James and Wayne haven't shown up yet right? Awesome. Now I thought I'll do the show this week as there are some really cool things happening. I have a new energy service from Azure. Yeah. More Private Link support and whole bunch of acronyms, like a lot.

I'm Lars Klint. This is Azure This Week and you're waiting for me to get on with it. All right I will. One of the many awesome PaaS services on Azure is API Management. It enables really quick API creation and will publish, secure, handle authentication and much more for you.

Now, while it can get expensive at times, if your API is very large or very popular, it is often worth it for the managed approach that removes a ton of maintenance from your plate. Hmm. Now the Private Link offering for API Management is finally in general availability. Oh, what is it? Right. Private Link is a feature where communications between your virtual network and the Azure API Management gateway travels over the Microsoft backbone network, privately and securely, eliminating the need to expose the service over to public internet.

Yes, this can be a requirement for many businesses and government departments. And by being able to offer it with API Management, your market for API for your API would increase or could increase at least. Now, if you want to learn more about API Management, check out the courses on Pluralsight or A Cloud Guru. Learn a thing. Did you ever think of Microsoft as an energy provider heating your house? Well, it's happening in Finland where Microsoft is planning on building a new datacenter region called Southern Finland.

The region will have all the usual availability zones, VMs, Office 365, Azure services, and much more. But the really cool thing is the way this datacenter is constructed. In a unique collaboration with Fortum Corporation, the waste heat produced in the datacenters will be converted to district heating, serving Finland's second largest city Espoo, and neighboring Kauniainen, and the municipality of Kirkkonummi. Sorry. In what to date will be the world's largest scheme to recycle waste heat from datacenters.

And that all feeds into Microsoft's intention to be carbon neutral by 2025. And it'll even be part of the plan to get rid of the last coal-fired power plant in Espoo. Now, Finland is the last of the Scandinavian countries to get their own region within Azure, although there is no word on when the new region will open for business. So I'll just make it up. It'll be in 2024.

Definitely. If you're up for a bit of fun, we have made a Tech Bingo here at Pluralsight. There are a bunch of challenges on the card. And by playing along, you will be entered for a chance to win a thousand US dollars. Now the money cash prize is only available to legal residents of United States, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain though.

Hmm. But even if you don't live in those places, you can still play along by scanning the QR code on the screen, boop, or clicking the link in the description. And you've got until April 15th. Azure HBv3 virtual machines are now upgraded to and generally available with AMD EPYC 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology, formerly codenamed "Milan-X". What? Yeah, I saw this heading as well and was as confused as I can see you are.

So let me explain. According to Microsoft, you will get 80% higher performance for CFD, 60% higher performance for EDA RTL, 50% higher performance for explicit FEA and 19% higher performance for weather simulation. That didn't help did it? Well, Azure, HBv3 series VMs with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache and InfiniBand from NVIDIA Networking delivers 2.23 to 3.88 times higher performance. What the heck? Microsoft? What, what is this? Um, Azure HBv3 are super powerful virtual machines that have enough power to calculate whether it will rain tomorrow. I think.

That'll do. Oh, uh, don't just spin one of these beasts up though. They're seriously costly. That's the news for this week. Private Link is one of those services on Azure that makes a huge difference for the security of your infrastructure, but often doesn't get a lot of attention.

It's an excellent addition to a lot of projects on Azure though. So I'll see you in the cloud. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.