Friday, November 5, 2021

AzUpdate S03E13: Azure Backup, Azure Red Hat OpenShift & Azure governance policy for Azure Key Vault

Hello folks!

 

This week was a blur…  Ignite kept us all busy and informed.  There were so many announcements that Jay Gordon (@Jaydestro) and I had a tough time picking just four or five to cover. On top of the news regarding Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode, Azure Chaos Studio, Azure Container Apps and Azure monitor, you can see all the other announcements in the Ignite Book of News.

 

Read-on!  Or better yet join us on the live stream

 

 

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode

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Virtual Machines Scale Sets – Flexible Orchestration mode (VM Scale Sets Flex) lets you deploy highly available large-scale cloud infrastructure quickly, reliably, and easily. They can meet the scalability and availability requirements of a broad number of business-critical workloads, for example:

 

  • Quorum-based workloads
  • Open-source databases
  • Stateful or stateless applications
  • Services which require a mix of different virtual machine types
  • Workloads that can leverage Spot and on-demand VMs together to optimize costs.
  • Existing applications running in Azure that use Availability Sets
  • Applications that need to scale out/in based on demand or performance requirements (e.g. CPU utilization metrics to reduce costs)

VM Scale Sets Flex is adding several new and important features beyond what the current VMSS (Virtual Machine Scale Sets Uniform Orchestration mode or VM Scale Sets Uniform) - has provided so far.

 

VM Scale Sets Uniform provides a quick, and easy way to deploy homogeneous VMs for stateless or batch type workloads. The key words here are homogeneous and stateless.

 

VM Scale Sets Flex now acts as a super-set of functionalities of both VM Scale Sets - Uniform and Availability Sets, giving you a single product with variety of options to deploy workloads with unique requirements.

 

For more information please refer to Flexible orchestration for virtual machine scale sets in Azure

Azure Chaos Studio

 

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Azure Chaos Studio is a managed service for improving resilience by injecting faults into your Azure applications.  Running controlled fault injection experiments against your applications, a practice known as chaos engineering, helps you to measure, understand, and improve resilience against real-world incidents, such as a region outages or application failures causing high CPU utilization on a VM.

 

Whether you are developing a new application that will be hosted on Azure, migrating an existing application to Azure, or operating an application that already runs on Azure, it is important to improve your application's ability to handle and recover from disruptions that can negatively impact your customers experience and erode their trust in your business or mission. To avoid these negative consequences, you need to validate that your application responds effectively to disruptions that could be caused by a service you depend on, disruptions caused by a failure in the service itself, or even disruptions to incident response tooling and processes. Chaos experimentation enables you to test that your application is resilient to these failures at any phase in the service lifecycle – from development through to production.

 

You can view the Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Digital & Application Innovation session where Donovan Brown and Rick Claus discuss Chaos Studio (fast forward to 14 minute into the session for the Chaos Studio section)

 

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You can find more information about Chaos Studio here.

Azure Container Apps

 

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Azure Container is a serverless application centric hosting service where users do not see or manage any underlying VMs, orchestrators, or other cloud infrastructure.

 

Azure Container Apps enables executing application code packaged in any container and is unopinionated about runtime or programming model. Applications can scale in response to HTTP requests, events (e.g. storage queue messages, Kafka topics, etc.), or simply run as always-on background jobs. Azure Container Apps addresses specific requirements for microservices including encrypted service to service communication and the independent versioning and scaling of services.

 

You can find out more about this is the announcement post here.  And try it  out following the steps in the Quickstart: Deploy your first container app

Azure monitor

 

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Azure Monitor already provides you with a rich set of enterprise ready capabilities to ensure you have complete observability of your hybrid environment, helping you keep it always available, reliable and performant.

 

During Microsoft Ignite 2021, we announced a bunch of new capabilities helping you gain more insights from your apps and infrastructure, and easily manage your log analytics workspaces and alerts.

 

You can read the announcement post here.

MS Learn Module of the Week

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This is right in line with the announcements regarding Azure Monitor.  Monitor cloud resources this learn module will step you through monitoring how your cloud resources are performing.  This is crucial to building reliable cloud applications. This module covers what monitoring is, why you need to do it, and how you can about monitoring your resources.

 

All right…  Microsoft Ignite 2021 is over but you can still view the on-demand content at myignite.microsoft.com

 

Cheers!

 

Pierre 

Posted at https://sl.advdat.com/2ZYbrBe