Optimize for internet traffic with Peering Service and the routing preference option

We announced that Azure Peering Service is now generally available. We also introduced “routing preference,” a new option for our customers to further architect and optimize their traffic to and from Azure over the “public Internet.”

Networking is a critical enabler of the cloud. The experience when accessing your applications and data depends on the performance of your network connection and the global network powering your applications and services in the cloud.

For the best experience, data should travel the shortest path and enter and exit the Microsoft network as close as possible to you or your users. Microsoft runs the Microsoft global network, one of the world's largest wide area networks (WANs). Stretching across all continents through hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber and hundreds of network points of presence (PoP), it powers all the Microsoft cloud services such as Azure, Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, and their millions of users.

A growing number of our customers are adopting an "Internet-first" approach. Driven by accelerated cloud adoption, the current global situation, and the need to quickly adjust and provide optimal access to users is a main priority. Cloud-centric architectures with virtual private networks (VPNs) and technologies such as SD-WAN are applied to optimize for cost, security, and performance.

Peering Service

Microsoft is always optimizing customer traffic within our network, from ingestion close to the user and carrying it as far as possible to its destination, avoiding the public Internet, to returning it the same way. Peering Service extends the optimized path to your doorstep or, in industry terms, to the last mile.

Concept diagram of Peering Service.

We have partnered with internet service providers (ISPs), internet exchange providers (IXPs), and software-defined cloud interconnect (SDCI) providers worldwide to provide reliable and performant public connectivity.

When connecting using a partner provider, you can take advantage of business-class internet connectivity with high availability and low latency. Using the optimal path and least amount of network hops, Peering Service improves the user experience in Microsoft apps, such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. Also, you will have access to optional advanced performance telemetry and security features such as route hijacking monitoring and prevention.

Prefix events in the portal showing an origin autonomous system number (ASN) change for a Peering Service customer's prefix.

Routing preference

While optimal consumption of apps is critical, so is the ability to architect the delivery. I am excited to introduce the new routing preference option in Azure. The option brings a new second network service tier and enables customers to select how traffic routes between their Azure resources and clients accessing them from the internet. The Microsoft global network is well provisioned with multiple redundant fiber paths to ensure exceptionally high reliability and availability. We do traffic engineering using a unique software-defined WAN controller that provides optimal path selection and high performance for your traffic.

Default routing of traffic for best performance in Azure.

While Microsoft will always default to the best performing and most secure option of carrying the traffic across our backbone from source to destination, the new competitive egress tier adds a secondary option for solutions that do not require the premium predictability and performance of Microsoft's global network. Instead, it will allow the routing of traffic directly to the public Internet.

Traffic routed with the new network service tier in Azure.

You can select your preferred routing when creating a public IP address and associating it to resources such as virtual machines (VMs), internet-facing load balancers, and more. You can also add the secondary routing preference, "Internet routing" for storage accounts that gives an additional endpoint to access services such as blobs, files, web, and Azure Data Lake over the public Internet.

Creation of an additional endpoint for internet routing option.

Let us look at how the two options compare. We did a performance comparison using ThousandEyes monitoring across multiple global locations, accessing Azure Virtual Machines. The average round-trip latency was measured over a period of 30 days. As expected, routing via Microsoft's network provides the best latency, with the gap between the two further widening with cross-continent traffic. The choice of best scheme, price, and performance is ultimately yours.

Performance between the Microsoft network and the public Internet.

Source: microsoft.com

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The Azure SQL family: Innovation and value in the cloud

How businesses respond in times of uncertainty is as varied as the businesses themselves. Many slow down operations to operate more cost-effectively, while others lean into new opportunities that didn’t exist before. Regardless of how you respond, ensuring your organization can cost-effectively adapt and scale to rapidly changing conditions is key.

When it comes to migrating your data, you have a variety of options to consider, and it’s important to have the flexibility to choose a path that helps you respond to uncertainty in a way that makes the most sense for your business. Azure SQL is here to help.

Introducing Azure SQL

Azure SQL is a family of fully managed, secure, and intelligent SQL database services that support a wide range of application patterns, from re-hosting and modernizing existing SQL Server workloads to modern cloud application development.

Because the entire Azure SQL family is built upon the same SQL Server database engine, you can migrate applications with ease and continue to use the tools, languages, and resources you’re familiar with. You’ll discover that your skills and experience transfer easily to the cloud, as the innovative features in Azure SQL help you operate more efficiently and save money along the way.

Azure SQL helps you do more

Azure SQL has options for any budget. You can choose managed services that are automatically patched, updated, and backed-up for you, so you can refocus resources onto higher priorities. A recent Forrester study found operational and financial benefits of modernizing applications on Azure SQL, citing a three-year 238 percent return on investment and up to a 40 percent increase in database administrator (DBA) productivity, among other benefits.1

Azure SQL also helps you stay agile in an ever-changing world by reducing your costs and simplifying performance management. Serverless compute, for example, continuously right-sizes resources to meet workload demand. Hyperscale storage is built on a flexible, cloud native architecture that allows it to grow as needed, rapidly scaling up to 100 TB. Built-in AI powers intelligent features like automatic tuning and Advanced Threat Protection, which maintain peak performance and data protection on your behalf.

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines offers similar efficiency and cost-effectiveness with Azure BlobCache, which is automatically provisioned for Azure Marketplace images and gives fast, free reads for customers. Given that typical SQL Server workloads are read-heavy, this provides tremendous savings.

Azure SQL comes with industry leading offers

In addition to the operational and financial benefits that come with managed services, Azure SQL can help reduce your upfront costs with industry-leading pricing and special offers, such as:

◉ Azure Hybrid Benefit — If you have SQL Server and Windows licenses with active Software Assurance, you can reuse those licenses in the cloud and save up to 82 percent2 off pay-as-you-go rates on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database.

◉ Reservation pricing — Get more cloud for less cost when you commit upfront to a one- or three-year term. With reservation pricing, you can save up to 80 percent3 versus pay-as-you-go pricing, and you can exchange or cancel unused reservations at any time.

◉ Azure Dev/Test Pricing — Use your Visual Studio subscriptions to get discounted pricing and Azure credits for non-production scenarios, with savings up to 55 percent off pay-as-you-go pricing on Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance and Ubuntu Linux rates on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft announces next evolution of Azure VMware Solution

With the current economic environment, many organizations face new challenges to find rapid and cost-effective solutions that enable business stability, continuity, and resiliency. The new Azure VMware Solution empowers customers to seamlessly extend or completely migrate their existing on-premises VMware applications to Azure without the cost, effort, or risk of re-architecting applications or retooling operations. This helps our customers gain cloud efficiency and enables them to innovate at their own pace with Azure services across security, data, and artificial intelligence, as well as unified management capabilities. Customers can also save money with Windows Server and SQL Server workloads running on Azure VMware by taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefits.

Microsoft first party service

The new Azure VMware Solution is a first party service from Microsoft. By launching a new service that is directly owned, operated, and supported by Microsoft, we can ensure greater quality, reliability, and direct access to Azure innovation for our customers while providing you with a single point of contact for all your needs. With today’s announcement and our continued collaboration with VMware, the new Azure VMware Solution lays the foundation for our customers’ success in the future.

Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer at VMware commented, “VMware and Microsoft have a long-standing partnership and a shared heritage in supporting our customers. Now more than ever it is important we come together and help them create stability and efficiency for their businesses. The new Azure VMware Solution gives customers the ability to use the same VMware foundation in Azure as they use in their private data centers. It provides a consistent operating model that can increase business agility and resiliency, reduces costs, and enable a native developer experience for all types of applications.”

These comments were echoed by Jason Zander, Executive Vice President at Microsoft, who said, “This is an amazing milestone for Microsoft and VMware to meet our customers where they are today on their cloud journey. Azure VMware Solution is a great example of how we design Azure services to support a broad range of customer workloads. Through close collaboration with the VMware team, I’m excited that customers running VMware on-premises will be able to benefit from Azure’s highly reliable infrastructure sooner.”

The new solution is built on Azure, delivering the speed, scale, and high availability of our global infrastructure. You can provision a full VMware Cloud Foundation environment on Azure and gain compute and storage elasticity as your business needs change. Azure VMware Solution is VMware Cloud Verified, giving customers confidence they're using the complete set of VMware capabilities, with consistency, performance, and interoperability for their VMware workloads.

Access to VMware technology and experiences

Azure VMware Solution allows you to leverage your existing investments, in VMware skills and tools. Customers can maintain operational consistency as they accelerate a move to the cloud with the use of familiar VMware technology including VMWare vSphere, HCX, NSX-T, and vSAN. Additionally, the new Azure VMware Solution has an option to add VMware HCX Enterprise, which will enable customers to further simplify their migration efforts to Azure including support for bulk live migrations. HCX also enables customers running older versions of vSphere on-premises to move to newer versions of vSphere seamlessly running on Azure VMware Solution.

Seamless Azure integration

Through integration with Azure management, security, and services, Azure VMware Solution provides the opportunity for customers to continue to build cloud competencies and modernize overtime. Customers maintain the choice to use the native VMware tools and management experiences they are familiar with, and incrementally leverage Azure capabilities as required.

As we look to meet customers where they are today, we are deeply investing in support for hybrid management scenarios, and automation that can streamline the journey. We are excited to announce more about future hybrid capabilities as they relate to Azure VMware Solution, soon.

Leverage Azure Hybrid Benefit pricing for Microsoft workloads

Take advantage of Azure as the best cloud for your Microsoft workloads running in Azure VMware Solution with unmatched pricing benefits for Windows Server and SQL Server. Azure Hybrid Benefit extends to Azure VMware Solution allowing customers with software assurance to maximize the value of existing on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server license investments when migrating or extending to Azure. In addition, Azure VMware Solution customers are also eligible for three years of free Extended Security Updates on 2008 versions of Windows Server and SQL Server. The combination of these unmatched pricing benefits on Azure ensures customers can simplify cloud adoption with cost efficiencies across their VMware environments.

In addition, at general availability Reserved Instances will also be available for Azure VMware Solution customers, with one-year and three-year options on dedicated hosts.

Global availability and expansion

The Azure VMware Solution preview is initially available in US East and West Europe Azure regions. We expect the new Azure VMware Solution to be generally available in the second half of 2020 and at that time, availability will be extended across more regions. Plans on regional availability for Azure VMware Solution will be made available here as they are disclosed.

Source: azure.microsoft.com

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Monitor your Azure workload compliance with Azure Security Benchmark

The Azure Security Benchmark v1 was released in January 2020 and is being used by organizations to manage their security and compliance policies for their Azure workloads. We are pleased to share that you can now track and monitor your compliance with the benchmark across your Azure environment in Azure Security Center.

The Azure Security Benchmark is a collection of over 90 security best practice recommendations you can employ to increase the overall security and compliance of all your workloads in Azure. The Azure Security Benchmark is based on common compliance frameworks and standards but is tailored to cloud deployments and specifically to Azure workloads. The benchmark provides specific guidance on how these common controls apply to Azure, and what you specifically need to implement in Azure to meet those requirements.

Now, not only can you understand the fundamental compliance framework requirements in Azure terms, but you can also measure and track how your own deployed Azure workloads are meeting those requirements at any given time.

Azure Security Center provides built-in automation for monitoring your compliance with the benchmark controls across different Azure resource types and workloads. Azure Security Center not only measures your compliance with the controls but also provides actionable recommendations for how to remediate the non-compliant resources and meet the requirements. The benchmark guidance and recommendations are contextualized for each Azure service, making it easier for you to implement the controls for the Azure services you are actively using.

The benchmark can be monitored using the Azure Security Center Regulatory Compliance Dashboard. The Azure Security Center compliance dashboard enables you to track and monitor industry-driven common compliance frameworks like NIST 800-53, Azure CIS, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001, among others. To monitor the benchmark in this dashboard, you need to onboard the Azure Security Benchmark as a tracked standard. Once you onboard, you get a clear view of how your currently deployed Azure environment is meeting the benchmark controls. You can use the dashboard to track the status of your Azure resources with respect to benchmark requirements, download a summary report, and improve your compliance posture using Azure Security Center remediation guidance and automation.

To onboard the benchmark to your Azure Security Center compliance dashboard, you need to add the Azure Security Benchmark initiative package to your compliance view. You can then view the dashboard and start tracking your compliance status with benchmark controls.

Increasing coverage of the Azure Security Benchmark

The Azure Security Benchmark core requirements are already being met by all major Azure services, and those controls can be monitored and tracked in this dashboard today. With time, coverage will increase even further as Azure services are working to create additional features supporting the full set of security and compliance requirements of the Azure Security Benchmark, and monitors for those.

Here are a couple of recent examples of Azure services providing added capabilities to help you implement the security benchmark:

◉ Encrypt sensitive information at rest: In some cases, you may want to use your own encryption key to protect your data. Fifty new services including Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Data Lake now support customer-managed keys for encryption at rest.

◉ Protect Azure resources within virtual networks: Private Link allows you to securely access an Azure Service over a private endpoint in your virtual network. Thirteen new services including Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Data Explorer now support Private Link.

Over time, a larger portion of controls will be supported and will be monitorable using the dashboard. 

The Azure Security Benchmark and Secure Score

Secure Score in Azure Security Center is a measure that helps you track your security posture, and effectively and efficiently improve your security by prioritizing the actions most likely to create a risk to your organization. Secure Score is comprised of a set of controls, where each control reflects a certain attack surface. Each control has an associated score (number of points) that represents your vulnerability for that attack surface, along with a set of security recommendations for reducing your vulnerability and improving your security. The cumulative scores for all controls are then used to calculate your overall Secure Score, which is a single KPI measurement representing your security posture.

The underlying security recommendations stipulated by Secure Score are the same as those associated with the Azure Security Benchmark controls. They are comprised of the same set of actions, that ultimately serve the common purpose of maximizing your Azure security posture. The Secure Score adds the additional dimension of threat analysis, risk, and vulnerability to each of those recommendations, and thus helps you prioritize action according to the most significant factors in reducing risk in your environment. The benchmark then illustrates how these security settings and factors apply to compliance framework requirements. It also adds some additional requirements that are compliance-focused but don’t have a direct impact on security risk.

Our recommendation is to use Azure Secure Score view to address misconfigurations starting with the highest priority recommendations.  The Azure Security Benchmark view is helpful for understanding your compliance and is sorted by controls rather than score impact.

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Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes preview and new ecosystem partners

A set of technologies that unlocks new hybrid scenarios for customers by bringing Azure services and management to any infrastructure across datacenters, edge, and multi-cloud. Based on the feedback and excitement of all the customers in the private preview, we are able to deliver Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes in preview to our customers. With this, anyone can use Azure Arc to connect and configure any Kubernetes cluster across customer datacenters, edge locations, and multi-cloud.

Over the last few months through private preview, organizations across a wide range of industries have experienced the power of Azure Arc for Kubernetes. Retail customers are deploying applications and configurations across their branch locations with guaranteed consistency. Financial institutions and healthcare providers are using Azure Arc to manage Kubernetes instances in geographic regions with custom data sovereignty requirements. Across several application scenarios and deployment environments, customers are embracing the diversity of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes is uniquely positioned through its openness and flexibility to help our customers meet their business challenges using the tools of their choice.

With today’s preview of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes, support for most CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions works out of the box. In addition, we are also announcing our first set of Azure Arc integration partners, including Red Hat OpenShift, Canonical Kubernetes, and Rancher Labs to ensure Azure Arc works great for all the key platforms our customers are using today.

Benefits of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes

Application delivery is an inherently collaborative activity, especially as customers adopt DevOps practices. Developers, system operators, infrastructure engineers, and database administrators each play an active role in developing, deploying, and managing applications across multiple environments. To do this efficiently, customers have a need for shared application and infrastructure lifecycle management for teams that are siloed, based on locations and skills. In uncertain times, like we’re going through today, it’s even more important to ensure that your organization has visibility and oversight so you can go fast, safely.

Developers creating modern applications are adopting Kubernetes to spend more time focused on the application and less on the infrastructure. There is a rich Kubernetes ecosystem ranging from off-the-shelf Helm charts to developer tooling to use. Using your existing DevOps pipelines, Kubernetes manifests, and Helm charts, Azure Arc enables deployment to any connected cluster at scale. Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes adopts a GitOps methodology, so customers define their applications and cluster configuration in source control. This means changes to apps and configuration are versioned, enforced, and logged across any number of clusters.

Azure Arc provides a single pane of glass operating model to customers for all their Kubernetes clusters deployed across multiple locations. It brings Azure management to the clusters—unlocking Azure capabilities like Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, and Azure Resource Graph. By bringing every system into Azure Arc, it’s much easier to establish clear roles and responsibilities for team members based on a clear separation of concerns without sacrificing visibility and access.

Inventory and organization: Work more efficiently by getting control over sprawling resources at organizational, team, and personal levels.

◉ Bring all your resources into a single system so you can organize and inventory through a variety of Azure scopes, such as Management groups, Subscriptions, and Resource Groups.

◉ Create, apply, and enforce standardized and custom tags to keep track of resources.

◉ Build powerful queries and search your global portfolio with Azure Resource Graph.

Governance and configuration: Streamline activities by creating, applying, and enforcing policies to Kubernetes apps, data, and infrastructure anywhere.

◉ Set guardrails across all your resources with Azure Policy to ensure consistent configurations to a single cluster, or to many at scale by leveraging inheritance capabilities.

◉ Standardize role-based access control (RBAC) across systems and different types of resources.

◉ Automate and delegate remediation of incidents and problems to service teams without IT intervention.

◉ Enforce run-time conformance and audit resources with Azure Policy.

Integrated DevOps and management capabilities: Mix and match additional Azure services or your choice of tools.

◉ Integrated with GitHub, Azure Monitor, Security Center, Update, and more.

◉ Common templating for automating configuration and infrastructure as code provide repeatable deployments.

◉ End-to-end identity for users and resources with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Azure Resource Manager.

Unified tools and experiences: Create a shared application and infrastructure lifecycle experience for teams that have traditionally been siloed based on locations, skills, and job descriptions.

◉ Simplify your work with a unified and consistent view of your resources across datacenters, edge locations, and multi-cloud through the Azure portal and APIs.

◉ Connect Kubernetes version of your choice from the ecosystem and work with them alongside Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs), physical servers, and Azure data services.

◉ Establish clear roles and responsibilities for team members with clear separation of concerns without sacrificing visibility and access.

How our integration partners leverage Azure Arc

“Red Hat OpenShift delivers the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, with a proven track record and large installed base and tailor-built for workloads that need to run across the hybrid cloud. Azure Arc helps to provide a common control plane for OpenShift from corporate datacenters to the public cloud, providing a single management point for organizations seeking to pair the flexibility and innovation of OpenShift with the scalability and power of Azure.” —Mike Evans, Vice President, Technical Business Development, Red Hat OpenShift

“Canonical's Charmed Kubernetes enables enterprises to accelerate the development of a new generation of applications while benefiting from fully automated architecture and operations. By integrating Azure Arc, Charmed Kubernetes clusters can now be managed across any infrastructure, alongside Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) deployments, fitting coherently into an organization’s wider IT estate. This integration provides enterprises with a single, unified place to visualize, govern and manage their environments at scale, from edge to cloud.” —Christian Reis, VP Public Cloud, Canonical Kubernetes

“Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) on Microsoft Azure is a proven platform that provides amazing capabilities for cloud computing. By extending Azure to RKE anywhere with Azure Arc, Rancher Labs and Microsoft are poised to accelerate the development of a new generation of applications for the enterprise by bringing expanding and evolving IT estates under control.” —Sheng Liang, CEO, Rancher Labs

With Azure Arc, customers can connect and configure Kubernetes clusters and deploy modern applications at scale. Azure Arc also allows customers to run Azure data services on these Kubernetes clusters. In addition, the reality is that many customers have applications running on Windows and Linux servers. Azure Arc allows the management of servers as well, all from the same unified single-pane-of-glass experience. Going forward, the next Azure Arc preview will bring Azure data services, such as Azure Arc enabled SQL Managed Instance and Azure Arc enabled PostgreSQL Hyperscale, to Kubernetes clusters—taking advantage of always current, cloud-native services in the location they need.

Source: microsoft.com

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Azure Files share snapshot management by Azure Backup is now generally available

Microsoft Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. For users of Azure Files, share snapshots have offered a read-only version of file shares from a previous point in time. Share snapshots are also incremental in nature, making their storage usage efficient. Although customers can simply use these share snapshots to go back in time, managing snapshots using scripts or automation is a labor-intensive process. Microsoft Azure Backup offers a simple and reliable way to backup and protect Azure Files using share snapshots.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of snapshot management for Azure Files by Azure Backup. Apart from being available natively in the cloud, Azure Backup offers significant benefits while protecting file shares using Recovery Services vault.

Key benefits

◉ Simple configuration: You can use the +Backup option from Recovery Services vault to discover all unprotected file shares in storage accounts, select multiple file shares if necessary, choose a policy, and configure backup for all file shares at once. Once configured, you can manage your backups directly from the Azure Files portal.

◉ Zero infrastructure solution: Being an Azure native solution, using Azure Backup means that you don’t need to run any additional compute. This saves you from setting up infrastructure to schedule snapshots or maintain or modify them periodically.

Azure File Sync users do not need to back up their data from on-premises servers as the entire data is available in cloud. You can enable cloud tiering on your on-premises servers or machines and continue to use Azure Backup to protect the cloud data.

◉ Flexible backup policy: Azure Backup provides you with the ability to create and modify policies of choice to define the schedule for snapshots.

You’re already used to creating daily snapshots as part of the Azure Backup policy. As part of the general availability release, we have also introduced the ability to create weekly, monthly, and yearly snapshots. You can also choose retention for these snapshots for up to 10 years. The backup policy automatically takes care of pruning expired snapshots, allowing you to stay within the 200 snapshots limit per file share.

◉ Comprehensive restore capabilities: Azure Backup offers a variety of options to restore your file share data. You can choose to restore the entire file share or individual files and folders. Restores can also be done to the original location or to alternate file shares in the same or different storage accounts. Azure Backup also preserves and restores all access control lists (ACLs) of files and folders.

Apart from the options above, Azure Backup ensures that the restores are sync-aware. We coordinate with the Azure File Sync service to trigger a resync back to on-premises servers once we complete restore to the associated file shares in the cloud.

◉ Protection against accidental deletion: Accidental deletion can happen at multiple levels.

     ◈ Individual files and folders: The lowest level is a file or folder. This is also the most common scenario. Using scheduled snapshots and being able to restore individual files and folders addresses this issue.

     ◈ Snapshot: Azure Backup becomes the initiator of the snapshot that it takes using the backup policy. However, administrators can still delete specific snapshots in their file shares. These deletions are not recommended as the restore points become invalid. We’re actively working on a mechanism that will allow Azure Backup to prevent you from any accidental snapshot deletions.

     ◈ File share: You could delete your file share and end up wiping out all snapshots taken for the file share. Azure Backup is currently working on protecting against accidental deletion of your file shares and the solution should be available in the first few regions soon.

     ◈ Storage account: Deleting storage accounts can wipe out all file shares inside the storage account along with its snapshots. Customer conversations indicate that, although this is a less common scenario, there needs to be protection against it.

◉ On-demand snapshots: Apart from the backup policy option to schedule snapshots, you can also choose to create up to four on-demand backups every day. Taking multiple on-demand backups in a day reduces the recovery point objective (RPO) for customers. Although Azure Backup purges these snapshots based on the retention set during backup, you need to ensure that you do not exceed the 200 snapshots per file share limit while using this capability.

◉ Alerts and reports: Integration with Azure Backup alerts enables you to configure email notifications for critical failures. Once the general availability release is available across all regions, you will start seeing backup related data in Azure Backup reports.

What’s next?

Based on our conversations with customers, we‘re working to deliver functionality above and beyond snapshot management using Azure Backup, including the ability to copy file share data to Recovery Services vault. We welcome this and all feedback from customers that help us align our work on features you will value.

Getting started

Start protecting your file shares by using the Recovery Services vaults in your region. For the list of supported regions, please refer to the support matrix. The backup goal option in the vault overview will let you choose Azure File shares to back up from storage accounts in your region. 

Pricing

For pricing details, please follow the Azure Backup pricing page for updates as we are currently rolling out the regional prices. Snapshot management using Azure Backup will not be chargeable for customers until July 1, 2020. All users can access and trial the feature without added cost through June 2020.

Source: microsoft.com

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Announcing Azure Front Door Rules Engine in preview

Starting today, customers of Azure Front Door (AFD) can take advantage of new rules to further customize their AFD behavior to best meet the needs of their customers. These rules bring the specific routing needs of your customers to the forefront of application delivery on Azure Front Door, giving you more control in how you define and enforce what content gets served from where.

Azure Front Door provides Azure customers the ability to deliver content fast and securely using Azure’s best-in-class network. We’ve heard from customers how important it is to have the ability to customize the behavior of your web application service, and we’re excited to announce Rules Engine, a new functionality on Azure Front Door, in preview today. Rules Engine is for all current and new Azure Front Door customers but is particularly important for customers looking to streamline security and content delivery at the edge.

New scenarios in Azure Front Door

Rules Engine allows you to specify how HTTP requests are handled at the edge.

The malleable nature of Rules Engine makes it the ideal solution to address legacy application migrations, where you don’t want to worry about users accessing old applications or not knowing how to find content in your new apps. Similarly, geo match and device identification capabilities ensure that your users are always seeing the best content for where they are and what device they are accessing it on. Implementing security headers and cookies with Rules Engine can also ensure that no matter how your users come to interact with the site, that they’re doing so over a secure connection, preventing browser-based vulnerabilities from impacting your site.

Different combinations of match conditions and actions give you fine-grained control over which users get which content and make the possible scenarios that you can accomplish with Rules Engine endless. Some of the technical capabilities that empower these new scenarios on AFD include the following:

◉ Enforce HTTPS, ensure all your end users interact with your content over a secure connection.

◉ Implement security headers to prevent browser-based vulnerabilities, like HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS), X-XSS-Protection, Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, as well as Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers for CORS scenarios. Security-based attributes can also be defined with cookies.

◉ Route requests to mobile or desktop versions of your application based on the patterns in the contents of request headers, cookies, or query strings.

◉ Use redirect capabilities to return 301/302/307/308 redirects to the client to redirect to new hostnames, paths, or protocols.

◉ Dynamically modify the caching configuration of your route based on the incoming requests.

◉ Rewrite the request URL path and forward the request to the appropriate backend in your configured backend pool.

How Rules Engine works

Rules Engine handles requests at the edge. Once configuring Rules Engine, when a request hits your Front Door endpoint, Web Application Firewall (WAF) will be executed first, followed by the Rules Engine configuration associated with your frontend or domain. When a Rules Engine configuration is executed, it means that the parent routing rule is already a match. Whether all actions in each of the rules within the Rules Engine configuration are executed is subject to all of the match conditions within that rule being satisfied. If a request matches none of the conditions in your Rule Engine configuration, then the default Routing Rule is executed.

For example, in the configuration below, a Rules Engine is configured to append a response header which changes the max-age of the cache control if the match condition is met.

In another example, we see that Rules Engine is configured to send a user to a mobile version of the site if the match condition, device type, is true.

In both examples, when none of the match conditions in Rules Engine are met, the default behavior specified in the Route Rule is what gets executed.

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Learn how to deliver insights faster with Azure Synapse Analytics

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

Many organizations are turning to cloud analytics solutions to quickly create a data-driven culture, accelerate time to insight, reduce costs, and maximize ROI. Join us on Wednesday, June 17, 2020, from 10:00 AM–11:00 AM Pacific Time for Azure Synapse Analytics: How It Works, a virtual event where you’ll hear directly from Microsoft Azure customers. They’ll explain how they’re using the newest Azure Synapse capabilities to deliver insights faster, bring together an entire analytics ecosystem in a central location, reduce costs, and transform decision-making.

In technical demos, customers will show how they combine data ingestion, data warehousing, and big data analytics in a single cloud-native service with 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 will also demonstrate how Power BI provides a graphical complement to Azure Synapse with built-in Power BI authoring, giving their employees access to unprecedented insights from enterprise data—in seconds, through beautiful visualizations.

Companies 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 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. Businesses 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.

BI specialists, data engineers, and other IT and data professionals all use Azure Synapse to build, manage, and optimize analytics pipelines, using a variety of skillsets and in multiple industries. The Azure Synapse studio provides a unified workspace for data prep, data management, data warehousing, big data, and AI tasks.

◉ 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.

At the Azure Synapse Analytics: How It Works 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. With Azure Synapse, data professionals can query both relational and non-relational data using the familiar SQL language, using either serverless or provisioned resources.

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. They help ensure that data stays safe and private by using column-level security and native row-level security, as well as dynamic data masking to automatically protect sensitive data in real time.

Attend the Azure Synapse Analytics: How It Works virtual event on June 17, 2020, to learn how to deliver:

◉ Powerful insights.
◉ Unprecedented ROI.
◉ Unified experience.
◉ Limitless scale.
◉ Unmatched security.

Source: microsoft.com

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Use Azure Firewall for secure and cost-effective Windows Virtual Desktop protection

Work from home policies require many IT organizations to address fundamental changes in capacity, network, security, and governance. Many employees aren't protected by the layered security policies associated with on-premises services while working from home. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments on Azure can help organizations rapidly respond to this changing environment.  However, you need a way to protect inbound or outbound internet access to and from these VDI deployments.

Windows Virtual Desktop is a comprehensive desktop and application virtualization service running in Azure. It’s the only VDI that delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, and optimizations for Office 365. You can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes and get built-in security and compliance features. In this post, we explore how to use Azure Firewall for secure and cost-effective Windows Virtual Desktop protection.

The Windows Virtual Desktop service is delivered in a shared responsibility model:

◉ Customer-managed RD clients connect to Windows desktops and applications from their favorite client device from anywhere on the internet.

◉ Microsoft-managed Azure service handles connections between RD clients and Windows Virtual Machines in Azure (including Windows 10 multi-session).

◉ Customer-managed virtual network in Azure hosts Windows 10 multi-session virtual machines in host pools.

Windows Virtual Desktop doesn't require you to open any inbound access to your virtual network. However, to ensure platform connectivity between customer-managed virtual machines and the service, a set of outbound network connections must be enabled for the host pool virtual network. While these dependencies can be configured using Network Security Groups, this configuration is limited to network-level traffic filtering only.

Host pool outbound access to Windows Virtual Desktop

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native firewall as a service (FWaaS) offering that allows you to centrally govern and log all your traffic flows using a DevOps approach. The service supports both application and network-level filtering rules and is integrated with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed for filtering known malicious IP addresses and domains. Azure Firewall is highly available with built-in auto scaling.

Azure Firewall provides a Windows Virtual Desktop FQDN Tag to simplify host pool outbound access to Windows Virtual Desktop. Use the following steps to allow outbound platform traffic:

◉ Deploy Azure Firewall and configure your Windows Virtual Desktop host pool subnet User Defined Route (UDR) to route all traffic via the Azure Firewall.

◉ Create an application rule collection and add a rule to enable the WindowsVirtualDesktop FQDN tag. The source IP address range is the host pool virtual network, the protocol is https, and the destination is WindowsVirtualDesktop.

The set of required storage and service bus accounts for your Windows Virtual Desktop host pool is deployment specific and isn't yet captured in the WindowsVirtualDesktop FQDN tag. Additionally, a network rule collection is needed to allow DNS access from your Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) deployment and KMS access from your virtual machines to Windows Activation Service.

Host pool outbound access to the internet

Depending on your organization needs, you may want to enable secure outbound internet access for your end users. As Windows Virtual Desktop sessions are running on customer-managed virtual machines, they are also subject to your virtual network security controls. In cases where the list of allowed destinations is well-defined (for example, Office 365 access), you can use Azure Firewall application and network rules to configure the required access. This routes end-user traffic directly to the internet for best performance.

If you want to filter outbound user internet traffic using an existing on-premises secure web gateway, you can configure web browsers or other applications running on the Windows Virtual Desktop host pool with an explicit proxy configuration.

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Prepare for Microsoft MS-900 Exam to Be Expert in Microsoft 365 Fundamentals

Fundamental skills in every technical role are essential in helping you find your place in this field. They help you to understand the fundamental requirements of a specific area, particularly if you are completely new in the industry. Learning this basic knowledge will help you evolve your interest in a particular field and obtain prerequisite skills for the higher level. This is why Microsoft has included the Fundamentals category in its certification track. Microsoft 365 Fundamentals MS-900 is one of the exams related to this level. This exam emphasizes the fundamentals of Microsoft 365.

Microsoft 365 Fundamentals MS-900 Exam and Associated Certification

Microsoft provides several certifications, which are split into three categories: Fundamentals, Associate, and Expert. One of the most coveted certifications in the Microsoft 365 Certified Fundamentals certification. Having this certification confirms that you are well-versed with the elements available in Microsoft 365 and the benefits they can fetch to an organization.
MS-900 is the only exam you will be needed to pass to achieve the Microsoft 365 Certified Fundamentals certification. It will gauge if you have the required skills.

The topics you will be examined on in the MS-900 exam will evaluate your understanding of:

• Cloud concepts (15-20%)
• Core Microsoft 365 services and concepts (30-35%)
• Security, compliance, privacy, and trust in Microsoft 365 (25-30%)
• Microsoft 365 pricing and support (25-30%)

Microsoft MS-900 exam comprises of 40-60 questions and needs to finish in 60 minutes. The exam cost is $99, though the price may differ.
Microsoft MS-900 exam will last for 60 minutes and will cost you $99, though the price varies according to the location you are taking the exam in.
Be prepared to answer different types of questions, among which you can face multiple-choice, short answer, active screen, active screen, amongst many.

Resources for Microsoft MS-900 Exam Preparation

There are a lot of methods you can utilize to prepare for the MS-900 exam.

Microsoft

Microsoft itself presented free online training and paid instructor-led training. The online course is excellent for people who wish to work at their own convenience while Instructor-led one is best for applicants who need more guidelines. Other than the resources given by Microsoft, you can also use many other external resources like:

YouTube

YouTube nowadays the best solution to academic problems for applicants. You can get free videos concerning to just any area covered in the MS-900 exam syllabus. Uploaded the test- takers or IT professionals, they are valuable resources for exam preparation.

Books

If you require a more thorough understanding of different aspects included in the Microsoft 365 Certified Fundamentals certification exam syllabus, books are an excellent option. Learning from the study guides will help you cover all exam topics and help you schedule study time in a correct manner.

Online Communities

There are many communities and forums aimed at the MS-900 exam. If you participate in them, you can interact with other candidates who share their experiences and preparation strategy they used, websites to take advantage of, and prep material to utilize. There can be experienced tutors to help you. You can get answers to your questions and acquire a lot of useful pieces of suggestions from them.

MS-900 Practice Tests

Practice tests help you assess your proficiency level before the real exam. One of the benefits of taking mock tests is that they help you identify your weak areas in the exam preparation. Sometimes you read and think you have learned so much; meantime, you have not. By taking practice tests, you can simply measure your level of understanding of any topic and know the areas you require to study further before you take the Microsoft MS-900 exam.

Tips to Prepare for MS-900 Exam

• We have discussed different resources you can use to prepare for the MS-900 exam above. Now, let's figure out how you can make your preparation journey more productive.
• Your first step is to create a study plan. Make a list of tasks you require to do to prepare for the exam and then find out what intervals of time you can commit to those tasks. By doing this, organize yourself more effectively and use your time more constructively.
• Award yourself after each MS-900 exam topic you complete. This gives you the encouragement to complete the next. Thus, ensuring you go through each task without trouble.
• As the saying goes "Practice makes perfect." Practice tests are the best way to ensure your brain strongly grasps the concepts learned. You can practice doing questions taking the MS-900 practice tests from a reliable and authentic site.
• Create short notes. You can use quick notes to help you practice recollecting prolonged understanding utilizing a small clue. They can also be utilized to revive your understanding right before the exam.
• If you are someone who finds it difficult to concentrate on one task for more than five minutes, then there is a straightforward trick you can practice to help you with it. Set the alarm on your phone for around 25 minutes and begin working on your exam and stop yourself from doing anything else without you hear the alarm go off. This is a technique that has demonstrated to work, so take a chance.
• Join online forums. By participating in relevant discussions, you will be provoking your brain to think in a broader area. You will realize that you don't have answers to many questions, thus making you search for them and obtaining more information.

Conclusion

Achieving the Microsoft 365 Certified Fundamentals certification is an excellent way to boost your career in IT. To obtain this certification, you have to pass the MS-900 exam. But it is a popular truth that Microsoft exams are a little bit difficult. Irrespective, there are plenty of resources and tricks you can utilize pass your certification exam.

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Microsoft Services is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider

Modern applications are increasingly built using containers, which are microservices packaged with their dependencies and configurations. For this reason, many companies are either containerizing their existing applications or creating new complex applications that are composed of multiple containers.

As applications grow to span multiple containers deployed across multiple servers, operating them becomes more complex. To manage this complexity, Kubernetes, an open-source software for deploying and managing those containers at scale, provides an open source API that controls how and where those containers will run.

Kubernetes Certified Service Provider

Microsoft Services is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP). The KCSP program is a pre-qualified tier of vetted service providers who have deep experience helping enterprises successfully adopt Kubernetes. The KCSP partners offer Kubernetes support, consulting, professional services, and training for organizations embarking on their Kubernetes journey.

We have trained hundreds of consultants on Kubernetes, developed a comprehensive service offering around Kubernetes, and successfully delivered Kubernetes engagements to many customers in all industries, all over the world.

Using our global reach and ecosystem, we empower organizations to put innovation into practice to deliver strategic business outcomes, maximize the value of cloud technology, and drive success through continual support.

Microsoft Services is your partner to enable your organization to leverage container capabilities and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, to adopt modern technologies to increase speed and agility while also maintaining control and good governance.

The Azure Workloads for Containers offering

We recognize a need to help you address your secure infrastructure challenges and requirements. We envision the containers infrastructure to be more than just the containers orchestration layer to include networking, storage, secrets, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Microsoft Services has a full Kubernetes offering, called Azure Workloads for Containers. This offering is composed of several workstreams that focus on the activities and outcomes that are most relevant to our customers. These workstreams provide full flexibility to our customers as each one of them can be selected independently and customized to meet the specific needs of a given project.

Below are the details of these workstreams.

Kubernetes foundation

◉ Design and plan Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster and shared services.

◉ Implement AKS cluster and shared services.

◉ Deploy application on AKS.

◉ Test application.

◉ Rollout to production. ​

Containers migration

◉ Assess, design, and plan migration.

◉ Migrate the containers-based application(s).

◉ Test the migrated application(s).

◉ Rollout to production.

Kubernetes security hardening

◉ Refactor your security controls for AKS.

◉ Secure your CI/CD pipeline (DevSecOps).

◉ Harden your AKS environment to meet your compliance obligations.

◉ Assist with third-party security product integration.

Kubernetes threat modeling

◉ Build a threat mo​​del based on the AKS cluster and the apps running on it.

◉ Identify threats and mitigations.

◉ Produce clear actions to mitigate the threats.

Application containerization

◉ Create container image(s) for one or multiple applications.

◉ Test the application(s) running as container.

◉ Deploy the application to an AKS cluster in production​.

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Microsoft 70-466 Certification Paves the Way to A Top Career

It is an era of competition in every sphere of life. Survival of the fittest is required, and for that, it is essential for all people whether they belong to the field of 70-466 Information Technology or not to stay alert, updated, and proactive so that they can achieve the wanted results.

It is a golden opportunity for the people relating to the folds of information technology that such a leading organization like Microsoft provides now and then not just a new program but also a 70-466 course to understand the plan and work with it.

If you are looking to implement data models and reports using Microsoft SQL Server and gain faster insights on data, this is the ideal skill enhancement tool for you.

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system with the primary purpose of storing and recovering data as requested by other software applications. Being able to tell a story using data is critical for today's growing businesses who want insight into their customers, products, etc.

Professionals seeking comprehensive knowledge of how to harness Microsoft SQL Server to deliver mission-critical performance will significantly benefit from the Microsoft 70-466 Practice Test. This practice test will prepare you to ace the Microsoft 70-466 certification exam confidently.

Who Should Give the 70-466 Exam?

Anyone who does not needs to shy away from the competition and stay ahead of everyone else should give 70-466 exam. After all, it is all about the continuation of the fittest. Those individuals who want to learn whereby to implement data models, make them and get the most out of their skills as IT Professionals.

Also, all those individuals who require to get certified by the leading organization worldwide this is a golden opportunity that should not be missed. The results will be that when he will receive the stamp of endorsement from Microsoft itself and will guarantee that he gets the best job available.

Why Should You Give the 70-466 Certification?

It is essential to understand that, along with time now. Then several new inventions will be practicing birth all around the world coping to make a place for them in the world of information technology. In such a case, your experience and education, no matter how new it is, and your experience no matter how large it is, will cause burning out.

So you need to have on modernizing and brushing up your skills, and for that, such a course is essential. This 70-466 certification course is necessary for implementing data models and getting a suitable SSAS solution as well as going for business intelligence programs.

The exam it aligns with is intended for business intelligence (BI) developers who focus on creating BI solutions that need implementing multi-dimensional data models, implementing and maintaining OLAP cubes, and creating information displays used in business decision making.

Obtaining 70-466 certification implies that you possess the fundamental knowledge to build an analysis services multidimensional database, manage, maintain. And troubleshoot SQL Server Analysis Services database, create a tabular data model, and make a report with SQL Server Reporting Services.

70-466 Certification Preparation Tips Directly from the Experts

Undoubtedly, experts’ tips can change the way you prepare. Therefore, our experts have joined all tips and tricks that helped them qualify for the 70-466 exam.

To get started, pull yourself together, begin organizing and make a planner and try to stick to it.
Secondly, make sure to follow your preparation daily. Also, do not try to do last minute prep. Further, that will only start to confusion and nothing else.

Further, allow yourself to get enroll in either an online or offline training course as well because training will increase your capability to solve the problem in the exam.

Glimpses of Getting the Microsoft 70-466 Certification

Lastly, always keep in mind that developed a clear understanding of all the topics before appearing for the 70-466 exam.

Self-evaluation Time

Make sure you are going through sample tests only after you have gone through the whole syllabus. All the sample test mock tests are designed in such a way that you encounter the real exam environment around you. After making sample tests, you can easily understand the areas you are lacking behind and work upon them. Practice papers can be from different sources. Remember, the more you test yourself, the better you are going to become.

So, START PRACTICING NOW!

Job Opportunities

There is tremendous scope for Microsoft 70-466 certified people in the market. The certification will add value and a strong base to your resume. Big players of the industry always give the accredited people high paying jobs.

After passing this exam, the candidate will have plenty of job options like:

• Microsoft system administrator

• Software developer and architecture

• Network support specialist/network engineer

• System analyst/support engineer

In Conclusion

Certainly, addition a Microsoft certification to your resume will aid you to stand out and get hired. So, if you are aspired to advance your career and motivated to follow your dream, then passing the 70-466 exam will be the last step towards being certified.

In other words, certification exams like the 70-466 exam will not only demonstrate that you have the skills required for the job but will also showcase your responsibility towards your dreams and aspirations. Training and certification do affect your profession undoubtedly in terms of financial benefits too. Not to mention, this will also showcase your dedication towards your dream and aspirations.

So, do not doubt your worth, buckle up!  Gear yourself up with all the resources, along with proper use of your time. With these resources, the 70-466 exam is entirely achievable.

So, take your career to the next level!

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