Hi, and welcome to Azure This Week. A show filmed live,
but uploaded af...Wait,
filmed here right now, but watched late...No, wait.
I'm messing this opening up. Azure This Week.
A show which you can watch every week or several times a day, if you w...
ah forget it. This particular episode, which is live and fresh right now,
has new guaranteed capacity, some real world Azure awesomeness,
and some new updates to Azure Firewall, firewall, firewall,
firewall, coming up now!
Until now the only way to obtain a service level agreement, or SLA,
for Azure Virtual Machines capacity has been to deploy actual virtual
machines, whether running or stopped.
This can create all sorts of overhead for using the VMs. For example,
if they're in use and you need them for a more critical purpose,
or if you don't use them, but need to keep them up to date.
The new on-demand capacity reservations for Azure VMs means you can reserve
the capacity without having to create the VMs then and there.
It provides a lot more flexibility within the same SLAs that you are used
to already.
You might be wondering how is this different to reserved instances which have
been around for years? Well, reserved instances are much,
much cheaper to run,
but you aren't guaranteed capacity and you have to commit for one or three
years. Reserved capacity is pay as you go pricing,
capacity is guaranteed and there's no commitment.
On-demand capacity reservations for Azure Virtual Machines is out now
in public preview. Now,
normally this show will tell you about the latest changes to Azure services,
the new features out in preview and which cloud product can give you free swag.
However, for something different,
I wanted to show a great example of Azure, and cloud computing,
making things better for the people in my backyard here in
Australia. Yeah, well, not exactly my backyard. You know.
The Australian electricity provider Ausgrid have made an agreement
with Azure and Infosys to migrate the infrastructure onto Azure.
This is not a big deal as such,
I mean lots of companies migrate to Azure all the time,
but this is a major utility company.
If their system goes down four million Aussies are affected and then that could
mean disaster for systems and devices that support critical infrastructure.
Now the fact that Ausgrid is putting all their infrastructure eggs in the cloud
basket is a big tip of the hat to the maturity and reliability of the
cloud and Azure. In fact,
Ausgrid says this move is in part to make their systems more resilient.
Well done Ausgrid and Azure.
Ah, the good old firewall.
One of the services that have been around the longest,
both on the ground and in the cloud old doesn't mean obsolete though.
This week more new features and updates were added to Azure Firewall.
Now, Azure Firewall supports US West 3,
Gio...Jio India West and Brazil Southeast.
Auto-generated self-signed certificates for Azure Firewall premium SKU for
non-production deployments. Secure Hub now supports Availability Zones.
And that's pretty cool. I like that one.
Deploy Azure Firewall without public IP in Force Tunnel mode and configure
pre-existing Azure Firewalls in Force Tunnel mode using stop or start commands.
Free tacos if you deploy Azure Firewall on the first Tuesday of the month.
Okay. I made that last one up. Would be nice though. I like tacos.
Get all the details about these new features and updates using the link below.
Did you know, A Cloud Guru offers a free plan?
It gives you access to a roasting list. Wait, who wrote this?
A rotating list of free courses and quizzes each month,
plus all of our original series and learning plans.
And you don't even need a credit card to sign up! We've included the link below.
It's free, go! As we say on the A Cloud Guru team,
when we struggled to reserve enough capacity to edit this week's episode without
getting a huge bill at the end of the month, "Seek,
and you shall cloud." So see you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.