It’s a year full of misery with the Covid-19 virus around the world. People who lose their loved one, It’s a very sad time for all of us! Microsoft technologies are still going on strong with new features in Azure Cloud Services but also supporting the people who are working in the healthcare, data analytics, Microsoft Teams for Collaboration and much more. But what I want to say to all HealthCare people over the world : THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL THE WORK YOU DO 👍
I have deep respect for you all !
Community, Microsoft Product Teams, MVP Lead, WIndows Insiders, I wish you and your family happy holidays and a Healthy 2021 with lot of Success! 🎄😍
Azure DevTest Labs is a service that helps developers and testers quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. You can test the latest version of your application by quickly provisioning Windows and Linux environments using reusable templates and artifacts. Easily integrate your deployment pipeline with DevTest Labs to provision on-demand environments. Scale up your load testing by provisioning multiple test agents, and create pre-provisioned environments for training and demos.
Here you see my Azure TestLAB and I will add a Docker artifact to my Running VM
JamesTestLAB
Here you find the Getting Started Documentation
In your TestLAB you can work with RBAC
Here you see the Roles in Azure DevTest LAB.
In my JamesTestLAB I have a Container01 with Windows Server 2016 with Container running.
Via the Marketplace for Artifacts, I select the Docker for Windows Server 2016 artifact 😉
Docker Artifact
Just ADD
Installing Docker for Windows Server 2016
Done !
Connect Container01
Docker for Windows Server 2016 Running in my Azure Test LAB
Today Microsoft released Azure Stack Technical Preview 3 for customers to do Proof of Concept (POC) with Azure Cloud Platform Services in your own Datacenter.
Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) support provides identity options for scenarios where network connectivity is limited or intermittent.
You can use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets to provide managed scale out of workloads.
Use Azure D-Series VM sizes for increased performance and consistency.
Deploy and create templates with Temp Disks that are consistent with Azure.
Marketplace Syndication allows you to use content from the Azure Marketplace and make available in Azure Stack.
Infrastructure and operations
Isolated administrative and user portals and APIs provide enhanced security.
Use enhanced infrastructure management functionality, such as improved alerting.
Using the Windows Azure Pack connector, you can view and manage IaaS virtual machines that are hosted on a Cloud Platform System (CPS) stamp. For this preview release, you can try this only with a CPS environment and additional configuration is required.
More Technical documentation of Azure Stack TP3 and Deployment :
The infrastructure for your application is typically made up of many components – maybe a virtual machine, storage account, and virtual network, or a web app, database, database server, and 3rd party services. You do not see these components as separate entities, instead you see them as related and interdependent parts of a single entity. You want to deploy, manage, and monitor them as a group. Azure Resource Manager enables you to work with the resources in your solution as a group. You can deploy, update, or delete all the resources for your solution in a single, coordinated operation. You use a template for deployment and that template can work for different environments such as testing, staging, and production. Resource Manager provides security, auditing, and tagging features to help you manage your resources after deployment.
The benefits of using Resource Manager
Resource Manager provides several benefits:
You can deploy, manage, and monitor all the resources for your solution as a group, rather than handling these resources individually.
You can repeatedly deploy your solution throughout the development lifecycle and have confidence your resources are deployed in a consistent state.
You can manage your infrastructure through declarative templates rather than scripts.
You can define the dependencies between resources so they are deployed in the correct order.
You can apply access control to all services in your resource group because Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is natively integrated into the management platform.
You can apply tags to resources to logically organize all the resources in your subscription.
You can clarify your organization’s billing by viewing costs for a group of resources sharing the same tag.
Working with Azure Resource Manager Templates in Visual Studio Code :
Azure Resource Manager templates are JSON files that describe a resource and related dependencies. These files can sometimes be large and complicated so tooling support is important. Visual Studio Code is a new, lightweight, open-source, cross-platform code editor. It supports creating and editing Resource Manager templates through a new extension. VS Code runs everywhere and doesn’t require Internet access unless you also want to deploy your Resource Manager templates.
Microsoft Azure Stack is a new hybrid cloud platform product that lets you deliver Azure services from your organization’s datacenter. Microsoft Azure Stack Technical Preview 2 is being made available through a Proof of Concept (POC). The POC is an environment for learning and demonstrating Azure Stack features. It lets you deploy all required components on a single physical machine to create an environment for evaluating key concepts and capabilities, and validating the extensibility model for APIs.
Before you deploy Azure Stack POC (Proof of Concept), make sure your computer meets the following requirements. The Technical Preview 2 deployment requirements for the POC are the same as those required for Technical Preview 1. Therefore, you can use the same hardware that you used for the previous single-box preview.
This standalone script goes through the pre-requisites checks done by the setup for Azure Stack Technical Preview 2 (TP2). It provides a way to confirm you are meeting the hardware and software requirements, before downloading the larger package for Azure Stack TP2
Build and deploy your application the same way whether it runs on Azure or Azure Stack. Use Azure Resource Manager to build reusable application templates for both traditional and cloud-native apps. Use role-based access control in Azure Resource Manager and Azure Active Directory to enable fine-grained access to application resources. Write to the same Azure APIs. Use the same Azure SDK. With Active Directory Federation Services supported, you can authenticate your apps to Azure Active Directory or your on-premises Active Directory. Continue to use Visual Studio as your development canvas. Or use PowerShell to deploy if that’s what you prefer. Just like Azure, you get a broad choice of open source technologies including Linux, Java, Node.js, and PHP.
Cloud and Datacenter Management Blog 