Last Week in Microsoft Azure: Week of May 10th

Jeff Brown

Updated: 5/10/2021

Direct from Microsoft

Senior Product Marketing Manager Erin Zefkeles announces a fluent new look for the Azure icon. The Azure “A” icon is getting an updated look to represent the unity of Azure within the larger Microsoft family of product icons.

Mastering Azure

This week I posted my experience with the Azure Cloud Resume Challenge. This challenge, originally presented by A Cloud Guru, is meant to help newcomers to Azure by giving them a project to complete. This is a great starter project for anyone to get hands-on experience in Azure.

Check out the April edition of AzUpdate! This update covers all the updates you need to know about in Azure.

Thomas Thornton shows how to copy Azure Key Vault secrets to another Key Vault using Azure CLI. He provides a script to quickly migrate these artifacts, something which I will probably use soon!

Sarah Lean shows how to troubleshoot a degraded state in Azure Traffic Manager. Sarah outlines how Traffic Manager probes work and how she resolved her issue with her Traffic Manager deployment.

Sonia Cuff outlines everything you need to know to understand Microsoft Azure virtual machine sizes. Sonia covers the different categories, series, and where to find more information on sizes, including costs!

Pierre Roman dives into Azure Backup Center. Organizations are facing exponential data growth, data source sprawl, growing databases, and compliance. The new Azure Backup Center provides a single, unified management experience for enterprises to manage their data.

Matt Allford provides an Introduction to Azure Template Specs in the latest video on his YouTube channel. Azure Templates Specs allow you to secure ARM templates in Azure for secure and easy deployments.

April Edwards goes in-depth on Securing Azure Logic Apps. Serverless is a great solution for many organizations, and April shows how to tackle security in a production environment.

Azure DevOps

Mark Johnson shares his experience with the tool Diagrams in Azure Pipelines. You use Diagrams to describe your cloud system architecture using Python code. Mark demonstrates how to draw a diagram of an Azure tenant and subscription setup. Mark then showcases how to use an Azure Pipeline to automatically build the diagram and provide the image.

Will Velida documents how to publish NuGet packages to a private Azure Artifacts feed with YAML build files. Will shows how to create the NuGet packages, then publish it to the feed. He provides the full YAML file for your use.

Olivier Miossec provides a great example of how to build a reusable, multi-data disk VM ARM template. Olivier solves the problem of making ARM templates reusable so the template works across multiple environments.

Nikos Tsirmirakis shows how to build and test SQL Server within Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines. Nikos uses Pester tests to validate the SQL Server configuration after deployment.

Azure Updates

The following Azure updates are now generally available:

The following Azure updates are currently available in preview:

Upcoming Events

Register now for Microsoft Build happening from May 25 – 27, 2021!

Training Resources

Learn more about how to get started with the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure in this video from Thomas Maurer, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft.