Azure Landing Zones Accelerators for Bicep and Terraform Announcing General Availability! (microsoft.com)

Confirm your account recovery settings (github.com)

Azure/alz-terraform-accelerator: Azure Landing Zones Terraform Accelerator (github.com)

Azure/Enterprise-Scale: The Azure Landing Zones (Enterprise-Scale) architecture provides prescriptive guidance coupled with Azure best practices, and it follows design principles across the critical design areas for organizations to define their Azure architecture (github.com)

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Azure CDN Overview

Azure CDN is a service that accelerates the delivery of your application’s content by caching and serving it from edge servers located closest to your users. This ensures faster load times, lower latency, and a better user experience. Additionally, Azure CDN provides increased reliability, security, and cost efficiency.

To integrate Azure App Service with Azure CDN, follow these steps:

• Create an Azure CDN profile and endpoint in the Azure portal.

• Configure your Azure App Service custom domain to use the Azure CDN endpoint.

• Update your application to reference the Azure CDN endpoint for serving static content. Once your integration is complete, your app’s content will be served from the edge server closest to the user, significantly improving performance.

The below shows the webapp being referenced from the start. It is also using the now ‘classic’ method of CDN deployment without front door.

Ideal Use Cases

Azure CDN is particularly beneficial for applications with static content such as images, videos, and scripts. It’s also ideal for apps with a global user base, as it reduces latency and increases responsiveness. Examples of suitable use cases include:

• Media-heavy websites

• E-commerce platforms

• Global SaaS products

Conclusion

Integrating Azure App Service with Azure CDN is an effective way to boost your application’s performance and reach a global audience. By leveraging this powerful combination, you can ensure that your users enjoy a fast, responsive, and seamless experience, regardless of their location. Give it a try and see the difference it makes in your app’s performance!

This is the final article from the series: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

Azure App Service:

Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps. It supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks and offers seamless integration with other Azure services, making it a popular choice among developers.

Azure Functions:

Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that enables developers to execute small pieces of code, known as functions, in the cloud in response to events. This event-driven approach allows applications to scale dynamically based on the number of executions, leading to optimized cost and performance. Integration of Azure App Service and Azure Functions: Integrating Azure Functions with Azure App Service allows developers to harness the power of serverless computing within their web applications. This integration enables the creation of event-driven, scalable APIs and microservices without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure.

Use Case Example:

Consider an e-commerce site built using Azure App Service. By employing Azure Functions, developers can offload tasks such as image processing, order processing, and sending notifications to serverless functions. As the website’s traffic grows, Azure Functions will automatically scale to handle the increased workload, ensuring a smooth and responsive user experience.

To get started with Azure App Service and Azure Functions, follow these steps:

• Sign up for an Azure account if you haven’t already.

• Create a new Azure App Service instance and choose your preferred language and framework.

• Create a new Azure Functions instance in the same resource group as your Azure App Service.

• Use the Azure Functions extension for Visual Studio Code, or your preferred development environment, to write and test your functions locally.

• Deploy your functions to the Azure Functions instance you created earlier.

• Integrate the deployed functions into your Azure App Service web application by calling the appropriate HTTP endpoints or using other supported triggers, such as Azure Event Grid, Azure Service Bus, or storage queues.

By following these steps, you can unlock the potential of serverless architecture in your web applications and APIs, and take advantage of the powerful features offered by both Azure App Service and Azure Functions.

Conclusion:

In summary, combining Azure App Service and Azure Functions offers a powerful, flexible, and scalable solution for building serverless web applications and APIs. Leveraging these services allows developers to focus on writing code and delivering value, while Azure handles the complexities of scaling and infrastructure management.

Whether you’re building a new application from scratch or looking to modernize your existing applications, integrating Azure App Service and Azure Functions can help you build scalable, cost-effective, and high-performance solutions. With serverless technology, you can focus on delivering value to your users while Azure takes care of the rest. So, go ahead and explore the possibilities of serverless computing with Azure App Service and Azure Functions today!

This is article number 9 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

Why use deployment slots?

Deployment slots provide numerous advantages:

• Reduced downtime: Deploying to a staging slot and swapping it with the production slot minimizes downtime, ensuring a smooth release process.

• Accurate testing: Deployment slots share resources and configurations with your production environment, enabling accurate testing of your app’s behaviour.

• Simplified rollback: If issues arise after deployment, you can quickly roll back to the previous version by swapping the slots again.

Creating and using deployment slots

Creating a deployment slot is straightforward:

• Navigate to your App Service in the Azure portal.

• Select ‘Deployment Slots’ from the left menu

• Click ‘Add Slot’ and provide a name for the new slot.

Once you’ve created a deployment slot, you can deploy your app to it just like you would with the production environment.

To test your app in the staging slot, use the unique URL assigned to the slot. This allows you to verify your app’s functionality without affecting your live users.

After thorough testing, you can swap the staging and production slots with a single click, making the updates live.

Automatic swap and rollback

Azure App Service also supports automatic swapping of slots based on pre-defined triggers. This feature can help automate the release process and reduce manual intervention. In case of issues, you can easily roll back to the previous version by swapping the slots again, ensuring minimal impact on your users.

Conclusion

Deployment slots and staging environments in Azure App Service provide a reliable, efficient, and seamless way to manage your app deployments. By utilizing these features, you can minimize downtime, accurately test your updates, and quickly roll back in case of issues. Give deployment slots a try for your next deployment, and experience the benefits yourself!

This is article number 8 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution that collects, analyses, and acts on telemetry data from your Azure resources. With Azure Monitor, you can set up custom alerts, create dashboards, and visualize metrics in real-time, giving you a complete view of your app’s health and performance.

Application Insights

Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service that automatically detects performance anomalies and provides powerful analytics tools. By integrating with your app’s code, Application Insights can track request rates, response times, failure rates, and custom events and metrics, giving you a deeper understanding of user behaviour and application performance.

Log Stream

Log Stream is a real-time logging feature that enables you to monitor application and server logs as they happen. This live streaming of logs makes it easier to identify and resolve issues during runtime. Additionally, Log Stream supports streaming logs to external storage like Azure Blob Storage or Azure Event Hubs for long-term retention and analysis.

How to Enable Monitoring and Diagnostics

Enabling monitoring and diagnostics for your Azure App Service is a straightforward process. Follow these steps to get started:

• Navigate to your app’s resource in the Azure portal.

• In the left-hand menu, look for the ‘Monitoring’ section.

• Here, you’ll find options to configure Alerts, App Service Logs, Logs and Log Stream.

For custom metrics and logs, you’ll need to integrate the appropriate SDKs into your application code. Detailed documentation and code samples are available in the Azure documentation to help you with this integration process.

Conclusion

Monitoring and diagnostics features in Azure App Service are invaluable tools for keeping your app running smoothly and efficiently. By leveraging Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Log Stream, you can gain deep insights into your app’s performance, identify and resolve issues quickly, and ultimately provide a better experience for your users. Don’t hesitate to explore these features and unlock their full potential in optimizing your Azure-hosted applications.

This is article number 7 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

Built-in Security Features

Azure App Service provides a comprehensive suite of built-in security features to protect your web applications from a variety of threats. Some key features include Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, threat detection, and mitigation. These features work together to secure your apps from malicious attacks, ensuring the availability and integrity of your applications.

Secure Development Practices

Azure App Service promotes secure development practices by providing secure connections to other Azure services, such as Azure SQL Database and Azure Storage. App Service also supports HTTPS connections, which ensures the privacy and integrity of data transmitted between your app and its users. These features help you create secure applications from the ground up.

Identity and Access Management

With Azure App Service, you can integrate Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to manage authentication and authorization for your applications. By leveraging Azure AD’s built-in security features, you can set up single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and easily control user access to your app. This simplifies identity management and enhances the overall security of your applications.

Compliance Standards

One of the key advantages of using Azure App Service is its adherence to various industry standards and regulations. Azure App Service is designed with compliance in mind, meeting the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). By using Azure App Service, you can ensure that your application complies with these stringent requirements, reducing your organization’s risk exposure.

Data Protection

Azure App Service offers built-in data protection features, such as data encryption at rest and in transit. You can also configure custom encryption keys using Azure Key Vault for added security. Moreover, Azure App Service supports data residency by allowing you to choose the specific datacenter where your data will be stored, ensuring compliance with local data protection regulations.

Security Centre Integration

Azure App Service integrates seamlessly with Azure Security Center, a unified infrastructure security management system. This integration allows you to monitor and manage the security posture of your applications, receive alerts on potential security issues, and access recommendations to improve overall security. This helps you stay informed and proactive about your application’s security.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Azure App Service provides a comprehensive set of security features and adheres to strict compliance standards, making it an ideal platform for building, deploying, and scaling web applications. By using Azure App Service, you can focus on creating innovative and feature-rich applications, knowing that your data and infrastructure are protected. Start building secure applications today with Azure App Service and experience the benefits of a powerful, secure, and compliant platform.

This is article number 6 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

What is CI/CD?

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is a set of practices that automates the process of building, testing, and deploying software applications. With CI/CD, developers can integrate their code changes more frequently, resulting in faster deployments, improved collaboration, and higher quality software.

CI/CD in Azure App Service

Azure App Service is a powerful platform for building, deploying, and scaling web applications. One of its many features is seamless integration with popular CI/CD tools like GitHub, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps. By leveraging this integration, developers can automatically build, test, and deploy their web applications to Azure App Service each time they push code changes to their repository.

Setting up CI/CD in Azure App Service

Configuring CI/CD for your web application in Azure App Service is a straightforward process. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

• Navigate to the “Deployment Center” in the Azure App Service dashboard.

• Select your preferred version control provider, such as GitHub or Bitbucket.

1. Connect your account and choose the repository containing your application code.

2. Configure your build provider, which can be Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, or others.

3. Define the branch you want to deploy from, typically the “main” or “master” branch.

4. Configure any additional settings, such as build tasks, test tasks, or deployment slots.

Once you’ve set up CI/CD, Azure App Service will automatically deploy your code changes each time you push them to the configured branch.

Benefits of CI/CD in Azure App Service

Implementing CI/CD in Azure App Service offers numerous benefits for developers and organizations:

• Faster deployments: With CI/CD, code changes can be automatically deployed as soon as they’re pushed to your repository, reducing the time it takes to bring new features to market.

• Improved quality: Automated testing helps catch bugs and other issues before they reach production, improving the overall quality of your application.

• Enhanced collaboration: CI/CD enables developers to work together more efficiently, as it streamlines the process of integrating code changes and resolving conflicts.

Conclusion

Integrating CI/CD with Azure App Service is an effective way to optimize your web application development and deployment process. By automating builds, tests, and deployments, you can ensure your application is always up-to-date and delivering the best possible experience to your users. Explore the other features of Azure App Service to maximize the potential of your web applications and stay ahead in today’s competitive market.

Whitepaper from Microsoft of example architecture.

This is article number 5 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

Custom Domains: Why They Matter

When you create a web app using Azure App Service, it’s assigned a default domain such as “yourapp.azurewebsites.net.” While this is sufficient for development and testing, a custom domain (e.g., “yourapp.com”) is crucial for production environments. A custom domain gives your app a professional appearance and makes it easier for users to find and remember your web address.

SSL Certificates: The Key to Security

Securing your web app with an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate is essential for protecting sensitive data. SSL certificates encrypt the connection between your app and its users, ensuring that information remains secure and safe from hackers. An SSL certificate also adds credibility to your app, as it indicates that you prioritize user privacy and security.

Setting Up Custom Domains

To set up a custom domain with Azure App Service, follow these steps:

• Purchase a domain from a domain registrar or use an existing one.

• Configure your domain’s DNS records to point to your Azure App Service. Add a CNAME record with a hostname (e.g., “www”) and set the value to your default Azure domain. For the root domain, create an A record pointing to your app’s IP address, which can be found in the Azure portal.

• In the Azure portal, navigate to your web app and select “Custom domains.” Click on “Add custom domain,” enter your domain name, and click “Validate.” If the configuration is correct, click “Add custom domain” to complete the process.

Setting Up SSL Certificates

Once you have a custom domain, it’s time to secure your app with an SSL certificate. Azure App Service offers two options for SSL certificates:

• Purchase an SSL certificate from a third-party provider.

• Use the App Service Managed Certificates feature to obtain a free SSL certificate.

To obtain a free SSL certificate using App Service Managed Certificates, follow these steps:

• In the Azure portal, navigate to your web app and click on “TLS/SSL settings.”

• Click on “Private Key Certificates” and then “Create App Service Managed Certificate.” Choose your custom domain, and Azure will generate a free SSL certificate for you.

This is article number 4 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

But one of its most powerful features is the seamless integration with other Azure services. In this blog post, we’ll explore how Azure App Service can be combined with other Azure offerings to create comprehensive, end-to-end solutions.

Azure Functions: Embrace Serverless Architecture

One of the key integrations is with Azure Functions, a serverless computing service that enables you to build event-driven applications without worrying about infrastructure management. By integrating Azure App Service with Azure Functions, you can create serverless APIs and microservices that scale based on demand, optimizing both cost and performance.

This event-driven architecture allows you to respond to events from other Azure services, enabling seamless integration and data processing across your applications.

Azure DevOps: Streamline Your Application Lifecycle

Azure App Service can be integrated with Azure DevOps to streamline your application’s development and deployment process. Azure DevOps offers a comprehensive suite of tools for planning, coding, building, testing, and deploying applications.

By leveraging Azure App Service’s continuous integration and deployment capabilities, you can automate the process of updating your applications, ensuring they always run the latest code and features.

Azure Active Directory: Secure Your Applications

Securing your applications is a top priority, and Azure App Service makes it easy to implement identity and access management by integrating with Azure Active Directory (AD). Azure AD allows you to enable single sign-on (SSO), enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA), and manage access to your applications based on user roles and permissions.

This integration ensures that your applications are secure and compliant with industry standards.

Azure Cognitive Services: Add AI and Machine Learning Capabilities

Azure Cognitive Services is a collection of AI and machine learning services that can be integrated with your Azure App Service-based applications to add powerful features. By leveraging Cognitive Services, you can implement natural language processing, computer vision, and speech recognition capabilities in your applications.

This integration enables you to create more engaging and intelligent applications that delight your users.

Azure Logic Apps: Automate Workflows Across Services

Azure Logic Apps is a serverless service that allows you to create workflows that integrate with various services and APIs. By connecting your Azure App Service with Logic Apps, you can automate tasks and create complex, multi-step processes with minimal coding.

This is especially useful for orchestrating tasks across different services in your application architecture, ensuring smooth data processing and communication between components.

Conclusion

In summary, Azure App Service’s seamless integration with other Azure services allows you to unlock the full potential of the Azure ecosystem. By combining Azure App Service with Azure Functions, Azure DevOps, Azure Active Directory, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Logic Apps, you can create powerful, end-to-end solutions that are secure, scalable, and intelligent.

Explore these integrations to take your applications to the next level and harness the power of the Azure platform.

This is article number 3 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

That’s where Azure App Service swoops in like a superhero, ensuring your applications scale with ease and provide a seamless user experience.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how Azure App Service can automatically scale your web applications based on demand, keeping your apps responsive and efficient during peak traffic parties.

Understanding Scalability: It’s Elastic!

When it comes to web applications, scalability is like an elastic band—it stretches to handle increased workloads and adapt to changing demands. Azure App Service makes this process a breeze by taking care of infrastructure management, so developers can focus on creating awesome applications.

Autoscaling Options: Manual vs. Automatic

Azure App Service offers two ways to scale your app: manual and automatic. Manual scaling is like setting your cruise control based on expected traffic—it’s a good starting point, but won’t react to unexpected traffic jams.

Automatic scaling, however, adjusts the number of instances dynamically based on specific metrics (e.g., CPU usage or memory consumption), keeping your app cruising smoothly no matter the traffic conditions.

Setting up Automatic Scaling: Easy as 1-2-3-4

Setting up automatic scaling in Azure App Service is as simple as following these four steps:

• Open your App Service in the Azure Portal.

• In the “Settings” section, choose “Scale out (App Service plan).”

• Enable and configure custom autoscale rules. For example, you can set a rule to add more instances if the average CPU usage goes above 70% for a certain period.

• Set minimum and maximum limits for the number of instances to ensure your app doesn’t get too greedy with resources or blow your budget.

### Scaling Out vs. Scaling Up: Horizontal vs. Vertical

Understanding the difference between scaling out and scaling up is like knowing the difference between horizontal and vertical. Scaling out (horizontal scaling) means adding more instances to handle increased demand. Azure App Service is a pro at scaling out, making it an affordable and efficient way to handle traffic surges.

Scaling up (vertical scaling) involves beefing up existing instances with more resources like CPU, memory, or storage. Although it can improve performance, it’s usually more expensive and less flexible than scaling out. Azure App Service supports scaling up too, but in most cases, scaling out is the better option.

Monitoring and Adjusting Scaling Rules: Keeping an Eye on the Prize

To ensure your scaling rules are working like a charm, monitor your application’s performance regularly. Azure Monitor and Application Insights are your trusty sidekicks to track key performance indicators, such as response times and resource usage. Based on these insights, you can fine-tune your scaling rules to optimize both performance and costs.

Conclusion

Azure App Service is the scaling superhero you’ve been looking for to build responsive and high-performing web applications. Embrace the power of automatic scaling in Azure App Service and watch your web applications stay efficient and responsive, no matter how wild the traffic party gets.

Try it out and letAzure App Service flex its scaling muscles for you!

This is article number 2 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

Enter Azure App Service, a fully managed platform that’s not just about building, deploying, and scaling web apps, but also making developers’ lives easier and injecting a bit of fun into the process.

Let’s dive into the world of Azure App Service and uncover the secrets of its lightning-fast development and deployment capabilities.

Swift Development with Azure App Service: Say Goodbye to Snail Pace

Creating applications can sometimes feel like waiting for water to boil, especially when you’re bogged down with infrastructure and other behind-the-scenes components. Azure App Service is here to save the day, allowing developers to focus on coding in their favourite programming languages and frameworks, such as .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, and PHP (a veritable coding buffet!).

Thanks to Azure’s fully managed platform, you can wave goodbye to managing infrastructure and runtime, and instead spend your time crafting extraordinary applications. Azure’s got your back with built-in support for popular web frameworks like ASP.NET, Express, Django, and Laravel, helping you kick off application development faster than a caffeinated coder.

Seamless Deployment: Effortless Updates for the Win

After you’ve whipped up your masterpiece of an application, it’s time to send it off into the cloud. Azure App Service takes the hassle out of this process with a user-friendly interface that lets you deploy applications directly from source control repositories like GitHub, Bitbucket, or Azure Repos.

It's like having your very own cloud-based concierge!

With continuous integration and deployment, your application will automatically update whenever you push new code, ensuring your app stays fresh without breaking a sweat. The App Service Editor even allows you to make quick edits to your code directly in the Azure Portal and view changes in real-time – it’s like magic!

PaaS: The VIP Treatment for Developers

App Service is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, meaning it handles all the nitty-gritty of managing servers, networking, and storage for you. Gone are the days of patching and maintaining operating systems or wrangling network configurations. This not only speeds up the development process but also saves you time on infrastructure management, so you can focus on what truly matters – your application and its fabulous features.

Adaptable Deployment Options: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Azure App Service knows that variety is the spice of life, so it provides flexibility in deployment options. Choose to deploy your app on Windows or Linux, or even containerize your applications using Docker containers. This adaptability ensures you can build and deploy applications tailored to your preferred technology stack, because who doesn’t love customization?

Conclusion

Azure App Service is your golden ticket to lightning-fast development and deployment. With its fully managed platform, support for popular programming languages and frameworks, streamlined deployment process, and versatile options, you’ll be building, deploying, and updating your web applications quicker than ever before.

If you’re seeking a powerful, scalable, and feature-loaded platform to build, deploy, and manage web applications, it’s time to embrace the perks of Azure App Service.

Unleash the speed of swift development and deployment, and stay ahead in the fast-paced realm of web applications.

This is article number 1 from: 10 Reasons to use Azure App Service

**1. Rapid development and deployment: **

It allows developers to quickly build, deploy, and update web apps using popular programming languages and frameworks such as .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, and PHP. The platform abstracts away infrastructure management, enabling developers to focus on their applications.

**2. Scalability: **

App Service can automatically scale applications based on demand, ensuring that applications perform optimally even during peak traffic periods. Developers can configure autoscaling rules or use the built-in automatic scaling feature.

3. Integration with other Azure services:

Azure App Service seamlessly integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Functions, Azure DevOps, and Azure Active Directory. This integration enables developers to build end-to-end solutions that leverage the full power of the Azure ecosystem.

4. Custom domains and SSL support:

Built-in support for custom domains and SSL certificates, making it easy to configure a secure and professional web presence for your applications. With the App Service Managed Certificates feature, you can even obtain free SSL certificates for your custom domains.

5. Continuous integration and deployment:

Supporting popular CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) tools like GitHub, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps. This integration streamlines the deployment process, ensuring that your applications are always up-to-date with the latest code changes.

6. Security and compliance:

Azure App Service comes with built-in security features, such as DDoS protection, threat detection, and mitigation. It also adheres to strict compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS, making it a suitable platform for organizations with strict security and regulatory requirements.

7. Monitoring and diagnostics:

Azure App Service provides a range of monitoring and diagnostic tools, such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Log Stream. These tools help developers analyse application performance, identify issues, and optimize their apps for better user experiences.

8. Deployment slots and staging environments:

Deployment slots are used to allow developers to create separate staging environments for testing new features or updates before pushing them to production. This helps ensure a smooth and error-free deployment process.

9. Serverless architecture with Azure Functions:

Azure App Service integrates with Azure Functions, enabling developers to build serverless applications and APIs. This allows you to scale your application based on the number of executions rather than pre-allocated resources, optimizing cost and performance.

10. Global reach with Azure CDN:

Combine with Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute your app’s content across a global network of edge servers. This ensures low-latency access to your application and its content, regardless of user location.

Overall, Azure App Service is an excellent choice for developers looking for a robust, scalable, and feature-rich platform to build, deploy, and manage web applications.

I shall be writing about each point over the coming weeks.

This post will show you how to setup, for free, an AWS EC2 server in preparation to be configured to connect in to Azure Arc.

Why: The reason is during this scenario we want to connect a remote machine into Azure Arc and see what we can do with it, what better system that a competitors!

Firstly, go here to create an account: Cloud Computing Services – Amazon Web Services (AWS)and follow the process to sign up

** Secondly,** or if you already have an account, login here

Your screen should look like this (boring right);

You will see that my screen has services I have previously looked at, yours will probably look different but not too different.

Righto now were in and we need to setup a free VM to play with.

You can either open the services pane from the top left which will show all services or type EC2 in the search bar.

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Lets smash the Launch Instance orange button and get a VM in AWS up and running.

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Lots of config to fill in, as this is only a test we shall leave the RDP connection open.  I would never normally recommend this however were just playing around to show the service and this will be terminated when finished.

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In order to connect to your machine you will need a key pair to decrypt and get your password, click on Create New Keypair, give it a name and download the file.

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This is what a complete instance should look like, you could add more and play around if you want but for testing this will do for now.

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Click on launch instance (orange button on the right)

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Boom, done, lets view it!

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Back to the EC2 console and we can see our new VM (the selected one, the other was from a previous test)

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In the bottom right you will see the Public IPv4 DNS record, open it and see what happens, nothing I would expect….lets see what we can do to this when we deploy Arc…

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Lets try and connect in via RDP;

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Ah, no credentials, lets go get them…

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Back to the console

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Click connect and select RDP;

Upload your .pem file from earlier;

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Decrypt that key to get the lovely password, forget about SSO or AAD…..

Boom password and the obvious username of course…

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Here we go, take 2!

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Classic cert alert..

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Bosh, job done, were in!

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Right, now we have a VM in AWS we can reach and login to which we can use to connect back in to Azure Arc.

We should only need to connect back into this VM once more to run the arc powershell script.

I have recently been asked to give the speaker coach a go in teams and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to improve communication skills during meetings and/or for presentations.

This will only work in your own tenant, for now, so don’t expect it to work if you are joining a meeting in another tenant.

One to watch for, if you enable speaker coach whilst on another tenant, you will still get notified at the end of the meeting that your report is ready but you wont be able to access it.

1: Firstly turn on speaker coach whilst in a meeting 

2: It will start advising you, live, during a meeting! !

3: Get a nice report at the end of your meeting !

4: The important bit, if you want to carry on using it select this option from your first report, if you don’t you will have to turn on the coach EVERY time! !

More info can be found here

Currently, Azure Arc allows you to manage the following resource types hosted outside of Azure:

• Servers: Manage Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure.

• Kubernetes clusters: Attach and configure Kubernetes clusters running anywhere, with multiple supported distributions.

• Azure data services: Run Azure data services on-premises, at the edge, and in public clouds using Kubernetes and the infrastructure of your choice. SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL (preview) services are currently available.

• SQL Server: Extend Azure services to SQL Server instances hosted outside of Azure.

• Virtual machines (preview): Provision, resize, delete and manage virtual machines based on VMware vSphere or Azure Stack HCI and enable VM self-service through role-based access.

Next we shall be deploying Arc and managing some AWS resources.

Our goal with Azure Digital Twins is to make the creation of sophisticated digital twin solutions easy. With today’s announcement, you can apply your domain expertise on top of Azure Digital Twins to design and build comprehensive digital models of entire environments.

Using Azure Digital Twins, you can gain insights that drive better products, optimization of operations, cost reduction, and breakthrough customer experiences. And you can now do so across environments of all types, including buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums—even entire cities.

What’s new?

We received a lot of valuable feedback from the Azure Digital Twins preview and we are excited to share the expanded capabilities of Azure Digital Twins that will simplify and accelerate your creation of IoT connected solutions.

Open modeling language

The new preview of Azure Digital Twins lets you create custom models of any connected environment. Using the rich and flexible Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL), based on the JSON-LD standard, you can configure your Azure Digital Twins service to tailor to the specific needs of your use case.

Real-world environments are created from connected twins. Each twin is modeled using properties, telemetry events, components, and relationships that define how twins can be connected into rich knowledge graphs. DTDL is also used for models throughout other Azure IoT services, including IoT Plug and Play and Azure Time Series Insights.

DTDL is the glue that helps you keep your Azure Digital Twins solution connected and compatible with other parts of the Azure ecosystem.

As part of our commitment to openness and interoperability, we will continue to promote best practices and shared digital twin models for a wide range of businesses and industry domains through the Digital Twins Consortium and other channels to accelerate your time building valuable IoT connected solutions that span many industry verticals and use cases.

Live execution environment

Azure Digital Twins lets you bring your digital twins to life using data from IoT and other data sources, creating an always-up-to-date digital representation of your environment that is scalable and secure.

Using a robust event system, you can build dynamic business logic and data processing as data flows through the execution environment, and now, you can harness the power of external compute resources, such as Azure Functions. This makes it easy to use pre-existing code with Azure Digital Twins, which provides freedom of choice in terms of programming languages and compute models.

To extract insights from the live execution environment, Azure Digital Twins provides a powerful query system that allows you to search for twins based on a wide range of conditions and relationships.

Input from IoT and business systems

You can easily connect assets such as IoT and IoT Edge devices, as well as existing business systems such as ERP and CRM, to Azure Digital Twins to drive the live execution environment.

You can now use a new or existing Azure IoT Hub to connect, monitor, and manage all of your assets at scale, taking advantage of the full device management capabilities that IoT Hub provides. The ability to use any existing Hub makes it easier to add Azure Digital Twins to existing IoT solutions incrementally.

Using the Azure Digital Twins REST APIs, you can also use data sources other than IoT, unlocking even more actionable insights with Azure Digital Twins.

Output to Azure Time Series Insights, storage, and analytics

You can integrate Azure Digital Twins with other Azure services to build complete end-to-end solutions. You can define event routes that send selected data to downstream services through endpoints that support Event Hubs, Event Grid, or Service Bus Event routes to send data to Azure Data Lake for long term storage; to data analytics services such as Azure Synapse Analytics to apply machine learning; to Logic Apps for workflow integration; or to Power BI to extract insights. Another important use case is time series data integration and historian analytics with Azure Time Series Insights.

Combined, these capabilities greatly simplify today’s difficult tasks of modeling and creating a digital representation of an environment, helping you focus on what differentiates your business rather than building and operating complex, distributed systems architecture securely and at scale.

Innovating with customers and partners

Azure Digital Twins is already being used by a broad set of customers and partners. Below are a few examples showcasing the applicability of Azure Digital Twins across a wide range of industries:

Ansys Twin Builder: physics-based digital twins

Physics-based simulation has long been an essential part of the product design process, helping engineers to optimize and validate design choices. With the broad deployment of IoT sensors in products and their environment, it is now possible to apply the same simulation technology after a product has been built, shipped, and deployed in the field. Simulation technology can be used to optimize performance and energy usage or predict failures in a highly accurate and immediate way, without the complexities associated with alternative techniques.

“Ansys Twin Builder lets engineers quickly deliver real-time simulation models for operational use. With Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins platform, it is now possible to efficiently integrate the simulation-based twins into a broader IoT solution.” —Sameer Kher, Senior Director, Twin Builder Product Line for Ansys

Bentley iTwin: infrastructure digital twins

In the world of infrastructure development, complex computer-aided design (CAD) data is the backbone of planning, execution, and operation of major infrastructures, such as road and rail networks, public works and utilities, industrial plants, and commercial and institutional facilities. Bentley’s iTwin platform captures geometry and metadata of the project and its environment as the source of truth that drives daily decisions throughout the entire lifecycle of the project. As a developer, you can think of it as GitHub for CAD.

“Using Azure Digital Twins, we can bring this backbone to life using raw and processed information from IoT sensors distributed throughout the infrastructure. By bringing a wide range of information sources together into a comprehensive Digital Twin, including CAD data, real-world scans and photometry, IoT sensor data, weather feeds and many more, we can revolutionize the way infrastructure projects are planned, built and operated.” —Pavan Emani, Vice President, iTwin software development for Bentley

To learn more about the customers and partners using Azure Digital Twins in exciting ways, we encourage you to visit the customer stories covering a spectrum of industry use cases.

Get started

We look forward to continuing to deliver on our commitment of simplifying and accelerating your time to value building next-generation IoT connected solutions. We are excited about the role Azure Digital Twins will play helping you gain valuable insights across your environments.

Watch this video to learn more:

Get started with Azure Digital Twins today.

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Visit the Azure Digital Twins product page.

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See the Azure Digital Twins documentation and quick start guides.

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Watch the Deep Dive: Azure Digital Twins webinar for a technical walkthrough. Join the event at 9 AM PT June 29, 2020 for Live Q & A.

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Watch the Deep Dive: Bentley and Azure Digital Twins webinar for architectural overview. Join the event at 9 AM PT August 3, 2020 for Live Q & A.

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Watch how Bentley uses Azure Digital Twins to build Bentley iTwin solution.

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Watch the Azure Digital Twins Microsoft Build event session.

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Read our customer stories from Ansys and Bentley.

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Read Announcing Azure Digital Twins: Create digital replicas of spaces and infrastructure using cloud, AI and, IoT to get familiar with the previous release.

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This post outlines five key reasons to view the one-hour event.

Learn how to deliver powerful insights with speed and ease

Today, it’s critical to have a data-driven culture in your organization. Analytics play a pivotal role in helping many organizations make insights-driven decisions—decisions to transform supply chains, develop new ways to interact with customers, and evaluate new offerings.

At Azure Synapse Analytics: How It Works, customers showed how they combine data ingestion, data warehousing, and big data analytics in a single cloud-native service using Azure Synapse. If you’re a data engineer trying to wrangle multiple data types from multiple sources to create pipelines or a database administrator with responsibilities over your data lake and data warehouse, you’ll see how all this can be simplified in a code-free environment.

Customers also demonstrated how they give their employees access to unprecedented, real-time insights from enterprise data using Azure Synapse with built-in Power BI authoring.

Achieve unprecedented ROI

Companies featured at the event have demonstrated significant cost reductions with cloud analytics solutions. Compared to on-premises solutions, these solutions:

• Require lower implementation and maintenance costs.

• Reduce analytics project development time.

• Provide access to more frequent innovation.

• Deliver higher levels of security and business continuity.

• Help ensure a better competitive advantage and higher customer satisfaction.

With cloud analytics, organizations pay for data and analytics tools only when needed, pausing consumption when not in use. They can reallocate budget previously spent on hardware and infrastructure management to optimizing processes and launching new projects. In fact, customers average a 271 percent ROI with Azure Synapse—savings that come from lower operating costs, increased productivity, reallocating staff to higher-value activities, and increasing operating income due to improved analytics. Analytics in Azure is up to 14 times faster and costs 94 percent less than other cloud providers.

Deliver a unified analytics experience to everyone in your organization

BI specialists, data engineers, and other IT and data professionals are using Azure Synapse to build, manage, and optimize analytics pipelines, using a variety of skillsets.

• Data engineers can use a code-free visual environment for managing data pipelines.

• Database administrators can automate query optimization and easily explore data lakes.

• Data scientists can build proofs of concept in minutes.

• Business analysts can securely access datasets and use Power BI to build dashboards in minutes—all while using the same analytics service.

Analyze data at limitless scale

By viewing the event, you’ll learn how to access and analyze all your data, from your enterprise data lake to multiple data warehouses and big data analytics systems, with blazing speed. Join us to see how data professionals can query both relational and non-relational data using the familiar SQL language, using either serverless or provisioned resources—with Azure Synapse.

Attain unmatched security

Of course, trust is critical for any cloud solution. Customers will share how they take advantage of advanced Azure Synapse security and privacy features such as automated threat detection and always-on data encryption to help ensure that data stays safe and private by using column-level security and native row-level security. You’ll also learn about dynamic data masking, which automatically protects sensitive data in real time.

In summary, by viewing the Azure Synapse Analytics: How It Works virtual event, you’ll learn how to deliver:

• Powerful insights.

• Unprecedented ROI.

• Unified experience.

• Limitless scale.

• Unmatched security.

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We have heard feedback from our customers and partners that automating support procedures is key to help them move faster in the cloud and focus on their core business. Integrating internal monitoring applications and websites with Azure support tickets has been one of their top asks. Customers expect to create, view, and manage support tickets without having to sign-in to the Azure portal. This gives them the flexibility to associate the issues they are tracking with the support tickets they raise with Microsoft. The ability to programmatically raise and manage support tickets when an issue occurs is a critical step for them in Azure usability.

We’re happy to share that the Azure Support API is now generally available. With this API, customers can integrate the creation and management of support tickets directly into their IT service management (ITSM) system, and automate common procedures.

Using the Azure Support API, you can:

• Create a support ticket for technical, billing, subscription management, and subscription and service limits (quota) issues.

• Get a list of support tickets with detailed information, and filter by status or created date.

• Update severity, status, and contact information.

• Manage all communications for a support ticket.

Benefits of Azure Support API

Reduce the time between finding an issue and getting support from Microsoft

A typical troubleshooting process when the customer encounters an Azure issue looks something like this:

On step five, if the issue is unresolved and identified to be on the Azure side, customers navigate to the Azure portal, to contact support. With programmatic case management access, customers can automate their support process with their internal tooling to create and manage their support tickets, thus reducing the time between finding an issue and contacting support.

Customers now have one end-end process that goes smoothly from internal to external without the person filing the issue having to deal with the complexity and challenges between separate case management systems.

Create support tickets via ARM templates

Deploying an ARM template that creates resources can sometimes result in a ResourceQuotaExceeded deployment error, indicating that you have exceeded your Azure subscription and service limits (quotas). This happens because quotas are applied in the resource group, subscription, account, and other scopes. For example, your subscription may be configured to limit the number of cores for a region. If you attempt to deploy a virtual machine with more cores than the permitted amount, you receive an error stating the quota has been exceeded. The way to resolve it is to request a quota increase by filing a support ticket. With Support APIs in place, you can avoid signing in to the Azure portal to create a ticket, instead request quota increases directly via ARM templates.

Getting started

The Azure Support API is available with a Professional Direct, Premier, or Unified technical support plan.

For detailed examples using .NET and C#, refer to our code samples.

View the list of all languages and interfaces we support for ticket creation and management. As always, you can also directly use the Support REST API.

Use the API and tell us about it

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback about the Azure Support API. In the Azure support feedback forum, you can post ideas and suggestions for the API and other aspects of the support experience.

To report an API issue, go to the issues section of the GitHub repository for the language or interface you’re using. For example, go to the repository for issues with the PowerShell cmdlets. Select New issue and tag it with the labels Support and Service Attention.

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Today we’re excited about the first release of the new Docker Desktop integration with Microsoft Azure. Last month Microsoft and Docker announced this collaboration, and today you can experience it for yourself.

The new edge release of Docker Desktop provides an integration between Docker and Microsoft Azure that enables you to use native Docker commands to run your applications as serverless containers with Azure Container Instances.

You can use the Docker CLI to quickly and easily sign into Azure, create a Container Instances context using an Azure subscription and resource group, then run your single-container applications on Container Instances using docker run. You can also deploy multi-container applications to Container Instances that are defined in a Docker Compose file using docker compose up.

Code-to-Cloud with a serverless containers

Azure Container Instances is a great solution for running a single Docker container or an application comprised of multiple containers defined with a Docker Compose file. With Container Instances, you can run your containers in the cloud without needing to set up any infrastructure and take advantage of features such as mounting Azure Storage and GitHub repositories as volumes. Because there is no infrastructure or platform management overhead, Container Instances caters to those who need to quickly run containers in the cloud.

Container Instances is also a good target to run the same workloads in production. In production cases, we recommend leveraging Docker commands inside of an automated CI/CD flow. This saves time having to rewrite configuration files because the same Dockerfile and Docker Compose files can be deployed to production with tools such as GitHub Actions. Container Instances also has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which means you will only be billed for CPU and memory consumption per second, only when the container is running.

Let’s look at the new Docker Azure integration using an example. We have a worker container that continually pulls orders off a queue and performs necessary order processing. Here are the steps to run this in Container Instances with native Docker commands:

Run a single container

As you can see from the above animation, the new Docker CLI integration with Azure makes it easy to get a container running in Azure Container Instances. Using only the Docker CLI you can log in to Azure with multi-factor authentication and create a Docker context using Container Instances as the backend. Detailed information on Container Instances contexts can be found in the documentation.

Once the new Container Instances context is created it can be used to target Container Instances with many of the standard Docker commands you likely already use; like docker run, docker ps, and docker rm. Running a simple docker run <image> command will start a container in Container Instances using the image that is stored in a registry like Docker Hub or Azure Container Registry. You can run other common Docker commands to inspect, attach-to, and view logs from the running container.

Use Docker Compose to deploy a multi-container app

We see many containerized applications that consist of a few related containers. Sidecar containers often perform logging or signing services for the main container. With the new Docker Azure integration, you can use Docker Compose to describe these multi-container applications.

You can use a Container Instances context and a Docker Compose file as part of your edit-build-debug inner loop, as well as your CI/CD flows. This enables you to use docker compose up and down commands to spin up or shut down multiple containers at once in Container Instances.

Visual Studio Code for an even better experience

The Visual Studio Code Docker extension provides you with an integrated experience to start, stop, and manage your containers, images, contexts, and more. Use the extension to scaffold Dockerfiles and Docker Compose files for any language. For Node.js, Python, and .NET, you get integrated, one-click debugging of your app inside the container. And then of course there is the Explorer,** **which has multiple panels that make the management of your Docker objects easy from right inside Visual Studio Code.

Use the **Containers **panel to list, start, stop, inspect, view logs, and more.

From the **Images **panel you can list, pull, tag, and push your images.

Connect to Azure Container Registry and Docker Hub in the Registries panel to view and manage your images in the cloud. You can even deploy straight to Azure.

The **Contexts **panel lets you list all your contexts and quickly switch between them. When you switch context, the other panels will refresh to show the Docker objects from the selected context. Container Instances contexts will be fully supported in the next release of the docker extension.

Try it out

To start using the Docker Azure integration install the Docker Desktop edge release. You can leverage the current Visual Studio Code Docker extension today, Container Instances context support will be added very soon.

To learn more about the Docker Desktop release, you can read this blog post from Docker. You can find more information in the documentation for using Docker Container Instances contexts.

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