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June 2020 marks the end of Vibranium and the start of Manganese, the codenames for the ending and starting half-year semesters in the Azure development year, and with that a whole new half-year of Azure goodies for us to look forward to. But before we get caught up in the future, we’d better consider the recent past. I’ve highlighted some of the stories that, at first glance, might not seem all that important but they will be!
Microsoft’s platform-based Firewall has been installed in every one of my deployments since January of 2019. Customers, in my experience, prefer a platform-based option where there are no appliance maintenance tasks and the thing auto-scales according to demand. Throw in the fact that it’s deployed and configured entirely as an ARM template and enterprises can start to move towards a DevSecOps (Wait! Was that a link to RedHat?!) model where the firewall is configured and change-controlled through Git, GitHub, DevOps, and so on.
There were two announcements in June. The first announcement, Azure Firewall forced tunneling and SQL FQDN filtering now generally available, revealed two features had just gone GA:
But Azure Firewall has not stopped there – New Azure Firewall features in Q2 CY2020:
But that is not all that the Azure Firewall product group has been up to – watch this space!
Are we getting to the point where Azure virtual machines should be branded like Apple iPads once were – let’s just call it the D-Series and leave it at that. But no; we need a _v4 with more variants: New general purpose and memory-optimized Azure Virtual Machines with Intel now available.
Azure added:
Let’s boil all that down:
In my experience, the Bs-Series and the Ds-Series have been, and continue to be, the most commonly used SKUs in Azure.
Here are other Azure IaaS headlines from the past month:
This time, it’s still Azure-related, but it’s from a source that most techies will normally ignore. The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a set of guides to steer an organization through its adoption of Microsoft Azure. It’s a lot of heavy reading. Historically, it’s been a set of questions with a bunch of possible answers that needed interpretation, understanding, and decision-making.
Last month, a new section was added to CAF to document an “enterprise-scale landing zone architecture”. This is a “virtual data center” implementation:
This is an area I know well because I built such a “product” with my colleagues 18 months ago and have been delivering it to customers for over a year. I knew it was coming and was surprised to see the quiet launch – a page appeared, and a few Microsoft staff members tweeted about it. I guess the big launch will come at the virtual Inspire conference in July (a partner/business-focused event).
You can poke around and learn more about how the architecture is built and deployed. The main GitHub repo is https://github.com/Azure/Enterprise-Scale/. At the heart of the network, you will find the Secure Virtual Hub, a merger of Azure Virtual WAN, Azure Firewall, and Azure Firewall Manager for site-to-site networking, point-to-site networking, SD-WAN, region-to-region, networking, and spoke-to-spoke connectivity. While the tech is very interesting, I have to question the scalability of some design elements and the design choice to use tens of thousands of lines of code in a single JSON template – contrary to the modular approach that many now prefer. I would have tested it out, but deployments failed in my tenant because there appear to be dependencies on Microsoft-internals or private preview features (I got access denied errors even though I’m a global admin with elevated rights for management groups). I guess we’ll see how this product develops now that the public can contribute via GitHub.
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