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.
Azure
Compute
New cloud datacenter region in Greece
Microsoft has announced plans build its newest datacenter region in Greece. This announcement will also encompass a skilling initiative which will reach a minimum of 100,000 people in Greece, as well as an AI for Cultural Heritage initiative, which will digitize 3D video from the Ancient City of Olympia. The new region is anticipated to include Microsoft Azure, with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to follow.
New Azure Spot Virtual Machines features
In the Azure portal, you can now access the spot price and the eviction rate for the past 28 trailing days for the specific Spot VM you intend to deploy. These new capabilities will enable you to derive estimates about the probability that your workloads will be evicted while providing insights regarding the cost of running interruptible workloads using Spot VMs.
Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series expanding within Europe, United Kingdom and United States
Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in North Europe, UK West and US West. Customers in Europe, United Kingdom and United States now have disaster recovery capabilities available. These VMs are backed by the latest generation of Intel XEON E-2288G processor with Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology, and with the Intel Turbo Boost Technology these machines can go up to 5.0 GHz. Use the DCsv2-series instances to build secure, enclave-based applications to protect your code and data while it’s in use.
Azure DevTest Labs: network isolated lab
An Azure Virtual Network helps ensure that private network traffic is logically isolated from outside traffic. Each lab can be configured with an Azure network to ensure virtual machines and environments created within are isolated from unwanted traffic and follow enterprise networking policies. Lab owners can also now create a network isolated lab. This means, alongside isolating lab virtual machines and environments to a selected network, lab owners can also isolate the lab storage account and key vaults created for certain lab operations. Learn more about how you can create an isolated network lab.
Azure DevTest Labs: available in more regions
Azure DevTest Labs is now available in the UAE North, Germany West Central and Norway East regions. The support includes full Azure DevTest Labs capabilities.
Storage
Azure NetApp Files Manual QoS Capacity Pool (preview)
Microsoft is introducing Azure NetApp Files (ANF) manual quality of service (QoS) capacity pool, which is a new type of capacity pool that allows you to assign the capacity and throughput for a volume independently. The total throughput of all volumes created with a manual QoS capacity pool is limited by the total throughput of the pool. The total throughput of the pool is determined by the combination of the pool size and the service-level throughput. Find more details in the ANF user documentation.
Azure Blob: Soft Delete for Containers preview region expansion
Soft delete for containers expands upon Azure Blob Storage’s existing capabilities such as blob versioning, soft delete for blobs, account delete locking, and immutable blobs, making our data protection and restore capabilities even better. When container soft delete is enabled for a storage account, any deleted container and their contents are retained in Azure Storage for the period that you specify. During the retention period, you can restore previously deleted containers and any blobs within them. Microsoft is expanding the public preview to all public Azure regions. There is no additional charge to enable container soft delete. Data in soft deleted containers is billed at the same rate as active data.
Azure Files premium tier is now available in more regions with LRS, ZRS, and NFS support
Azure Files premium tier storage offers highly-performant, highly available file services, that is built on solid-state drives (SSD). Premium tier is optimized to deliver consistent performance for IO-intensive workloads that require high-throughput and low latency. More Azure Files premium tier regions, more premium files regions with locally redundant storage (LRS), zone redundant storage (ZRS) support, and Network File System (NFS 4.1) public preview support. Stay up to date on the premium tier region availability through the Azure region availability page.
Networking
Standard Load Balancer and Public IP addresses support resource group move
Standard Load Balancers and Standard Public IP addresses now support being moved across resource groups within the same subscription. Moving a resource only moves it to a new resource group. It doesn’t change the location of the resource or the subscription. Moving Standard Load Balancers and Public IP addresses across resource groups is supported in all Azure public cloud regions.
