G'day, everyone. Wayne Hoggett here and  welcome to Azure This Week, where it's   our job to go through the pages and pages of  Microsoft announcements and service updates,   pick out all the top stories and share them with  you. It seems Microsoft got back to work this week   and there's plenty to share. So I've picked a few  updates that I think you'll enjoy. We'll take a   look at updates to Azure Kubernetes Service that  will benefit anyone running Windows containers.   An improvement to log-based alerts in Azure  Monitor. And we'll take a look at improvements  

to certificates in Azure API Management. All  of this coming right up in Azure This Week. Microsoft has announced general availability of  one-minute frequency for Azure Monitor Log Alerts.   So why is this important? Well, Azure Monitor can  generate alerts based on either metrics or logs,   and metrics are numerical data recorded over time.  These include things like processor, memory usage,   or the number of users accessing your  service. Because metrics were so lightweight,   you could receive alerts relatively quickly. Logs  are richer. They include data based on log events  

generated by Azure, or your workloads. Sometimes  logs contain data that is really important to know   as soon as possible, but up until this feature  was available, you could only generate alerts   every five minutes. An example might be a  log entry warning for an application that   is not performing as expected. Well, now with  one-minute frequency, you can get alerted faster,   which means you'll likely have less  downtime. And that's always a good thing. Microsoft continues to deliver updates to Azure  Kubernetes Service. And I think we'll see this  

trend continue. While containers were born in  Linux, Microsoft is determined to make Windows   a great choice for your containerized workloads.  To help bridge the gap between Linux and Windows   on AKS, Microsoft has announced containerd  runtime support for Windows. Containerd is   an industry standard container runtime that  is used across all the major cloud vendors.   Containerd offers improved launch  time and consumes less resources.  

This means you'll be able to run more container  instances on the same number of worker loads.   And when you need to scale your workloads to meet  demand, it'll happen faster. Pretty neat right? So many times I've seen outages  due to certificates expiring.   I used to have calendar  reminders set up weeks in advance   to remind me before a certificate was due for  renewal, because all too often they were missed. Microsoft has even had a global Azure storage  outage due to an expiring certificate. Managed  

certificates are a great solution to this  problem. It works by automatically managing   the renewal of your certificates to ensure you  don't get downtime when your certificates expire.   Microsoft has announced support for managed  certificates on Azure API Management in preview.   With this feature, Microsoft provides a managed  certificate for your custom domain. So you never   need to worry about API management certificates  again. And you wanna know what the best part is?  

It's free. Just remember, preview features aren't  ready for production workloads. So test it out   now, contain your enthusiasm, and wait for general  availability before you roll it into production.   Well folks, that's a wrap for Azure This Week, the  show powered by the same Aussie summers that power   Microsoft's carbon neutral data centers. Be sure  to check out next week's episode, where you'll be   joined once again by the legendary, Lego-rific,  Lars Klint. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.