You might not guess how Azure thinks about investing in continually improving customer experiences. We talk to Azure Partner PM Scott Hitch about the work his team does to improve the time in takes to remediate your applications and resources in Azure.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode393.mp3

YouTube: https://youtu.be/08mTqIr_-W0

Resources: 

Azure Advisor: http://aka.ms/azureadvisor

Service Health: https://aka.ms/azureservicehealth

Other updates:

Guarantee capacity access with on-demand capacity reservations—now in preview

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/guarantee-capacity-access-with-ondemand-capacity-reservations-now-in-preview

Public preview: Automatic scaling with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode   -> Jerry Steele was on the show previously

Published date: September 07, 2021

We are announcing that we have enabled elastic virtual machine profile and automatic scaling for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets with flexible orchestration elastic profile and automatic scaling. The features are now in public preview, and provide: 

• Up to 1000 instances in a scale set (general purpose virtual machine sizes only)

• Ability to manually add VM instances to the scale set

• The option to spread instances across fault domains automatically, or specify a fault domain

• Place on demand and Spot VMs in the same scale set

• (New) Define a VM profile and specify instance count

• (New) Automatically scale out and scale in based on metrics, schedule, or AI prediction (private preview)

• (New) In guest patching that respects high availability / FD constraints

• (New) Automatic extension updates

• (New) Automatic instance repair/replacement of unhealthy instances

• (New) Terminate notification for on demand and Spot VMs

• (New) Secure by default networking - customers must explicitly define outbound connectivity

• (New) Improved scale out and scale in reliability, latency, and elasticity

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/automatic-scaling-for-vms-with-azure-virtual-machine-scale-sets-flexible-orchestration-mode

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-app-service-support-for-availability-zones-reaches-general-availability/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/private-link/disable-private-endpoint-network-policy

Ryan Hill, a Software Engineer in the Azure CXP group, shares details of the new Microsoft Q&A website which serves as a one-stop for getting questions answered around Azure and other Microsoft technologies.

Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode336.mp3

Resources:

Supported services in QnA: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/products/#supported-products

How to write quality question: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/articles/24951/how-to-write-a-quality-question.html

Job postings: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/search-results?keywords=%23MicrosoftATL

Other updates:

Azure Storage account failover is now generally available
Published date: June 17, 2020
Customer-initiated Storage account failover is now generally available, allowing you to determine when to initiate a failover instead of waiting for Microsoft to do so. When you perform a failover, the secondary replica of the Storage account becomes the new primary, and the DNS records for all Storage service endpoints—blob, file, queue, and table—are updated to point to this new primary. Once the failover is complete, clients will automatically begin reading from the Storage account and writing data to it in the new primary region, with no code changes.
Customer initiated failover is available for GRS, RA-GRS, GZRS, and RA-GZRS accounts. To learn more, read the documentation.

From <https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-storage-account-failover-ga/>

Azure Container Registry: Securing container workflows
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-container-registry-securing-container-workflows/
Simplifying declarative deployments in Azure
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/simplifying-declarative-deployments-in-azure/

Evan and Sujit are fortunate to chat with Bryan Belmont, a GM in the Azure organization, to give us some insight into what goes into offering top-notch support in the cloud and how it differs from on-premises support. 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode126.mp3

Other updates:

Free ebook: Introducing Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/microsoft_press/2016/04/20/free-ebook-introducing-windows-server-2016-technical-preview/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-egress-fee-waiver-for-the-academic-community/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-support-for-php-7-0-in-azure-app-service-and-notice-of-php-5-4-retirement/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-data-lake-introduces-java-sdks-in-public-preview-for-big-data-processing-in-java-applications/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-blockchain-update-8/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-the-azure-iot-gateway-sdk-beta/

The guys chat with Russell Young, who has joined Microsoft as a Principal PFE specializing in supporting customers with Azure Development. Russell’s passion is helping customers with their cloud and mobile strategies, as well as planning, designing and architecting modern software solutions. He shares some of his experiences with Azure. 

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode113.mp3

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftservices/premier_support_developers.aspx

Big news from last week - Azure Stack is now available in Preview:

List of related links - http://aka.ms/azurestackakaguide

Help Forum - http://aka.ms/azurestackforum
Suggestions for Azure Stack - http://aka.ms/azurestackuservoice

We are fortunate to have Azure Senior PM, Bernardo Muñoz on the show to talk about a new facility called Azure Resource Health which makes diagnosing problems with VMs etc. so much easier.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode111.mp3

Blog about this service: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/reduce-troubleshooting-time-with-azure-resource-health/

Other updates and resources:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-state-of-the-union-with-microsoft-pulse-and-azure-event-hubs/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-batch-service-update-december-2015/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/analyzing-your-azure-search-traffic/

Cale and Evan talk to Jason Johnson from the Azure Customer Response Team - they monitor the @AzureSupport Twitter alias in Azure Engineering and respond to customer questions.

Media file: http://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode80.mp3  

http://twitter.com/AzureSupport

News:

Importing data to DocumentDb just got faster and easier

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/06/02/importing-data-to-documentdb-just-got-faster-and-easier/

Jelastic on Azure 

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/06/03/jelastic-on-azure-2/

Intermediate TLS certificates for Azure App Service Web Apps

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/06/01/intermediate-tls-certificates-for-azure-app-service-web-apps/