Luper’s Learnings – Azure Technical Community for Partners (June 2016)

This is the last Luper’s Learnings for Microsoft’s Fiscal Year 2016. I hope that you’ve found value from these emails over the past year. Your input continues to make this a more valuable resource. Please keep the suggestions coming via Twitter and email.

Thanks so much for your patience. With all the excitement closing our FY16 and planning going on for our new Fiscal Year (FY17) on 1 July, it’s taken me longer than I had planned to get this edition to you. It would be wonderful to hear from you — both stories you have of how Luper’s Learnings has impacted you individually, your Azure partner organization or your customers as well as any suggestions you have for improving Luper’s Learnings in the coming year. Being able to talk about your stories here in Redmond enables me to continue to get time and investment to share my Learnings with you each month. Please share any short stories you have by email to luperslearnings (at) microsoft.com. Thanks!

Here we go with my Learnings from the last month…

•  Two of Microsoft’s biggest and best conferences take place within the next few months. The first, coming up just about a month from today is our Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). As I mentioned in the May Luper’s Learnings, WPC is taking place in Toronto, Canada from 10 July – 14 July. It’s generally not a conference that purely technical folks from partners attend. If, however, you’re in a role with business and commercial responsibilities as well and will be there, please make a point to say ‘hi’ as I’ll be there the whole week.
• I’ve also told you previously about Ignite in Atlanta in September. It’s the premier conference for partners to go for in person, deep dive technical training on all topics Azure. Plans are just starting to come together for an Azure Partner Networking Happy Hour during Ignite. If you’ll be at Ignite watch this space for more details and, of course, feel free to reach out to me to make sure that we connect during the week of Ignite.

• The news is nearly a month old at this point but there’s no end to the growth of the geographies where Azure is available. Azure CVP Takeshi Numoto announced that our Toronto and Quebec City datacenter regions became generally available and that we’ll be expanding into South Korea including a datacenter region in Seoul. I can’t recall if I’ve shared it previously… the Azure Regions page lists the regional locations where Azure is hosted in addition to a great table of which services are available by region.
• Microsoft is unique among cloud vendors in our on-premises roots. That is key to what many customers are looking for, a hybrid cloud offering. In May, James Staten, Chief Strategist for Cloud + Enterprise wrote Hybrid cloud: How you can take advantage of the best of both worlds which includes a link to the Enterprise Cloud Strategy ebook I promoted here in March.
• I have told you about DevTest Labs’ progression from Private Preview (October) through Public Preview (April and May). Now it’s time to tell you that Azure DevTest Labs became generally available at the end of May. DevTest Labs is your self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create dev/test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs.
  • Not sure you get it? Watch this three minute video for an explanation.
  • Tom Archer also published a What is DevTest Labs? article.
  • A brief walkthrough — Create custom images from a lab VM
  • You can provide your feedback in the DevTest Labs Feedback Forum.
  • I’m pretty sure that they above will cover what you’re looking for but do take a look at Xiaoying Guo’s detailed announcement of General Availability.
• You may recall that in April, after Build, you heard about Cognitive Services. The Speaker Recognition API entered public preview in May.
• Happy Birthday ARM! Azure Resource Manager (ARM) began offering support for IaaS via templates around May 2015. Today there are over 350 community contributed Azure Quickstart Templates in the catalog. You can consume and contribute at this GitHub repo. You’ll find that there’s no shortage of guidance on how to take advantage of, create and contribute ARM templates.
  • Regular IT Guy – Making an ARM template from SCRATCH
  • Azure and the Modern Data Center  – Deployment with ARM templates and GIT
  • Visual Studio ALM Rangers – How to create an Azure ARM template in Visual Studio 2015
  • Tobias Zimmergren – Azure Resource Manager (8 part series, so far)
  • MVA – Deep Dive into Azure Resource Manager Scenarios and Patterns
  • Rick Rainey – Deploy an Azure Resource Manager Template
  • Tom FitzMacken – Authoring Azure Resource Manager templates
  • Nava Vaisman Levy – Resource Manager template walkthrough
  • Kirk Evans – Creating ARM Templates with Azure Resource Explorer
  • Microsoft + Open Source – APT fun with ARM templates
  • CANITPRO – DevOps Basics: Infrastructure as Code – ARM Templates
  • Paulo Marques – Azure ARM Template to deploy a new VM in a new storage account deployed at same time from a custom image
  • opsgility – Introduction to Automating IaaS with ARM and PowerShell
  • opsgility – Introduction to ARM Templates with Visual Studio 2015
• In February, Eugene Shvets announced the public preview of Azure Search indexers for Blob storage.  They have the ability to crack open and index major document formats, including PDF, Microsoft Office, HTML, JSON, and more. Now, in May, he announced that the Blob storage indexer can now parse JSON blobs and select any part of the JSON payload for indexing in Azure Search. Currently, this functionality is in preview. Read the comprehensive Indexing Documents in Azure Blob Storage with Azure Search for more info.
• The Mailbag series on the Enterprise Mobility and Security Blog came to my attention recently. You’re bound to find a number of nuggets in the over a dozen posts since the series started in December. A few that caught my eye:
  • Azure Subscriptions and Azure AD
  • MFA Q&A, Round 4!
  • Azure AD Connect Health
  • PowerShell Tips and Tricks!
• While we’re on the topic of Azure AD, More preview enhancements have been added for Azure AD B2C.
• Azure Automation is pretty cool. Just over a month ago Chris Sanders updated his post telling us that Azure Automation and Azure Virtual Machines have released a new feature allowing you to configure Virtual Machine (VM) alerts to run Automation runbooks. In May, in addition to choose a standard task, like restarting or stopping the VM in response to an alert, you can now choose to run a custom task (Azure Automation runbook) when the alert is triggered via your custom Automation runbooks to respond to the VM alert with your own workflow steps. BTW, the Azure Automation Cmdlets reference is here.
• Speaking of Runbooks… The Azure Automation Runbook Gallery has been updated and now pulls runbook content from the PowerShell Gallery in addition to Script Center.
• Azure Backup became Generally Available in the Azure Portal. Now you can seamlessly back up Azure Resource Manager-based virtual machines, as well as virtual machines created from the Azure classic portal, under the newly introduced recovery services vault.
• Manoj Kumar Jain announced Azure Site Recovery now has a simplified experience plus support for ARM and CSP.
• I get asked pretty regularly about platform-supported migration of ASM (classic) VMs to ARM. In May we announced the public preview of this capability. Documentation including capabilities, experience and current limitations is here.
• If you are using Azure Mobile Services, remember that we are transitioning from Azure Mobile Services to Azure App Service. While no action is required on your part, please note the management experience will change. You may choose to migrate prior to September 1, 2016 or wait until Azure migrates you. Announcement.
• Mid-June 2016 brings compatibility level 130 for new Azure SQL databases – Azure SQL Database runs millions of databases under several different T-SQL versions, preserving backward compatibility for applications. SQL Database implements a versioning technique called “compatibility level.” Use of compatibility level 130 enables developers to benefit from SQL Server 2016 query processor enhancements. The enhancements can improve your query executions by leveraging new features such as parallel plan execution, serial batch mode execution, and new query plan estimates, to name a few.
• The May 2016 update to Azure SQL Data Warehouse added several features. The short list, includes AAD authentication, Large-row support, Archival compression for clustered columnstore tables.  A fuller explanation is here.
• SQL Database Advisor and Performance dashboard have reached General Availability in the Azure Portal.
• Announcing support for PHP 7.0 in Azure App Service and notice of PHP 5.4 retirement – Back in November, we announced the availability of PHP 7 on App Service in an experimental capacity. With that announcement you were able to leverage PHP 7 (x86) on App Service using a site extension. A few weeks later, a second site extension was released which delivered PHP 7 (x64) support on App Service.
• Azure Content Delivery Network from Akamai is now available. Overview of the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Via Azure Blockchain as a Service update #8 Microsoft announced that we joined the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a new trade association focused on the possibilities and potential of distributed ledgers.
• If you want to experience an application running on Azure, but don’t want to create an Azure subscription or use a credit card, then you can take a free test drive without the commitment. Azure Test drives now allow you to launch a pre-configured image running on Azure with a couple of clicks, then explore, and finally decide whether it’s right for you.
• Are you that guy or gal who occasionally edits or deletes the wrong thing (I can hear you saying “me? I’d never do that!”) As I’ve done it a time or two, I found it pretty cool when I heard about Resource lock management becoming available in the portal. If you take a look at the documentation, you’ll see that it’s a pretty simple way to prevent critical resources from being deleted accidentally and creates an extra safety check when you do want to really delete those resources. Ok. Resource locks aren’t new as Michael Collier wrote about them a year ago but you’ll notice that he was talking about using PowerShell and ARM templates at the time. In addition to those options, those locks are now exposed and manageable in the Portal.
• If you use Azure Scheduler, you’ll be interested to know about the P10 and new P20 Premium plans and related pricing.
• A wee bit of news you may have heard about a few weeks ago. SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud. One of the highlights is that SAP and Microsoft announced joint plans to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA platform deployed on Microsoft Azure.
• If you are doing or learning about Machine Learning, I stumbled across the 8 Best Machine Learning Cheat Sheets.
• Closing out, I want to share a few recent cloud cover and Azure Friday episodes with you.
  • Using Azure CDN features in the Azure Portal
  • Using Azure Container Service with Docker
  • Azure Web Apps introduces Local Cache
  • Developer Tools for the Azure CDN
  • Episode 205: Azure Functions with Chris Anderson
  • Episode 206: Bot Framework with Mike Hall
  • Episode 207: Netflix Spinnaker on Azure with Andy Glover, Richard Guthrie, and Arun Chandrasekhar
• Fun comment / tip for the month — en-us — Yup. I’m that American who works in Redmond, builds these emails every month and sends them to you. Therefore, all of the URLs I copied from my Edge browser know that I speak English and that I’m in the US. I had a couple of partners point this out to me in my recent travels. Much of our content is localized for language and geography. If English isn’t your first language or you are in a country other than the US, and you want to use the many, many URLs that I share in Luper’s Learnings, I have two tips for you. First, consider replacing the “en-us” in the URLs I link to with whatever is appropriate for your language and geography (es-es for Spanish and Spain, fr-fr for French in France, pt-br for Brazilian Portuguese etc..) Second, don’t forget that many Microsoft web pages will do that for you if you scroll down to the very bottom of the page and select your language. On the azure.microsoft.com web site, the language control looks like   and is to the right of “Hello from Seattle.” In the footer of the page.

Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the June Luper’s Learnings. And, again, apologies for it getting to you a few days later than usual. I’d love your input for topics for the July edition let me know what they are!