Last Week in Microsoft Azure: Week of June 7th

Direct from Microsoft

Azure announced the general availability of scale-out NVIDIA A100 GPU clusters. This addition gives Azure the fastest public cloud supercomputers on-demand in four Azure regions: East United States, West United States 2, West Europe, and South Central United States. Microsoft benchmarked 164 ND A100 v4 virtual machines on a pre-release public supercomputing cluster and yielded a result of 16.59 petaflops!

The Azure Blog outlines Azure Cost Management and Billing updates for May 2021. Notable updates include management group exports in Azure Government cloud, new cost optimizations, and a reminder that Cloudyn is retiring on June 30, 2021.

Mastering Azure

I posted an article on using ARM template copy functionality with an array of objects. Using an array and copy loops allows you to deploy Azure resources more dynamically. The tutorial covers how to do this with data disks on a virtual machine deployment.

Sam Cogan provides some excellent tips he learned using Azure Key Vault with Application Gateways. Azure Key Vault can now store Application Gateway endpoint certificates. Storing certificates in a Key Vault provides centralized storage and automatic renewals.

Thomas Maurer covers running cloud-native apps on Azure PaaS anywhere using Azure Arc. Announced at Build 2021, Azure Arc-enabled application services allow you to deploy Azure application services (think Azure App Service, Functions, Logic Apps) anywhere, on-premises, edge locations, and other cloud providers.

Billy York demonstrates how to customize cost data visualizations with Azure Workbooks and Azure Cost Management. Azure Workbooks is a data visualization tool inside Azure, and you can create dynamic reports through parameters and control what is seen by the user.

Check out this week’s AzUpdate, which covers updates to Azure Security Center, the latest releases for Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Cost Management and Billing updates for May 2021.

Thomas Thornton showcases how to create CSV reports from Log Analytics queries and email using Azure Logic Apps. This article is a great demonstration of how to use multiple Azure services when designing a solution.

Angel Perez covers ARM Template Specs now being generally available. Template Specs is a new resource type that allows you to store ARM templates in resource groups. You can share with other administrators, perform deployments, and use role-based access controls to control sharing.

The Azure Az PowerShell module received a significant update this week to version 6.0.0! Check out all the new changes outlined in the project’s GitHub.

John Savill has a great video on how to completely stop and start an Azure Kubernetes Cluster and different node pool scaling options. Stopping an AKS cluster is great for test or dev scenarios where you don’t need the cluster running all the time.

Azure DevOps

Achraf Ben Alaya shows us how to deploy infrastructure using Terraform and Azure DevOps pipelines. Achraf walks through step-by-step to create an Azure DevOps project and pipeline and deploy several Azure resources using Terraform.

Vinicius Moura demonstrates how to create a variable groups dashboard on Azure DevOps. The project extracts all variables groups for a project and displays them in a Power BI report.

Azure Updates

The following updates are now generally available:

• Key Rotation and Expiration Policies for Azure Storage
• ExpressRoute Global Reach Pricing Reduction
• Pricing changes to Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor to help you reduce costs

The following updates are now available in preview:

• Identity-based connections in Azure Functions with latest Azure SDK triggers and bindings

Training Resources

With Azure Bicep 0.4 released, check out AzureFunBytes’ Intro to Bicep, which includes a video and many links to get started learning this new language.