G'day Cloud Gurus. I'm Wayne Hoggett, and I'll be  taking you through what's new and interesting in   the world of Azure. Welcome to Azure This Week. In  this episode, we'll take a look at improvements to   backend options for Azure Static Web Apps, Cosmos  DB continuous backup, and Windows Admin Center   support for Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure.  Okay. That was a mouthful. Let's jump in. So it's been at least a few hours since we  last spoke about Azure Static Web Apps. In   case you missed it, Azure Static Web Apps is one  of Microsoft's most exciting new Azure services.  

Don't worry, Azure Arc I still love you too. Azure  Static Web Apps combines all of the things we love   about DevOps, combined with globally-distributed  static web hosting, using basically any framework   you can imagine, including support for both  JavaScript and C#. One of the great features about   Azure Static Web Apps is that it integrates your  static frontend web content with your backend API,   and enables seamless routing. Up until now, you  could use managed Azure functions to achieve this,   or you could bring your own Azure functions.  While now the possibilities for backend APIs has   grown to include Azure API Management, Azure App  Service, and even the new Azure Container Apps.  

Now all of these backends are currently in  preview, but it's great to see even the newest   Azure Container Apps being supported  so soon after general availability. Ensuring your Cosmos DB databases are backed  up, has historically been a bit of a challenge.   The first option for Cosmos DB backups is to use  periodic backups. Periodic backups could be taken   as frequently as once every hour, or  as infrequently as once every 24 hours.   And you could retain these backups for  anywhere between two hours and 30 days,   depending on your interval. There are some  problems with periodic backups though.  

Firstly, they are only a point in time, missing  any changes between the backup intervals.   And secondly, you need to raise a support  ticket every time you want to do a restore.   And with periodic backups, only your first two  backups are free. You could always do something   like Azure Data Factory or the change feed to  manage your own backups. But that's obviously less   than ideal, and not something we'd expect from a  service like Cosmos DB. Around August last year,  

Microsoft released continuous backups for Cosmos  DB giving us 30 days of continuous backups   and self-service restore. But the free backup  capabilities remained limited to periodic backups.   Well, good news. Free continuous backups  for up to seven days is now in preview,   which will hopefully start to give everyone a  migration path away from point-in-time backups. Every month A Cloud Guru has a number of totally  free courses, which change over time. This month   is Azure month. So we have a bunch of Azure  courses free for you, including Introduction  

to Governance and Compliance on Azure, Intro  to Serverless on Azure, and Azure Storage Deep   Dive. And a free account is genuinely free. No  credit card is needed, just content delivered. Alright, so this story is a little older,   but as a hybrid cloud guru, I  couldn't possibly leave it out. If you, like many enterprises, have  a large number of Windows Servers,   be they running on premises, in Azure, other  public clouds, or even at branch offices,   you'll know that it can be time consuming  to manage and maintain these servers.   Azure Arc allows you to bring together  all of these servers and manage them in   one place. Microsoft has been adding a ton of  features to Azure Arc over the last few months.   The latest feature to be added is support  for Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal   for Azure Arc-enabled servers and Azure stack  HCI. What you might not know about this though,  

is that along with all the standard management  and monitoring you get with Windows Admin Center,   using it through the Azure Portal, combined  with Azure Arc, allows Remote PowerShell and   Remote Desktop connectivity to your on-premises  servers without inbound network connectivity   to those servers, using something like a VPN.  And in my opinion, that's quite neat. Expect   the updates for Azure Arc to keep flowing in and  stay tuned to Azure This Week for all the latest. Have you tried Cosmos DB? Azure Static Web Apps?  What about Azure Arc? What did you think? Let us   know in the comments, community Discord, or  the Azure This Week forum on A Cloud Guru.   Well, that's all we have time for in this episode  of Azure This Week. Thanks for being with me.   And until next time, keep  being awesome Cloud Gurus.