Published: Sep 01, 2020
This monthly update comes to you from COVID-19 lockdown central in Ireland. The county that I live in has been “locked down” for the last 3 weeks after isolated clusters in several factories were identified. Remote working has never been more important – and the cloud plays a big role in that. So, let’s see what Microsoft Azure did to improve things for us in the last month.
How do you find out about an outage (service incident) in Azure? For some, stuff doesn’t work right and you check the Azure status page. For others, they go onto some social media platform and observe their uneducated friends crowing “this is why I will never do cloud” (and become redundant). Microsoft wants to improve that experience for Azure customers using 5 pillars:
As you can see Service Health is the place to go – allegedly – during/after an incident.
Several announcements were made by the Azure Backup team:
The announcement that will affect the fewest of us is this one: Azure Backup for SAP HANA databases running on RHEL is now generally available. In my entire career, I have one 1 employer that use SAP (and it was a pain in the you-know-where). This story reminds me of the weekly meetings I used to have with Microsoft as a managed partner. They’d come in, we’d talk about sales pipes, what we were doing to develop the business, and then they’d ask us “how about SAP on Azure – is there any work there”. And every week I would respond with no – and there won’t be. But they kept on asking me the same question, week after week.
SAP on Azure is like those fancy high-end brand stores in the airport. You know the ones – they’re in a high foot-fall location, there are 2 well-dressed sales assistants, lots of pricey items with no price tags, and no customers. But week after week, month after month, year after year, that store is still there paying rent to the airport. Why? Because it only takes 1 customer every once in a while to make a profit.
Backing up SAP on RHEL on Azure sounds like it will affect a tiny percentage of customers. But those few customers will consume a LOT of storage and fund further improvements of Azure Backup. And that makes a “I don’t care” feature like this something that those of us who are using Azure Backup should care about.
Here are other Azure IaaS headlines from the past month:
I had my crazy times with phones when I paid for a Lumia 1020. Now I am a safe and boring person with an iPhone. I was intrigued by the Surface Duo, but I will not buy it. What I want to focus on is apps – not the apps running on the phone but the apps running in Azure that are being used on the phone.
When Microsoft announced the availability of the Duo there was a comment that it would pair up nicely with Windows Virtual Desktop. Some in the media wondered how that could ever work – how could you use a desktop on a phone screen? The answer is: you wouldn’t.
Remote Desktop Services (RDS) has long allowed you to publish an app. This means that the app runs on the server but appears in its own window on the client device. If that app isn’t too big, it might run just perfectly fine on the Duo using the Android Remote Desktop app, complete with touch and gesture support. In the sales or field first-line worker world, a stylus might be useful. But that all assumes that there is a signal, but that’s a conversation best left for another time.
Will the Duo be a success? I would not touch the Duo with a barge pole if I was an enterprise IT admin. It reminds me too much of tech like the Band and other long-dead devices from Microsoft. I am not convinced that Duo will be a supported brand in 3 years. Think of those airlines that used Lumias for in-cabin payments. What are they using now? Yup – iPhones. I think that Microsoft will have tough resistance with the Duo, and don’t be surprised to hear of a partnership with Dell or HPE to try to get some traction with large customers (at huge discounts).
I don’t want to be a total Debbie Downer. I hope that I am wrong and that the Duo evolves into something new, that I don’t envision, just like the Surface Pro did.