Mark Russiovich is the CTO of Microsoft Azure. When Mark Russiovich came to Australia for the first time just last week, it was for a very special event, the opening of the two Canberra Azure regions with a special event April 3 & April 5 in both Sydney & Melbourne. There’s me with the man himself. Sky news recorded a special interview with Mark Russinovich talking about the new Canberra datacenters, some highlights below: New “Protected status certification” for Azure itself, however with the co-location option in the CDC, data of all classifications, including Public, Unclassified (DLM), Protected, Secret and Top…

Automatically Start/Stop virtual machines, the Azure Reboot and more on this episode of the Need to Know podcast. Start/Stop VMs during off-hours solution 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 Log Analytics, and sends optional emails by leveraging SendGrid. It supports both Azure Resource Manager and classic VMs for most scenarios. This solution provides a decentralised automation capability for customers who want to reduce their costs leveraging serverless, low cost resources. Features include: Schedule VMs to start/stop Schedule VMs to start/stop in ascending order using…

New Azure VMs ND, DCv2 and the M series are all GA’d, another free eBook for developers, new WhiteBoard app and the Azure Application Architecture Guide on episode 171 of the Need to Know podcast. ND and NCv2 virtual machines now available ND and NCv2 virtual machines (VMs), as announced at Build 2017, are now available. The ND-series, powered by NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs based on the new Pascal Architecture will provide more than twice the performance over the previous generation for FP32 (single precision floating point operations), for AI workloads utilising CNTK, TensorFlow, Caffe, and other frameworks. The ND-series also…

VMware on Azure, free Azure ebook, Azure Stack @ ANZ plus more on the latest Need to Know podcast. Host VMware infrastructure with VMware virtualization on Azure Most workloads can be migrated to Azure easily using services like Azure Site Recovery; however, there may be specific VMware workloads that are unique and more challenging to migrate to the cloud. For these workloads, you may need the option to run the VMware stack on Azure as an intermediate step. Microsoft have announced the preview of VMware virtualization on Azure, a bare-metal solution that runs the full VMware stack on Azure hardware, co-located…

This week on the Need to Know podcast, ND series of VMs for Deep Learning & NCv2 series for HPC compute coming into GA in December, brand new NCv3-series VMs that use NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. System state backup directly to Azure using Azure Backup and much more. Azure App Service and Functions on Azure Stack We are pleased to share that Azure App Service and Functions are now generally available on Azure Stack. This release brings the power of Azure App Service and Azure Functions on-premises, and offers product support for customers running in multinode environments. Learn more in this…

New Fv2 VMs (fastest in the public cloud), Cray Supercomputers and Azure Container Service (AKS) on the latest Need to Know podcast episode 168. Fv2 VMs are now available, the fastest VMs on Azure The new Fv2 VM family in Azure now generally available offers the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor (code-named Skylake), the fastest Skylake CPU in the public cloud today. The closest cloud competitor offering Skylake currently only offers 2.0 GHz. These VM sizes are hyper-threaded and run on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8168 processor, featuring a base core frequency of 2.7 GHz and a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 3.7…

We talk about the new Azure Files Sync along with all the latest Microsoft Cloud news with Office 365 and Azure on the latest Need to Know podcast episode 167. Azure SQL managed instance Instance-level functionality or isolation requirements where customers who have made deep investments in instance-level SQL Server capabilities (e.g. SQL CLR integration, SQL Server Agent, cross database querying, etc.) expect similar capabilities in Azure SQL Database. Now there’s a private preview of a new deployment option for Azure SQL Database called Managed Instance. Managed Instance offers near 100% SQL Server compatibility with the benefits of PaaS (platform as a service)!…

All the latest Ignite 2017 Announcements plus heaps more on the latest Need to Know podcast. Keep up to date with all the latest Azure announcements, what in and out of preview –  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/roadmap Microsoft have invested over $15 billion in building our global cloud infrastructure since they opened their first datacenter in 1989.   Azure Compute Announcements – Ignite 2017 In Preview Virtual network service endpoints for Azure Storage and SQL Database are currently in Public preview. You can now secure Azure Storage and Azure SQL Database endpoints to only your virtual networks, by using virtual network service endpoints….

AAD Managed Service Identity, B-Series burstable VMs & Web App for Containers and Azure App Service on Linux are all part of Azure News this week playing catch-up from the last two weeks, bundled in together through here. All on the Need to Know podcast. Introducing Azure AD Managed Service Identity A common challenge in cloud development is managing the credentials used to authenticate to cloud services and keeping credentials out of code, but not anymore, Azure Active Directory Managed Service Identity (MSI) preview helps. MSI gives your code an automatically managed identity for authentication to Azure services, so that…

AD Domain Services for ARM based vNets, Dynamic Group Membership for Azure AD, new Azure SQL standard tiers and new Azure portal changes all in the latest Need to Know podcast. Azure AD domain services for ARM based vNets You may remember back in July we announced the public preview of Azure AD Domain Services in the new Azure portal where you can now create new managed AD domains and perform administrative tasks like configuring secure LDAP. Now there is the public preview of Azure AD Domain Services support for virtual networks created using Azure Resource Manager. You can now create…