G'day Cloud Gurus. Welcome to Azure This Week. I'm Wayne Hoggett,
and I'll be taking you through all that's new and interesting in the world of Azure.
In this episode, we'll take a look at improvements to redundancy for Azure SQL Database,
DevOps improvements to Azure Static Web Apps, and the latest changes and enhancements to the Azure
Monitor Agent. DevOps, monitoring and redundancy. Three of my favorite topics. Let's jump in.
You can now configure your Azure SQL Databases in the general purpose service tier for zone
redundancy. This was previously reserved only for the higher-cost business and critical tiers. And
this includes both the provision and serverless compute tiers. Zone redundancy protects your
databases against a wider range of Azure failures, including datacenter outages. And because of this,
it will bump the SLA provided by Microsoft to four 9s and a five, or 99.995%.
And because these zones are in the same region, you still get a Recovery Point Objective,
or RPO, of zero. Which means zero data loss in the event of a zone failure. Zone redundancy can be
added to existing databases by flicking the switch over to zone redundant using either the Portal,
ARM templates, PowerShell, or the Azure CLI. Adding zone redundancy will cost a bit more,
and it's only available in select regions, with additional regions available in preview.
So check out the details in the link to see if it's available in your region.
Now you can go crazy with all this redundancy by adding zone redundancy and geo-replication,
but this will increase your cost significantly. So always remember to match the availability
of your workloads to the criticality and impact provided by your business leaders.
Did you know that you can access some of our courses for free?
Yep. That's right. All the cloud learning and none of the cost. There's a couple of new courses you
can try for free right now. On A Cloud Guru, we have Identity and Access Management for Azure,
and my Introduction to Networking on Azure course. You don't even need a credit card to sign up,
and you can just jump straight in and start. I'll leave links in the description.
Azure Static Web Apps is one of my favorite up-and-coming Azure server. And I say
up-and-coming because it's still a baby in the Azure world, being only a year since general
availability. Azure Static Web Apps allows you to easily deploy globally redundant web front ends,
and they can be easily integrated with Azure Functions. What's really great about Azure
Static Web Apps is their integration with modern DevOps tools, like GitHub and Azure DevOps,
to continuously deploy your changes. Previously, whenever you created a pull request against your
production branch, Azure Static Web Apps would generate a preview URL. So you could take a look
at the changes before merging the pull request. With the release of stable URLs in public preview,
you can now have a permanent preview for your different branches of your website. Let's say
you have a long-running development branch that's used for continuous integration, you can now have
a URL permanently set up for that branch so you can easily preview the changes. Lovely.
The Azure Monitor Agent is the new agent you can deploy to your Azure Virtual Machines,
Scale Sets and Azure Arc-enabled servers to send log and metric data to your Log Analytics
Workspace. Previously, this collection was done by a handful of different agents,
including the Log Analytics Agent. The Log Analytics Agent now has a retirement date of
August, 2024. This means that Microsoft is busily adding all of the features
from the Log Analytics Agent into the new Azure Monitor Agent. The latest of these features to
enter public preview is support for custom text-based logs and Windows-based IIS logs.
This is in addition to the recently added support for Windows 10 and Windows 11 clients. What I love
about the Azure Monitor Agent is its support for Data Collection Rules that allow you to granularly
configure which logs and metrics are collected. And you can even hand off this responsibility
to workload teams to decentralize your monitoring configuration efforts.
Take a look at the Azure Monitor Agent. You can run it alongside the Log Analytics Agent and see
if it supports your requirements, and make sure you move across before the Log Analytics Agent
is retired. You'll continue to see Microsoft adding features to the Azure Monitor Agent,
so keep an eye on it in the coming months.
Well, that's all we have time for in this episode of Azure This Week. Thanks for being with me.
Next week we'll go even further down under and have Lars Klint back for another round of the
latest Azure news. So be sure to tune in for that. Until next time, keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.