Azure Insights: Shared Disks; Istio; Firewall VNets; PowerShell for Docker; Microsoft exams

Microsoft Azure pros share their latest insights on working with Shared Disks, deploying Istio high availability, Firewall and VNets, PowerShell in a Docker container and more.

Making sense of Shared Disks

Writing on 2 Azure, Cor den Boer took time to analyze Microsoft's public preview of Azure Shared Disks. As a result, users will be able to move clustered apps based on Windows Server over to Azure. Shared Disks supports scale-out file servers, RDS User Profile Disks, SQL Server and SAP ASCS/SCS servers or Linux-based clustered systems.

For now, Shared Disks are only available with Premium SSD disks with greater than 256 Gb P15, although Ultra disk support is set to come out soon. Users need to preset the number of nodes that can be attached to a disk in advance. Boer noted pricing and drew attention to a few limitations, such as a lack of availability outside the West Central US region or the need to deploy all VMs on a shared disk in the same proximity placement group.

Managing a high availability control plane for Azure Kubernetes Service