Hello folks!
This week Jay Gordon (@Jaydestro) and I are back with the news around Microsoft Azure and the IT pro and Operations audiences. This being the week before Microsoft Ignite, a lot of the product groups are saving any news items they have so they can be released next week in the Book of News. Nevertheless, there are some development with Azure Backup, Azure Red Hat OpenShift and Azure governance policy for Azure Key Vault. So, Read-on! Or better yet join us on the live stream
Azure Backup
Last August we announced that you could retain your backups for a longer duration in a cost-effective manner using Azure Backup’s archive tier for your Azure Virtual Machines and SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines. What changes this week is that PowerShell is no longer required to achieve that. We are now introducing support for using the Vault-Archive tier of Azure Storage via Azure Portal and Azure CLI making this capability accessible using all forms of management.
This is a great way of managing the costs of your backup retention point storage by using the archive tier, in addition to Snapshots and the Standard tier. The table below is an overview the supported workloads that can take advantage of this capability.
Follow the link for more information about Archive Tier support
Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Azure Red Hat OpenShift extends Kubernetes. Running containers in production with Kubernetes requires additional tools and resources. This often includes needing to juggle image registries, storage management, networking solutions, and logging and monitoring tools - all of which must be versioned and tested together. Building container-based applications requires even more integration work with middleware, frameworks, databases, and CI/CD tools. Azure Red Hat OpenShift combines all this into a single platform, bringing ease of operations to IT teams while giving application teams what they need to execute.
This week we’ve announce that Azure Red Hat OpenShift is now in Preview in Azure Government. But’ that’s not all… We’re also releasing new capabilities for Azure Red Hat OpenShift:
- You can now create MachineSets for worker nodes using Azure Spot Virtual Machines. Using Azure Spot Virtual Machines allows you to take advantage of our unused capacity at a significant cost savings.
- You can now bring your own key (BYOK) for OS disk encryption in preview. This feature enables customers to provide their own key for encrypting data on the OS disk enabling them to encrypt their confidential data by using keys they manage and store in Azure Key Vault.
Find out what else is on our roadmap for Azure Red Hat OpenShift.
Azure governance policy for Azure Key Vault
Azure Key Vault not only serve as a safeguard for your secrets. Now with the power of Azure Governance you will also be empowered to enforce security standards at scale.
This will allow users to perform audit, real-time enforcement, and remediation of their Azure environment.
This also enable scenarios like:
- Implementing requirements around minimum key sizes and maximum validity periods of certificates
- Stop individuals from creating self-signed certificates
- separate enforcement of your resources for your test teams
You can find more info here.
MS Learn Module of the Week
Since we covered Azure Red Hat OpenShift, let explore the Introduction to Red Hat on Azure learn modules where you ca explore the pros and cons of using Red Hat on Azure to run your Linux workloads in the cloud.
By the end of this module, you'll be able to:
- Evaluate whether to use Red Hat on Azure to migrate and/or modernize your Linux workload in the cloud.
- Describe the different Red Hat Linux solutions on Azure and how you can apply them to your business needs.
That’s it for this week! Let us know in the comments below if there are other items you would like to see covered on this blog. No go out there and get that candy…
Cheers!
Pierre Roman
Posted at https://bit.ly/3pMiAiy
