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…

Alibaba using Microsoft’s open source software, Citrix Essentials now in Azure, Azure Stack TP3 refresh and more as heard on the Need to Know podcast. Alibaba is using Microsoft’s Azure networking switch for its public cloud Last year, Microsoft contributed its Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONIC) to the Open Compute Project datacenter foundation. Almost exactly a year later, Alibaba announced that it is starting to use SONIC for its own public cloud datacenters. More Info. Azure surpasses AWS as the public cloud of choice A new survey of IT professionals shows Microsoft Azure has overtaken Amazon Web…

Azure AD B2C Access Tokens, Azure SQL hybrid, IOT Camp in Sydney and General Availability of Geographic Routing capability in Azure Traffic Manager all news items this week in the Need to Know podcast – Episode 146 – also on http://podcasts.needtoknow.cloud. Azure AD B2C Access Tokens now in public preview You now have greater control over your web API’s when you secure them using Azure AD B2C. Microsoft have announced the public preview for using access tokens with web API’s. With this in-demand feature it makes it possible to create web API’s that can be accessed by different client applications. You can grant permissions to…

Another new family of Azure VMs, DocumentDB API for MongoDB now GA, using Azure’s flexible compute directly from your R session and New capabilities of HDInsight and DocumentDB are all Azure news items in the past week and are all heard on the Need to Know podcast. New Storage Optimised Virtual Machines, L Series We are excited to introduce a new series of virtual machine sizes. The L Series for Storage optimizes workloads that require low latency, such as NoSQL databases (e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB, Cloudera and Redis). This new series of VMs offers from up to 32 CPU cores, using the Intel®…

ARM on ARM, new Azure SQL service tiers, Visual Studio 2017 Launch, TechFemme Sydney 2017, PowerShell v6.0.0 and Microsoft Global Cloud Network Switch (SONiC) are all in the news this week on the Need To Know podcast. ARM on ARM Microsoft is moving beyond Intel in its Azure cloud and is going to start using ARM-based servers in its Azure cloud Microsoft has been testing Windows Server running on ARM-based servers made by Qualcomm and Cavium. They are testing Qualcomm’s ARM-based 10 nanometre Centriq 2400 processor, available with up to 48 cores. They plan on using ARM based servers to run search, storage, machine-learning…

Some important Azure milestones with both Azure CLI 2.0 & Azure Stack TP3 that has been released also Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner, Azure SQL Data Sync, 5 new Azure services to Canada, AWS outage, Auto-Shutdown for ARM based VMs. Lots of Azure News this time around again – as heard on the latest Need to Know podcast episode 143. Azure CLI 2.0 now generally available Azure CLI is a command line utility which runs on Mac, Linux and Windows. The Azure CLI 2.0 is open source and on GitHub. http://aka.ms/CLI More Info. Azure Stack TP3 has been released New features in Azure Stack…

New Windows Server 2016 RDS template in Azure, More Azure regions, Kubernetes now Generally Available on ACS, Azure Network Watcher and we speak with Orin Thomas who is one of five (5) Microsoft Regional Directors in Australia. Azure news as heard on the Need to Know podcast: On the last episode we Last week we mentioned some Ignite Australia stats, but below is a more complete list kindly provided by Microsoft: How many square meters does Ignite Australia take up? 14368m2 How many cups of coffee did we all drink this year? 8,800 cups How much data was downloaded as of 12pm…

Azure price cuts, IoT and AI transforming cars, Microsoft Azure gaining on AWS & Google, In the Azure cloud world, enterprise architects are the highest paid, Free eBook: Migrating SQL Server Databases to Azure and all the latest news as heard on the latest Need to Know podcast – episode 141. Some Stats from Ignite Australia 2017 How much data was used? 4.7TB How many cups of coffee was consumed? 8,800 cups How many hours of breakout content was logged? 228.75 hours Script to download all Ignite 2017 AU Sessions http://wellytonian.com/2017/02/microsoft-ignite-australia-2017-sessions-downloader/ Price cuts Last year Scott Guthrie himself said that Microsoft would no…

Azure VM Managed Disks, Cisco joins Azure Stack, Apache Kafta on HDInsight, Azure SQL Database Threat Detection and Azure IoT Hub Supports Cassandra Databases. Lots of Azure news this time with only days till Ignite Australia. Azure News as heard on the Need to Know Podcast. Follow us on Twitter @n2kpodcast. Cisco Integrated System for Azure Stack Coming Later This Year Just like HP-E, Lenovo & Dell – Cisco has joined the Azure Stack appliance group. Azure Stack will be released later this year as a turnkey solution, like an appliance, fully built and configured, you just need to buy…

Wow, February already!!! Holy s**t!  Where did the time go? Lots of Azure news coming through this time of the year in the lead up to Microsoft Ignite AU. Azure News below, as heard on the Need to Know podcast. Follow the Need to Know podcast on Twitter @n2kpodcast. In the lead up to Microsoft Ignite, we are featuring on the podcast all the presenters that are presenting at Microsoft Ignite. As always, appreciate the feedback, either constructive or non-constructive. Keep it coming, feedback@needtoknow.cloud Microsoft Azure Germany expands services and compliance Azure Germany has been opened for business since September 2016 and they…