After many hybrid events in the last few years I really like to get back to in-person or hybrid events to see the community live at the events and discuss and learn from each other about different projects and meet some new people.
About the Cloud Brew
One of my favorite conference in 2019 was the Cloud Brew in Belgium, it was a great conference because of different things:
Great list of speakers and sessions
Deep dive technical sessions
Big community from around europe
One of the biggest Azure related conference in belgium
In the past, it was quite quiet about new features and announcements in the Azure IaaS space. Yes, sometimes there were new VM sizes with more cores or more RAM, but in general there were no surprising announcements last year. From my point of view, this has changed with MS Inspire, which is currently underway.
Microsoft announced, surprising from my point of view, a new Disk SKU for Azure VMs called Premium SSD v2 Disk. The last announcement in this area was 2019 with the introduction of Ultra Disks.
Added some details about v. 1.6.11.3 which fixes a security issue.
Microsoft released a major update of Azure AD Connect. This major release brings a lots of new features and requirements for the local infrastructure. In this article I will cover the latest information and how you can upgrade to the new release.
The new version 2 of Azure AD Connect was released on 20/07/2021 and bring the product to the version 2.0.3.0 the lastet release of version 1 was 1.6.4.0 1.6.11.3. Microsoft found a security issue in 1.6.4.0 and 2.0.3.0 and updated the Azure AD Connect v2 to 2.0.8.0.
Microsoft released also an update for AAD Connect v1 and brings it to 1.6.11.3. This is for customers who running an older version of Windows Server who can not upgrade to WS 2016 and fixes an security issue in 1.6.4.0.
The Cloud usage grows in the last years rapidly, but in many customer environments we had servers and applications they can´t migrate to the cloud about different reasons. There are many reasons why applications can not migrated to the cloud e.g. data regulations, connections and latency challenges and more. On the other hand customers whish to use different cloud providers. In summary the hybrid cloud is one of the most use cases in many customer environments. Microsoft released Azure Arc as a solution for hybrid cloud environments. Azure Arc was announced as public preview at Ignite 2019 and going GA on Ignite 2020.
In this article I will cover how connect Windows VMs to Azure Arc.
Azure Arc in General
Azure Arc capabilities – Image from Microsoft Docs
Azure Arc is a solution to extend the Azure management capabilitites to services outside of Azure. This gives the possibilites to manage different services, in different environments from one central place with same capabilities across different services layers.
Microsoft release the first version for Server management and has since expanded the range of functions over Dataservices, Kubernetes and new since some days Azure applications.
The recording of the session is now available on Youtube. I have added the link at the end of the article.
I am glad to announce that I was invited as a speaker to the Cloudeight conference. This is the 3rd edition of this conference and the conference is grown to a really big conference with a lots of great speakers and sessions. The conference itself was founded by Drago Petrovic as a free community driven conference.
I am very exited to deliver a session on 7 tips you need to know to use Azure File Sync perfectly. Azure File Sync is a perfect service to sync file servers across enterprise boundaries through a central Azure Fileshare. In this session, I will share the best practices to use Azure File Sync perfectly based on my real-world experience. I will cover the following topics:
Microsoft has changed the #AzureBastion minimum subnet size from /27 to /26. Installed #Azure Bastion are unaffected, but new deployments require the new subnet size. Please remember this. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bastion/bastion-faq#subnet
I updated the article based on the latest information around Azure Bastion. One big announcement is the support for peered VNETs for Azure Bastion – this is also integrated in this article. Please feel free to share and comment 🙂
Azure Bastion is a new service to reaches Azure VMs in a secure way without needing a Jump host in the same VNET or to publish an Public IP for a VM. Many customers using Public IPs to reach VMs (Windows and Linux) in Test and Dev environment. Please avoid managing Azure VMs over a Public IP, this is unsecure – use Azure Bastion.
The Microsoft Ignite is running since Monday and in this blog post I will give you a short overview about the new announcement in the range of Azure services.
To each service you have a headline link to additional information on the Microsoft Azure blog article or the update site. Did you have any questions about this announcements, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Don´t miss our MsIgnite Azure Recap Meetups in Thueringen and Bonn. Information about the Meetups at the end of the article.
Im Vorfeld zur Ignite wurde vor ein paar Tagen eine kleine Überraschung im Azure Blog angekündigt: Announcing the general availability of larger, more powerful standard file shares for Azure Files. Bedeutet das für alle jetzigen Azure Fileshares im Standard Tier die neuen Performancewerte ausgerollt werden. Damit fällt auch die bisherige Limitierung von 5TB für Azure Fileshares und damit verbunden für Azure File Sync. Die neuen Performancewerte sehen folgendermaßen aus:
IOPS: 10.000 (vorher 1000)
Durchsatz: 300MB/sec (vorher 60MB/sec)
Fileshare Größe: 100TB (vorher 5TB)
Bisher waren Azure Fileshares auf 5TB limitiert. Die Freigabe wird als Speicherort der Azure File Sync Dateien genutzt – daher galt hier das gleiche Limit. Doch diese Herausforderung ist gelöst und vorhandene Fileshares lassen sich über das Azure Portal auf die neue Größe erweitern. Dieser Artikel zeigt kurz die notwendigen Schritte.
In letzter Zeit hatte ich das Vergnügen Azure File Sync auf verschiedenen Community Events vorzustellen und dabei die Einrichtung, Konfiguration und Best Practices zu erläutern. Mit Azure File Sync lassen sich Fileserver über Unternehmensgrenzen hinweg, mit Hilfe eines zentralen Azure Fileshares, synchronisieren. Eine häufig gestellte Frage ist, wie der Service mit Dateikollisionen umgeht.
The Cloud Brew Conference is a great conference in the hearth of Belgium in Mechelen 30km north of Bruessel. The conference first start in 2013 with a great location, in a old brewery and still takes place there today.
With two full days of Azure experience with many international speakers from around the globe, it’s a must for Belgians and cloud folks with Azure focus. The agenda looks pretty good.
