Monthly Azure news roundup as delivered to the Brisbane Azure User Group by Dan Toomey (content contributed by Todd Whitehead)

1. @BrisbaneAzureUG
meetup.com/Brisbane-Azure-User-Group

2. Microsoft Azure News
October 2016

3. sponsorship

4. sponsorship

5. sponsorship

7. Upcoming Presentations
Month Presenter(s) Topic
May 2016 Matt Simpson & Ed Smith (MegaPort) ExpressRoute and Office365
June 2016 BAUG Un-convention 2016.1
1. Mateusz Ligeza
2. Todd Whitehead
3. Adam Finster
4. Dan Toomey
1. Sandra.Snow & Azure Websites
2. Azure Cool Storage
3. Microsoft Cognitive Services
4. Microsoft Flow
July 2016 Paul Seymour / Peter McCloy
(Patient Zero)
Internet of (Smelly) Things:
Discoveries from the “Skunk Lab”
August 2016 Bill Chesnut (MVP / SixPivot) API Management & Hybrid Integration
September 2016 Dan Dekel (Patient Zero) Azure Functions
October 2016 Matt Moore (Brocade) The Art of Performance
November 2016 Todd Whitehead Operationalizing Azure: How I learned to Stop
Worrying and Love Governance
December 2016 (Various) Unconvention Night

9. http://www.meetup.com/Brisbane-Azure-User-Group/messages/boards/thread/49963628

11. acknowledgement
Todd Whitehead
@TodWhitehead
Thanks Todd for gathering all
of the content for this month’s
news update!

12. L-Series • Storage-optimized VMs
• Low latency, high throughput, large local disk storage
• Built on Intel Haswell processors (Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3)
• Supports up to 6 TB of local SSD
H-Series • Fastest CPUs in public cloud
• RDMA with InfiniBand,
• High performance Computing (HPC) applications like computational fluid
dynamics, automotive crash testing, genome and molecular research
N-Series • GPU-powered
• Offering visualization SKU and a compute-focused SKU
• Unparalleled performance for desktop graphical modeling/rendering and
deep learning computational models
SAP HANA • GA of large instances specifically designed for SAP HANA workloads
• Can run the largest SAP HANA workloads in the public cloud
• Accommodate SAP HANA OLTP scenarios for up to 3 TB, and large scale-
out OLAP deployments for up to 32 TB of RAM.

13. • Further regional availability of Linux and open source solutions
• On-demand Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in Azure
Government
• Adding RHEL support for SAP applications (NetWeaver and
HANA)

14. Microsoft’s Azure Service Fabric, a microservices application platform
for developing and managing cloud-scale applications, was released
last year to help developers build and manage cloud-scale applications
• Service Fabric for Windows Server (GA)
• Service Fabric for Linux Server (Preview)
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-cluster-creation-for-windows-server/

15. • Provides out-of-the-box, platform-level metrics at 1-minute
granularity and 30-day data retention, without the need for any
diagnostics setup.
• Seamless
integration with
Application Insights
and OMS
• Alert Rules and
automated actions
on issues

16. • New foundations services in the box:
• Azure Queue Storage
• Azure Key Vault
• New services to come, including App Service
• Introduces infrastructure management technologies
• Single server deployment
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/

17. ISO 22301 Certification • Only hyper scale cloud service provider to receive a formal certification
for business continuity management
• Comprehensive internal guidelines for the prevention, response, and
recovery from disruptive incidents
EU-US Privacy Shield
Framework
• First cloud vendor to get certified under the new EU-US Privacy Shield
Framework for the protection of personal data of EU citizens
• Latest example of the company’s commitment to privacy
IT-Grundschutz
Workbook
• New security & compliance workbook available
• Subject to the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)
information protection standards

18. • New analytics designed to detect:
• Insider threats
• Persistence attempts within a compromised system
• Use of compromised systems to mount attacks
• Security Incidents enriched to correlate alerts from different sources
• Threat attribute reports provide information about attackers
• Support for integration vulnerability assessment from Qualys and
other partners
• Security assessment of Web Apps and Storage Accounts

19. • Support for SSL/TLS certificates
• Enroll & renew certificates from supported 3rd party CAs:
• Digicert
• Globalsign
• WoSign
• Provides auditing trails

20. • Virtual Machines:
• Azure Disk Encryption for both Windows & Linux Standard VMs
• Protect & safeguard OS and data disks at REST
• Azure Blob Storage
• Storage service encryption is GA
• Data encrypted with Microsoft managed keys
• 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256)
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-service-encryption/

21. • 33% to 50% network bandwidth performance improvement over
entire fleet
• NVGRE Offload harnesses the networking capabilities of the hardware
• Windows & Linux VMs will experience performance improvements
• World-wide deployment will complete in 2016
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-networking-announcements-for-ignite-2016/

22. Accelerated Networking (Public Preview)
• Up to 25Gbps of throughput
• Drastically reduces network latency up to10x!
• Applications will benefit from a new generation of
hardware technologies including SR-IOV
• VMs to communicate directly to the hardware NIC
completely bypassing the Hypervisor’s virtual
switch.
• Along with higher bandwidths and lower
latencies, applications will experience reduced
jitter and improved Packets Per Second (PPS)
performance.
• With Accelerated Networking, Azure SQL DB In-
Memory OLTP transaction performance improved
1.5X. Also with this preview, DS15v2 and D15v2
VM sizes provide up to 25Gbps of network
throughput.
• Azure Storage users will benefit from substantially
increased IOPS performance based on these
advancements, combined with newly developed
storage specific offloads.

23. Virtual Network Peering (GA)
• Connects Virtual Networks (VNets) in the
same region, enabling direct full mesh
connectivity
• VMs in the peered VNets communicate
with each other as if they are part of the
same Vnet
• Higher bandwidth and lower latency.
• Hub & Spoke topologies are supported
with Transit Routing through gateways.
• VNet Peering works across subscriptions
allowing for simplified service
management.
• Enables co-existence of “Classic” VNets and
Azure Resource Manager VNets.

24. • UltraPerformance
Gateway SKU for
ExpressRoute
• Up to 10 Gbps throughput
• 5x improvement over the
existing ExpressRoute
HighPerformance
gateway
• 99.95% availability SLA
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/expressroute-about-virtual-network-gateways/

25. IPv6
• Azure now supports Native IPv6
network connectivity for
applications and services hosted
on Azure Virtual Machines.
• IPv6 has been used by internal
Microsoft services such as Office
365 for over three years.
• Native IPv6 connectivity to the
virtual machine is available for
both Windows and Linux VMs.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/load-balancer-ipv6-overview/?rnd=1

26. Active-Active Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Gateway
• New Active-Active Virtual Private Network (VPN) Gateway for the High-Performance VPN gateway
recommended for production workloads.
• Each VPN gateway has two active instances.
• Customers can now implement dual redundancy for cross-premises VPN connections, increasing the
availability of their VPN connections to their Azure VNets.
• Complete end to end availability perspective that includes the customer’s on-premises VPN devices
and using different service providers to connect to the Active-Active VPN gateway.

27. IP/NIC Enhancements
• Multiple VIPs on internal load balancers
(GA)
• New port reuse options across public and
internal load balancers (GA)
• Multiple IP addresses on a Network
Interface Card (NIC) (preview)
• Enabling all NICs on a VM to have a Public
IP address on the NIC or through the load
balancer (preview)
• Check the service update page on the
availability of these abilities.

28. • Host domains in Azure DNS and manage DNS records using the same
credentials, APIs, tools, billing and support as other Azure services
• Azure Resource Manager’s enterprise-grade security features,
enabling role-based access control and detailed audit logs
• Supports multiple record types including, A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS,
PTR, SOA, SRV and TXT
• 99.99% availability SLA
• Manage through Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, or cross platform
Azure CLI
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/dns-domain-delegation/

29. Application Gateway - E2E SSL
• Now supports end to end SSL encryption: termination and
re-encryption
• User configurable SSL policies allows the customer to
selectively disable older SSL/TLS protocol versions thus
further strengthening the security profile of the application
behind the Application Gateway.

30. Application Gateway – WAF (Public Preview)
• Application Gateway WAF offers simplified
manageability of application security
• Preconfigured with protection from the most
prevalent web vulnerabilities as identified by Open
Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10
common vulnerabilities.
• Can run in either protection or detection only mode.
• Provides real time metrics and alert reporting to
continuously monitor web application against
exploits.
• Security rules customization and integration with
the Azure Security Center will be available soon.

31. • View performance metrics for an Application Gateway on the Azure
Portal
• Configure threshold based alerts on metrics to proactively monitor
the network via email notification or invoke a web hook that can
integrate with 3rd party messaging services.
• ExpressRoute operational insights into routing configurations and
network peering statistics
• Effective Routes provide an aggregated view of user-defined routes
(UDRs), system and BGP routes that impact a VM’s network traffic
flow

33. DDD Brisbane
http://dddbrisbane.com/

34. Ignite 2016 (New Zealand)

36. Date Topic Time
Wednesday 21 September 2016 Kick-off / Design and implement Web Apps 16:30 – 18:30
Wednesday 28 September 2016 Create and manage virtual machines 16:30 – 18:30
Wednesday 5 October 2016 Design and implement cloud services 16:30 – 18:30
Thursday 13 October 2016 Design and implement a storage strategy 16:30 – 18:30
Wednesday 19 October 2016 Break / self-study / Catchup Week
Wednesday 26 October 2016 Manage application and network services 16:30 – 18:30
Wednesday 2 November 2016 Hackathon 16:30 – 20:30
Thursday 10 November 2016 Final Review - Exam Prep Session 16:30 – 20:30
The aim is to work together to develop the necessary understanding and knowledge that will enable everyone to confidently
sit (and hopefully pass) the Microsoft 70-532 certification exam.
We will use the efforts of the study group participants and Microsoft SME’s to understand and discuss the required topics
below.
Location: Microsoft Brisbane – Level 28 – 400 George Street
towhit@microsoft.com
Do you want to increase your Azure knowledge, skills and experience? Let’s do it together!
Brisbane Study Group for Azure 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions Certification

37. On Demand Training - Updates
mva.microsoft.com
•Dev/Test in the Cloud
•Getting Started with the Internet of Things (IoT)
www.pluralsight.com
•Designing a Hybrid Cloud in Azure
•Docker for Web Developers
•Azure AD for Developers
www.opsgility.com
•Azure For AWS Experts
•Deploying Hybrid Identitity Solutions Using Azure AD
•Monitoring Apps with Application Insights

40. • Two per meeting given away
• Free for unemployed members

43. The Art of Performance
Matt Moore
Brocade