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Hi, I have blogged many maps to describe the Azure landscape. These have proven helpful and I've received a lot of positive feedback about them. The networking piece in Azure is taking more and more space, so I thought it deserved its own map. This map is primarily intended to describe native services, although in any Azure deployment, you will find third-party and open-source products as well. It is by no means exhaustive, but should help you find your way in the vast Azure Networking landscape. Feel free to zoom into the raw image for better readability. I have divided this map into the following categories: L3-L7: mostly about connectivity …

In June 2021, we announced that Microsoft Machine Learning Server & Microsoft R Open will be retired on July 1, 2022. In continuation with the retirement process, the Microsoft R Application Network (MRAN) website and CRAN Time Machine will be retired on July 1, 2023. How does this change affect me? After January 31, 2023, we will no longer maintain the CRAN Time Machine snapshots. Existing snapshots will be available until June 30, 2023. Microsoft R Application Network website and CRAN Time Machine will be shut down on July 1, 2023. For R users, the “checkpoint” package will only serve CRAN snapshots up to January 31, 2023 and will cease to function entirely…

Introduction This is part of a series on Azure DevOps pipelines, previously we discussed Azure DevOps Pipelines: tasks, jobs, and stages. At this point you are familiar with core components of Azure DevOps pipelines (tasks, jobs, and stages) and are looking how to best leverage some additional components such as environments and variables. Environments and variables are two key components when it comes to Azure DevOps pipelines security and governance. Additionally, if done right they assist with reusability of your pipelines. Environments Azure DevOps environments are defined as “a collection of resources that you can target with deploy…

Overview Microsoft Sentinel’s REST – API based data connectors a lot of times use secrets and keys that customers would prefer to keep secured in a vault from where they can effectively manage (retrieve, update, delete, manage access, etc.) these secrets and keys. In this article, we’ll talk about securing API secrets and keys using an Azure Key Vault. Content Hub solution when deployed may not necessarily deploy the Azure Key Vault resources as a part of the solution deployment to account for varied usage of Azure Key Vaults. However, Azure Function apps can use keys stored in AKV using AKV references without any changes in the Azure Function App code. Inte…

The most common way to load test applications is to simulate a specific number of virtual users. But what if you want to test the system to make sure it can handle a desired number of requests per second (RPS) ? For example, you may want to load test a payment gateway service for the number of transactions that can be processed every second. RPS or throughput is a crucial metric that reveals fundamental information about the tested system. Every system has a critical point in terms of throughput. Once the system reaches the critical point, it might keep the throughput around the same level, but the response times go up or the requests get throttled. In this article yo…

In June 2021, we announced that Microsoft Machine Learning Server & Microsoft R Open will be retired on July 1, 2022. In continuation with the retirement process, the Microsoft R Application Network (MRAN) website and CRAN Time Machine will be retired on July 1, 2023. How does this change affect me? After January 31, 2023, we will no longer maintain the CRAN Time Machine snapshots. Existing snapshots will be available until June 30, 2023. Microsoft R Application Network website and CRAN Time Machine will be shut down on July 1, 2023. For R users, the “checkpoint” package will only serve CRAN snapshots up to January 31, 2023 and will cease to function entirely…

If we have a Customer-managed TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) and we delete by mistake the entire "Azure Key Vault" or just the "Key" object, the database will be inaccessible: Don't worry, this problem is solvable. Every "Azure Key Vault" or its "keys"/"secrets"/"certificates" objects have the "soft-delete" feature enabled, so if you delete any of these elements, Azure keeps a backup copy of them for 90 days: Azure Key Vault soft-delete | Microsoft Learn We need to recover the "Azure Key Vault" (AKV) or the Key object. We can follow these steps in the Azure Portal: Case 1 - [ Deleted key object] Go to the Azure K…

Introduction SSMA is a great tool for data migration if you plan to migrate data to SQL database without any additional cost and setup hassle. It initiates a single data migration process for each individual table. However, if you have a very large table in your database, the total data migration time will increase because the SSMA will not initiate multiple copy process for a single table. If you have a database with similar data distribution with handful of tables holding most of the data and none of the other available migration services and tools are suitable for you, then use following hack to split your data into multiple chunks for faster data migration. …

In June 2021, we announced that Microsoft Machine Learning Server & Microsoft R Open will be retired on July 1, 2022. In continuation with the retirement process, the Microsoft R Application Network (MRAN) website and CRAN Time Machine will be retired on July 1, 2023. How does this change affect me? After January 31, 2023, we will no longer maintain the CRAN Time Machine snapshots. Existing snapshots will be available until June 30, 2023. Microsoft R Application Network website and CRAN Time Machine will be shut down on July 1, 2023. For R users, the “checkpoint” package will only serve CRAN snapshots up to January 31, 2023 and will cease to function entirely…

The pgcrypto module is a cryptographic extension that provides a number of hashing and cryptographic functions using MD5, SHA, HMAC, AES, BLOWFISH, PGP, and CRYPT, as well as DES and 3DES. When encrypting data, one must take into an account the more difficult you make it to read data, it also takes more performance overhead to query and decrypt this data. With that in mind, it's important to pick your encryption strategies based on the sensitivity of your data. There are two basic kinds of encryption, one-way and two-way. In one-way encryption you don't ever care about decrypting the data into readable form, but you just want to verify the user knows what …

This article contains a few recommendations for reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster. If you want to minimize the number of unused cores, you can use the following general guidelines to improve the density of your workloads and reduce the number of VMs to the bare minimum. Use the cluster autoscaler, Kubernetes Event-Driver Autoscaler (KEDA), and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler to scale in and scale out the number of pods and the number of nodes based on the traffic conditions. Make sure to properly set requests and limits for pods to avoid assigning too many resources in terms of CPU and memory to the user-defined w…

Logging is an essential component of any good software development process. Through logging, we can detect and fix issues, understand the behavior of users, and obtain valuable business insights. However, logging involves many complex problems that we need to solve, and it would be best if we didn’t do it all alone. The best practice often is to employ one of the many logging frameworks that are at your disposal. This will enable you to focus on improving your app and delivering value for your users, while the framework does all the heavy lifting. One such framework is the Apache Log4j 2. What is Log4j? Log4j is a popular logging framework for Java applications …

Hi community, I am Helmut Wagensonner, a Cloud Solution Architect – Engineer at Microsoft. In a former blog (Windows 10 or Windows 11 GPO ADMX - Which One To Use For Your Central Store?), where I did a comparison between Windows 10 and Windows 11 ADMX files, I promised in my comments to do a follow-up when both 22H2 ADMX versions are finalized. A couple of weeks after the ADMX files for both versions were available for download, I did another comparison. I used the Windows 10 October 2022 ADMX files vs. Windows 11 September 2022 templates. Still, we have differences between the two versions. I did not compare the diffs from the old blog with the current ones…

Background Azure policy introduced a new policy effect named 'DenyAction' recently, which enables the user to block requests on intended action to resources in case the critical resources are changed. This article introduces the 'DenyAction' effect and the expected behaviors with a demo. Please note that the DenyAction effect is now in public preview. We will cover two sections in this article: Policy definition. The expected behavior of the effect. Policy Definition The DenyAction effect is designed to block the operation of intended action to modify specific resources. Currently, only the DELETE action is supported. When a re…

In this blog, we will explain how auditing works for some of the latest features for Hyperscale Azure SQL Database I.e. Hyperscale Named replicas and Geo replication & auto failover groups. Auditing for Named Replicas: We added auditing support for Hyperscale’s Named replicas. When you create a named replica for a database, the database-level audit configuration of the primary database is copied to the named replica and the configured actions will be audited. Server Level Auditing Policy for the Named Replica is picked up from the server on which the named replica is placed. Auditing for Hyperscale Geo Replicas We added auditing suppo…

Teams Live Share seamlessly integrates meetings with Fluid Framework. As a recent GA SDK in Oct, 2022, Live Share provides a free, fully managed, and ready to use Azure Fluid Relay backed by the security and global scale of Teams. With this technology, participants in the same Teams meeting can easily interactively work together on the same content or object, for example, with real time shared annotations, operations, to exchange ideas efficiently. Starting from the simple live canvas demo, I verified more functions by integrating below parts together: Live Share Canvas Fluid UI/Web Component BabyLon Js Customized Fluid Relay Service and …

Hello There If you're hosting any real time, highly transactional and synchronous workload, low network latency and the distributed resiliency of Kubernetes can be very relevant to you. In this post I hope to objectify performance and implications of these factors for L7 ingress in Kubernetes. On We Go Assuming you're leveraging the Azure CNI, as long as we don't dive into the intricacies of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, when thinking about AKS and ingress load balancing options we typically have the option of selecting between Nginx or Azure Application Gateway (AppGW). Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) within K8s will manage App…

Voices of Healthcare Cloud is a webinar series that showcases how Healthcare is seeing positive business and clinical outcomes with cloud technology. We bring new and creative solutions to you at least once a month, so we hope you tune in live or catch the on-demand recording after the session is completed. If you want to get direct invites for these sessions, you can let us know by filling out this form. We had a tremendous line-up of speakers/presenters this year covering a wide range of thought-provoking ideas. Here's a quick recap of our sessions from 2022: Hyperautomation in Healthcare, Beyond RPA Hyperautomation is a business-driven, d…

Today, I worked on a service request that our customer got several issues that I would like to share with you my findings here. 1) pyodbc.Error: ('HY000', '[HY000] [Microsoft][ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server]Connection is busy with results for another command (0) (SQLExecDirectW)') This error ocurrs when the Python code is trying to open a new cursor when we have a previous one with results. import os import pymssql import pyodbc conn = pyodbc.connect("DRIVER={ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server};server=servername.database.windows.net,1433;UID=username;PWD=Password;database=dbName;Mars_Connection=no"); cursor = conn.cursor() cursor.execute('s…

Disclaimer This document is not meant to replace any official documentation, including those found at docs.microsoft.com. Those documents are continually updated and maintained by Microsoft Corporation. If there is a discrepancy between this document and what you find in the Compliance User Interface (UI) or inside of a reference in docs.microsoft.com, you should always defer to that official documentation and contact your Microsoft Account team as needed. Links to the docs.microsoft.com data will be referenced both in the document steps as well as in the appendix. All the following steps should be done with test data, and where possible, testing should be perf…

On a previous blog post written by one of my colleagues it has been discussed the many ways to reach a connection limit in Azure SQL DB. Recently, we worked on a case where the customer was getting the following error when trying to connect to a SQL database that was part of an elastic pool using SSMS. In the documentation of the connection limits for the elastic pool we can see that the limit that was reached was “Max concurrent sessions”. Regardless of the service objective, this session limit is consistent for all tiers. So, scaling up will not provide more sessions. Fortunately, the customer had an SSMS session where we could ex…

In our daily work we constantly encounter what I like to call ‘The Time Thieves.’ These are the things that take away our ability to be proactive in our day-to-day job. They are the reasons we fall behind in our work and can’t always meet delivery dates. I’ve listed several of the time thieves that all of us can relate to: Unknown dependencies Too much work (WIP) Neglected Work Conflicting priorities Unplanned work We are all too familiar with these items listed above. While I wish I had a magic bullet, I don’t, but we’re going to look at some ways in which we can help alleviate these. There very much needs to be a cultural change within your organizati…

Hi everyone! Can you believe the year is already coming to an end? I don’t know about you, but this December *flew* by! As we look ahead to 2023, my goal is to continue to feature more of our amazing community members and highlight events and content that will help you learn more about what’s new at Microsoft. Thank you for an amazing 2022, and I look forward to what the next year will bring for the MTC! Now, let’s dive into what’s been going on in the MTC for our last weekly recap of the year! MTC Moments of the Week For our last MTC Member of the Week of 2022, we are spotlighting a new member to the MTC, @XXplore, who joined us earlier this …