Oh, you, you're already here. Well, that's  a bit awkward. I've been waiting around here   in the studio since last week, looking for  Azure news and it's been slowly dripping in   like sort of thick molasses and,  you know, that's all I've got.   I guess this means my prediction from last week  show is already proving accurate. Azure may just   have little feature updates, bug fixes and version  upgrades in 2022. Now, since you're here, let me   tell you what I did find. I have five updates  for you this week. Five. So, uh, this is Azure  

This Week. The show that promotes quantity over  quality. Wait, that doesn't sound right. Uh... The Hyperscale service tier in Azure SQL is  not only a cool name, but also the top tier   for Azure SQL when it comes to rapid scale out  and scale up, support for huge databases up to   a hundred terabytes in size, nearly instantaneous  backups and very fast restores. It's like the   supercar of the database world, a supercar the  size of a bus. Anyway, this week auto-failover   groups for Hyperscale were released in preview.  Some of the benefits you get with auto-failover   groups are: simplified management of a group  of geo-replicated databases, including ability   to failover the entire group of databases. Ability  for applications to maintain the same read, right,  

and read-only endpoints after failover. Recovery  during loss of an entire region, hope not,   through geo-failover, which can be initiated  manually or through an automatic failover policy.   And finally, readable online secondaries that can  be used for read-only workloads by connecting with   read-only listener endpoints, which remain  unchanged during geo-failovers. Pretty neat. On January 17th at 3:30 PM Eastern Time, 18th  of January 7:30 AM, Australian Eastern Time,   yours truly, Scott 'Omnibus' Pletcher, and  Matias 'The certification ninja' Anddersson   will be live on YouTube and Twitch to  give a bunch of tips on how to start   your cloud journey. Bring your questions.  We will answer. Link is in the description. Policy support for Azure Site  Recovery is now generally available.  

Once you have a Disaster Recovery policy created  for a given subscription or resource group,   all new VMs that are added to that  subscription or resource groups will have   Azure Site Recovery enabled automatically. This  can be handy to comply with company policy,   but don't forget that you pay for each of  those ASRs being enabled. Could get pricey. If you've ever used Traffic Manager, you might  know that it has an endpoint monitoring service   that evaluates the endpoints that traffic is  directed to. And this is to ensure, of course,   that traffic isn't directed to a broken endpoint,  keeping your application healthy. Now to make   sure that the capacity of the probes follows  the growth of Traffic Manager, Azure will be   increasing the number of probes deployed within  Traffic Manager's endpoint monitoring service   over the next few years. What you'll have to  do is to monitor this list of IP addresses for  

the probes to make sure you're allowed  them to work with your Traffic Manager. Is 2022 the year of picking up new cloud computing  knowledge, then check out ACG’s free plan.   My own voice even went uh-uh. Anyway, gives you access to free courses and quizzes,  plus learning paths and original series content.   The entire month of January the full courses  Introduction to Azure Virtual Desktop and   Introduction to Networking on Azure are free  as well as a bunch of other content. And  

you don’t need a credit card to sign up.  I’ll include links in the description below. Semantic Search is now in public preview,  which means you can enable it with a flick   of a switch in the Azure Portal. All right, what  is Semantic Search? Sure. It's a new feature of   Azure Cognitive Services, which can understand  user intent and rank the most relevant search   results based on the context. Yeah. So have a play  with it today using the link in the description.   Just don't search for llama rainbows again,  cuz you know what happened last time. Finally, there are a bunch of little updates  to Azure IoT Central. The limit of devices that  

can be shown on a single tile on an Azure  IoT Central dashboard has gone up from 10   to a hundred. You can now duplicate IoT dashboards  to increase the number of dashboards dramatically,   I guess. And you can now send device telemetry  in different shapes and transform the telemetry   into structured data at Azure IoT Central  Ingress. If you do a lot of IoT Central things,   you now have a few more updates to play  with. That's it. As predicted a bunch of   little updates and improvements to a bunch of  services on Azure. So next week, the incredibly  

handsome James Lee is on the show to take you  through the latest. I look forward to seeing   what he can come up with as well. I will see you  in the cloud and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.