Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (August 2017)

Welcome to the August 2017 monthly edition of Luper’s Learnings.

I’m baaaaackkkk… After a yearlong break, Luper’s Learnings is stretching its legs and getting back on the ground. As this is the first edition in 2017 and first time back in a while, I’ll keep it a bit short but… do be prepared for the next edition,  post Ignite on 29 September. I’ll be watching Ignite remotely this year so will miss those of you who will be attending in person but please do stay in touch via Twitter and email.

If you received this directly from me then you are on my list and you will continue receiving my Learnings once per month. If you would prefer to stop receiving it, please reply to me and I’ll remove you promptly. If somebody forwarded this email to you and you would like to begin receiving it from me directly each month, just email me at luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com.

Here we go with things I’ve learned since the last Luper’s Learnings…

Hopefully many of you in the US experienced and survived the eclipse this week. Several of us from the partner technical team tried to get closer to totality without getting caught in traffic for days. We drove about an hour south of Seattle and experienced around 94% totality so… it never got dark. Good time, though!

(I’m on the left with the Azure t-shirt on)

• I had the pleasure of attending Inspire (formerly the Worldwide Partner Conference / WPC) in Washington, DC last month and spending time with a variety of partners discussing building and growing their Azure practices. I  particularly focused on where they had the opportunity to deliver solutions transacted via CSP. I’m very excited to continue to work with partners in the US this fiscal year on that journey.
• Above I mentioned that the next edition of Luper’s Learnings will come out at the tail end of the Ignite conference. While I had the opportunity to attend Ignite the past two years, I have other commitments this year so won’t be able to be there in person. There are still some passes available on the Ignite site if you are interested in attending. It’s 25 – 29 September (just about a month from now) in Orlando, Florida. If you do go or watch sessions remotely, I would appreciate hearing your takeaways and highlights from the conference.
• Recently there has been so much news and noise around containers, orchestration etc. that I can barely contain myself in sharing a few of the highlights with you around Azure and containers.
  • Just a month ago, at the end of July, there was great info about Azure Container Instances going into preview. Corey Sanders announced Fast and Easy Containers: Azure Container Instances followed by Azure Container Instances demo,  Tuesdays with Corey: Kubernetes Connector for Azure Container Instances! and  Tuesdays with Corey: Azure Container Instances with WINDOWS containers.
  • The Microsoft Azure Cloud Cover Show spent almost ½ hour on the topic in Episode 232: Azure Container Instances.
  • TechCrunch covered the ACI announcement
  • John Adams posted on the Opsgility Cloud Readiness Blog, The gap is filled: How Azure Container Instances completes the PaaS hosting spectrum at last.
  • Full details are available here. There’s a great table on that page helping you to decide which Azure service is the best for you depending on your container needs.
  • The Azure Container Instances documentation includes 5-Minute Quickstarts, Step-by-Step Tutorials plus links to the Azure CLI usage.
• Acknowledging that it’s not about ACI but still container related, David Gristwood posted a short article Getting up and going with Windows Containers on Microsoft Azure with some links to other good resources.
• And, William Eastbury’s Crib Sheet: Get Started with Windows Containers and Docker shows a good path that he took to learn about containers.
• Mid August we had the announcement Introducing Azure Event Grid – an event service for modern applications. While I have not had much of an opportunity to do anything with Azure Event Grid yet, I found a few nuggets to share with you.
  • InfoWorld’s coverage Get started with Azure Event Grid for serverless events
  • 30 minute Cloud Cover Show Episode 233: Azure Event Grid with Bahram Banisadr
  • Documentation including Quickstart and tutorial

• Just this week, Kumail Hussain announced the public preview of Azure Archive Blob Storage and Blob-Level Tiering. “What in the world is that?” you may ask. I’m glad you did…  Last year, we launched Cool Blob Storage to help customers reduce storage costs by tiering their infrequently accessed data to the Cool tier. This announcement is of the public preview of Archive Blob Storage designed to help organizations reduce their storage costs even further by storing rarely accessed data in our lowest-priced tier yet. Furthermore, we’re excited to introduce the public preview of Blob-Level Tiering enabling you to optimize storage costs by easily managing the lifecycle of your data across these tiers at the object level.
• At the beginning of this month, Richard Hay of ITPro Windows called out some of the ways that you can learn about Azure Backup and Site Recovery capabilities. His article includes on demand sessions plus instructor led content showing the differences between backup and disaster recovery, how the two approaches work together, and having a recovery plan and dealing with a recovery it becomes necessary.
• I’m not going to spend a ton of time on it this month, I’ll recruit some of my colleagues to share details in coming months but I do want to mention that during the Inspire conference in July, Mike Neil announced that Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order now. Daniel Savage kicked of a series of blog posts discussing Operating Azure Stack.
• If you aren’t familiar with them, keep in mind that we have a collection of Azure Reference Architectures, a set of standard configurations of Azure infrastructure services. This month, Joe Davies added New Reference Architecture for a high availability SharePoint Server 2016 farm in Azure. Others in the collection include Windows VM workloads, Linux VM workloads, SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA plus more.
• You know that there’s Azure PowerShell cmdlets, the cross platform CLI but did you know that there is now a shell in the Azure Portal? It’s called Azure Cloud Shell. The official word on it from a few months ago can be found here. Russell Smith wrote about it on Petri. Scott Hanselman has a ten minute video with Rob Caron on Azure Cloud Shell from earlier this month on Azure Friday. The team wants to know how to improve Azure Cloud Shell. Share your feedback.
• In Azure Network Watcher introduces Connectivity Check (Preview), Abhishek Pathak says that diagnosing network connectivity and performance issues in the cloud can be a challenge as your network evolves in complexity. We are pleased to announce the preview of a new feature to check network connectivity in a variety of scenarios when using VM.
• Every so often I like to call out some of the great customer stories that are available. All of the below recent customer stories include some of our terrific partners who are delivering solutions on Azure.

• Frequently in Luper’s Learnings I share Service Updates that stand out. Below are a few that you might be interested in.
  • Azure Monitor: New capabilities for diagnostic settings
  • General availability: Instant file recovery from Azure VM backups
  • Preview: Azure Service Health
  • As always, the ever changing list of Azure Updates is here.
• A few quick hit geeky topics for you
  • A few weeks ago, Marcel Zehner, Microsoft MVP and RD shared OMS welcomes the new “Azure Analytics Query Language”
  • Mark Russinovich, CTO of Azure announced the Coco Framework for enterprise blockchain networks
  • Raman Sharma wrote Build apps faster with Azure Serverless
  • How to Setup NVIDIA Driver on NV-Series Azure VM from Michael Collier
• I always like to end with fun. Here are just a couple fun things for August
  • Elon Musk just made Microsoft Azure 100% cooler by association
  • A is for Azure: The Alphabet in Colors – Heliotrope Fun Facts and Prompt!

Back issues of Luper’s Learnings are available via the archive at https://blogs.technet.com/luperslearnings for your convenience and perusal.

Whether you’ve read this on Friday, over your weekend or at the beginning of the week, thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the August Luper’s Learnings. You’ve continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions.