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Last week in Azure: Migrating VMWare environments to Azure, and more

Highlights from last week in Azure for the week of November 20, 2017: Transforming your VMWare environment with Azure, Azure Advisor updates, and more.

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, last week was a light news week for Azure. But that doesn’t mean nothing new was announced. On Tuesday, Corey Sanders announced new services that will make it easier than ever to migrate VMWare-based environments to Azure. Central to this is Azure Migrate, which is a free service that became broadly available yesterday. This is just one set of investments in Azure’s comprehensive hybrid capabilities to help you along your cloud journey. See below for a summary of what else happened prior to the holiday break.

Compute & Containers

Transforming your VMware environment with Microsoft Azure – The post from Corey Sanders mentioned above that goes into detail about the new services that will help you migrate your VMWare environments to Azure.

Jenkins on Azure update – ACI experiment and AKS support – Learn how you can get your Jenkins build agents running in Azure with the Jenkins in the Cloud tutorial in which you’ll use Azure Container agent to add on-demand capacity and use Azure Container Instances (ACI) to build the Spring PetClinic Sample Applicaiton.

Data

#AzureSQLDW cost savings with optimized for elasticity and Azure Functions – part 1 – Learn how you can push data quickly into Azure Analysis Services for optimized performance by using Azure Functions to create schedule-based scaling to control when you want to have your data warehouse scaled up, down, or paused. This enables you to control cost by having the compute level match query activity patterns.

Azure SQL Databases Disaster Recovery 101 – Geo Restore and Geo Replication provide two different solutions for coping with disaster recovery. In this post you’ll learn how these solutions differ based on data loss, recovery time, and cost. Understanding these differences will help you choose between the two solutions.

Management

Azure Advisor – your personalized best practices service got better – Azure Advisor has a new dashboard to help you review its recommendations across multiple subscriptions. .

Public preview of new Azure Policy features – Several new features for Azure Policies announced at Ignite (Azure Compute session, Azure Governance session, and Azure Resource Manager session) are now in public preview.

Time to migrate off Access Control Service – Access Control Service is retiring and will be discontinued next year on November 7, 2018. Read this post for details about the retirement schedule, how to determine if you’re using this service, and how to migrate if you are.

Additional news

Announcing the public preview of Azure Media Clipper – A public preview of new capabilities in Azure Media Services (AMS) for composing media clips and stitching together rendered videos. Azure Media Clipper is a free JavaScript library that enables web developers to provide their users with an interface for creating clips.

R3 on Azure: Strengthening our partnership – Microsoft is expanding its strategic partnership with R3 to integrate more deeply with R3’s distributed ledger platform, Corda and R3Net, with Azure.

Microsoft showcases latest industrial IoT innovations at SPS 2017 – Learn about several IoT product announcements that we made at SPS IPC Drives 2017 in Nuremberg last week.

Content, SDKs, and samples

The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure – 2nd Edition – This is a major revision to the original Developer’s Guide to Azure. This free e-book provides a comprehensive technical overview of Azure for developers from my colleague Michael Crump and Pluralsight author Barry Luijbregts.

Azure Shows

Using Web App for Containers in a Multi-Tier Application – Ahmed Elnably joins Scott Hanselman to discuss a sample project, Developer Finder, that was created to showcase how to use Web App for Containers in the context of a multi-tiered application.

Azure Analysis Services: Desktop PowerBI to the Cloud – The new web modeling experience for Azure Analysis Service can supersize the models that you have built for Power BI. In this episode, Josh Caplan will show how you can take data models that were built inside the Power BI desktop and easily convert them to Azure Analysis Services models. You can then use all the Power of Azure Analysis Services to scale your model to hundreds or even thousands of users.

The Azure Podcast: Episode 205 – SQL Vulnerability Assessment – Extremely informative discussion with Ronit Reger, a Senior PM in the SQL Team, about this new service they put out for SQL Azure to make is easier for customers to find out if their database is vulnerable to attacks. A must-have for anyone using SQL in Azure.

Cloud Tech 10 – 27th November 2017 – Jenkins with ACI, SQL DW with Functions and more! – Each week, Mark Whitby, a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft UK, covers what's happening with Microsoft Azure in just 10 minutes, or less. In this episode:

  • Using Azure Container Instances as build agents for Jenkins
  • Improvements to Azure Advisor
  • Scale Azure SQL Data Warehouse using Azure Functions
  • Public Preview of Azure Policy