I'm David Tucker for A Cloud Guru and  this is Azure This Week. Wait, wait,   before you even say it. I know, you've missed  us. We're back after the company-wide holiday.   And it's a good thing because we have  exciting new Azure news to get to. We'll   be talking through announcements, including  the general availability of VM Applications,   an even easier way to get started with IoT  Central, with the new guided tour experience.   And two new capabilities in AKS, including auto  blocking the deployment of vulnerable images,   as well as the new AKS node pool user start  stop capability. There might also be some  

IPv6 news I'll toss in somewhere along  the way as well. Let's get to the news. Oh, and if you want to always  know about all of the amazing   Azure news throughout the entire  year, hit that subscribe button. First up, we have some exciting news for those of  you that have been watching VM Applications. This   service has now transitioned to being generally  available. Now, if you're new to VM Applications,   this service enables you to store your VM-based  applications in the Azure Compute Gallery. It  

provides management of those packages,  including versioning, handling security,   and securing those packages. Nope,  I didn't say it right. So I'm gonna   have to go back and redo this section. Now  it provides management of those packages,   including versioning. It handles securing those  packages by only giving access to who you specify,   and ultimately letting you leverage Virtual  Machine Scale Sets for deployments. Now,   since this service is generally available, you  can integrate it into your production workloads   today. Follow the link in the description for  more information on how you can create and upload  

your applications, as well as information  on how to leverage them in a deployment. Next up, getting started with an IoT project has  its complexities. It's not as easy as setting up a   web application or a REST API. Now, since you have  to deal with connecting devices and configuring   communication, and handling real-time data, it  can potentially limit the number of developers   that are willing to...no stop looking at the  microphone. It can potentially limit the number   of developers that are willing to dive in and give  it a try. Microsoft is now providing a generally  

available resource with the guided tour experience  to streamline the process of getting started with   Azure IoT Central. Now, how do they overcome  the hurdles I mentioned earlier? Well they   let you use your phone as a device to explore  the capabilities of the service. That's right,   you can actually start an IoT project  without buying 20 Raspberry PI devices,   or even having to worry about the OS  that your connected device will run on. Wait, wait, is that true? Cuz that's, that's how  I start all of my IoT pro...What's even better   here is that Microsoft is letting you try this  out for free. According to Microsoft, an app,  

a cell phone, and five minutes are all you  need to start for free. So check it out today. Is 2022 the year of picking up cloud computing  knowledge? Then check out ACGs free plan. You   get access to free courses and quizzes, plus  learning paths and original series content.   There's even free course content. Right now  you can try Intro to Serverless on Azure,   or perhaps you'd prefer Azure Active Directory  Deep Dive. You don't even need a credit card  

to sign up. You can just jump straight in and  start. I'll leave the links in the description. Next up we have a pair of AKS announcements  for all of you in the Kubernetes crowd. First up AKS is now providing a way for you  to prevent your organization from deploying   an image that has known vulnerabilities. Now  I should mention though, before I get too far,   that this capability is only available as a public   preview. So I'd keep it away from your  production workloads for just a bit. Now, next up, you now have the ability to  start and stop an AKS node pool and no,   I don't mean scale it down to zero.  You can truly just stop the pool,  

but keep all of the other configuration  in place. This AKS announcement is indeed   generally available, so you can  feel free to go all in on this one. Finally, Microsoft has announced that,  and I quote, "Effective July 31st, 2022,   all Public IPv6 Addresses and Public IPv6  Prefixes will be free." Free you say yes,   free as in 'subpar t-shirts at a  tech conference vendor booth' free.   Now I think we can all agree that free is a  great way to end this episode. Don't forget  

that the cloud never slows down, so you can come  back next week for even more Azure announcements   here on Azure This Week. Be sure to let us  know if you have any comments below and if   you've enjoyed this, hit the like, and share  it with others. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.