BIG BIG News!!! – Microsoft launches Azure DevOps

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, 11th 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/

Workshop: I find your lack of Azure disturbing

On the 20th of July I will deliver a great workshop in Lisbon, Portugal about Microsoft Azure. This workshop is part of the Tuga IT Conference (http://tugait.pt/) and is targeted for all IT Professionals that want to start to design, create and/or migrate solutions for Microsoft Azure.

Here are all the details about the workshop:

“I find your lack of Azure disturbing”

More and more companies are implementing, designing and architecting solutions on Microsoft Azure. This full day workshop will provide you guidance and knowledge on some of the core Azure services. This workshop will be led by Tiago Costa, Microsoft Cloud architect and advisor for several customers across the world and two times author of Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) – 20532 and 20535. Be prepared for a demo dependent workshop, we will do our best to blow your mind!

Outline:

  • Introduction to Microsoft Azure
  • Azure AD
  • Virtual Networks
  • Virtual Machines
  • Azure Storage
  • Azure App Services
  • Architecture Best Practices

You can sign up for this workshop at: https://www.eventbrite.pt/e/bilhetes-i-find-you-lack-of-azure-disturbing-47095724580.
Hope to see you there!!!

You can also check other workshops from great speakers about Git, Cassandra and SQL Server at http://tugait.pt/workshops/

Course 20532: Developing Microsoft Azure Solution Authoring

This has been an amazing year so far! I’m very privileged to do what I love to do. This allows me to get up every day full of energy for one more long working day that sometimes involves flying around the world.

In the beginning of the year I had the opportunity to share with you that I had authored, together with another three amazing professionals, the 20535A: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions course for Microsoft Learning. This was my first MOC Authoring project and I loved every bit of it. If this was not enough, I just helped on authoring the update of the 20532D: Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions MOC course. This project was done with Sidney Andrews has the lead SME. What a great project too. I hope that you all love this update on this Microsoft Azure course and what better way for me to celebrate this? Yes!!!! I’m going to deliver this course next week!!! It will be 4 days of an amazing delivery in the beautiful city of Sofia the capital of Bulgaria.

Azure Storage File Share Backup

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. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. In the Backup Policy blade, select an existing backup policy or create a new one.
  6. 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:

New Microsoft Azure Exam: 70-535: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions

Microsoft is creating a new Microsoft Azure Exam – 70-535: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions, in order to better align the objective domains to Architecting solutions in Microsoft Azure and not the details in implementing solutions in Azure like we have today in the 70-534 exam.

This new exam will also bring changes to the current certifications that use the now old 70-534 Exam. MCSA and MCSE will start using this in the next few weeks. If you have a current MCSA/MCSE or MCSD certification that used the 70-534, your certification will still be current. I also recommend you to check the new Microsoft Azure Certification that Microsoft is releasing. You can find more information’s at:  https://borntolearn.mslearn.net/b/weblog/posts/announcing-three-new-azure-exams

Microsoft is also creating a new MOC (Microsoft Official Course) that aligns with this new exam. It will be the 20535: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions. According to the Born to Learn post it will be available in February 2018.

You can find more information in this Born to Learn article: https://borntolearn.mslearn.net/b/weblog/posts/microsoft-exam-70_2d00_535-to-replace-70_2d00_534_3a00_-architecting-microsoft-azure-solutions-on-november-30-_1320_-here_1920_s-what-you-should-know-