Tag Archives: Preview

Microsoft Defender for Business servers preview

Microsoft announce that Defender for Business servers is now in preview, offering endpoint security for Windows and Linux servers for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s free during this preview period and will then be charged at $3 per server instance per month at General Availability, when it will be available as an Add-on licence to Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Microsoft Defender for Business.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3RZ7TVO, and a useful FAQ here: https://bit.ly/3BhF3d3.

Preview of Power Pages

Microsoft announce the preview of Power Pages, the fifth product in the Power Platform family. In common with the other members of the Power Platform family it’s a low-code solution, and enables any user to create a secure website, but with advanced capabilities for customisation by professional developers as required. This new product extends the capabilities of the Power Apps Portals product which has historically been used to create external portals quickly and easily.

There’s a free 30-day preview available, and you can find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3lEZpUT.

SQL Server 2022 in preview

Microsoft announce the preview of SQL Server 2022 for early adopters, with the public preview and general availability coming in the next year.

In terms of what’s new, there are the usual improvements to performance, security and availability that you’d expect, as well as greater integration with Azure.

The three main improvements feature Disaster Recovery in the cloud through Azure SQL Managed Instance, near real-time insights on on-premises data through Azure Synapse Link, and visibility across the entire data estate though integration with Azure Purview.

There’s a useful datasheet here: https://bit.ly/30j36Ig with links at the bottom to the announcement, an overview video, and where you can apply to join the Early Adoption Program.

Preview of Azure Spot virtual machines

Microsoft announce the preview of Azure spot virtual machines. Azure Spot VMs let you access unused Azure compute capacity at large discounts compared to pay-as-you-go prices. These VMs are evicted when Azure no longer has available compute capacity and must reallocate its resources. At that point, the VM is deallocated and no additional VM-related changes are incurred, but other resources, such as disk or network, continue to run and accrue charges.

Ideal workloads for Azure Spot VMs include:

  • development and test
  • workloads that can recover from interruptions
  • short-lived jobs which can easily be run again if the virtual machine is evicted.

Azure Spot VMs are created in the same way as regular VMs, but a flag is set at the time of creation, designating it as a Spot VM. At this point in the preview the pricing is fixed for a Spot VM, but in the future the pricing will vary based on capacity for a particular VM in a particular region. You’ll be able to choose your eviction terms: when Azure needs the capacity, or when the variable pricing reaches a maximum price that you have set.

As a comparison of pricing, for an Fsv2 VM, the pay-as-you-go price per hour is $0.163, while the Spot price is $0.065 per hour, with 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances at $0.142 and $0.1227 per hour respectively.

Find the announcement here: http://bit.ly/36O659J and there’s a useful FAQ at the bottom of this page: http://bit.ly/2tsxXBO.