Hello Cloud Gurus. I'm Matt Ulasien and welcome  to another fresh edition of Azure This Week. In   last week's episode, we got to watch Lars Klint  squirm a bit as there wasn't much in the way of   news. However, he did give a fantastic rundown on  why you should get Azure certified. If you haven't   already, I highly encourage checking that video  out, and we will include a link in a description   if you want to do so. That said, we do have a few  news items this week that are quite interesting.   We'll be covering Azure's new Load Testing  Service to easily stress test your application,   and also cover the new free tier available  in Azure Kubernetes Service. We'll also have   even more ChatGPT news. Come on, I know  you love it, and a roundup of the latest  

free Azure courses available for the month  of February. Alright, let's get started.   Starting with Azure News. First up, we have  the new Azure Load Testing Service that's now   generally available. When developing your  applications, you need to know that your   application will perform well even under a lot of  stress. So stress testing your application before   your customers get their hands on it is really  important. With that in mind, Azure just announced  

the general availability of the Azure Load Testing  Service, which is a fully-managed service that   uses the Apache Jmeter framework to simulate  heavy load on your applications. Azure Load   Testing is intended to use within your development  pipeline to find performance and scalability   issues before it hits production. Afterwards,  you then get access to a dashboard to help   identify performance bottlenecks so you can take  action and have a more resilient application.   Azure Kubernetes Service provides a managed  control plane for managing different Kubernetes   workloads. Until recently, you had to pay for  usage of this control plane in addition to the   VMs that act as your nodes, which makes AKS  a bit more expensive to use, even if you're   just testing an app for non-production  uses, like well, learning about AKS.  

Good news is that Azure has just announced two  new pricing options for AKS in the standard and   free tiers. The standard tier is essentially the  previous normal tier that you pay for, which also   comes with a guaranteed uptime SLA and support for  a huge number of nodes up to 5,000. Ironically,   many customers who are already using the normal  tier, were not aware of the SLA support option   of which Microsoft hopes to build awareness with  the introduction of these two new separate tiers.   By contrast, the new free tier provides the exact  same functionality with the exception that there   is no guaranteed SLA, and it only supports up  to 10 individual nodes in a cluster. The main   benefit is that you do not have to pay for all the  different Kubernetes management bits when using   the free tier. With these new pricing options,  you can now choose what's essentially a lower  

price environment to learn and experiment with  AKS or run different proof-of-concept tests.   Now, keep in mind that you do still have to  pay for the VMs that you're using as nodes,   but that's it. When you're then ready to  deploy a cluster to full-time production,   you can then switch over to the standard  tier for that more guaranteed uptime   and higher scaling potential. So  more choices always a good thing.   Next up, we have even more ChatGPT news. Yes,  it's the gift that keeps giving all year round.   OpenAI just announced that they will be rolling  out a premium version of ChatGPT as a $20 per   month subscription. This premium subscription  will come with a few benefits like priority  

access to ChatGPT, even during peak times, faster  response time, and priority access to new features   and improvements once they come out. Now, in my  own experience, I have noticed that ChatGPT has   lately gotten a little bit slower as it becomes  more popular. Sometimes it simply hasn't been   available at all during those peak usage times. Those who are interested in getting in on this   new premium access can join a wait list, which  we will have linked in the video description,   from which interested users will be invited to  sign up over the course of the next few weeks.   Now is guaranteed access to ChatGPT really worth  $20 a month? Well, that depends entirely on how   much you intend to use it. If you just play with  it occasionally, it's probably not gonna be worth  

it. However, those who use it as an essential tool  for their daily workflows like coding, writing   prompts, and more, it might be a worthwhile  investment for those people. Personally speaking,   I may get some use out of it and I'm currently on  the wait list to try it out. Let me know in the   comments if you'd like to see a follow up video  on that premium access once it becomes available.   So it's a new month of February, which means  that's right, new free Azure courses to make   you an Azure Guru. This month's free courses are  Creating Startup Scripts for VMs with Cloud-init,  

and Introduction to Microsoft Azure Compute.  Now, I actually created the startup script   course last year to provide a quick and easy to  understand reference for how to create startup   scripts for Linux VMs using Azure's native  cloud-init format. It cuts through a lot   of fluff and gets right to the point of how to  quickly create scripts using cloud-init modules   for a variety of startup actions. Anyway,  free courses. Go check them out. Why not?   Well, that's gonna do it for this week  Cloud Gurus. Hope you learned something   new and exciting, and be sure to join us next  week to keep up on what's new in the world   of Azure...and ChatGPT for that measure.  Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus. See ya.