This series of blog posts includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft in the last two weeks.
In this dedicated post you can find the most important announcements and major updates officialized last week during Microsoft Ignite 2020 conference.
Azure
Compute
The new Azure VMware Solution is now generally available
Designed, built, and supported by Microsoft, Cloud Verified by VMware, running VMware Cloud Foundation technologies, Azure VMware Solution enables customers to extend or migrate VMware workloads to the cloud seamlessly. Organizations can maintain existing VMware skills and operational processes, running VMware Cloud Foundation technologies, and leverage the benefits of Azure, all at the same time.
Azure Availability Zones in more regions
Azure Availability Zones, high-availability solutions for mission-critical applications, are now generally available in Australia East and Canada Central.
Azure DevTest Labs: Encrypt OS disks in your lab
Server-side encryption (SSE) protects your data and helps you meet your organizational security and compliance commitments. SSE automatically encrypts your data stored on managed disks in Azure (OS and data disks) at rest by default when persisting it to the cloud. Within DevTest Labs, all OS disks and data disks created as part of a lab are encrypted using platform-managed keys. As a lab owner you can now choose to encrypt lab virtual machine OS disks using your own keys. If you choose to manage encryption with your own keys, you can specify a customer-managed key to use for encrypting data in lab OS disks.
Storage
Price reduction on the Azure Files premium tier by 33%
The new pricing is effective October 1st and applies to all the regions/redundancy options for the premium tier. The price reduction on the premium tier, coupled with the recent introduction of two new hot and cool tiers, makes customers’ decision easier to choose the right files storage tier that fits best their workload’s needs while offering a most cost effective storage. Azure Files premium tier hosted on SSD storage, with no additional cost for transactions, is best suited for workloads that are IO intensive, with high throughput and low latency needs. The three standard tiers (transaction optimized, hot, and cool) are best suited for workloads that do not need high throughput or IOPS but require a reliable lower cost storage.
Shared disks on Azure Disk Storage is now available in broader set of regions
With shared disks, Azure Disk Storage is the only shared block storage in the cloud that supports both Windows and Linux based clustered or high-availability applications. Shared disks is now available for Premium SSDs in all regions and available for Ultra Disks in all regions that support Ultra Disks. Shared disks allows a single disk to be attached to multiple virtual machines, enabling customers to run their most demanding enterprise applications in the cloud like clustered databases, parallel file systems, persistent containers, and machine learning applications, without compromising on well-known deployment patterns for fast failover and high availability.
Azure Ultra Disk is now available in more regions
Azure Ultra Disks offer high throughput, high IOPS, and consistent low latency disk storage for Azure VMs. Azure Ultra Disk is now available in Australia Central, India Central, Korea Central and US Gov Texas.
