Load Testing GA, AKS free tier & ChatGPT Premium | Azure This Week

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.