Last Week in Microsoft Azure: Week of March 22nd

Direct from Microsoft

On March 15, 2021, Azure Active Directory experienced an outage lasting around 2 hours. The outage impacted Office 365 applications and access to the Azure Admin Portal. Microsoft posted a preliminary root cause analysis stating a cryptographic key was retained for longer than normal. However, automation ignored the retained state and removed the key instead. Once the key was restored, caching in other applications led to the extended outage. Read more about the outage on the Azure status history page.

Microsoft is the first major cloud provider to offer confidential virtual machines using AMD EPYC 7003 series processors. Azure virtual machines powered by these processors are fully encrypted at runtime, thereby protecting your data even when it is in use. Read more about this announcement in this article by Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich.

This week, Microsoft announced a commitment to expanding Azure Availability Zones to more regions. Microsoft’s goal is to have Azure Availablity Zones (AZ) in every country where they operate a datacenter region with Brazil Sout being the latest deployment. As zonal capabilities expand, all foundational and mainstream Azure services will be AZ enabled.

Community Contributions

Check out part 1 of Rolf Schutten’s guide on creating a static website in Azure. In this first post, Rolf covers what a static website is, popular static website generators, and how to create a local static website. Check back for parts 2 and 3 where he will cover deploying the website to Azure and incorporating automated builds using Azure DevOps.

Chris Pietschmann provides cost-saving tips on properly shutting down an Azure virtual machine to save money. Chris provides details on the differences between stopping a virtual machine and stopping and deallocating a virtual machine.

Jesse Loudon outlines using DeployIfNotExists (DINE) policy to automate Azure Monitoring governance with Azure Monitor Metric Alerts. Jesse provides a summary of what DINE policies are and provides examples using Bicep and Terraform.

Thomas Thornton provides a quick tutorial on deploying Terraform using GitHub actions to Azure. Terraform is rising in popularity and is a great alternative to using ARM templates for Azure deployments.

Thomas Maurer shows how to run scripts against multiple Azure VMs by using the Run command. Being able to run scripts against multiple Azure VMs without logging into each one is a great time saver and makes deployments easier.

Upcoming Events

This week marks the Azure Spring Clean 2021 event. This is a collection of community-driven articles around promoting well-managed Azure tenants. Look for articles highlighting best-practices, lessons learned, and diving deep into the more difficult Azure Management topics.

Road Map Updates

Now Available:

• Brazil South Availability Zones now generally available
• Monitor your spending through forecasted cost alerts with Azure Cost Management and Billing

In Preview:

• Long-term backup retention (LTR) for Azure SQL Managed Instance in public preview
• Limited preview: Make workloads on AMD-backed virtual machines confidential without recompiling code

Training Resources

Want to learn more about Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates for deploying Azure resources? Check out this Channel 9 video on the how and why of learning about ARM templates.