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Azure Thursdays Meeting Summaries

By Kyle Wilson, Tech Solutions Prof, Azure
Meeting summaries from Azure Thursdays webinars. Azure Thursdays is a recurring webinar series for Microsoft customers who already use or are exploring Azure. The webinar is facilitated by Azure technical specialists and during each session we share Azure news, present an Azure related topic, provide Azure tips & tools and answer questions.

This blog post was authored by the East Region Azure TSP team. (updated 7/14/17)

IMPORTANT:  Azure Thursdays is taking a summer break and will return in a couple months. 

Check back mid-August 2017 for an update!

 

Azure Thursdays Connection Information:
Web Meeting & Phone: +1866-679-9995 Conference #: 51668325 | Download Appointment (ics)
Next Meeting:  TBD

 

July 13 – Azure Thursdays Meeting Summary – Microservices and Azure Service Fabric

Meeting Topics: Azure News, Microservices Presentation, Tools & Tips, Questions

Speakers: Kyle Wilson (Azure TSP) & Rahul Marathe (Azure TSP) & Chris Santaniello (Azure TSP)

Discussion Notes & Key Links:

  1. News – Recap of Azure related news & announcements
    1. Azure Site Recovery Updates – Ubuntu Support, 4TB Disks and Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces
    2. GA of Managing StorSimple 8000 Series in New Azure Portal
    3. Project Olympus to support Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
    4. Network Enhancements for Windows and Linux VMs
    5. Azure Stack is ready to order!
    6. Managed Applications in the Azure Marketplace Preview
  2. Topics (slides)

    1. Why a microservices approach?

    2. What is a microservice?

    3. What is Azure Service Fabric?

    4. Azure Service Fabric Advantages

  3. Tool & Tip of the Week

    1. Tool = Cloudberry Lab Azure Storage Explorer is a FTP like tool for working with Azure blob storage (file movement, properties, etc.)

    2. Tips

      1. Container Camp Labs – a series of labs hosted on GitHub for learning how to use the Azure CLI to deploy containers on to VMs in Azure

      2. Azure Service Fabric Build Session – a great session from Build in May 2017 that reviews the service, provides some roadmap updates and showcases some scale demonstrations

  4. Questions From The Field were provided check out these slides for details

 

June 29 – Azure Thursdays Meeting Summary – Containers on Azure

Meeting Topics: Azure News, Containers Presentation, Tools & Tips, Questions

Speakers: Chris Santaniello (Azure TSP) & Rahul Marathe (Azure TSP) & Kyle Wilson (Azure TSP) 

Discussion Notes & Key Links:

  1. News – Recap of Azure related news & announcements
    1. Secure Transfer Required setting available for Azure Storage Containers
    2. Event Hubs Capture now GA
    3. Azure Site Recovery adds Ubuntu Linux support
    4. Snapshot Debugger for Azure App Services launched in preview
    5. Text Analytics Cognitive Services API now supports analyzing sentiments in 16 languages
  2. Topics (slides)

    1. What is a container?

    2. Using Containers and Container registries

    3. Azure Container Services

    4. Azure Service Fabric

  3. Tool & Tip of the Week

    1. Tool = migAz is an open source tool to help with migrating resources from one Azure subscription to another (see slides for more detail)

    2. Tip = leverage Custom domains for storage accounts to provide attractive/vanity URLs for access storage objects (files, blobs, etc.)

  4. Questions From The Field were provided check out these slides for details

 

June 15 – Azure Thursdays Meeting Summary – Azure App Services & App Service Environments Explained

Meeting Topics: Azure News, Azure App Services Presentation, Tools & Tips, Questions

Speakers: Rahul Marathe (Azure TSP) & Kyle Wilson (Azure TSP) & Chris Santaniello (Azure TSP)

Discussion Notes & Key Links:

  1. News – Recap of Azure related news & announcements
    1. Storage Service Encryption with Customer Managed Keys Preview
    2. New Azure VPN Gateways and performance increase
    3. Storage Service Encryption Support for Managed Disks
    4. Azure Site Recovery for Azure VMs to another Azure Region Preview
  2. Topics (slides)

    1. What is an App Service?

    2. What is an App Service Plan?

    3. What is an App Service Environment?

    4. Logic Apps & Functions Apps Explained with Demos

    5. How do I scale an App Service & What are the Pros / Cons?

  3. Tool & Tip of the Week

    1. Visual Studio Code – supports App Services and lots of other Azure services, great lightweight IDE (https://code.visualstudio.com)

    2. Tip = ModSecurity in Azure WebApps, Build WAF functionality into your Azure Web App  (Azure Blog Article) 

  4. Questions From The Field were provided check out these slides for details

 

June 1 – Azure Thursdays Meeting Summary – Azure Active Directory

Meeting Topics: Azure News, Azure Active Directory Presentation, Tools & Tips, Questions

Speakers: Chris Hanson, (Azure TSP) & Chris Santaniello (Azure TSP)

Discussion Notes & Key Links:

  1. News – Recap of Azure related news & announcements. (links in the slides):
    1. Larger Disk Sizes in Azure VMs
    2. Azure Backup for Windows Server System State
    3. vCenter/ESXi 6.5 support for Azure Backup Server
    4. Higher DTU-per-DB limits in Azure SQL Standard Elastic Pools
    5. PowerShell in the Cloud Shell preveiw
    6. NVIDIA Grid on NV Series VMs
  2. Topics (slides)

    1. What is Azure AD?

    2. Azure AD Connect Synchronization & Authentication Options

    3. Identity Protection and Privileged Identity Management

    4. Azure AD Feature Comparison

  3. Tool & Tip of the Week

    1. Azure Speed Test (www.azurespeed.com)

    2. Tip = Azure Preview Services for Azure AD (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/preview/) 

  4. Questions From The Field were discussed check out these slides for details

 

May 18 – Azure Thursdays Meeting Summary – Demystifying Database Platforms on Azure

Meeting Topics: Azure News, Azure Data Platform Services, Questions

Speakers: Kyle Wilson (Azure TSP), Daniel Sheehan (Azure DSA) & Chris Santaniello (Azure TSP)

Discussion Notes & Key Links:

  1. News – Recap of Azure related Build conference announcements. Including:
    1. Low Priority VMs for Batch Computing
    2. Azure Functions Runtime
    3. Azure Cloud Shell
    4. Azure Mobile App
    5. MySQL and Postgres managed DBs
    6. Cosmos DB
    7. Great List of Key Azure announcements from Build 2017
  2. Topics (slides)

    1. Boiling Down the Data Services Available into 3 categories:  Databases | Data Warehouse, Analytics & Machine Learning Solutions | Data Processing Services & Tools

    2. Factors For Choosing A Solution:   SMP vs MPP architecture, Data Types, Volume, Velocity & Location of Data

    3. Data Platform Diagnostic Questions you use to identify what are potential solutions

    4. We reviewed what is Azure SQL Data Warehouse and compared it with Azure Data Lake and explained what Azure Data Lake Analytics provides

  3. Tools & Tip of the Week

    1. Azure Platform Explorer Website – Handy reference website with clickable graphics that share a summary and detail links for services in Azure.

    2. Microsoft Data Migration Assistant 3.1 Tool – This tool helps you to analyze an existing database for migration to Azure SQL

    3. Tip = Cloud Essentials a cool free service that provides:

      1. Self-paced Labs
      2. Instructor-led Virtual Classes (some from Pluralsight)
      3. Cloud Monitor Tool
      4. A small amount of individual Azure Credit (for individual playing around/exploration)
      5. Functionality Overview Videos
      6. Access to Trials for various cloud services
      7. Career Guidance
      8. Community Forums
  4. Questions From The Field were discussed check out the Slides for details

 

May 5 – Azure Thursdays Meeting Summary: Test & Dev Workload Management in Azure

Meeting Topics: Azure News, Test & Dev Workload Management in Azure, Questions

Speakers: Rahul Marathe (Azure TSP) & Chris Santaniello (Azure TSP)

Discussion Notes & Key Links:

  1. DEV/Test Subscription offer – Optimize your Azure consumption by using Dev/Test subscription for non-production workloads. This Channel 9 video provides a walk-through of the process.

  2. DEV/TEST Labs Service – We discussed the Dev/Test Labs service in Azure to create environments in cloud fast; for videos on this topic checkout Channel 9.

 

April 20 – Azure Thursdays Meeting Summary:  Azure Backup & Azure Site Recovery

Meeting Topics: Azure News, Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery, Questions

Speakers: Kyle Wilson (Azure TSP) & Chris Hanson (Azure TSP)

Discussion Notes & Key Links:

  1. News – Introduced a broader team of Azure TSPs to the group including Chris Santaniello (NY Metro) and Rahul Marathe (Boston/North East)
  2. Topics (slides)

    1. Azure Block Blob Storage – the lowest cost option for storing backup and archive content. Moving from tapes to block storage can be a cost savings and business value benefit (time to recover, resilience, etc.) Ask your existing backup software vendor if they support Azure Block Blob as a storage target.

    2. Azure Backup – we offer a backup as a service solution called Azure Backup that supports workloads on premise and in Azure. This is particular appealing for branch offices who can backup directly to Azure without VMs or hardware locally.

    3. Azure Site Recovery – this is our solution for replicating compute workloads to Azure for business continuity. (VMWare, HyperV or Physical).

  3. Question Summary (see slides for answers)

    1. How do you replicate data from an On Premise SQL Server to the Azure SQL Service?

    2. What is the difference between Power BI Embedded (in Azure) and the Power BI service?

    3. What are your options if you want to move a large amount of data into Azure?

  4. Tool of the Week – the Azure Command Line Interface (CLI) team have released an Azure CLI Shell tool that helps to discover Azure CLI commands. It is in preview, but is very helpful when trying to learn the Azure CLI commands and arguments. Azure CLI Shell

 

April 7 – Azure Thursdays Meeting Summary: Azure Managed Disks & Azure Enterprise Accounts Portal

Meeting Topics: Azure News, Azure Managed Disks, Azure EA Portal, Azure Governance, and Configuration best practices resources.

Speakers: Chris Hanson, Azure TSP and Kyle Wilson, Azure TSP

Discussion Notes & Key Links:

  1. Azure News: Azure Monitor & Azure Advisor both were released for general availability. You can track Azure service news by following the Service Updates Feed, for high level announcements, and by reading the core Azure Blog, typically longer detailed explanations.
  2. Azure Managed Disks: A new way of creating VM disks that is simpler to implement and manage and provides better scale and resilience. Here is a short overview video and a longer overview video (27 minutes). In addition we have posted a guide for converting to managed disks from traditional storage accounts and page blobs.
  3. Azure EA Portal: We talked briefly about the benefits of the EA Portal managing multiple subscriptions and reporting on usage with Resource Tags, project cost tracking. There is a good video series that explains the various roles in the EA Portal and how to use its features.
  4. Azure Configuration best practices: We talked about how the Azure Advisor combined with the Azure Enterprise Scaffold Documentation are both good resources for best practices and governance.
 

Azure Thursdays Background:

Azure Thursdays is a recurring webinar series for Microsoft customers who already use or are exploring Azure.  The webinar is facilitated by Azure technical specialists and during each session we share Azure news, present an Azure related topic, provide Azure tips & tools and answer questions.

Web Meeting & Phone: +18666799995 Conference ID: 51668325 | Calendar Appointment (ics)