Good day Cloud Guruss and welcome to Azure. This week I'm Wayne Hoggett and I'll be taking you through what's new and interesting in the world of Azure. Now, after taking a break from our usual format last week to look at PS Rule for Azure and defender for DevOps, we have a little bit to catch up on. In this episode, we'll take a look at new deployment options for Azure Container Apps, Azure Bastion Shareable Links, and we'll take a look at the latest Azure freebies. Let's jump in. Microsoft has announced a few new ways you can deploy Azure Container Apps.

The first of these features currently in preview allows you to deploy Azure Container Apps using just source code. So there's no need to provide a docker file and all the instructions to create your container image. And this is achieved using the simple AZ container up command from the Azure CLI. In the background. The command will deploy all of the required resources for your container app, and if your target is GitHub as a source, it will even configure continuous delivery. And that brings me to the other deployment option.

In addition to GitHub actions that powered this continuous delivery, there were now Azure pipeline tasks for Azure DevOps to build and deploy Azure container apps. Now all of your favorite source code languages are supported including .net, node, php, python, ruby, and go. Let's take a quick look at a demo of this new feature. All right, so here I am in the Azure portal and I've gone ahead and launched Cloud Shell.

Let's grab the source code for Microsoft Simple RSS feed, Ridder sample application, and we'll clone that down locally using the Git clone command and providing the repository url. And then we need to install or upgrade the Azure container apps extension for the Azure cli, and we can do that using the az extension add command. Specify the name of container app and specify that we want to upgrade and then we are good to go. Let's deploy our container application using just one line from the Azure CLI and we'll do that using the AZ container app up command. Specify the name for our application, specify the local source, and specify that we want external access.

And you'll notice I didn't even provide a resource group or location. Those will just be automatically selected for me. This couldn't be any easier. And then after a few minutes, our app is deployed. Let's check it out. This looks great. Let's paste in the A Cloud Guru blog RSS feed url. There you go. It works just like it says on the box. Very cool.

Microsoft has also recently announced Azure Bastion Shareable Links in public preview. And this new feature enables connectivity to a target VM or a VM scale set using a simple shareable link. With this feature, you no longer need to provide access to the Azure portal to grant remote access using HTTPS to a VM or a VM scale set using Azure Bastion. Now I'm a huge fan of this feature. I can't remember how many times I've needed to provide temporary secure access to a virtual machine, so a software vendor or developer can provide support for the applications running on my virtual machine. You wanna check this out? Let's do it.

All right. And here we are in the Azure portal and we can see we have a VM named VM one and an Azure Bastion host. Let's say we need to grant temporary secure remote access for a vendor to VM one. First we'll select our Bastion host and on the configuration page, we need to make sure that we're using the standard tier and we need to make sure that shareable links are enabled. Then we can select shareable links and we can go ahead and select add, select the virtual machine that we wanna provide remote access to, and then click apply. It'll just take a second to create that shareable link.

Then we can go ahead and provide that link to our vendor. And then we'll log in using our vendor login for the virtual machine. And when the vendor is done providing the remote support, you can go ahead and delete the shareable link. It really is that easy. Microsoft continues to increase the number of Azure services that are free for the first 12 months for new customers. The new services include up to a hundred gigabytes of locally redundant Azure files up to five hours of media services for live and on-demand streaming.

And Microsoft has also recently upped the number of always free Azure services from around 40 to over 55. And you'll receive the free quota for these services, whether you're on a free trial or a pay you go subscription. And some of the new services include a quota for Azure container apps, new AI and machine learning services like Metrics Advisor and speaker recognition and real time communication with Web pub sub. And speaking of free, A Cloud Guru has a range of courses that are free for the month of December. Azure courses include the AZ 900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals as part of CloudHappy, but also this month we have some interesting learning opportunities with our Cloud Adventures, including Deploying Basic Infrastructure with the Azure CLI, and an Explorer's Guide to Azure Data Studio.

Check them out using the links in the description. Well, that's all we have time for in this episode of Azure this week. Thanks for being with me. Until next time, keep being awesome, Cloud Gurus.