Azure Technical News (March 2018)
Here you have the latest Azure news in a concise post so that you get at a glance the most important stuff. This month was strong in IaaS news, but do not miss the innovations around SQL, the team is doing an awesome job. The absolute highlight of the month in my opinion is the maturity of availability zones in Azure.
Azure generic
- Azure Availability Zones now available for the most comprehensive resiliency strategy
- New Microsoft Azure regions available for Australia and New Zealand
- Microsoft releases automation for HIPAA/HITRUST compliance
Management
- Introducing a new way to purchase Azure monitoring services
- Azure Monitor–General availability of multi-dimensional metrics APIs
- The next generation of Azure Alerts has arrived
- Announcing Azure Service Health general availability – configure your alerts today
- Support for tags in cost management APIs is now available
- Announcing Terraform availability in the Azure Marketplace
- Update management, inventory, and change tracking in Azure Automation now generally available
- Faster Metric Alerts for Logs now in limited public preview
IaaS
- Compute
- Storage
- Soft delete for Azure Storage Blobs now in public preview
- Announcing the general availability of Azure Files share snapshot
- Project Denali to define flexible SSDs for cloud-scale applications
- Announcing backup and restore performance improvements and support for large disk backup
- Announcing Storage Service Encryption with customer managed keys general availability
- Networking
- Application Security Groups now generally available in all Azure regions
- The new Azure Load Balancer – 10x scale increase (standard SKU)
- Azure DNS Private Zones now available in public preview
- SONiC, the network innovation powerhouse behind Azure
- Visibility into network activity with Traffic Analytics - now in public preview
Security and IAM
- Azure Security Center and discovery of partner solutions
- 7 month retirement notice: Access Control Service
- Heuristic DNS detections in Azure Security Center
- Azure’s layered approach to physical security
- Just-in-Time VM Access is generally available
Apps
- Create Service Fabric Clusters from Visual Studio now available
- Improved multi-member Blockchain networks now available on Azure
- Serverless computing recipes for your cloud applications
- Build Spring Boot 2.0 apps with Azure Starters and new VSCode extensions
- Public preview of Java on App Service, built-in support for Tomcat and OpenJDK
- New app usage monitoring capabilities in Application Insights
Data
- SQL
- Migrate your databases to a fully managed service with Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
- Preview: SQL Database Transparent Data Encryption with Azure Key Vault configuration checklist
- A flexible new way to purchase Azure SQL Database (vCores)
- Improvements to SQL Elastic Pool configuration experience
- Columnstore support in Standard tier Azure SQL Databases
- Azure SQL Database offers preview of zone redundant Premium databases and elastic pools
- Introducing SQL Information Protection for Azure SQL Database and on-premises SQL Server!
- SQL Database: Long-term backup retention preview includes major updates
- Modernize index maintenance with Resumable Online Index Rebuild
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse now generally available in all Azure regions worldwide
- Unlock your data’s potential with Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Databricks
- MySQL and PostgreSQL
- Azure Redis Cache feature updates
- Accelerate Data Warehouse Modernization to Azure with Informatica’s AI-Driven Platform
- Ingest, prepare, and transform using Azure Databricks and Data Factory
- Implementation patterns for big data and data warehouse on Azure
- Azure Event Hubs integration with Apache Spark now generally available
- Azure Data Lake launches in the West Europe region
- Azure Data Lake tools for VS Code now supports job view and job monitoring
IoT
- Azure IoT Hub is driving down the cost of IoT (basic tier)
- How to get support for Azure IoT SDK
- A digital transformation Journey featuring Contoso Manufacturing and Azure IoT
AI
- BigDL Spark deep learning library VM now available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace
- Using artificial intelligence to analyze roads
- Text Recognition for Video in Microsoft Video Indexer
- New machine-assisted text classification on Content Moderator now in public preview
- Microsoft and Esri launch Geospatial AI on Azure
Have fun!
Daniel