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
Recommended alert rules for virtual machines (preview)
The Azure portal experience now allows you to easily enable a set of recommended and out-of-the-box set of alert rules for your Azure resources. Currently in preview for virtual machines, you can simply enable a set of best practice alert rules on an unmonitored VM with just a few clicks.
Storage
Rehydrate an archived blob to a different storage account
You can now rehydrate an archived blob by copying it to a different storage account, as long as the destination account is in the same region as the source account. Rehydration across storage accounts enables you to segregate your production data from your backup data, by maintaining them in separate accounts. Isolating archived data in a separate account can also help to mitigate costs from unintentional rehydration.
Azure Archive Storage now available in Switzerland North
Azure Archive Storage provides a secure, low-cost means for retaining cold data including backup and archival storage. Now, Azure Archive Storage is available in Switzerland North.
Networking
Service tags support for user-defined routing
Specify a service tag as the address prefix parameter in a user-defined route for your route table. You can choose from tags representing over 70 Microsoft and Azure services to simplify and consolidate route creation and maintenance. With this release, using service tags in routing scenarios for containers is also supported. User-defined routes with service tags will update automatically to include any changes that services make to their list of IPs and endpoints.
DNS reservations to prevent subdomain takeover in Cloud Services deployments
Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform integrated with data services, advanced analytics, and developer tools and services. When you build on, or migrate IT assets to Azure, Microsoft provides a secure, consistent application platform to run your workloads. To strengthen your security posture, Microsoft rolled out DNS reservations to prevent subdomain takeover in Cloud Services deployments. Subdomain takeovers enable malicious actors to redirect traffic intended for an organization’s domain to a site performing malicious activity.
Azure Stack
Azure Stack HCI
Windows Server guest licensing offer
To facilitate guest licensing for Azure Stack HCI customers, take advantage of a new offer that brings simplicity and increased flexibility. This licensing is through an all-in-one place Azure subscription and in some cases may be less expensive than the traditional licensing model. The new Windows Server subscription for Azure Stack HCI is generally available as of April 1, 2022. With this offer, you can purchase unlimited Windows Server guest licenses for your Azure Stack HCI cluster through your Azure subscription. You can sign up and cancel anytime. There is a free 60-day trial after which the offer will be charged at $23.30 per physical core per month.
