Skip to main content

Differences between GA, Private and Public Preview on Azure Services and Features

By

 Let's talk about what are the main differences between Private Preview, Public Preview and General Availability (GA) of Azure Services and Features.

This topic is important when you run your workloads in production OR you manage sensitive data in production.

Remember that you SHALL NEVER use non-GA services and features for production workloads.  The purpose of Private and Public Preview is only for evaluation purposes. Except for the lack of SLA and formal support, there might be other issues that haven't been discovered or fixed yet. Think about the #ChaosDB vulnerability, which was caused by a CosmosDB feature that was in Public Preview. 

Below you can find a list of things that you might want to take into consideration:

Area

Private Preview

Public Preview

General Availability

SLA       

NO    

NO

YES        

Support

NO    

Limited

Formal support

For who is available

Available for limited no. of customers for evaluation.

Available for all customers for evaluation.

All Azure customers

Timeline

No timeline related to when will be General Available

A roadmap that is, in most of the cases, respected

Clear roadmap

Can be retired without notice

YES

In general NO.

NO

Invite base access

YES

NO

NO

How to join the program

Based on an invitation from the Product Team

Using -  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/?status=inpreview
Azure Portal for Public Previews - https://preview.portal.azure.com/

Azure Portal, no restrictions

Tips and tricks
  • Each Azure Service and Feature is on Public or Private Preview under specific terms and conditions. 
  • In most cases, Private Preview does not offer Support and the Public Preview offers limited support.
  • Sometimes a service/feature might not respect the roadmap and additional work is required. At that time, it would not go in GA or even be replaced by another service/feature.
How to access Public Preview?
The preview can be accessed from Azure Updates where there is a dedicated tag for IN PREVIEW. OR you could use the Azure Portal for Preview where Public Preview features are available and ready to be used. 

How to disable Preview features?
  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. Open the New blade.
  3. Enter the word preview.
  4. You will see a list of available preview features, with the word enabled next to each feature you have activated.
  5. Choose disable to turn off a preview feature.
Source: Daryusman


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

By
After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(
Post a Comment
Read more

Azure AD and AWS Cognito side-by-side

By
In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account. Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more. The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users.  This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.  Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be modified
Post a Comment
Read more

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

By
Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see
8 comments
Read more