Azure Technical News (January 2018)

After the Christmas break 2018 is now moving fast, and the amount of new information to process is keeping cloud professionals busy. To wake up, the announced Intel CPU vulnerability brought a bunch of upgrades in every cloud, including Azure. Other than that, very interesting announcements all over the Azure services portfolio. This blog post has been conceived so that you get a quick overview over all of them.

Azure generic

• Enhancements to Cost Management APIs
• Enhancements to Azure Budgets API supporting Resource Groups and Usage Budgets
• Announcing the general availability of Azure Event Grid
• Announcing the extension of Azure IP Advantage to Azure Stack

Management

• Azure and Ansible News:
  • Ansible in Azure Cloud Shell
  • Ansible extension for Visual Studio Code
• ITSM Connector for Azure is now generally available
• The Classic portal is history
• Change the subscription AAD directory (tenant) in the Azure portal
• Expanded options for accessing Cloud Shell

IaaS

• Compute:
  • Securing Azure customers from CPU vulnerability
  • Zone Redundant Virtual Machine Scale Sets now available in public preview
  • Accelerated Spark on GPU-enabled clusters in Azure
  • Keeping your environment secure with Update Management
  • Accelerate innovation with Microsoft Azure Databricks
• Network:
  • Network Watcher Connection Troubleshoot now generally available
  • Virtual Network Service Endpoints and Firewalls for Azure Storage now generally available
  • Azure ExpressRoute updates – New partnerships, monitoring and simplification
  • NSGs:
    • Public preview: Application security groups in all regions
    • General availability: Augmented rules for NSGs
    • General availability: Service tags for NSGs
  • Maximize your VM’s Performance with Accelerated Networking – now generally available for both Windows and Linux
• Storage
  • Azure Storage SDKs for Python, Ruby and PHP now generally available
  • Azure Zone Redundant Storage in public preview
  • Announcing integration of Azure Backup into VM create experience
  • Comprehensive monitoring for Azure Site Recovery now generally available
  • New functions in Azure Site Recovery for VMware:
    • OVF-based ASR VM deployment
    • New Web portal in configuration server
    • Fewer firewall rules required
  • Launching the Azure Storage Solution showcase
  • Azure Backup now supports BEK-encrypted Azure virtual machines

Security and IAM

• Integrate Azure Security Center alerts into SIEM solutions
• Azure Security Center and Microsoft Web Application Firewall Integration
• How Azure Security Center helps analyze attacks using Investigation and Log Search
• Azure Security Center adds support for custom security assessments

Apps

• February version updates for PHP on App Service
• Migration checklist when moving to Azure App Service
• New Best Practices documentation: Designing, building, and operating microservices on Azure
• DevOps:
  • Jenkins news in Azure
  • Managing Azure Secrets on GitHub Repositories

Data

• SQL:
  • Using the MySQL sys schema to optimize and maintain a database
  • Using EXPLAIN to profile slow queries in Azure Database for MySQL
  • Compatibility Level 140 is now the default for Azure SQL Database
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse, the cost benefits of an on-demand data warehousing
• Azure Data Factory:
  • New Azure Data Factory self-paced hands-on lab for UI
  • Azure Data Factory: Visual Tools enabled in public preview
• Analysis Services:
  • Azure Analysis Services now available in East US, West US 2, and more
  • Asynchronous refresh with the REST API for Azure Analysis Services
  • Azure Analysis Services features on Azure Friday
• Lambda Architecture using Azure #CosmosDB: Faster performance, Low TCO, Low DevOps
• New in Stream Analytics: General availability of sub-streams, query compatibility, and more
• Azure Data Lake tools integrates with VSCode Data Lake Explorer and Azure Account

IoT

• Announcing IoT extension for Azure CLI 2.0
• Manage and Auto-scale your IoT solution with a predictable IoT Cloud and Durable Functions
• Build richer apps with your time series data
• New functionality in Time Series Insights explorer
  • TSI is GA
  • TSI supports new accessibility features
  • Easier export of aggregate event data
• Whitepaper: Selecting the right secure hardware for your IoT deployment

AI

• How is AI for video different from AI for images
• Cognitive Services - Availability of SDKs for the latest Bing Search APIs
• Azure Search enterprise security: Data encryption and user-identity access control

Have fun!
Daniel