Welcome back.
Do you also have trouble keeping up with how many data centers Azure has and
where they are? Yeah, me too. And this week it didn't get any easier.
Also automation support and Linux gets some Azure love.
I'm Lars Klint and you're watching Azure This Week. A weekly,
show made every week about Azure. Well you fix that together?
Make it snappy.
So another Azure region you say? Right this time in Malaysia,
which brings the total number too
a lot. I think it's 68, but I've lost count too.
Now the new region comes with the usual range of Azure,
Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 services.
And while we love that Malaysia will get their own region and Microsoft plans to
up-skill 1 million Malaysians by the end of 2023,
the excitement for new regions have kind of waned.
So what is the Microsost strategy then?
Why are they going at lightspeed to get more and more and more and more regions
opened? There are a few reasons I can think of. First
more regions,
mean more flexibility and computing power to more customers.
I'm pretty sure that Microsoft wants more customers in more places and getting
regions closer to them makes sense.
Second regions specific applications can adhere
to local regulations, data sovereignty, and certifications.
And this is critical for many organizations in financial services,
healthcare and other industries. And third,
the forecast for growth in cloud computing needs from companies
is going up, up, up. Microsoft
wants to make sure that they can welcome new customers and, equally important,
support their large existing customer base that is slowly moving to a
cloud computing architecture.
I expect even more regions to open in 2021, but we shall see.
Automation is the Holy Grail for lots and lots of infrastructure and SysAdmin
teams. The more you can automate the more time you have to do cool and exciting
projects.
Azure Automation now supports System Assigned Managed Identities.
Managed Identities is the preferred way to authenticate with Azure services,
using a service principle and Azure-managed tokens. So there are no passwords.
Passwords are insecure and not very human friendly and always leak.
And then Troy Hunt gets them and you get an email...I
digress.
This addition to Azure Automation eliminates the management overhead associated
with managing RunAs Account in your run book code.
The end user can access resources via a managed identity of an
automation account from a run book without worrying about securing the access.
Neat! More time for llama automation.
More than half of the virtual machines in Azure are powered by Linux,
which means it isn't a surprise that more work by Microsoft is being done to the
Linux distributions.
The website Phoronix discovered the Microsoft Azure Network Adapter network
driver or MANA driver being included in the Linux
5.13 cycle. According to the site,
several Microsoft engineers worked on this Azure Network Adapter that comes in
more than 6,000 lines of new kernel code.
What is interesting is that it will be part of the lingers lennox livix.
Linux Linux.
What is interesting is that it will be part of the Linux kernel code rather than
something you add later.
It'll be interesting to follow this development and see what improvements this
will make to Azure and Linux. Do you want more regions in Azure too?
Let me know in the comments where you'd like to see the next.
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So see you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus. Oh, workout detected.
I'm actually doing a workout while presenting. I think that's worth noting.
See, it's hard work.