Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (July / August 2016)

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (July / August 2016)

Welcome to the combined July / August 2016 monthly edition of Luper’s Learnings.

Happy August and thank you for your patience waiting for this edition! So much has been happening at Microsoft over the past couple of months that I’ve not been as close to Azure as I usually am. We’re starting to get reconnected now J. This is very first Luper’s Learnings for Microsoft’s Fiscal Year 2017 after conferences, vacations, new fiscal year etc. I can’t wait to spend time (virtually and in person) with many of you in the coming year. Keep your content suggestions coming via Twitter and email.

WPC in Toronto last month was terrific and it was great to see some of you at the conference including breakfasts, lunches, parties and drinks with fabulous Azure partners! Take a look at the blog post from TJ at AvePoint. He lists his Three Major Takeaways from Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2016. You have three minutes? Watch the highlights reel. Want to dive a bit deeper? Dozens of recorded WPC 2016 sessions are available via the WPC Gallery.

I’m going to combine learnings from June and July with recent announcements to bring you the Luper’s Learnings edition below. Look for monthly editions to resume around 7 September then around 5 October just after Ignite.

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Here we go with my Learnings from the last month…

• As is usually the case, at the beginning of Microsoft’s fiscal year, we see lots of new readiness offerings start to roll out and continue for the next 6 – 10 months. You’ll see a heavy dose of readiness opportunities in my content below.

I mentioned Ignite above. Take advantage of your last chance to register as it is only six weeks away and is filling up quickly. It’s the premier conference for partners to go for in person, deep dive technical training on all topics Azure. My plans are coming together for an Azure Partner Networking Happy Hour during Ignite. If you’ll be at Ignite, let me know so that I can be sure to get an invite to you. Keep watching this space for additional details.

Data Platform Online is a series of online, live, and interactive training in which participants learn about Data Platform solutions and sales scenarios, as well as receive guidance on how to effectively orchestrate sales across each stage of the Data Platform sales cycle.

This particular series is targeted at Sales professionals within Microsoft and partner organizations. There are sessions on six distinct topics for targeted roles to attend, each lasting one hour. Each topic will be offered on one day in September, with two delivery times to accommodate global time zones. Sessions are led by Microsoft experts, and participants learn through a combination of lecture, presentation and interactive discussions. Course topics, dates, and times (all times Pacific) below. Registration

In addition to the Data Platform sessions, there are a series of Datacenter training sessions being delivered in the coming weeks. These sessions are online, live, and interactive sales training in which participants learn about key Microsoft Datacenter solutions and sales scenarios. The seven live sessions each last one hour and are offered on one day with two delivery times to accommodate global time zones. Full details below.

• Speaking of readiness, on the Born To Learn Blog, Alison Cunard announced the Microsoft Professional Degree (MPD) Program. Initially, you’ll see the Microsoft Professional Degree in Data Science. Microsoft consulted Data Scientists and the companies that employ them to identify the requisite core skills. We then developed a curriculum to teach these functional and technical skills, combining highly rated online courses with hands-on labs, concluding in a final capstone project. You can start the classes now.
• In addition to Ignite and the above training, I have line of site to great technical training coming to a location near you (plus virtual) on many, many Azure related topics. I’ll try to have more details for you in the September Luper’s Learnings.
• Now that I’ve gotten all that training, readiness and enablement stuff out there, be sure to check out the new Azure solutions section on the azure.com web site. It now front ends the case studies by both giving you access to those customer case studies as well as giving you a solution pivot on Azure based solutions that include things like Disaster recovery, SAP on Azure and Remote monitoring with IoT. Really cool that the listed solutions each show some customer examples and, in many cases, the partner who delivered the solution.
• Did you see Dan Plastina’s announcement Announcing Azure Information Protection. Microsoft Azure Information Protection is a new service that builds on both Microsoft Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS) and our recent acquisition of Secure Islands.
• Geekwire reports on the 2016 Morgan Stanley CIO survey of 100 CIOs around the world. Read their coverage -  Azure rising: Microsoft will be largest Infrastructure as a Service vendor by 2019, says new Morgan Stanley survey
• At WPC, you may have heard Gavriella Schuster say “…we're doubling our investment in free software, cloud services, and platforms for our partners over the next year…”. Redmond Channel Partner has a bit of coverage and the beginnings of some specifics in Scott Bekker’s What It Means for Microsoft To 'Double Investment' in IUR.
• If you or others in your organization have AWS skills, take a look at the five part series, Microsoft Azure for Amazon AWS Cloud Professionals.
  • Part 1 – Getting Started
  • Part 2 – Networking
  • Part 3 – Storage
  • Part 4 - Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets & Containers
  • Part 5 – Migrating to Azure
• You know that I’m excited about OSS and Linux solutions running on Azure. Back at //build, we announced that BASH would be coming to Windows 10. I wonder if and how you can use that in combination with your Azure projects? See Step-By-Step: Enabling Bash on Windows 10 from CANITPRO.

• Read Andrew Conway’s post discussing Enterprise Mobility Suite becomes Enterprise Mobility + Security and other details on AAD Premium and Azure Information Protection.
• You know that a virtual machine can encounter issues caused by user configurations or host infrastructure. If you have exhausted all other options under the troubleshooting menu, we suggest redeploying your virtual machine to a new host. The original virtual machine, including the local disk, is deleted, and the configurations and associated resources are transferred to a new virtual machine of the same size on a new Azure host. As part of our commitment to provide better customer service, when a virtual machine is redeployed, we pull the logs from the original host to see if we can prevent a similar issue in the future. Full instructions are available for either Linux or Windows virtual machines.
• Microsoft historically offered two synchronization tools with Azure AD: "DIRSYNC" for single forest customers and "Azure AD Sync" for multi-forest and other advanced capabilities. These older tools have been replaced with the single solution, Azure AD Connect, for all scenarios. Dirsync and Azure AD Sync are no longer being updated and have now been deprecated. These two synchronization clients will no longer be supported after April 13, 2017. Andreas Kjellman shared details, schedule and transition guidance. The clock is ticking.
• Speaking of identity, recently Gartner recognized Microsoft as a Leader, positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision, in the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Identity and Access Management as a Service, Worldwide. You can access the report here. Alex Simons commented on the results and report in his blog post.
• Since I connected the dots from Identity to Identity, now I’ll connect the dots from Gartner to Gartner. Brad Anderson announced “…that Gartner has recognized Microsoft with a visionary placement for Microsoft Intune and the Enterprise Mobility Suite in the Enterprise Mobility Management Magic Quadrant.” You also have access to that report here. In only its second year on the Gartner Identity and Access Management as a Service, Worldwide Magic Quadrant Microsoft was placed in the "Leader" quadrant, far to the right for our completeness of vision. Nice.
• Just a couple of weeks ago, the IoT team posted Azure Logic Apps facilitates rapid integration for IoT solutions talking a bit about Logic Apps, Connectors and IoT in light of the announcement from Frank Weigel of  Azure Logic Apps general availability.
• If you use Azure App Service Web App, it’s possible that your web app might go down once in a while. Of course, you want to be able to answer the question, why was it down? Introducing appLens for Azure App Service Web App. It’s a self service tool to help you figure out the answer to that question.
• The latest batch of updates to Azure Batch service capabilities was announced in mid June.
• At Build 2016, we announced a limited preview of Azure Service Fabric on Linux, which you can use to build, deploy, and manage cloud applications by using the same core technology that Microsoft has used to build massively scalable solutions on Windows. Read Mani Ramaswamy’s blog post for details and you can now sign up for the preview to check it out.
• Also in preview, New version of Azure Active Directory PowerShell cmdlets. Download AzureADPreview and read complete documentation here.
• Check out the free preview of Microsoft Stream, a new business video service that democratizes access to and discovery of video at work. Anyone with a business email address can sign up for the preview in seconds and begin uploading, sharing and tagging videos in their organization. Preview announcement. Stream blog. Get started.
• I’m torn between “it’s cool” and “it’s informative.” Watch this long (46 minute) episode of Cloud Cover. Haishi Bai is joined by Any Glover of Netflix to talk about Spinnaker, Netflix's open source, multi-cloud, global Continuous Delivery platform. Spinnaker is designed to be pluggable, allowing different tasks, models and targets to be incorporated into the deployment pipeline. It supports various deployment targets such as Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Platform, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry. Now with Microsoft's contribution, Spinnaker also deploys to Microsoft Azure! Check it out.
• Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer was updated last week. It allows you to easily work with Azure Storage from any platform, anywhere. It’s free and downloadable for Windows, Mac and Linux.
• You want your share (or more) of the “greater cloud spending” that IDC predicts will exceed $500 billion by 2020? Definitely take advantage of the Cloud profitability resources and scenarios.
• Lastly, from time to time I really enjoy being able to call out some Azure momentum. Here are a few highlights of services that became Generally Available in the past 60 days (I only highlighted 16 below but there were more!)
  • IaaS migration from classic to Resource Manager
  • Azure Security Center
  • Azure Active Directory B2C
  • Always Encrypted for Azure SQL Database
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse
  • Service Bus Premium Messaging released to general availability
  • Microsoft R Server for Linux virtual machines
  • Microsoft Power BI Embedded
  • HDInsight Tools for IntelliJ
  • SQL Server Stretch Database
  • Spark on HDInsight
  • Bing APIs in Microsoft Cognitive Services
  • Scale data across the globe with Azure DocumentDB multiple-region replication
  • Git integration for API Management
  • Azure Active Directory conditional access
  • Windows 10 Enterprise State Roaming via Azure Active Directory Premium
  • Plus… Two new Azure regions are generally available to customers in the United States and across the globe: West US 2 and West Central US. That brings Azure to 34 regions announced with 26 of them generally available - more than any other major cloud provider. Stay current on what regions are up and running and which services are available in those regions.

Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the July / August Luper’s Learnings. And, again, apologies for it getting to you a few days later than usual. I’d love your input for topics for the September edition let me know what they are!