It's the weekend before Microsoft Ignite 2020 and all the Azure services are a buzz! Here is the news the team will be covering this week: Azure Site Recovery update rollup 50, NFS 4.1 support for Azure Files is now in preview, Azure IoT Central August 2020 update, Azure Container Instances - Docker integration now in Docker Desktop stable release and of course our Microsoft Learn module of the week.

Azure Site Recovery update rollup 50 - September 2020

The latest Azure Site Recovery update provides fixes, updated Linux support for the Mobility service, and download links for Site Recovery components. The latest versions of these Azure Site Recovery components include:

Site Recovery Unified Setup and Site Recovery Mobility Agent (both are version 9.37.5724.1)—Used for Azure Virtual Machine (VM) replication as well as replication of on-premises VMware virtual machines and physical servers to Azure.

Site Recovery configuration server Open Virtualization Format (OVF) template (version 5.1.6347.0)—Used for replication of on-premises VMware virtual machines and physical servers to Azure.

Site Recovery Provider (version 5.1.6347.0)—Used for replication of Hyper-V virtual machines to Azure.

Recovery Services Agent (version 2.0.9192.0)—Used for replication of Hyper-V virtual machines to Azure.

NFS 4.1 support for Azure Files is now in preview

Azure Files now adds support for NFS v4.1 file system protocol for an easy migration of your Linux-centric workloads. Any application ever written for Linux file systems can run on NFS. Here is a subset of customer use cases we have seen during the preview:



Linux application - Shared storage for applications like SAP, storage for images or videos, Internet of Things (IoT) signals, etc.



Shared storage for applications like SAP, storage for images or videos, Internet of Things (IoT) signals, etc. End user storage - Shared file storage for end user home directories and home directories for applications like Jupyter Notebooks. For lift-and-shift datacenter NAS data to cloud to reduce the on-premises footprint and expand to more geo regions with agility.



Shared file storage for end user home directories and home directories for applications like Jupyter Notebooks. For lift-and-shift datacenter NAS data to cloud to reduce the on-premises footprint and expand to more geo regions with agility. Container-based applications - Persistent storage for Docker and Kubernetes environments. Microsoft is also launching the preview of CSI driver for Azure files Support for NFS today.



Persistent storage for Docker and Kubernetes environments. Microsoft is also launching the preview of CSI driver for Azure files Support for NFS Databases - Hosting Oracle database and taking its backups using Recover Manager (RMAN). Azure Files premium tier is highly optimized for database workloads.



Azure IoT Central new and updated features—August 2020

A plethora of updates and features are being made available which are included in the August 2020 update. The new features and updates include:

Job Improvements: Jobs creation has been redesigned with a new wizard experience you can use to create, run, and save a job. You can now navigate easily between the last 30 days of job runs and saved jobs.

File upload support added: Upload media and files from your devices to the cloud. Files are stored in an Azure storage endpoint.

New data export capabilities (preview): Send filtered and enriched data from devices in near real time to your cloud destinations to unlock business insights with IoT data.

CLI improvements: To expand the capabilities of the CLI, we've re-organized the commands in the azure-iot extension. New commands include az iot central user, az iot central api-token, and az iot central device compute-device-key to generate a device SAS key for provisioning.

Reduced application provisioning time: Provisioning a new IoT Central application now takes seconds instead of minutes, letting you get started within seconds of creating an application. This also streamlines creating IoT Central applications programmatically. The improvement is a result of optimized architecture and integration with the Device Provisioning Service (a core Azure IoT component).

Azure Container Instances - Docker integration now in Docker Desktop stable release

The Azure Docker integration enables you to deploy serverless containers to Azure Container Instances (ACI) using the same Docker Command-line (CLI) commands from local development. Use docker run to spin up a single-container or docker compose up to deploy multi-container applications defined with a Docker Compose file. You can also view logs, attach a shell, and perform other actions against the containers running in ACI, just as if those containers were running locally. In addition, you can now use Compose to attach Azure File Share volume mounts to your containers in either a local or ACI context.

MS Learn Module of the Week

Introduction to Docker containers

This MS Learn module provides an introduction of the benefits of using Docker containers as a containerization platform. It will also cover how to evaluate whether Docker is an appropriate containerization platform for you and detail how the components of Docker containers support compute container implementations.

Let us know in the comments below if there are any news items you would like to see covered in next week show. Az Update streams live every Friday so be sure to catch the next episode and join us in the live chat.