Static Web Apps get even more love from Azure with long weighted support for multiple deployment environments. Creators of custom VM images can now share their work with the world. Plus you can now access Azure Storage Shares directly from your Windows apps on the App Service. It's an exciting time in the Azure world. Hi, I'm Eric Gross. Welcome you to another episode of Azure This Week. Static Web Applications are gaining popularity in the it world.

You've probably noticed, with both Lars and Wayne discussing recent updates over the last couple of weeks. And it makes sense. Who really wants to manage those pesky web servers? In Azure Static Web Apps, you can deploy serverless apps and APIs using many of the popular frameworks out there, like Blazeor, React or Vue. Up until now though, you only had one deployment environment to use for your static web apps production. That just changed because support from multiple deployment environments is in preview for Azure Static Web Apps. You'll still get a temporary preview of your change on a pull request, with a URL that expires when the PR is closed.

But now you have other permanent options for deployment environments. They can be set up based on your branch names or your own naming scheme. Go crazy with them. Why not have environments for dev, QA, UAT, staging, A/B testing and prod? The sky's the limit. Or rather your Azure budget is a limit. For a while now,

creators of custom virtual machine images have been able to maintain private repos of their images in the Azure Compute Gallery. But what if you wanna share those images more broadly? You can now make your VM images available to the general public, with the preview release of the Community Gallery in Azure Compute Gallery. This opens up a lot of different possibilities. Whether you wanna share your non-commercial VM builds to a larger audience, or you wanna make specific build versions of your VMs available for specific timeframes, or even provide your most enthusiastic users with daily or nightly builds. You now have a huge degree of control. If you're in the custom VM business,

I'm waiting to see if someone will make a custom build with TurboPascal on it, just so I can revisit the last century. Great. Now I feel old. All right, let's move on. Is 2022 the year of picking up cloud computing knowledge? Then check out ACG's 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 Identity and Access Management for Azure, or perhaps you'd prefer Introduction to Networking on Azure. 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. Finally, let's jump over to the world of Windows development.

The Azure App Service has always been your best bet for hosting your .net web apps, but when your cloud-based app needs access to a network share, you've had to come up with some ungainly workarounds. That experience stands to get a lot better with the public preview of Azure Storage, as a share for your Windows apps on the app service. Combined with the Azure File Service, you can now put a cloud-based share location inside your virtual network and access it from code just like you would in an on-premise deployment. This lets you put more attention on the critical business logic you're busy creating and less on clunky systems just to give your app access to a network share. And the best thing is that as your app scales out,

every instance will have access to this connected Azure File share. This shows us that Windows developers are still getting love from Microsoft. Are you gonna jump into the world of static web apps? Gonna move your network shares into the cloud for your Windows apps? Join our Discord channel and let me know what you think while you're there. You can also chat with other students and ACG people, and get help for your cloud journey. You'll find a link below in the description. See you next week,

and keep being awesome cloud gurus.