Last Week in Microsoft Azure: Week of April 26th

Direct from Microsoft

Starting today, April 26, 2021, Microsoft is hosting Azure Trivia! Each week, @Azure will tweet a new Azure-related question for you to answer. Ten winners will be chosen at random each week.

Microsoft unveiled a new virtual datacenter experience where you take a digital tour of a typical Microsoft datacenter. Microsoft is set to build between 50 and 100 new data centers each year for the foreseeable future to support their cloud solution.

Microsoft and the UK Meteorological Office are working together to bring advanced supercomputing capabilities for weather and climate research. Azure’s supercomputing-as-a-service will enable the Met Office to use both dedicated and public cloud services for more accurate predictions in preparing for extreme weather and challenges associated with climate change.

Mastering Azure

Jamel Achahbar outlines his journey getting started with Azure Bicep. Azure Bicep is a new domain-specific language for deploying Azure resources. It has a simpler code syntax than ARM templates for interacting with the Azure Resource Manager API.

In this video, Thomas Maurer demonstrates how to use the Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal to manage your Windows Server infrastructure.

John Savill provides an excellent overview in choosing an Azure load balancer in Azure Global Load Balancer 101. In this video, John demonstrates the new cross-region, global Azure load balancer.

Currently, in preview, check out how to use managed identities in Azure Automation Accounts. Managed identities are an improvement over Run As accounts for working with Azure services or hybrid runbook worker groups.

Pierre Roman demonstrates how to use the SecretManagement module to access Linux VMs in Azure. Pierre pairs the SecretManagement module with the Az.KeyVault module to manage his demo and production environments.

Azure DevOps

Do you need to find the public IP address of an Azure DevOps hosted agent or GitHub-hosted runner? Thomas Thornton has the solution for you in this post explaining the process. This solution is useful if your pipeline needs to access a resource that has IP restrictions.

Praveen Kumar Sreeram demonstrates configuring self-hosted agents for Azure Pipelines. Self-hosted agents are created and managed by you when the Microsoft-hosted agents do not have the compute or software needed for your builds.

Upcoming Events

On Thursday, May 20, 2021, Tim Warner is presenting Get On Board Azure Monitoring with Log Analytics and KQL at the Nashville Microsoft Azure Users Group.

On April 27, 2021, register for the DevOps with GitHub event where you will learn about developing operations with GitHub.

Azure Updates

The following updates are now generally available:

The following updates are now in public preview:

Training Resources

Want to learn more about Azure Functions? Take a look at Azure Functions University, an open-source learning curriculum. Content is available here on GitHub or on YouTube.

Tip of the Week

Need help choosing the right Azure File solution? Check out this week’s Azure Unblogged where Sarah Lean talks with Will Gries about different storage tiers and how to optimize cost.