A new way to prevent blowing through your Azure budget.
Azure's commitment to expanding availability zones to more Azure regions and a
shiny new certification for you to take.
We've got plenty to cover with that being said, hi,
I'm Gwyn and welcome to another episode of Azure This Week,
let's get right into it.
Using budgets and any cloud platform is crucial.
We all know this and we've all implemented them for our own accounts, right? Uh,
but my one issue with budgets is the lack of real-time data.
Your budget could be showing you cost data from up to 24 hours ago,
which means you might've exceeded your budget by the time you're actually
looking into it.
Azure has announced forecasted cost alerts for Azure budgets now generally
available, and it aims to aid with this issue.
These alerts provide notifications in advance because they are based on spending
trends instead of your actual cost data.
And this enables you to proactively look into your spending activity before even
breaching a budget. So this is fantastic.
It's actually pretty easy to set up too,
right from the budget's blade in the cost management section of your Azure
portal.
I know I'm going to go ahead and enable this for my own account because any
feature or option that helps me not get caught off guard or surprised by any
charges is a win in my book.
An Azure Availability Zone is a unique physical location within a region.
And each zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent
power, cooling, and networking.
It's this physical separation that you get from availability zones that protects
our data and our applications from data center failures.
And this is also what enables Azure to provide 99.99%
connectivity SLA for virtual machines that have at least two instances deployed
across two or more availability zones within a region,
but not every region supports availability zones.
Azure has stated that they are committed to changing this.
They recently announced that by the end of 2021,
every country in which they operate a data center region will deliver Azure
Availability Zones.
Also every new data center region that they launch going forward will also
support Azure Availability Zones by default,
the capabilities that availability zones offer are critical.
So it's great to see this commitment from Azure. Oh,
you should check out the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
It could be somewhat of a dry read for some of y'all,
but it has some great insight into how you can improve the quality, reliability,
and security of your workloads amongst other things.
And you can even assess your alignment to best practices with the
well-architected review.
I'll make sure to link both of those things in the show notes. And finally,
everybody's favorite news: certifications,
the AZ-140 configuring and operating windows,
virtual desktop and Microsoft Azure certification exam is now in beta.
If planning, delivering, managing,
administrating virtual desktop experiences and remote apps with Azure is your
thing, this might be a good certification for you to look into.
You can expect to be tested on how to implement and manage networking for
windows virtual desktop, creating and configuring pools and session hosts,
implementing and managing FSLogix,
automating windows virtual desktop management tasks, and a bunch more.
I'll make sure to link the outline of the certification in the show notes for
you to go check out. They have a discount going on at the moment,
the first 300 people who take the exam before or on April 29th can get, 80% off,
but it is first come first serve. So get it while you can.
It seems like a pretty interesting certification.
If any of you plan on taking it, or maybe you already took it?
Let me know in the comments like how it went.
And that is it for this episode of Azure This Week.
I do have one thing to quickly add, we have a discord server,
we're doing study hours and office hours, study groups,
and a bunch of us Training Architects from ACG are in there.
And just talking about all things cloud, come and join us.
I'll make sure to add the invite link to the show notes as well.
Let me know what your favorite piece of news was in the comments.
Don't forget to subscribe to stay up to date with all the clouds,
keeping awesome cloud gurus. I'll see you in the next one.