Azure’s Hybrid Use Benefit is easier to implement in Azure, Azure AD B2B Vs Azure AD B2C, Azure Instance Metadata Service and Azure Architecture Center is all part of the news this week on the Need to Know podcast.
A change in the Azure portal
Microsoft are allowing users to activate the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit directly in the Azure Management Portal rather than manually tagging VMs using PowerShell. With the hybrid use benefit you can save up to 40% on virtual machine running costs if you bring your own Windows Server licensing such as software assurance.
On the subject of tagging, Azure Site Recovery helps make the journey to the cloud as easy as possible, you can use this to migrate any servers from anywhere including AWS, VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers to Azure. You can already configure ASR to use the Hybrid Use Benefit with PowerShell, however the tagging option will now be available within the Azure portal itself.
Moving to Azure
A new tool to help move businesses move to Azure. The free Cloud Migration Assessment helps you discover servers across your IT environment, analyze hardware configurations and provides a detailed report including the estimated cost benefits of moving to Microsoft Azure.
Azure AD B2B
Azure AD B2B collaboration is generally available today and is part of Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS).
Azure AD B2B is a set of capabilities in Azure AD that enable secure collaboration between business-to-business partners. These new capabilities make it easy for organisations to create advanced trust relationships between Azure AD tenants so they can easily share business applications across companies without the hassle of managing additional directories or the overhead of managing partner identities.
Azure B2B can be used across Azure AD Free, Azure AD Basic and Azure AD Premium plans.
6 million organisations already ready using Azure AD.
Millions of users from thousands of businesses have already been using Azure AD B2B collaboration capabilities available through public preview.
Azure AD B2C is an enterprise grade, multi-tenant cloud service that supports authentication with top consumer identity services like Facebook and Google and Microsoft Accounts. Microsoft have made is easy for you to store and manage hundreds of millions of consumer identities in a secure, reliable, scalable, cost effective service. And like the rest of Azure AD, Azure B2C is open standards based and cross platform using OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect for authentication and OData v3 for user management via the Graph API – so it works beautifully with iOS, Android, Windows and browser based applications and services.
Azure AD B2C is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. Your first 50,000 consumer identities are free, and then as you get more customers and traffic to your applications, you pay only a fraction of a cent per authentication and per stored identity.
All about Azure B2B – https://aka.ms/b2bmechanics
All about Azure B2C – https://youtu.be/ASC7CG4XMq8
How B2B works:
How B2C works:
Azure Identity Protection
What is Azure Identity Protection?
It’s available through Azure AD premium P2.
Announcing public preview of Instance Metadata Service
We are excited to announce the public preview of Instance Metadata Service in Azure’s West Central US region. Instance Metadata Service is a RESTful endpoint that allows virtual machines instances to get information regarding its compute, network and upcoming maintenance events. The endpoint is available at a well-known non-routable IP address (169.254.169.254) that can be accessed only from within the VM. The data from Instance Metadata Service can help with your cluster setup, replica placement, supportability, telemetry, or other cluster bootstrap or runtime needs.
Service is available to all Azure Resource Manager created VMs currently in West Central US region. As we add more regions we will update this post and the documentation with the details.
The service is available for both Linux or Windows
For Linux
- curl -H Metadata:true http://169.254.169.254/metadata/instance?api-version=2017-03-01
For Windows
- curl –H @{‘Metadata’=’true’} http://169.254.169.254/metadata/instance?api-version=2017-03-01
Azure Architecture Center
- Reference Architectures
- A set of recommended architectures for Azure. Each architecture includes best practices, prescriptive steps and deplorable solutions – you can deploy the example solutions right from the site using JSON template deployment
- Cloud Design Patterns for developers and solution architects. Each pattern describes a problem, a pattern that addresses the problem and an example that is based on Azure.
- Best practices for Cloud Applications covering aspects such as auto-scale, caching, data partitioning, API design and more
Marc Kean 