Hey Gurus! It's been a while.
Lars is out enjoying some well-deserved time off.
So I'll be covering for him this week.
While that does mean less llamas,
there's no shortage of Azure updates to go over.
While this last week didn't have any earth-shattering updates or vulnerabilities
that required immediate attention,
there were a couple of cool announcements to go over today.
Working with Managed Service Providers or managing multiple Azure tendencies
just got a whole lot safer with Microsoft's Privileged Identity Manager service
integrating with Azure Lighthouse now going into public preview.
For those of you who may not know,
Privileged Identity Manager is a service that you can use to eliminate
persistent access to elevated roles.
You can have users request access to various roles based on need,
rather than assigning a role because the person "may" require it.
It's a pretty cool way to ensure a potentially compromised account doesn't get
access to everything because your admin was given global administrative rights
for all time.
Azure Lighthouse is a service that allows you to manage multiple Azure
tendencies from a single console,
which is useful for things like Managed Service Providers or enterprises that
may have multiple tendencies.
It really shines for things like user delegation and activity monitoring when
you're doing those tasks across multiple organizations.
It's a pretty simple product offering, but very powerful and very useful.
Bringing the ability to use Privileged Identity Management into Azure Lighthouse
makes it so that you'll be able to not only authorize users when they need
access for good reason, and under expected circumstances,
not "just because".
This gives clients or organizations more control and their respective security
engineers better sleep at night.
Keep an eye on this if you leverage Azure Lighthouse,
because this'll be a great method of ensuring security and compliance.
All right, let's get serious for a moment.
I am a big fan of the classics: classical music,
classical styles, classic cars,
but we should all be moving away from Azure classic
services. Today roughly 90% of Azure's Infrastructure-as-a-service virtual
machines are ran by Azure Resource Manager.
And if you're still running workloads, leveraging Azure classic,
you only have until March 1st, 2023.
That may seem like a ways off, but the closer we get to that date,
the more pressure you're going to be under. Last week,
Microsoft placed their cloud services migration tool into general availability,
meaning that it's been tested and it's been found fairly successful.
Using this tool,
you can have Azure orchestrate the entire migration and any
associated resources to leverage Azure Resource Manager.
It does this using a three step method: you validate, prepare,
and then commit or abort.
You can leverage the ability to test the ARM template it generates before
deploying,
and Microsoft claims it'll retain any IP address and DNS associations you
already have configured.
The list of excuses to stay on Azure classic is dwindling.
So rather than wait until the last minute,
I'd recommend ARMing yourself with this tool and getting that migration planned.
Azure Communication Service allows you to add voice and video functionality to
your application by leveraging Azure's infrastructure if you so choose,
or by routing their service to your own telephony solution or carrier.
Well, that just got easier.
Microsoft followed through on commitments they made earlier this year at Ignite
to expand Azure's communication services feature set.
Adding onto new features like the call recording functionality and native
compatibility with Universal Windows Platform,
Microsoft announced Direct Routing to your telephony system,
effectively eliminating the need for middle-men infrastructure to utilize your
existing telephony solutions. Using this technology,
you'll be able to route your application calls directly to your existing carrier
or telephony solution, with just a few additions to your code.
Neat. Well, that's all for this episode Gurus. Next week,
Lars should be back to continue to update you on all the Azure goodness,
pending his llamas don't revolt and start Llamageddon.
That aside, we'd love to hear from you in the comments,
or come join the conversation on our Discord server,
which we've provided a link to in the description. Network with your peers,
join study groups, or just say hi. If you want to keep up with Azure news,
consider subscribing to this channel. And if you like this video,
give us a thumbs up. Well, Gurus it's been fun,
but as we always say here at A Cloud Guru, when hosting a show for a friend.
"Seek, and you shall cloud." See you next week and keep being awesome Gurus.