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Tag: Microsoft Ignite conference

  • Microsoft Advances DevOps Agenda

    Microsoft Advances DevOps Agenda

    Microsoft, at its online Ignite 2020 conference, has launched a bevy of updates that collectively further adoption of best DevOps practices on the Microsoft cloud platform, including for the first time a preview of an ability to store artifacts created using low-code Power Apps tools on GitHub.

    In addition, Microsoft announced a preview of an update to Visual Studio 2019 16.8 that will add support for GitHub Codespaces, a previously announced capability that automatically creates repositories on GitHub. GitHub Codespaces is currently available in beta and soon will be accessible directly from within Visual Studio.

    Microsoft also revealed it has enhanced the Git tooling experience in Visual Studio to enable more asynchronous collaborations. A GitHub extension for Visual Studio Code enables developers to work with GitHub Issues and Pull Requests directly in the editor. Development teams that need to work in real-time alternatively can employ Visual Studio Live Share.

    A publish experience in Visual Studio also now has the option to generate a GitHub Actions workflow for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments in Azure resources using the deployment secrets configured in a GitHub repository. GitHub Actions for Azure can now also scan Azure resources for policy violations and vulnerabilities in container images and issues involving Azure Resource Management (ARM) templates.

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told conference attendees the velocity at which applications are developed and deployed has become even more critical as organizations embrace digital business transformation in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

    GitHub support for Power Apps is especially significant because it will make it easier for so-called citizen developers to collaborate with professionals developers as they jointly develop applications, he said.

    Other notable updates to the Microsoft tools portfolio include a preview of an instance of the Azure Logic Apps workflow platform that can be deployed as a containerized runtime.

    A .NET 5 Release Candidate is also now available, with general availability expected next month. This update adds support to smaller, faster single-file applications that use less memory when employed within microservices and containerized applications. It also includes significant performance improvements, support for Windows ARM64 and new releases of C# 9.0 and F# 5.0 languages.

    Microsoft also announced several updates to App Service to make it easier and more cost-effective to migrate and modernize .NET web apps on the Azure cloud. A new Premium v3 (Pv3) App Service Plan can handle large-scale web apps, supporting more apps per instance and larger, memory-intensive apps with up to 32GB per instance. Microsoft is also making Windows Containers support in App Service generally available and will soon make Reserved Instance (RI) Pricing for App Service available to reduce costs.

    Finally, Microsoft made several Kubernetes enhancements, including a preview of a start/stop cluster feature that will be added to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and announced general availability of an Azure Policy add-on for AKS, which makes it possible to audit and enforce policies across Kubernetes clusters. Microsoft also made generally available Bridge to Kubernetes extensions for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code that allow teams to develop against microservices within a running AKS cluster to enable debugging existing services without having to reconfigure or deploy a new cluster.

    Nadella said keeping track of developer velocity and overall “tech intensity” within an organization is critical to success. It’s not yet clear how many organizations have put the metrics in place to measure either. However, it is clear that organizations that have yet to fully embrace best DevOps practices are already being left behind.

  • LogicMonitor Extends Reach to the Cloud

    LogicMonitor Extends Reach to the Cloud

    LogicMonitor has been making available performance monitoring tools as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for several years now. At the Microsoft Ignite conference this week, the company announced it is adding a module through which IT organizations can gain similar insights into public cloud computing services.

    Steve Francis, founder and chief evangelist for LogicMonitor, says LM Cloud is designed to provide real-time visibility into the performance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds, including resource performance monitoring, detailed billing analysis and cloud provider availability.

    Many IT organizations don’t realize just how different managing a public cloud is compared to an on-premises IT infrastructure environment, he says. Not only is too easy to let a workload waste resources, spiraling cloud service costs out of control, but also cloud service providers have policies that limit consumption of resources in a specific region.

    Capabilities provided by LM Cloud include automated discovery of an organization’s entire cloud environment and dashboards that can be employed to troubleshoot issues.

    Francis says that as an extension of the core LogicMonitor service, LM Cloud provides a means for IT organizations to employ one monitoring tool across what have become de facto hybrid cloud computing environments. In fact, using multiple clouds will require IT organizations to rely more on monitoring tools based in the cloud. Otherwise, Francis notes, IT organization would have to correlate data across multiple incompatible tools.

    One of the things that holds IT organizations back from using public clouds is simply that they are more familiar with their on-premises environments. Francis says tools such as LM Cloud will make it much simpler for IT administrators to explore a public cloud environment using a set of capabilities that cloud service providers are not inclined to provide.

    Thanks to the rise of public clouds, DevOps arguably has never been more complicated, with applications distributed across multiple public clouds. But it’s very difficult to manage what can’t be seen, and it’s nearly impossible to compare one public cloud with another—much less an on-premises IT environment—without access to a common baseline of metrics. All too often deciding where to deploy a workload is based on either instinct or corporate fiat rather than detailed analysis.

    While many IT organizations expect to reduce costs by moving workloads to the public cloud, the truth is more nuanced. Long-running applications tend to be less expensive to deploy on-premises. Shorter-run applications lend themselves well to public clouds. Yet, many IT organizations are simply not fast enough when it comes to deploying applications on-premises. Internal IT organizations that have embraced DevOps processes, however, are now more agile. That, coupled with software-defined infrastructure, is narrowing the dexterity gulf that exists between on-premises and cloud computing environments.

    All things may not be equal just yet. But the day when an on-premises IT environment is just another cloud that needs to be managed is that not that far off.

    — Mike Vizard