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Cloud Computing in Today's World

Monthly Archives: September 2015

AzureCon 2015 Announcements

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In today’s Azure Nugget I wanted to share the announcements made at Microsoft’s virtual event called AzureCon. If you didn’t get a chance to attend, below is a summary of all the feature announcements. Microsoft came out today to talk about their latest innovations to help customers transform their businesses. This wasn’t your typical newsletter to announce a service going GA or a price reduction. This was more like a feature release on steroids. If there was ever a question as to which public cloud service is gaining a competitive edge, I think we got our answer today. Listed below are the announcements that were made.

Applications

  • Azure Container Service – open source container scheduling and orchestration service that builds on partnerships with Docker and Mesosphere (avail in preview later this year)

Big Data and IoT

  • Azure IoT Suite available for purchase to address business needs such as remote monitoring, asset management, and predictive maintenance (solution types, device connectivity with wide protocol support, data analysis, and integration with backend systems to help automate business processes)
  • Azure Data Lake is a fully managed system for Big Data analytics (comprised of store, analytics service, and HDInsight) – store and analytics available for preview later this year
  • Cortana Analytics Suite available for purchase (suite to handle all analytics needs to transform data into intelligent actions)
  • Azure HDInsight on Linux GA

Intelligent Infrastructure

  • Currently there are 24 existing regions which is more than AWS and Google combined
  • General availability of 3 new regions in India (Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai), immediately available
  • Azure Security Center is an integrated security solution with end-to-end visibility and control of the security of your Azure resources. Helps find, deploy, and manage critical security services and provides recommendations. (avail later this year)
  • New N series Nvidia GPU- enabled VMs for graphics-intensive workloads. Compute intensive workloads and RDMA (avail for preview in the next few months)

Continuous Innovation

  • Azure Compute Pre-purchase plan designed for customers with predictable workloads, provides up to 63% savings over a year (avail globally Dec 1)
  • App Service Environment GA in Dec, fully isolated and dedicated environment for securely running apps
  • Azure Mobile Engagement Service GA, enables user segmentation, analytics, push notification, and in-app messaging across devices
  • Azure Media Services Live Encoding GA, enables delivery of high quality video streaming
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse available for public preview, is an elastic data warehouse in the cloud
  • ExpressRoute (21 locations worldwide and expanding). Office365 and Skype for Business ExpressRoute GA, with ability to connect to Azures Government Cloud via ExpressRoute, new pricing plans available as of Oct 1
  • DV2 VM 35% faster than D series , faster CPU, more memory, better local disk performance
  • Up to 60% price reduction on A8-A11 instances
  • Azure File Storage GA fully managed file share, can now mount to on-prem or Azure VMs
  • Azure Backup of application workloads GA, direct backup of SQL, Sharepoint, Dynamics
  • DevTest Labs in Preview, really neat offering for dev/test groups
  • Azure Resource Health exposes health of resources, root cause, actionable guidance and support ticket submission (avail for public preview in Oct)
  • Financial Services Compliance Program provides access to audit report evidence and platform penetration testing

If the sheer number of announcements listed above are any indication of Microsoft’s commitment to the cloud, we are in for a wild ride. Microsoft’s goal is to empower customers with the capability to deliver unique offerings to their customers across any platform, regardless of language. Message heard, Loud and Clear!

Azure Profile Configuration File

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In today’s Azure Nugget I wanted to share with you some information about the Azure profile configuration file. Recently I experienced an issue when attempting to run Azure PowerShell cmdlets to deploy resources using Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Everything had been working fine and then all of the sudden I get the error below.

Get-AzureSubscription : Failed to refresh token. AADSTS90002: No service namespace named {‘GUID’} was found in the data store.

Looking a little closer I noticed a reference to a namespace that was a GUID for a tenant. Prior to the issue I had 2 active subscriptions and 1 expired. The expired subscription was the reference to this GUID. I took a look at my subscriptions within the Usage & Billing Portal and noticed only the 2 active were showing. So apparently the expired subscription had just purged from my Azure Account. If that was the case then why am I getting this error when trying to query my subscription info.

When the Microsoft Azure PowerShell module is installed there is this concept of an Azure PowerShell Configuration File. The file is located at C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Windows Azure Powershell\AzureProfile.json. This is a JSON file containing sections of cached information for all subscriptions, accounts and environments that the account admin has configured on the system. After looking at this file in Visual Studio I could see that it was still referencing the expired subscription.

To resolve this issue I closed out all PowerShell consoles. Then I simply deleted the Windows Azure PowerShell folder containing the JSON file. After opening a new PowerShell console and running Add-AzureAccount, I could see the expired subscription tenant GUID was no longer present. Now I was able to query my subscriptions without error.

Hopefully this Azure Nugget has been helpful and will allow you to continue deploying resources with PowerShell and ARM. Until next time….

 

Increase the Core Count in a Microsoft Azure Subscription

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In today’s Azure Nugget I wanted to share with you how to increase the core count in Azure. Why would you want to do this and is this necessary? By default each subscription in Azure has a core quota limit of 20 cores per region with a maximum limit of 10,000 per region. Keep in mind that limits can vary by offer category type (i.e. Free Trial, Pay-As-You-Go etc.). If you plan to use more than 20 cores then you will probably want to do this soon after creating your subscription. The 20 core limitation can be increased with a support request. You will only pay for the number of cores you use and not for the number allocated. The steps below will show you how to submit the request using the Preview Portal (aka v2 portal or ARM mode). You can still use this method to request a core increase for v1 resources as well but just specify that in your request.

Procedure

1. From the Preview Portal Home page click on the Help + Support tile.

2. Select Create support request.

3. In the New support request blade, select Request type and click Quotas.

4. Select the subscription that you would like to have the core count increased.

5. On the Resources blade select General question.

6. Select a Support plan and click Ok.

7. Under Problem type select “Quota or Core Increase Requests” and under Category select “Cores: Virtual Machines and Cloud Services”, and click Ok.

8. On the Description blade, in the Details box type something similar to “Please increase my core count to <number> in the <your_region> for Azure Resource Manager.” It is important that you include the region as well as the mode or else you could end up getting the core increase based on v1 resources (Azure Service Management mode). Fill out Time frame and Resource boxes if necessary and click Ok.

9. On the Contacts blade, enter your contact info, Select Ok, and Create. Be patient as this could take up to a couple of days to get resolved.

10. To verify the core count you will need to have the Azure PowerShell module installed. Click here if you need help getting it installed. Once installed run the command below.

Once the Service Request is created it will show up on the Home page. You can click on it to get the details or to add a message. You will also have a history of all the communications.

I hope you liked this Azure Nugget on how you can increase the core count on your subscription and it will save you from hitting a brick wall during your deployments. Stay tuned for more Azure Nuggets!

 

 

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