Category: Azure

Microsoft just announced Azure DevOps.

In a great blog post, Jamie Cool the Director of Program Manager for Azure DevOps announced the service and what Includes:

• Azure Pipelines
• Azure Boards
• Azure Artifacts
• Azure Repos
• Azure Test Plans

Azure DevOps is an amazing in the evolution of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). If you currently use VSTS you will be upgraded to Azure DevOps automatically. Your URL will be updated from myvsts.visualstudio.com to dev.azure.com/abc and the service will support redirection of the old URL to the new one, this means that you don’t need to update right away your url. Stuff will still work for you, but of course is highly recommended that you inform your teams of the new URL ASAP.

With this change Team Foundation Server will also be updated naming wise, it will be called Azure DevOps Server.

Next few days I will review the new UI and create a more complete blog post about Azure DevOps. Hope you’re so exited with this change has I am!

Official Launche will happen on the Sep, 11^th 8AM to 9:30AM (Pacific Time). Check all the information about the event at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/community/events/devops/

You can check all the pricing of this service at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/

Keeping up with the changes in Microsoft Azure is one of the more challenging tasks I have in my professional life. I teach classes on Microsoft Azure all the time and I provide advising about Cloud to my customers, so it’s kind in my job description that I need to know all (in the real world most of…) the new services and new features that Microsoft releases. 

In the previous week we had some changes in the Azure Portal UI, but I also found out another great feature in the Azure Recovery Services. It’s now possible to backup your Azure Storage File Shares using the Azure Backup service in a very easy and quick way. When you add another Backup Item to you Azure Recovery Services Vault you can choose that it’s an Azure Service and up until now we only had the option for Virtual Machines, but now we also have Azure File Shares. At the time of writing this post it works with both Azure Storage Accounts V1 and V2. This allows you to create a backup solution for your Azure File Shares with zero infrastructure costs that allows you to do file-level restores.

Supposing that you already have a File Share in an Azure Storage account, if you want to backup that data using the Azure Backup service you just need to follow these steps:

1. In the Recovery Services Vault overview blade, click on the + Backup option.
2. In the Backup Goal blade select the following options and then click Backup.
1. Where is your workload running?
1. Select Azure
2. What do you want to backup? 
1. Select Azure FileShare
3. 
4. In the Select Storage Account blade, select the Azure Storage Account that contains the file share and click OK.
1. This will register the Storage Account with Recovery Services Vault. This operation might take a minute.
5. In the File Share to backup blade, select the file shares you want to backup and click OK. You can select more than 1 file share.
6. In the Backup Policy blade, select an existing backup policy or create a new one.
7. In the Backup blade, just click Backup and your File Share backup will be created.

Hope all of you love this feature as much as I do! This is a great feature to improve Microsoft Azure Storage and backup services. Waiting for more great features in both services, like Azure Blob Storage or event real Azure SQL Database Backups.

If you still don’t have an Azure Storage Account and/or an Azure Backup Vault here is some links to help you with that:

• How to create an Azure Storage Account
• How to create an Azure Recovery Services Vault