Oh, you, you're already here. Well, that's a bit awkward. I've been waiting around here
in the studio since last week, looking for Azure news and it's been slowly dripping in
like sort of thick molasses and, you know, that's all I've got.
I guess this means my prediction from last week show is already proving accurate. Azure may just
have little feature updates, bug fixes and version upgrades in 2022. Now, since you're here, let me
tell you what I did find. I have five updates for you this week. Five. So, uh, this is Azure
This Week. The show that promotes quantity over quality. Wait, that doesn't sound right. Uh...
The Hyperscale service tier in Azure SQL is not only a cool name, but also the top tier
for Azure SQL when it comes to rapid scale out and scale up, support for huge databases up to
a hundred terabytes in size, nearly instantaneous backups and very fast restores. It's like the
supercar of the database world, a supercar the size of a bus. Anyway, this week auto-failover
groups for Hyperscale were released in preview. Some of the benefits you get with auto-failover
groups are: simplified management of a group of geo-replicated databases, including ability
to failover the entire group of databases. Ability for applications to maintain the same read, right,
and read-only endpoints after failover. Recovery during loss of an entire region, hope not,
through geo-failover, which can be initiated manually or through an automatic failover policy.
And finally, readable online secondaries that can be used for read-only workloads by connecting with
read-only listener endpoints, which remain unchanged during geo-failovers. Pretty neat.
On January 17th at 3:30 PM Eastern Time, 18th of January 7:30 AM, Australian Eastern Time,
yours truly, Scott 'Omnibus' Pletcher, and Matias 'The certification ninja' Anddersson
will be live on YouTube and Twitch to give a bunch of tips on how to start
your cloud journey. Bring your questions. We will answer. Link is in the description.
Policy support for Azure Site Recovery is now generally available.
Once you have a Disaster Recovery policy created for a given subscription or resource group,
all new VMs that are added to that subscription or resource groups will have
Azure Site Recovery enabled automatically. This can be handy to comply with company policy,
but don't forget that you pay for each of those ASRs being enabled. Could get pricey.
If you've ever used Traffic Manager, you might know that it has an endpoint monitoring service
that evaluates the endpoints that traffic is directed to. And this is to ensure, of course,
that traffic isn't directed to a broken endpoint, keeping your application healthy. Now to make
sure that the capacity of the probes follows the growth of Traffic Manager, Azure will be
increasing the number of probes deployed within Traffic Manager's endpoint monitoring service
over the next few years. What you'll have to do is to monitor this list of IP addresses for
the probes to make sure you're allowed them to work with your Traffic Manager.
Is 2022 the year of picking up new cloud computing knowledge, then check out ACG’s free plan.
My own voice even went uh-uh.
Anyway, gives you access to free courses and quizzes, plus learning paths and original series content.
The entire month of January the full courses Introduction to Azure Virtual Desktop and
Introduction to Networking on Azure are free as well as a bunch of other content. And
you don’t need a credit card to sign up. I’ll include links in the description below.
Semantic Search is now in public preview, which means you can enable it with a flick
of a switch in the Azure Portal. All right, what is Semantic Search? Sure. It's a new feature of
Azure Cognitive Services, which can understand user intent and rank the most relevant search
results based on the context. Yeah. So have a play with it today using the link in the description.
Just don't search for llama rainbows again, cuz you know what happened last time.
Finally, there are a bunch of little updates to Azure IoT Central. The limit of devices that
can be shown on a single tile on an Azure IoT Central dashboard has gone up from 10
to a hundred. You can now duplicate IoT dashboards to increase the number of dashboards dramatically,
I guess. And you can now send device telemetry in different shapes and transform the telemetry
into structured data at Azure IoT Central Ingress. If you do a lot of IoT Central things,
you now have a few more updates to play with. That's it. As predicted a bunch of
little updates and improvements to a bunch of services on Azure. So next week, the incredibly
handsome James Lee is on the show to take you through the latest. I look forward to seeing
what he can come up with as well. I will see you in the cloud and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.