Azure News 2016 – Week 37
The following is Azure news from the most recent ‘Need to Know’ podcast Episode 114 with both Robert Crane and myself. We speak to Steve Luper, who is the Worldwide Technical Director | Azure Managed Partners. Not to mention his Luper’s Learnings, is an awesome resource to stay on top of Azure.
http://blog.ciaops.com/2016/09/need-to-know-podcastepisode-114.html
We talk about:
- The change of direction Azure takes in competition against rivals such as AWS
- Partners in keeping up to date with ‘tech’
- Ignite US
You can subscribe to Lupers Learnings by emailing: luperslearnings@microsoft.com
Other things mentioned in the podcast:
- Link to underwater datacenters – http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10883866/microsoft-underwater-data-centers
- Link to the past releases of Lupers Learnings – https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/luperslearnings/
- Steve Luper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lupes
- Azure geographic region footprint map: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/
Episodes of the podcast can be found http://ciaops.podbean.com
Azure AD is now available in the Ibiza Portal
Azure AD is the independent directory used by Azure Classic, Azure ARM and all Office 365 services and now it’s available in the new Ibiza portal.
Azure AD is now available in public preview, phase 1 of 2 phases is now ready to start to use.
Stuff you can use is:
- Day-to-day directory administration tasks related to users, groups, and applications
- Tasks to get your Azure AD configured for a production environment, things like verifying your custom domain names, getting started with Azure AD Connect, and configuring custom branding and self-service password reset.
In the coming weeks, they’ll update the new experience so that it works well for other directory roles such as user administrators and password administrators.
More info:
UK TechDays Online September 2016 | Channel 9
Run by MVPs for everyone keen on Azure. A series of tech videos all online from the recent UK TechDays from the Microsoft Campus in Reading.
- DevOps in practice
- Data Platform and BOTs
- exploit the functionality in Office365
- The inside track on Azure and UK Datacenter
- Artificial Intelligence
Get VMs ready in minutes by setting up an image factory in Azure DevTest Labs
If the following are your requirements:
- Complex environment (lots of software + configuration)
- Need to save on compute hours (shouldn’t be running 24/7)
- Need a simple experience for teams to ‘request’ a new developer desktop
- The time from requesting a new Developer Desktop (Virtual Machine) to having it running must be less than 10 minutes
- They do NOT want to take on the cost of manually creating and maintaining custom images
In a blog series, the topics above are all covered to enable anyone to setup, configure and run an image factory based on DevTest Labs
