Like previous years, I thought we should take a look back at the 2022 articles and provide a little bit of a recap.

We started off the year with new virtual machines – the v5’s – becoming available within the Australia East region, with some performance reports mentioning a 15-25% increase over the previous v4 generation of machines while at a similar price. This also expanded later in the year with the introduction of ARM based virtual machines - while not supporting Windows environments - they are shaping up to be a great offering for Linux workloads where high performance is required at a competitive price.

Azure Virtual Desktop continues to expand in popularity and functionality, with Azure AD Join in the pipeline for multi-session environments, and with the eventual goal of removing the requirement for a domain controller and instead allowing for cloud identity only solutions.

We looked at migration options from on-prem or other clouds into Azure and the options available from Microsoft directly like their Solution Assessments team, where they can provide assistance in assessing the environment to see if it is suitable for migration and provide documentation to assist in articulating the benefits of the Azure cloud to your customers over a traditional on-prem environment or alternative cloud offering. Later in the year we also expanded on this offering by providing support through a third party to handle the migration on your behalf or supporting yourselves by using tooling from Webroot Carbonite to assist you in the migration process.

Databases was a discussion point last year, with going over most of the database offerings within Azure, and their usage situations, from SQL Server to Azure SQL, through to Cosmos DB, and onto the open-source databases like MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL offerings and how Microsoft has capabilities anywhere your requirements may be.

Data redundancy while an exciting topic for some isn’t quite for others, but we covered off what it is, why it matters, how Azure does things (LRS, ZRS, GRS, etc) and how best to think of the offerings within the Azure context.

Hybrid environments are growing so we discussed Microsoft’s answer in this realm around Azure Stack HCI and the software which sits overtop Azure Arc. Azure Arc allows you to manage resources on-prem or in other clouds through a consistent interface through the Azure Portal and treat them as local(ish) resources for better management and visibility.

Continuing the virtual desktop theme due to continued growth in this area, we explored options for management of Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure, either through Azure’s built-in systems, or utilising third party offerings like Nerdio which often provide an easier experience with great functionality. These third-party offerings come into play especially when you are looking to expand and manage more AVD environments and are looking at a way of centrally managing them for scale and a consistent experience.

Monitoring and visibility of your Azure resources was touched on as a basis to discuss Log Analytics Workspaces as you will see them appearing more and more within services from Microsoft as a general storage location for large amounts of data which you may need to run queries across like performance metrics on virtual machines, diagnostic data from resources, or within the security world like Microsoft Sentinel.

Saving costs is always top of mind when utilising new technology and we discussed the new Azure Savings Plan offering and compared it against the savings provided through Reserved Instances, and how Azure Savings Plan may not be the solution in every situation and where Reserved Instances in a lot of cases could be the better offering, especially within the MSP world.

Lastly, we looked at Azure Firewall and the introduction of the new Basic tier designed for the SMB market while providing a cloud native enterprise grade experience with features like layer 3-7 filtering, HA support, central management through Azure Firewall Manager, alerts, and logging along with SIEM support for threat detection and investigation, to name among a few.

A lot was covered in 2022, and we didn’t scratch the surface of the features and functionality added into Azure in the past 12 months. 2023 is sure to keep this momentum up, so keep an eye out for more articles this year.