G'day Cloud Gurus. I'm Wayne Hoggett, and I'll be taking you through what's new and interesting in
the world of Azure. Welcome to Azure This Week. In this episode, we'll take a look at improvements to
backend options for Azure Static Web Apps, Cosmos DB continuous backup, and Windows Admin Center
support for Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure. Okay. That was a mouthful. Let's jump in.
So it's been at least a few hours since we last spoke about Azure Static Web Apps. In
case you missed it, Azure Static Web Apps is one of Microsoft's most exciting new Azure services.
Don't worry, Azure Arc I still love you too. Azure Static Web Apps combines all of the things we love
about DevOps, combined with globally-distributed static web hosting, using basically any framework
you can imagine, including support for both JavaScript and C#. One of the great features about
Azure Static Web Apps is that it integrates your static frontend web content with your backend API,
and enables seamless routing. Up until now, you could use managed Azure functions to achieve this,
or you could bring your own Azure functions. While now the possibilities for backend APIs has
grown to include Azure API Management, Azure App Service, and even the new Azure Container Apps.
Now all of these backends are currently in preview, but it's great to see even the newest
Azure Container Apps being supported so soon after general availability.
Ensuring your Cosmos DB databases are backed up, has historically been a bit of a challenge.
The first option for Cosmos DB backups is to use periodic backups. Periodic backups could be taken
as frequently as once every hour, or as infrequently as once every 24 hours.
And you could retain these backups for anywhere between two hours and 30 days,
depending on your interval. There are some problems with periodic backups though.
Firstly, they are only a point in time, missing any changes between the backup intervals.
And secondly, you need to raise a support ticket every time you want to do a restore.
And with periodic backups, only your first two backups are free. You could always do something
like Azure Data Factory or the change feed to manage your own backups. But that's obviously less
than ideal, and not something we'd expect from a service like Cosmos DB. Around August last year,
Microsoft released continuous backups for Cosmos DB giving us 30 days of continuous backups
and self-service restore. But the free backup capabilities remained limited to periodic backups.
Well, good news. Free continuous backups for up to seven days is now in preview,
which will hopefully start to give everyone a migration path away from point-in-time backups.
Every month A Cloud Guru has a number of totally free courses, which change over time. This month
is Azure month. So we have a bunch of Azure courses free for you, including Introduction
to Governance and Compliance on Azure, Intro to Serverless on Azure, and Azure Storage Deep
Dive. And a free account is genuinely free. No credit card is needed, just content delivered.
Alright, so this story is a little older,
but as a hybrid cloud guru, I couldn't possibly leave it out.
If you, like many enterprises, have a large number of Windows Servers,
be they running on premises, in Azure, other public clouds, or even at branch offices,
you'll know that it can be time consuming to manage and maintain these servers.
Azure Arc allows you to bring together all of these servers and manage them in
one place. Microsoft has been adding a ton of features to Azure Arc over the last few months.
The latest feature to be added is support for Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal
for Azure Arc-enabled servers and Azure stack HCI. What you might not know about this though,
is that along with all the standard management and monitoring you get with Windows Admin Center,
using it through the Azure Portal, combined with Azure Arc, allows Remote PowerShell and
Remote Desktop connectivity to your on-premises servers without inbound network connectivity
to those servers, using something like a VPN. And in my opinion, that's quite neat. Expect
the updates for Azure Arc to keep flowing in and stay tuned to Azure This Week for all the latest.
Have you tried Cosmos DB? Azure Static Web Apps? What about Azure Arc? What did you think? Let us
know in the comments, community Discord, or the Azure This Week forum on A Cloud Guru.
Well, that's all we have time for in this episode of Azure This Week. Thanks for being with me.
And until next time, keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.