memory, intensive workloads and a single tenant hardware,
isolated environment.
Azure virtual machines is getting a new feature that allows Azure to try
and redeploy previously evicted spot VMs as part of a scale set.
This would improve the overall run time of scale out ups,
VMware SD LAN,
and the Azure virtual wan hub integration is now in preview.
So is Azure route server.
Both of these services help users streamline operations between networking
appliances and Azure's virtual network new capabilities to manage
Linux environments yay for Linux and the preview of Azure native integration
with elastic services and much, much more.
I know these features might sound a tad dry, but they are important.
And it's good to see how they're putting in the work to improve the performance
of the platform.
For a complete list of all these new features be sure to check out the link in
the show notes and get all the details. Alrighty, let's move on to,
Azure Trusted launch.
Azure Trust launch is a new feature that is in preview now.
It prevents boot kits and root kit infections for virtual machines.
These are types of malware that run with the same kernel mode privileges as the
operating system they infect.
So that means they can hide themselves from anti-malware making them hard to
detect and remove. So, yeah, it's a pretty big deal.
Trust's launch leverages something called the trusted launch virtual platform
module V T P M for short.
To measure whether the boot of a VM has been compromised.
You also get visibility into the integrity of the entire boot process.
It's pretty simple to enable as well.
You just need to make a slight change in your deployment code,
or you can simply check a box off in the security section of the
Azure portal.
Azure trusted launch is in preview within select regions at no additional
costs.
And it supports the most commonly used operating systems with many more coming.
Awesome time for some Azure arc news.
A big challenge to hybrid and multi-cloud adoption is managing and securing
environments. And that's where Azure Arc comes in.
Arc is a set of technologies that extends Azure management and services to any
infrastructure.
And Azure has announced updates that help it support even more scenarios.
These include you can now run Azure machine learning service with Azure
arc.
This means that you can extend machine learning capabilities to hybrid and
multi-cloud environments,
and you can train your models directly where your data lives.
Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes is generally available.
This will allow you to easily manage and govern Kubernetes clusters anywhere
right from your Azure portal.
Azure has also collaborated with some of the popular Kubernetes distributions,
including VMware Tansu, Nutanix carbon,
which joins already Red Hat OpenShift,
canonicals charm to Kubernetes and rancher,
Kubernetes engine archaic for short to test and validate their
implementations with Azure Arc. Back in our predictions episode,
I did mention Azure was going to be putting in a lot more work and focus on
their Kubernetes support.
So I told you so overall a great update for all
of those Azure Arc users out there. Alrighty, that's it for this episode.
Personally,
I think Azure Trusted launch is a neat feature and I'm going to go give it a try
later on today.
Let me know what you think about it in the forums for this episode,
if you feel informed, make sure to give us a thumbs up on this episode.
Keep being awesome cloud gurus. I'll see you in the next one.