G'day Cloud Gurus. Welcome to  Azure This Week. I'm Wayne Hoggett,   and I'll be taking you through all that's  new and interesting in the world of Azure.   In this episode, we'll take a look at  improvements to redundancy for Azure SQL Database,   DevOps improvements to Azure Static Web Apps, and  the latest changes and enhancements to the Azure   Monitor Agent. DevOps, monitoring and redundancy.  Three of my favorite topics. Let's jump in. You can now configure your Azure SQL Databases  in the general purpose service tier for zone   redundancy. This was previously reserved only for  the higher-cost business and critical tiers. And   this includes both the provision and serverless  compute tiers. Zone redundancy protects your  

databases against a wider range of Azure failures,  including datacenter outages. And because of this,   it will bump the SLA provided by Microsoft  to four 9s and a five, or 99.995%.   And because these zones are in the same region,  you still get a Recovery Point Objective,   or RPO, of zero. Which means zero data loss in the  event of a zone failure. Zone redundancy can be   added to existing databases by flicking the switch  over to zone redundant using either the Portal,   ARM templates, PowerShell, or the Azure CLI.  Adding zone redundancy will cost a bit more,   and it's only available in select regions,  with additional regions available in preview.  

So check out the details in the link to  see if it's available in your region.   Now you can go crazy with all this redundancy  by adding zone redundancy and geo-replication,   but this will increase your cost significantly.  So always remember to match the availability   of your workloads to the criticality and  impact provided by your business leaders. Did you know that you can access  some of our courses for free?   Yep. That's right. All the cloud learning and none  of the cost. There's a couple of new courses you   can try for free right now. On A Cloud Guru, we  have Identity and Access Management for Azure,  

and my Introduction to Networking on Azure course.  You don't even need a credit card to sign up,   and you can just jump straight in and  start. I'll leave links in the description. Azure Static Web Apps is one of my favorite  up-and-coming Azure server. And I say   up-and-coming because it's still a baby in the  Azure world, being only a year since general   availability. Azure Static Web Apps allows you to  easily deploy globally redundant web front ends,   and they can be easily integrated with Azure  Functions. What's really great about Azure  

Static Web Apps is their integration with modern  DevOps tools, like GitHub and Azure DevOps,   to continuously deploy your changes. Previously,  whenever you created a pull request against your   production branch, Azure Static Web Apps would  generate a preview URL. So you could take a look   at the changes before merging the pull request.  With the release of stable URLs in public preview,   you can now have a permanent preview for your  different branches of your website. Let's say   you have a long-running development branch that's  used for continuous integration, you can now have   a URL permanently set up for that branch so  you can easily preview the changes. Lovely.

The Azure Monitor Agent is the new agent you  can deploy to your Azure Virtual Machines,   Scale Sets and Azure Arc-enabled servers to  send log and metric data to your Log Analytics   Workspace. Previously, this collection  was done by a handful of different agents,   including the Log Analytics Agent. The Log  Analytics Agent now has a retirement date of   August, 2024. This means that Microsoft  is busily adding all of the features   from the Log Analytics Agent into the new Azure  Monitor Agent. The latest of these features to   enter public preview is support for custom  text-based logs and Windows-based IIS logs.  

This is in addition to the recently added support  for Windows 10 and Windows 11 clients. What I love   about the Azure Monitor Agent is its support for  Data Collection Rules that allow you to granularly   configure which logs and metrics are collected.  And you can even hand off this responsibility   to workload teams to decentralize  your monitoring configuration efforts. Take a look at the Azure Monitor Agent. You can  run it alongside the Log Analytics Agent and see   if it supports your requirements, and make sure  you move across before the Log Analytics Agent   is retired. You'll continue to see Microsoft  adding features to the Azure Monitor Agent,  

so keep an eye on it in the coming months. Well, that's all we have time for in this episode  of Azure This Week. Thanks for being with me.   Next week we'll go even further down under and  have Lars Klint back for another round of the   latest Azure news. So be sure to tune in for that.  Until next time, keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.