So much has happened in 2021, not just for cloud computing, but in general, of course.
Now this being the last show of the year, it's time for
the Azure This Year Awards. So sit tight, grab the popcorn and enjoy.
Welcome to the end of the year awards for Azure, or what we like to call the Kroonenburgs. Now,
these might not be the awards that you expect, but they are the ones that you deserve. And
let's not dilly dally and drag out the time like on all those other awards shows. We are digging
in...now. The first Kroonenburg of the evening is for the most underrated Azure service of the year,
and the nominees are: Azure Storage for its continued improvement and addition of new features
you never knew you wanted or needed. Immutable tags, client side encryption, and index tags are
a few of the new features that you probably didn't know existed. Azure App configuration for being
able to centrally manage application settings and feature flags, as well as debug environments, fast
and efficiently. Event Grid for its versatility and applicability, that's a hard word to say,
in a ton of scenarios, including checking claims between services, pushing millions of events
to a large number of services, and checking any number of properties in a system. And the vinner,
the vinner, the winner is
Event Grid. Yeah, really. That wasn't a hard choice. Congratulations Event Grid.
Now, if you wanna know more about hidden gems and underrated services in Azure, check out the
blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago on just that topic. Link is in the description. And we go
from hidden services to not so hidden events. 2021 brought a few whoopsies in the cloud and we think
they should be remembered. So the nominees are: the Azure AD outage in March, where pretty much
all of Azure login and authentication went offline for two or more hours. The August Cosmos
DB incident that exposed over 3000 customers data to, well, everyone. And the Kroonenburg goes to
AWS for this week's trouble that took amazon.com, Netflix, Disney +, Venmo, and many more.
So well done AWS. Ouch. Now, if you wanna know what really happened in more detail on AWS,
head over to our sister show AWS This Week. So let's get to the hands-on award
of the year, the best new or updated tool. And there are so many tools on Azure of which some
were excellent. Some not so much. The nominees are: Azure Virtual Desktop for allowing everyone
to work from home on a managed environment that doesn't require any installation or software.
Azure SQL Database Ledger for providing cryptographic evidence that centralized
data stores haven't been tampered with. And Azure Arc for allowing VM containers and SQL databases
anywhere to be managed through Azure. And finally, Visual Studio Code for allowing everyone to be a
developer, even if you have a Chromebook. Yes. And the winner of the Kroonenburg is
Visual Studio Code for now being a hundred percent online and accessible through your browser.
Just a fantastic tool for any developer, cloud or not. Well done Visual Studio Code.
Now we're getting to the pointy end of the evening. The next two awards have been
at the top of the cloud computing mantlepiece of several services. The first award is the best
serverless service of the year and the nominees are: Azure Functions for providing the easiest
way to pretend there are no servers in the cloud. Azure Functions for enabling complex architectures
with decoupled and distributed projects. And Azure Functions for enabling thousands of developers
to create fast and efficient solutions to real business problems. And the Kroonenburg goes to
Azure Logic Apps for continuing to surprise everyone with the powerful integrations of
hundreds of services with little effort and amazing value. Congratulations, Logic Apps.
One of the things that Azure does so, hang on, very well,
apart from giving us infinite compute is testing our knowledge on the cloud itself. After all,
having a certification shows that you understand the subject and that you are
taking your cloud journey seriously. So the nominees for best Azure certification exam are
AZ-305 Azure Solutions Architect Expert. This certificate is finally consolidating all of the
goodness of Azure architecture into a single exam. Still bloody hard though. Hmm. AZ-700
for recognizing networking in the cloud is what binds all of Azure together. And AZ-800 and 801
for finally looking after the huge on-prem segment that looks to using Azure in a hybrid capacity.
Ooh, it's a big one, really big actually. And the winner is
all of the certifications as they all help our learners succeed in the cloud and make a better
career for them. So well done certifications. That's it for 2021, I'll be back in the new
year with a whole lot more Azure. And who knows, perhaps even a new co-host or two.
Thanks for now. Enjoy the time with your family and loved ones. Keep being awesome.
And I can't actually stretch my arms more than this, that's why I don't. But anyway.