Category Archives: #Azure

Today Azure rolled out a new business model called a per-minute-pay-as-you-grow pricing model

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Azure has rolled out a new business model called a per-minute pricing model that helps in reducing the cost for shorter deployments.

Microsoft is hoping to attract new customers in the PaaS market with a per-minute pricing model that promises to reduce costs for many cloud deployments. For toddlers using Azure, when VM is stopped, the meter stops, instead of having to explicitly delete the deployment, while preserving the VM state and configuration. This makes it easier to stop VMs that are no longer being used and then restart them down the road.

In addition, Azure has rolled out a new business model called a per-minute pricing model that helps in reducing the cost for shorter deployments. Microsoft has also reduced the cost of spinning up a VM for developers to only 6 cents per hour. These results in massive cost savings for development and testing scenarios compared to any other cloud option on the market.

The recent roll out also include enhancements for Azure designed to improve the deployment, protection and analysis of media content. With the help of Media PaaS, organizations can stream video to HTML5, Flash, Silverlight, and Windows 8, iPad, iPhone, Android, Xbox and other clients via different streaming formats. This offering assures to overcome the tedious tasks involved in provisioning and managing a custom distribution infrastructure.

By leveraging Microsoft’s Dynamic packaging enables users to capture a single file format and stream to many adaptive protocol formats automatically. The packaging and conversion happens in real-time on the host server, which results in significant storage costs and time savings.

Source: Microsoft

‘Lift and Shift’ your legacy workloads easily into the big 3?

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The “big three” public cloud providers are turning their sights to legacy workloads. It will be interesting to see how customers adopt and deploy VMware on AWS, Azure Stack and, now, Google Nested Virtualization.

One knock on public clouds from Google, Amazon, and even Microsoft is that they are terrific for brand-new software built to take advantage of their resources, but not so great for existing, older business software developed and deployed before the cloud era kicked off 10 years ago.

The cloud players are working to address that issue. Many companies don’t necessarily want to rebuild applications that run just fine so they can move to someone else’s cloud data centers.

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Azure Reference Architecture and best practices – Integrate on-premises Active Directory domains with Azure Active Directory

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More and more often in my client projects, I need to integrate or expand Identity and Access Management. Almost always the situation is that a client, locally has an active directory in use and would like to associate this with cloud resources. As an Architect I find it very important to implement according guidelines of Microsoft and make good use of reference architectures. I want to share these reference architectures, which I use with the community, so we can all make good use of these guidelines.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a cloud based multi-tenant directory and identity service.This article describes best practices for integrating on-premises Active Directory domains and forests with Azure AD to provide cloudbased identity authentication.

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Azure Tech Selector – 2017 Edition

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A couple of years ago Endjin put together the Azure Tech Selector – a handy poster which walks you through the technology choices you can make for common cloud workloads.

Endjin, a Microsoft Gold Partner for Cloud Platform, have produced some guidance to help you walk through your options, and make pragmatic choices based on the functionality, workflow, connectivity and scale needed by your solution.

Confused by the difference between Azure Websites and Web Roles? WebJobs vs. Worker Roles? Table Storage vs. SQL Azure? Cloud Queues vs. ServiceBus? Want to know when you should be using Azure Data Factory, HDInsight or Stream Analytics?

To help guide you through the maze of options, Endjin have created a free poster, which you can download here.

by Matthew Adams, Endjin blog

Cloud Platform Comparison – AWS vs Azure vs Google

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Always looking for good info and tools for my daily work, I happened to find a website where clouds were compared. I found it so interesting that I found it useful and also want to share it through my blog. The maker have certainly done a good job. Thanks to Jess Panni for sharing this.

You can download the complete document here

Source: Jess Panni, endjin blog

 

Get your Microsoft Azure Icon Set Download – Visio stencil, PowerPoint, PNG, SVG – Build Azure

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The Microsoft Azure, Cloud and Enterprise Symbol / Icon Set is a Free download from Microsoft that includes the icons for all the different Microsoft Azure services and other products. These icons are extremely helpful in creating much nicer architectural diagrams for systems that use Microsoft Azure services. These icons can be used to help you have fun in creating internal project diagrams to impress your co-workers or boss. Or, you can use these icons to give your architecture diagrams and project documentation a more professional look before you deliver to your clients.

You can download the Icon set here: Microsoft Azure, Cloud and Enterprise Symbol / Icon Set – Visio stencil, PowerPoint, PNG, SVG

I use these icons in images for designs also for my user group / conference talk slides, and in my day2day job. They really help enhance the professional look and feel of the content that I build.

I hope these help you in enhancing the look of your own diagrams, project specifications, etc. too!

In addition; The new Azure logo is not yet included. There are a couple images for the new icon here

If you want to be the first to know about new updates, I suggest you follow Chris his blog BuildAzure.com. I certainly do 🙂

Thanks to: Chris Pietschmann, Microsoft MVP

A new Azure logo

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Old Logo (left) and New Logo (right)

Out of the MANY different announcements made @Ignite is the fact that Microsoft has created a new logo for the Microsoft Azure cloud. The old logo could be described as a cloud with a module connected to it. It wasn’t exceptional, but it was unique to Microsoft Azure. Microsoft released a brand new logo for Microsoft Azure. Not only that! But, Microsoft has released a new “Azure Manifesto” video as well to inspire all of us “change agents” to unlock the power of the cloud!

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