Azure news 2022 - The greatest hits!

Hello Cloud Gurus! I've taken a look back over Azure This Week for 2022 to bring you the top stories, as voted by your views. From Azure certifications and exams, to Azure Managed Grafana, we've got it all here so let's jump in!

I was going to do a top 52, but management said I had to keep it to 5. Sorry. Anyway, number 5 is one of the great words in tech: Grafana. Back in September Brian Roehm shared the story of Azure Managed Grafana.

Grafana is already widely used, but with this integration into Azure, all your Azure project dashboards could access the benefits of Grafana much easier. In particular, developers can integrate services on Azure as well as off Azure with the Managed Grafana instance, giving just that bit more flexibility.  

Number 4 is getting even more use from Azure logs, in particular Azure Monitor.

Almost a year ago in January Wayne Hoggett told us about the usefulness of having alerts from your logs every minute. And while this might not sound terribly exciting, it is one of those small improvements that make a huge impact on your production stability and reliability.

Knowing as fast as possible when there is an issue is often critical to both fix the issue, but also minimise the impact. Apparently you thought so too with your views!

This was one of those stories that you couldn't look away from. Azure described their biggest DDoS attacks in 2021, as well as mentioning casually that Azure on average gets attacked from cyber criminal elements almost 2,000 times a day!

Oh, the biggest you ask? Yeah, it was 3.47Tb of data per second, or about 300GB of data being sent to a service every second. Which is a lot! As far as I know that is still the biggest attack on Azure.  

As I said back in February, DDoS won’t go away any time soon either. As long as bandwidth is cheap, plentiful, and accessible, we will see larger and larger attacks. They are easy to do. On the upside, Microsoft seems to be on top of the defense and there hasn’t been any successful attacks for some years (that we know of at least).  

At number 2 is the Azure exam sandbox. As James Lee explained in January of 2022, you can now get familiar with the Azure certification exam format before you take it.

The exam sandbox shows question types and formats, as well as lets you do test questions, all without the time pressure or fear of failing it. It is a neat way of getting familiar with the process before you sit an actual exam yourself.

If you want even more sandbox experiences, we have world class Azure hands-on labs on the A Cloud Guru platform too, which can help you learn a ton of cloud stuff by actually doing it. 

And speaking of exams, by far the most popular topic on the show has been certifications. New certifications, updated certifications, certification mid-year updates, predictions, you just love it all.  

We got AZ-800 and AZ-801 for Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate, as well as AZ-720 Azure Support Engineer as all new shiny fresh smelling certifications. And on top of that there were updates to AZ-900, DP-900, AI-900, AZ-104, DP-300, AZ-600, AZ-305, and AZ-400.  

I get why certifications are top of the list to be honest. They transform careers, team capabilities and lives of many people. Which is also why we put so much time and effort into the courses for each of them!

Oh, and if your head is swimming with all these numbers, and you're wondering where to start with your Azure studies, the best place to begin is our Azure Certification Guide.

So that’s all the biggest 2022 headlines for Azure wrapped up! 

Azure This Week is your weekly news roundup for all things Azure. Join our expert hosts as they cover everything you need to know about the past week’s developments, keeping it short, fun and informative. 

Whether you’re just beginning your cloud journey, or you know your stuff, there’s something for everyone!