Apuntes Azure 4

Azure Subscriptions Using Azure requires an Azure subscription which provides you with authenticated and authorized access to Azure products and services and allows you to provision resources. An Azure subscription is a logical unit of Azure services that links to an Azure account, which is an identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) or in a directory that an Azure AD trusts. An account can have one subscription or multiple subscriptions that have different billing models and to which you apply different access-management policies. You can use Azure subscriptions to define boundaries around Azure products, services, and resources. There are two types of subscription boundaries that you can use, including:     Billing boundary. This subscription type determines how an Azure account is billed for using Azure. You can create multiple subscriptions for different types of billing requirements, and Azure will generate separate billing reports and invoices for each subscription so that you can organize and manage costs.     Access control boundary. Azure will apply access-management policies at the subscription level, and you can create separate subscriptions to reflect different organizational structures. An example is that within a business, you have different departments to which you apply distinct Azure subscription policies. This allows you to manage and control access to the resources that users provision with specific subscriptions. Create additional Azure subscriptions You might want to create additional subscriptions for resource or billing management purposes. For example, you might choose to create additional subscriptions to separate:     Environments: When managing your resources, you can choose to create subscriptions to set up separate environments for development and testing, security, or to isolate data for compliance reasons. This is particularly useful because resource access control occurs at the subscription level.     Organizational structures: You can create subscriptions to reflect different organizational structures. For example, you could limit a team to lower-cost resources, while allowing the IT department a full range. This design allows you to manage and control access to the resources that users provision within each subscription.     Billing: You might want to also create additional subscriptions for billing purposes. Because costs are first aggregated at the subscription level, you might want to create subscriptions to manage and track costs based on your needs. For instance, you might want to create a subscription for your production workloads and another subscription for your development and testing workloads. You might also need additional subscriptions due to:     Subscription limits: Subscriptions are bound to some hard limitations. For example, the maximum number of Express Route circuits per subscription is 10. Those limits should be considered as you create subscriptions on your account. If there is a need to go over those limits in particular scenarios, then you might need additional subscriptions. Customize billing to meet your needs If you have multiple subscriptions, you can organize them into invoice sections. Each invoice section is a line item on the invoice that shows the charges incurred that month. For example, you might need a single invoice for your organization but want to organize charges by department, team, or project. Depending on your needs, you can set up multiple invoices within the same billing account. To do this, create additional billing profiles. Each billing profile has its own monthly invoice and payment method. The following diagram shows an overview of how billing is structured. If you've previously signed up for Azure or if your organization has an Enterprise Agreement, your billing might be set up differently.   Azure offers free and paid subscription options to suit different needs and requirements.     A free account. Get started with 12 months of popular free services, $200 credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days, and 25+ services that are always free. Your Azure services are disabled when the trial ends or when your credit expires for paid products, unless you upgrade to a paid subscription.     Pay-As-You-Go. This subscription allows you to pay for what you use by attaching a credit or debit card to your account. Organizations can apply to Microsoft for invoicing privileges.     Member offers. Your existing membership to certain Microsoft products and services affords you credits for your Azure account and reduced rates on Azure services. For example, member offers are available to Microsoft Visual Studio subscribers, Microsoft Partner Network members, Microsoft BizSpark members, and Microsoft Imagine members.  

Azure Free Accounts An Azure free account provides subscribers with 12 months of our most popular services, a $200 credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days, and over 25 services are free. Do you pay anything to start with the Azure free account? No. Starting is free, plus you get a $200 credit you can spend during the first 30 days. What do you need to sign up for a free account? All you need is a phone number, a credit or debit card, and a GitHub account or Microsoft account username (formerly Windows Live ID). What happens once you use my $200 free credit or I’m at the end of 30 days? We’ll notify you so you can decide if you want to upgrade to pay-as-you-go pricing and remove the spending limit. If you do, you’ll have access to all the free products. If you don’t, your account and products will be disabled, and you'll need to upgrade to resume usage. What happens at the end of the 12 months of free products? For 12 months after you upgrade your account, certain amounts of popular products for compute, networking, storage, and databases are free. After 12 months, any of these products you may be using will continue to run, and you’ll be billed at the standard pay-as-you-go rates.  

Management Groups The organizing structure for resources in Azure has four levels: Management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources. The following image shows the relationship of these levels i.e. the hierarchy of organization for the various objects   Management groups: These are containers that help you manage access, policy, and compliance for multiple subscriptions. All subscriptions in a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group.     10,000 management groups can be supported in a single directory.     A management group tree can support up to six levels of depth.     This limit doesn't include the Root level or the subscription level.     Each management group and subscription can only support one parent.     Each management group can have many children.   Subscriptions: A subscription groups together user accounts and the resources that have been created by those user accounts. For each subscription, there are limits or quotas on the amount of resources you can create and use. Organizations can use subscriptions to manage costs and the resources that are created by users, teams, or projects. Resource groups: A resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources like web apps, databases, and storage accounts are deployed and managed. Resources: Resources are instances of services that you create, like virtual machines, storage, or SQL databases.    

Purchasing Azure products and services There are three main customer types on which the available purchasing options for Azure products and services is contingent, including:     Enterprise. Enterprise customers sign an Enterprise Agreement with Azure that commits them to spending a negotiated amount on Azure services, which they typically pay annually. Enterprise customers also have access to customized Azure pricing.     Web direct. Web direct customers pay public prices for Azure resources, and their monthly billing and payments occur through the Azure website.     Cloud Solution Provider. Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) typically are Microsoft partner companies that a customer hires to build solutions on top of Azure. Payment and billing for Azure usage occurs through the customer's CSP. Products and services in Azure are arranged by category, which have various resources that you can provision. You select the Azure products and services that fit your requirements, and your account is billed according to Azure's pay-for-what-you-use model. At the end of each monthly billing cycle, the usage values will be charged to your payment method and the meters are reset. You can check the billing page in the Azure portal at any time to get a quick summary of your current usage and see any invoices from past billing cycles.   Usage meters When you provision an Azure resource, Azure creates one or more meter instances for that resource. The meters track the resources' usage, and each meter generates a usage record that is used to calculate your bill. For example, a single virtual machine that you provision in Azure might have the following meters tracking its usage:     Compute Hours     IP Address Hours     Data Transfer In     Data Transfer Out     Standard Managed Disk     Standard Managed Disk Operations     Standard IO-Disk     Standard IO-Block Blob Read     Standard IO-Block Blob Write     Standard IO-Block Blob Delete The following sections describe the main factors that affect Azure costs, including resource type, services, and the user's location.   Resource type Costs are resource-specific, so the usage that a meter tracks and the number of meters associated with a resource depend on the resource type. Note: Each meter tracks a specific type of usage. For example, a meter might track bandwidth usage (ingress or egress network traffic in bits-per-second), number of operations, size (storage capacity in bytes), or similar items. The usage that a meter tracks correlates to a quantity of billable units. Those are charged to your account for each billing period, and the rate per billable unit depends on the resource type you are using. Services Azure usage rates and billing periods can differ between Enterprise, Web Direct, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers. Some subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs. The Azure team develops and offers first-party products and services, while products and services from third-party vendors are available in the Azure marketplace. Different billing structures apply to each of these categories. Services Azure usage rates and billing periods can differ between Enterprise, Web Direct, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers. Some subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs. The Azure team develops and offers first-party products and services, while products and services from third-party vendors are available in the Azure marketplace. Different billing structures apply to each of these categories.  

Billing Zones Bandwidth refers to data moving in and out of Azure datacenters. Some inbound data transfers, such as data going into Azure datacenters, are free. For outbound data transfers, such as data going out of Azure datacenters, data transfer pricing is based on Zones. A Zone is a geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purposes. the following Zones exist and include the sample regions as listed below:     Zone 1 – West US, East US, Canada West, West Europe, France Central and others     Zone 2 – Australia Central, Japan West, Central India, Korea South and others     Zone 3 - Brazil South     DE Zone 1 - Germany Central, Germany Northeast To avoid confusion, be aware that a Zone for billing purposes is not the same as an Availability Zone. In Azure, the term Zone is for billing purposes only, and the full-term Availability Zone refers to the failure protection that Azure provides for datacenters.   Pricing Calculator The Pricing Calculator is a tool that helps you estimate the cost of Azure products. It displays Azure products in categories, and you choose the Azure products you need and configure them according to your specific requirements. Azure then provides a detailed estimate of the costs associated with your selections and configurations. Get a new estimate from the pricing calculator by adding, removing, or reconfiguring your selected products. You also can access pricing details, product details, and documentation for each product from the pricing calculator.   The options that you can configure in the pricing calculator vary between products, but basic configuration options include:     Region. Lists the regions from which you can provision a product. Southeast Asia, central Canada, the western United States, and Northern Europe are among the possible regions available for some resources.     Tier. Sets the type of tier you wish to allocate to a selected resource, such as Free Tier, Basic Tier, etc.     Billing Options. Highlights the billing options available to different types of customer and subscriptions for a chosen product.     Support Options: Allows you to pick from included or paid support pricing options for a selected product.     Programs and Offers. Allows you to choose from available price offerings according to your customer or subscription type.     Azure Dev/Test Pricing. Lists the available development and test prices for a product. Dev/Test pricing applies only when you run resources within an Azure subscription that is based on a Dev/Test offer. ✔️ The pricing calculator provides estimates, not actual price quotes. Actual prices may vary depending upon the date of purchase, the payment currency you are using, and the type of Azure customer you are.   Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) The Total Cost of Ownership Calculator is a tool that you use to estimate cost savings you can realize by migrating to Azure. To use the TCO calculator, complete the three steps that the following sections explain. Step 1: Define your workloads Enter details about your on-premises infrastructure into the TCO calculator according to four groups:     Servers. Enter details of your current on-premises server infrastructure.     Databases. Enter details of your on-premises database infrastructure in the Source section. In the Destination section, select the corresponding Azure service you would like to use.     Storage. Enter the details of your on-premises storage infrastructure.     Networking. Enter the amount of network bandwidth you currently consume in your on-premises environment. Step 2: Adjust assumptions Adjust the values of key assumptions that the TCO calculator makes, which might vary between customers. To improve the accuracy of the TCO calculator, you should adjust the values so they match the costs of your current on-premises infrastructure. The assumption values you can adjust include storage costs, IT labor costs, hardware costs, software costs, electricity costs, virtualization costs, datacenter costs, networking costs, and database costs.   The TCO calculator generates a detailed report based on the details you enter and the adjustments you make. The report allows you to compare the costs of your on-premises infrastructure with the costs using Azure products and services to host your infrastructure in the cloud.

explore-minimizing-costs The following best practice guidelines can help minimize your Azure costs. Perform cost analyses Plan your Azure solution wisely. Carefully consider the products, services, and resources you need, and read the relevant documentation to understand how each of your choices are metered and billed. Additionally, you should calculate your projected costs by using the Azure Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculators, only adding the products, services, and resources you need. Monitor usage with Azure Advisor In an efficient architecture, provisioned resources match the demand for those resources. The Azure Advisor feature identifies unused or under-utilized resources, and you can implement its recommendations by removing unused resources and configuring your resources to match your actual demand. Use spending limits Free trial customers and some credit-based Azure subscriptions can use the Spending Limits feature. Azure provides the Spending Limits feature to help prevent you from exhausting the credit on your account within each billing period. If you have a credit-based subscription and you reach your configured spending limit, Azure suspends your subscription until a new billing period begins. The spending limit feature is not available for customers who aren't using credit-based subscriptions, such as Pay-As-You-Go subscribers. Use Azure Reservations Azure Reservations offer discounted prices on certain Azure products and resources. To get a discount, you reserve products and resources by paying in advance. You can pre-pay for one year or three years of use of Virtual Machines, SQL Database Compute Capacity, Azure Cosmos Database Throughput, and other Azure resources. Azure Reservations are only available to Enterprise or CSP customers and for Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions. Choose low-cost locations and regions The cost of Azure products, services, and resources can vary across locations and regions, and if possible, you should use them in those locations and regions where they cost less. Note: Some resources are metered and billed according to how much outgoing network bandwidth they consume (egress). You should provision connected resources that are bandwidth metered in the same region to reduce egress traffic between them. Research available cost-saving offers Keep up-to-date with the latest Azure customer and subscription offers, and switch to offers that provide the greatest cost-saving benefit. Apply tags to identify cost owners Tags help you manage costs associated with the different groups of Azure products and resources. You can apply tags to groups of Azure products and resources to organize billing data. For example, if you run several virtual machines for different teams, you can use tags to categorize costs by department, such as Human Resources, Marketing, or Finance, or by environment, such as Production or Test. Tags make it easy to identify groups that generate the biggest Azure costs, so you can adjust your spending accordingly.   Cost Management Cost Management is an Azure product that provides a set of tools for monitoring, allocating, and optimizing your Azure costs. The main features of the Azure Cost Management toolset include:     Reporting. Generate reports using historical data to forecast future usage and expenditure.     Data enrichment. Improve accountability by categorizing resources with tags that correspond to real-world business and organizational units.     Budgets. Create and manage cost and usage budgets by monitoring resource demand trends, consumption rates, and cost patterns.     Alerting. Get alerts based on your cost and usage budgets.     Recommendations. Receive recommendations to eliminate idle resources and to optimize the Azure resources you provision.     Price. Free to Azure customers.

Services Level Agreements Microsoft maintains its commitment to providing customers with high-quality products and services by adhering to comprehensive operational policies, standards, and practices. Formal documents known as Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) capture the specific terms that define the performance standards that apply to Azure. SLAs describe Microsoft's commitment to providing Azure customers with certain performance standards. There are SLAs for individual Azure products and services. SLAs also specify what happens if a service or product fails to perform to a governing SLA's specification. Performance Targets, Uptime and Connectivity Guarantees A SLA defines performance targets for an Azure product or service. The performance targets that a SLA defines are specific to each Azure product and service. For example, performance targets for some Azure services are expressed in terms of uptime or connectivity rates. Performance targets range from 99.9 percent to 99.99 percent A typical SLA specifics performance-target commitments that range from 99.9 percent (“three nines”) to 99.99 percent ("four nines"), for each corresponding Azure product or service. These targets can apply to such performance criteria as uptime, or response times for services. For example, the SLA for the Azure Database for MySQL service guarantees 99.99 percent uptime. The Azure Cosmos DB (Database) service SLA offers 99.99 percent uptime, which includes low-latency commitments of less than 10 milliseconds on DB read operations and less than 15 milliseconds on DB write operations. SLA downtime estimates The following table lists the potential cumulative downtime for various SLA levels over different durations:   SLA percentage         Downtime per week         Downtime per month         Downtime per year 99                                    1.68 hours                        7.2 hours                                    3.65 days 99.9                                 10.1 minutes                     43.2 minutes                              8.76 hours 99.95                                 5 minutes                        21.6 minutes                              4.38 hours 99.99                                1.01 minutes                     4.32 minutes                             52.56 minutes 99.999                              6 seconds                           25.9 seconds                           5.26 minutes   Service Credits SLAs also describe how Microsoft will respond if an Azure product or service fails to perform to its governing SLA's specification. For example, customers may have a discount applied to their Azure bill, as compensation for an under-performing Azure product or service. The table below explains this example in more detail. The first column in the table below shows monthly uptime percentage SLA targets for a single instance Azure Virtual Machine. The second column shows the corresponding service credit amount you receive, if the actual uptime is less than the specified SLA target for that month.   Monthly Uptime Percentage                  Service Credit Percentage <99.9                                                                     10 <99                                                                        25 <95                                                                       100   ✔️ Azure does not provide SLAs for many services under the Free or Shared tiers. Also, free products such as Azure Advisor do not typically have a SLA.  

Composite SLA When combining SLAs across different service offerings, the resultant SLA is a called a Composite SLA. The resulting composite SLA can provide higher or lower uptime values, depending on your application architecture. Consider an App Service web app that writes to Azure SQL Database. At the time of this writing, these Azure services have the following SLAs:     App Service Web Apps is 99.95 percent.     SQL Database is 99.99 percent.   Maximum downtime you would expect for this example application In the example above, if either service fails the whole application will fail. In general, the individual probability values for each service are independent. However, the composite SLA value for this application is: 99.95 percent × 99.99 percent = approx 99.94 percent This means the combined probability of failure value is lower than the individual SLA values. This isn't surprising, because an application that relies on multiple services has more potential failure points. Conversely, you can improve the composite SLA by creating independent fallback paths. For example, if SQL Database is unavailable, you can put transactions into a Queue for processing at a later time.   With the design shown in the image above, the application is still available even if it can't connect to the database. However, it fails if both the SQL Database and the Queue fail simultaneously. If the expected percentage of time for a simultaneous failure is 0.0001 × 0.001, i.e. (1.0 - 0.9999) x (1.0 - 0.999), the composite SLA for this combined path would be: Database *OR* Queue = 1.0 − (0.0001 × 0.001) = 99.99999 percent Therefore, the total composite SLA is: Web app *AND* (Database *OR* Queue) = 99.95 percent × 99.99999 percent = ~ 99.95 percent However, there are tradeoffs to using this approach such as, the application logic is more complex, you are paying for the queue, and there may be data-consistency issues which you need to consider.  

Application SLA Azure customers can use SLAs to evaluate how their Azure solutions meet their business requirements and the needs of their clients and users. By creating your own SLAs, you can set performance targets to suit your specific Azure application. When creating an Application SLA consider the following:     Identify workloads. A workload is a distinct capability or task that is logically separated from other tasks, in terms of business logic and data storage requirements. Each workload has different requirements for availability, scalability, data consistency, and disaster recovery. To ensure that application architecture meets your business requirements, define target SLAs for each workload. Account for the cost and complexity of meeting availability requirements, in addition to application dependencies.     Plan for usage patterns. Usage patterns also play a role in requirements. Identify differences in requirements during critical and non-critical periods. For example, a tax-filing application can't fail during a filing deadline. To ensure uptime, plan redundancy across several regions in case one fails. Conversely, to minimize costs during non-critical periods, you can run your application in a single region.     Establish availability metrics — mean time to recovery (MTTR) and mean time between failures (MTBF). MTTR is the average time it takes to restore a component after a failure. MTBF is how long a component can reasonably expect to last between outages. Use these measures to determine where to add redundancy and to determine service-level agreements (SLAs) for customers.     Establish recovery metrics — recovery time objective and recovery point objective (RPO). RTO is the maximum acceptable time an application can be unavailable after an incident. RPO is the maximum duration of data loss that is acceptable during a disaster. To derive these values, conduct a risk assessment and make sure you understand the cost and risk of downtime or data loss in your organization.     Implement resiliency strategies. Resiliency is the ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function. Implement resiliency design patterns, such as isolating critical resources, using compensating transactions, and performing asynchronous operations whenever possible.     Build availability requirements into your design. Availability is the proportion of time your system is functional and working. Take steps to ensure that application availability conforms to your service-level agreement. For example, avoid single points of failure, decompose workloads by service-level objective, and throttle high-volume users. Understand your app requirements Building an efficient and reliable Azure solution requires knowing your workload requirements. You can then select Azure products and services, and provision resources according to those requirements. It's important to understand the Azure SLAs that define performance targets for the Azure products and services within your solution. This understanding will help you create achievable Application SLAs. In a distributed system, failures will happen. Hardware can fail. The network can have transient failures. It's rare for an entire service or region to experience a disruption, but even this must be planned for. Resiliency Resiliency is the ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function. It's not about avoiding failures, but responding to failures in a way that avoids downtime or data loss. The goal of resiliency is to return the application to a fully functioning state following a failure. High availability and disaster recovery are two crucial components of resiliency. When designing your architecture you need to design for resiliency, and you should perform a Failure Mode Analysis (FMA). The goal of an FMA is to identify possible points of failure and to define how the application will respond to those failures. Cost and complexity vs. high availability Availability refers to the time that a system is functional and working. Maximizing availability requires implementing measures to prevent possible service failures. However, devising preventative measures can be difficult and expensive, and often results in complex solutions. As your solution grows in complexity, you will have more services depending on each other. Therefore, you might overlook possible failure points in your solution if you have several interdependent services. [!Tip] For example: A workload that requires 99.99 percent uptime shouldn't depend upon a service with a 99.9 percent SLA. Most providers prefer to maximize the availability of their Azure solutions by minimizing downtime. However, as you increase availability, you also increase the cost and complexity of your solution. [!Tip] For example: An SLA that defines an uptime of 99.999% only allows for about 5 minutes of total downtime per year. The risk of potential downtime is cumulative across various SLA levels, which means that complex solutions can face greater availability challenges. Therefore, how critical high-availability is to your requirements will determine how you handle the addition of complexity and cost to your application SLAs. Considerations for defining application SLAs If your application SLA defines four 9's (99.99%) performance targets, recovering from failures by manual intervention may not be enough to fulfill your SLA. Your Azure solution must be self-diagnosing and self-healing instead. It is difficult to respond to failures quickly enough to meet SLA performance targets above four 9's. Carefully consider the time window against which your application SLA performance targets are measured. The smaller the time window, the tighter the tolerances. If you define your application SLA as hourly or daily uptime, you need to understand these tighter tolerances might not allow for achievable performance targets. ✔️ Performance targets about 99.99% are going to be very difficult to achieve.

Walkthrough-Calculate Composite SLAs In this walkthrough, we will determine services SLA uptime percentages and then calculate the application composite SLA uptime percentage. Task 1: Determine the SLA uptime percentage values for an application In this task, we will determine the SLA uptime percentage values for an example appliation. Task 2: Calculate the Application Composite SLA percentage uptime In this task, we will calculate the application composite SLA percentage uptime. Congratulations! You have determined the SLA uptime percentages for each of the services in our sample application and then calculated the composite SLA uptime percentage for the application.   Public and private preview features Microsoft offers previews of Azure services, features, and functionality for evaluation purposes. With Azure Previews, you can test pre-release features, products, services, software, and even regions. Previews allow users early access to functionality. Additionally, users providing feedback on the preview features helps Microsoft improve the Azure service. Categories There are two categories of preview that are available:     Private preview - An Azure feature is available to certain Azure customers for evaluation purposes.     Public preview - An Azure feature is available to all Azure customers for evaluation purposes. Azure Preview Terms and Conditions Azure feature previews are available with their own terms and conditions. The terms and conditions are specific to each Azure preview. All preview-specific terms and conditions supplement your existing Azure service agreement. ✔️ Some previews aren't covered by customer support.

Try This - Access preview features You can access publicly available Preview features directly via the Azure portal. Preview - New Services You can view preview services by doing the following     Sign into the Azure portal     Click Create a resource     Type preview in the search box and press Enter     A list of services is returned and displayed for you to browse through. You can select one to learn more about it, and also create an instance of the service, then try it out. Preview - New Functionality/Features within an existing service Some preview features relate to a specific area of an existing Azure Service. These preview features are accessible as you deploy, configure and manage the service. One such example is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), where you can view preview functionality available within AKS by doing the following.     Sign into Azure portal     Open, Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) then click Create Kubernetes service button     Under, Cluster Details > Kubernetes version section expand the drop-down list to display the versions.     The latest version 1.14.0 is listed as currently in preview 1.14.0 (preview). It's being made available to provide new functionality in AKS and allow testing. ✔️ You may choose to use an Azure preview service in production. Remember, the preview feature or functionality may not yet be ready for production deployments. Make sure you're aware of any limitations around its use before deploying to production.

Access Azure portal preview You can access preview features that are specific to the Azure portal from the https://preview.portal.azure.com page. Typical portal preview features provide performance, navigation, and accessibility improvements to the Azure portal interface.   Providing Feedback Azure customers can provide feedback on the preview features they've tested by sending a smile in the portal. Or customers can post ideas and suggestions on the Azure portal feedback forum. You can revert to the default Azure portal by going to the https://portal.azure.com page.   ✔️ There is a Azure portal feedback forum. ✔️ For more information about Azure portal preview features, see Get early access to the newest Azure portal features.   General Availability Once a feature is evaluated and tested successfully, it may release to customers as part of Azure. In other words, the feature may be made available for all Azure customers. A feature released to all Azure customers typically goes to General Availability or GA.   The above image outlines the general process for features and bugs during the development lifecycle. It's common for features to move from Azure preview features to GA, based on customer evaluation and feedback. ✔️ Learn about updates and new product features on the Azure announcements blog.   Try This - Monitoring Service and Feature Updates   Go to the Azure updates page for information about the latest updates to Azure products, services, and features, as well as product roadmaps and announcements. From the Azure updates page, you can:     View details about all Azure updates.     See which updates are in general availability, Preview, or Development.     Browse updates by product category or update type, by using the provided dropdown lists.     Search for updates by keyword by entering search terms into a text-entry field.     Subscribe to get Azure update notifications by RSS.     Access the Microsoft Connect page to read Azure product news and announcements.   Walkthrough-Access Azure Preview features In this walkthrough, we will access and identify Azure preview services and features, and view the latest Azure updates information. Task 1: Access preview services and features In this task, we will review Marketplace Preview features. Task 2: Review the Azure Updates page In this task, we will review the Azure Updates page. Congratulations! You have accessed and identified Azure preview services and features, and viewed the latest Azure updates information.