Welcome to Azure this week.
This is the show where I talk about
Azure for a whole week. Oh no,
this is a show that builds an Azure
clone in a week. Not that. Well,
we do talk about Azure
weekly, so there's that.
This time on the show Azure
Cosmos DB gets a friendly touch,
Azure knows when your VMs
are broken and repairs them,
and some vulnerability scanning
for your containers. Enjoy.
Cosmos DB is a globally scalable and
distributed database that has amazing
performance and features. In my opinion,
it is one of the most versatile
and impressive services on Azure.
In my opinion it is also a great
service to rack up a nice fat bill with.
It's easy to get into trouble
with costs you didn't anticipate,
especially if you don't fully
understand how it works.
So I am guessing Microsoft has heard
this feedback too because from this week
you can now get a free tier
subscription to Cosmos DB. Yay!
So when free tier is enabled
on an Azure Cosmos DB account,
you'll get the first 400 RU/s and five
gigabytes of storage for free for the
lifetime of the account.
There is a maximum of one free tier per
account though per Azure subscription,
so go get Cosmos-ing.
And now for a new feature I kind
of thought was already existing.
It's one of those things that I
genuinely took for granted I guess.
So Azure virtual machine scale sets now
provide the capability to automatically
repair unhealthy instances based
on application health status. Yeah,
I thought that was already
there. There you go.
If you configure the scale set instances
to emit application health by using
either the application health extension
or Azure load balancer health probes,
then Azure will enable the automatic
repairs policy and when an instance is
found to be unhealthy,
the scale set will automatically delete
the unhealthy instance and create a new
one to replace it. Like magic!
Azure Container Registry holds a base
or master image that your infrastructure
will use and trust.
What if that image has been moonlighting
in dark alleys on the weekends?
How do you know you can
100% trust it?Vulnerability
scanning for images stored
in Azure Container Registry is now
available in Azure security center.
So when you push an image
to container registry,
security center automatically scans it
then checks for known vulnerabilities in
packages or dependencies
defined in the file.
And when the scan completes in
about roughly 10 minutes or so,
security center provides details and
a security classification for each
vulnerability detected along with
guidance on how to remediate issues and
protect vulnerable attack surfaces. Whew.
But that's what it does. So no more,
moonlighting! Another week
with free stuff from Azure,
do you use Cosmos? If not, this is
a good opportunity to try it out.
It is a great product. As we
say on the A Cloud Guru team,
when we have to figure out how
to end the show in a clever way.
"Seek and you shall cloud". So see
you next week and keep staying calm,
cloud gurus.
