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
Deployment enhancements for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
A great update to our Azure Marketplace image with SQL is you can now configure the instance during deployment. Most companies have standards for their SQL instances and can now make configuration changes during deployment vs keeping the preconfigured image settings. Items like moving the system database to a data disk, configuring tempdb data and log files, configuring the amount of memory and more. During SQL VM deployment under SQL Server Settings, you have the options to change the defaults by clicking Change Configuration for storage or Change SQL Instance settings for customizing memory limits, collation, and ad hoc workloads.
Networking
New Azure Firewall capabilities
New Azure Firewall capabilities are available:
- Azure Firewall network rule name logging: previously, the event of a network rule hit would show the source, destination IP/port, and the action, allow or deny. With the new functionality, the event logs for network rules will also contain the policy name, Rule Collection Group, Rule Collection, and the rule name hit.
- Azure Firewall premium performance boost: this feature increases the maximum throughput of the Azure Firewall Premium by more than 300 percent (to 100Gbps).
- Performance whitepaper: to provide customers with a better visibility into the expected performance of Azure Firewall, Microsoft is releasing the Azure Firewall Performance documentation.
Azure Bastion now supports file transfer via the native client (preview)
With the new Azure Bastion native client support in public preview and included in Standard SKU, you can now:
- Use either SSH or RDP to upload files to a VM from your local computer.
- Use RDP to download files from a VM to your local computer.
Custom virtual network support in Azure Container Apps (preview)
You can now create Azure Container Apps environments into new or existing virtual networks. This enables Container Apps to receive private IP addresses, maintain outbound internet connectivity, and communicate privately with other resources on the same virtual network.
