(RDS) Tip of the Day: Azure.Source – Volume 43 - Keep current on what's happening in Azure, including what's now in preview, generally available, news & updates, and more.

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Today's tip...

Now in preview Announcing public preview of Azure IoT Hub manual failover feature - IoT Hub cloud service manual failover enables customers to failover an IoT hub instance from its primary Azure region to its corresponding geo-paired region with a recovery time objective (RTO) of 10 min–2 hours. The IoT Hub service provides cross-regional automatic disaster recovery as a default mitigation for region-wide failures or extenuated outages, which has an RTO of 2 – 26 hours. If your business uptime goals are not satisfied by the RTO that the Microsoft-initiated failover provides, you should consider using manual failover to trigger the failover process yourself.

 

Azure Monitor: Route AAD Activity Logs using diagnostic settings - Azure Monitor diagnostic settings enable you to stream log data from an Azure service to three destinations: an Azure storage account, an Event Hubs namespace, and/or a Log Analytics workspace. This allows you to easily route logs from any Azure service to a data archive, SIEM tool, or custom log processing tool. Now you can route your AAD audit and sign-in logs to these same destinations, centralizing all of your Azure service logs in one pipeline.

 

Now generally available Instance size flexibility for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances - Instance size flexibility for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances is a new feature that makes your reserved instance purchasing and management even simpler by applying reservation discounts to different virtual machine (VM) sizes within the same VM group. With instance size flexibility, you don’t have to deploy the exact same VM size to get the benefit of your purchased Azure Reserved Instances (RI) as other VM sizes within the same VM group also get the RI discount.

 

Azure management groups - Azure management groups enable you to organize your subscriptions and apply governance controls, such as Azure Policy and Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC), to the management groups. All subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the controls applied to the management group. No matter if you have an Enterprise Agreement, Certified Solution Partner, Pay-As-You-Go, or any other type of subscription, this service gives all Azure customers enterprise-grade management at a large scale for no additional cost. Management groups not only allow you to group subscriptions but also allows you to group other management groups to form a hierarchy.

 

Linux on App Service Environment - Linux on App Service Environment combines the features from App Service on Linux and App Service Environment. Linux customers can take advantage of deploying Linux and containerized apps in an App Service Environment, which is ideal for deploying applications into a VNet for secure network access or apps running at a high scale.

 

Start/Stop VMs during off-hours in Azure Automation. The Start/Stop VMs during off-hours solution starts and stops your Azure virtual machines on user-defined schedules, provides insights through Azure Log Analytics, and sends optional emails by using action groups (email functionality not available in Government subscriptions). It supports both Azure Resource Manager and classic deployment models for VMs in most scenarios.

 

Technical content and training Hardening security with Azure security - Learn how the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center is helping to secure Azure and the global security landscape. The team also has a broad view across many geographies and a view of the services that run in Azure. With this insight, the team can see common attack patterns. These patterns can be at the network level, service level, app level, or OS level. As soon as an exploit is detected, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center works with other teams at Microsoft to build mitigations into our products and services.

 

Getting started with IoT: what do you do with all that data? - Once your IoT devices are deployed, secured, and provisioned through Azure IoT Hub, the question remains: where do you send all of the data? The role of Azure IoT Hub is to determine how each data packet needs to be prioritized and where to send it. Knowing how to handle the information you generate, and where to route it, can be a challenge; however, once you start establishing connections, you can begin to comprehend the potential of IoT to transform your business.

 

Real example: improve accuracy, reduce training times for existing R codebase - Retailers have been building product recommendation systems for years, and many of those are built using the programming language R. For older implementations of recommender systems, it’s time to consider improving performance and scalability by moving these systems to Azure. Learn the process of successfully optimizing and reusing an existing recommendation system written in R using the parallelism of the MicrosoftML and RevoScaleR libraries built into Microsoft Machine Learning Server.

 

There is a ton of additional content including upcoming events, developer spotlight, videos, tips & tricks and more.

 

Read the full article HERE.

Reference: Azure.Source – Volume 43 - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-source-volume-43/