This special edition includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft this week during Microsoft Ignite 2020 conference. Microsoft announced several important additions to its Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) portfolio and the Microsoft infrastructure services continue to evolve to optimize the experience of running business-critical workloads.

Azure

Compute

Availability Zones deployed to more Azure Regions

Azure Availability Zones (AZs) provide a high-availability option for comprehensive business-continuity and disaster-recovery strategies (BCDR), 99.99% uptime service-level agreement (SLA) on virtual machines, flexible high-performance architecture and multizone support with built-in security. Microsoft continues to expand deployment of Availability Zones in datacenter regions worldwide, with a roadmap to provide Availability Zone options in each country it operates datacenters in over the next 24 months. In September, Availability Zones will be available in two more existing regions, Canada Central and Australia East, bringing the total number of Microsoft’s AZ-enabled regions to 14.

Zone to zone disaster recovery for azure virtual machines

Zone to Zone disaster recovery allows customers to replicate, failover and failback their business-critical virtual machines within the same region with zones. The capability adds options for scenarios such as metro-based disaster-recovery strategy while customers are hosting applications on-premises and are looking to mimic that after migrating applications over to Azure; those that have complicated networking infrastructure and want to avoid the cost and complexity of recreating it in a secondary region; and those in regions that prefer not to use paired region disaster recovery options.

New Azure Spot VM features

New Azure Spot VM features, in preview soon in the Azure portal, enable customers to access and review the price history of Spot VMs and eviction rate for the past 28 trailing days. Also, not only allow customers to derive estimates about the probability that their workloads will be evicted, but also enable better estimates for the cost of running interruptible workloads using Spot VMs.

Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux workload (preview)

Azure Hybrid Benefit, available in preview, improves flexibility and enhances user experience for Red Hat and SUSE customers migrating Linux to Azure.Directly in the portal or through CLI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) customers will be able to convert existing Linux VMs from pay-as-you-go (PAYG) billing to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, making use of their existing Red Hat and SUSE subscriptions. This is a unique capability that allows customers to first deploy a POC in Azure using the convenience of on-demand PAYG Linux VMs, and when testing is complete, convert it to long-term production using RHEL and SLES subscriptions. This removes the headache of production redeployment, preserves existing investments in on-premises RHEL and SLES subscriptions, and reduces migration planning worries.

A new Azure-supported Linux distribution

Flatcar Container Linux by Kinvolk, is now available in Azure Marketplace. Flatcar is an immutable Linux distribution and is compatible with Core OS (which reached its end of service on May 26, 2020), making Flatcar Container Linux a viable and straightforward migration choice for container workloads running on Azure.

Azure Image Builder

Azure Image Builder, generally available by the end of this year, is a free image-building service that streamlines the creation, update, patch, management and operation of Linux and Windows images. Azure Image Builder will deploy resources into your subscription when used, and you pay only for the virtual machines and associated storage and networking resources consumed when running your image-building pipeline.

Multiple new Azure Infrastructure features

Multiple new Azure Infrastructure features are now available:

• New Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are now generally available featuring Intel Cascade Lake processors for general purpose and memory-intensive workloads. These VMs provide up to 20% greater CPU performance compared to the prior generation.
• Azure Dedicated Host now gives customers more control. Customers can schedule host maintenance operations on Dedicated Hosts and isolated VMs as well as control when guest OS image updates are rolled out. Azure Dedicated Host also supports Virtual Machine Scale Sets and simplifies deployment by offering customers the ability to let the platform select the host group where VMs are deployed to.

Storage

New Azure Disk Storage updates

New Azure Disk Storage updates, including:

• Azure Private Link integration which enables secure import and export of data over a private virtual network for enhanced security
• Support for 512E on Azure Ultra Disks to enable migration of legacy databases to Azure.

Networking

Cisco SD-WAN with Azure Virtual and Global Load Balancer feature (preview)

Azure networking enhancements announced at Ignite include the addition of Cisco Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) native support within the Azure Virtual WAN hubs, and the Global Load Balancer feature for Azure Load Balancer. Both are available in preview.

The use of Cisco SD-WAN with Azure Virtual WAN aligns with networking trends to leverage technologies such as SD-WAN to improve performance through intelligent path selection and central policies. They work to eliminate traditional networking backhauls by sending traffic directly from branch to the cloud via local breakouts and allow you to leverage your chosen vendor’s path selection and policy management.

With Global Load Balancer, customers can use the feature in the Azure Load Balancer to distribute traffic to their global applications, improving performance and availability.

Azure orbital: a new managed service that provides access to physical satellite communication  (private preview)

Azure Orbital is a new managed service that provides access to physical satellite communication capabilities to process and analyze data in Microsoft Azure. Take advantage of a low-latency global fiber network when working with large satellite datasets. Azure Orbital is available now to select customers in private preview. Azure Orbital enables satellite operators to schedule contacts with their spacecrafts and directly downlink data into their virtual network (VNet) in Azure. 

Azure Stack

Azure Stack Edge

Two new Azure Stack Edge rugged devices are available

Customers can perform machine learning and gain quick insights at the edge by running the Azure Stack Edge Pro R with NVIDIA’s powerful T4 GPU and the lightweight, portable Azure Stack Edge Mini R. Both devices are designed to operate in the harshest environments at remote locations. 

Azure Stack Edge is now available with GPUs

Customers can run visualization, inferencing, and machine learning at the edge with the Azure Stack Edge Pro series powered by the NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU. This unlocks a broad set of new edge scenarios, such as automatically recognizing license plates for efficient retail curbside pickup, and detecting defects in real time in products on a manufacturing assembly line.

Azure Stack HCI

Preview of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI

AKS on Azure Stack HCI enables customers to deploy and manage containerized apps at scale on Azure Stack HCI, just as they can run AKS within Azure. This now provides a consistent, secure, and fully managed Kubernetes experience for customers who want to use Azure Stack HCI within their datacenters. Sign up for the preview of AKS on Azure Stack HCI.

Azure Stack Hub

Azure Stack Hub is now available with GPUs

To power visualization intense apps, we’ve partnered with AMD to bring the AMD Mi25 GPU to Azure Stack Hub, which allows users to share the GPU in an efficient way. The NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPU enables customers to run compute intense machine learning workloads in disconnected or partially connected scenarios. The NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU provides visualization, inferencing, and machine learning for less compute intense workloads

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

Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series are available in Southeast Asia

Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are available in Southeast Asia in multiple availability zones.

Storage

Azure Blob storage object replication

Object replication is a new capability for block blobs that lets you replicate your data from your blob container in one storage account to another anywhere in Azure.

Object replication unblocks a new set of common replication scenarios:

• Minimize latency: users consume the data locally rather than issuing cross-region read requests.
• Increase efficiency: compute clusters process the same set of objects locally in different regions.
• Optimize data distribution: data consolidated in a single location for processing/analytics and then distribute only resulting dashboards to your offices worldwide.
• Minimize cost: tier down your data to Archive upon replication completion using lifecycle management policies to minimize the cost.

Change feed support is generally available for Azure Blob Storage

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 Azure VMs for general purpose and memory intensive workloads

The new D v4 and E v4 series Azure Virtual Machines, now generally available, are based on the Intel Xeon Platinum 8272CL custom processor, which can achieve up to 3.4Ghz all core turbo frequency. These new Azure Virtual Machines do not provide any temporary storage. If you require temporary storage select the latest Dd v4 and Ed v4 Azure virtual machines, which are also generally available.

• The D v4 / Ds v4 virtual machine sizes offer a combination of vCPUs and memory able to meet the requirements associated with most general-purpose workloads. You can attach Standard SSDs and Standard HDDs disk storage to the D v4 virtual machines. If you prefer to use Premium SSD or Ultra Disk storage, please select the Ds v4 virtual machines.
• The E v4 / Es v4 virtual machines feature up to 504 GiB of RAM and are ideal for various memory-intensive enterprise applications. You can attach Standard SSDs and Standard HDDs disk storage to the E v4 VMs. If you prefer to use Premium SSD or Ultra Disk storage, please select the Es v4 virtual machines.

Storage

AzCopy: new version available

AzCopy v10.6 has released with support for:

• Sync command now includes access control lists (ACLs) between supported resources (e.g. Windows and Azure Files) using persist-smb-permissions flag
• Sync also includes SMB properties (Created Time, Last Write Time, and attributes such as Read Only) between supported resources (e.g. Windows and Azure Files) using the persist-smb-info flag
• Support for higher block & blob size.  Blob block size up to 4,000 MiB supported.  This provides block blob sizes up to 190.7 TiB (4,000 MiB x 50,000 blocks)
• Support for Blob Versioning using list-of-versions flag for both download and delete operations

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2: access control list recursive update (public preview)

The ability to recursively propagate access control list (ACL) changes from a parent directory to its existing child items for Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 is now available in public preview. This public preview is available globally in all Azure regions, through PowerShell, .NET SDK, and Python SDK.

Networking

Azure Stack

Azure Stack Hub

Stream Analytics can be run on Azure Stack Hub

Azure Stream Analytics now can be run on Azure Stack Hub as an IoT Edge module. Configurations have been added to the IoT Edge module which allows it to interact with blob storage, Event Hubs, and IoT Hubs running in an Azure Stack Hub subscription. Customers can build truly hybrid architectures for stream processing in your own private, autonomous cloud, which can be connected or disconnected with cloud-native apps using consistent Azure services on-premises.

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 GPU NCas T4 v3 VMs (preview)

The NCas T4 v3 Series virtual machine is a new addition to the Azure GPU family specifically designed for the AI and machine learning workloads. The VMs feature 4 NVIDIA T4 GPUs with 16 GB of memory each, up to 64 non-multithreaded AMD EPYC 7V12(Rome) processor cores, and 448 GiB of system memory. These virtual machines are ideal to run ML and AI workloads utilizing Cuda, TensorFlow, Pytorch, Caffe, and other Frameworks or graphics workloads using NVIDIA GRID technology. 

Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series in West US 2

Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in two availability zones in West US 2.

Storage

Azure Blob storage: Network File System 3.0 protocol support region expansion (preview)

Azure Blob storage is the only storage platform that supports NFS 3.0 protocol over object storage natively (no gateway or data copying required), with crucial object storage economics. NFS 3.0 support to block blob storage accounts with premium performance public preview regions now include: US East, US Central, US West Central, Australia Southeast, North Europe, UK West, Korea Central, Korea South, and Canada Central. 

Azure Blob storage: Soft Delete for Containers (preview)

Soft delete for containers expands upon Azure Blob Storage’s existing capabilities such as 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. Container soft delete is available in preview in the following regions: France Central, Canada East, and Canada Central. 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 Ultra Disk: generally available in more regions and Availability Zones

Azure Ultra Disks offer high throughput, high IOPS, and consistent low latency disk storage for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). It is now available in Australia East, East Asia, Brazil South, and Canada Central. Moreover, Azure Ultra Disk support is now expanded to the 3 Availability Zones in US East 2 and Japan East.

Azure Data Box Disk is now available in South Africa and China

Data Box Disk is an SSD-disk-based option for offline data transfer to Azure. It’s ideal for a recurring or one-time data migration of up to 40 TB to Azure and is especially well-suited for data migration from multiple remote or branch offices. Azure Data Box Disk is now Generally Available in South Africa and China. This is in addition to the regions where Data Box Disk is now generally available. 

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

SQL Server FCI on Shared Disks for SQL Server on virtual machines

Azure Shared Disks for SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance (SQL FCI) on Azure IaaS is now in general availability. Azure Shared disks for SQL FCI enables lift and shift migrations for the most commonly used high availability configuration on-premises to Azure IaaS.

Storage

New regions for Azure Blob storage object replication (preview)

Object replication is a new capability for block blobs that lets you replicate your data from your blob container in one storage account to another anywhere in Azure. Microsoft has expanded the preview regions to include East US 2 and Central US.

Azure Blob storage: Network File System 3.0 protocol support (preview)

Network File System (NFS) 3.0 protocol support for Azure Blob storage is now in preview. Azure Blob storage is the only storage platform that supports NFS 3.0 protocol over object storage natively (no gateway or data copying required), with crucial object storage economics. This new level of support helps with large scale read-heavy sequential access workloads where data will be ingested once and minimally modified further including large scale analytic data, backup and archive, NFS apps for seismic and subsurface processing, media rendering, genomic sequencing, and line-of-business applications. NFS 3.0 is available to block blob storage accounts with premium performance in the following regions: US East, US Central, and Canada Central. Support for GPV2 accounts with standard tier performance will be announced soon. During the preview, test data stored in your NFS 3.0-enabled storage accounts will be billed at the same capacity rate (per GB per month) as Azure Blob storage. Pricing for transactions is subject to change and will be determined when generally available.

Azure File Sync agent v10.1

Azure File Sync agent v10.1 is available and it’s now on Microsoft Update and Microsoft Download Center.

Improvements and issues that are fixed:

• Azure private endpoint support
  • Sync traffic to the Storage Sync Service can now be sent to a private endpoint. This enables tunneling over an ExpressRoute or VPN connection. To learn more, see Configuring Azure File Sync network endpoints.
• Files Synced metric will now display progress while a large sync is running, rather than at the end.
• Miscellaneous reliability improvements for agent installation, cloud tiering, sync and telemetry.

Installation instructions are documented in KB4522411.

Networking

Upcoming billing changes to Azure Bandwidth

On a rolling basis throughout September 2020, Microsoft will move Bandwidth to a source–destination billing model. Additionally, metering will be divided into inter-region meter IDs. As a result, Bandwidth charges for inter-region data transfers will either remain the same or decrease. First 5 GB of outbound data transfers will remain free of charge and the current data volume tiers will be replaced by one flat price.

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

Storage

Advanced threat protection for Azure Storage

The preview of extending advanced threat protection for Azure Storage is available to support Azure Files and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 API, helping customers to protect their data stored in file shares and data stores designed for enterprise big data analytics. With this release, Azure Files customers can benefit from the following capabilities of advanced threat protection for Azure Storage:

• World-class algorithms that learn, profile, and detect unusual or suspicious activity in your file shares
• Actionable alerts in a centralized view in Azure Security Center with optional email notifications
• Integration with Azure Sentinel for efficient threat investigation
• Azure-native support for Azure Files with one click enablement from the Azure portal and with no need to modify your application code

Allow or disallow blob public access on Azure Storage accounts

Azure Storage now supports anonymous public read access for containers and blobs. By default, all requests to a container and its blobs must be authorized by using either Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) or shared key authorization. When you configure a container’s public access level setting to permit anonymous access, clients can read data in that container without authorizing the request. Anonymous public read access to containers and blobs in Azure Storage is a convenient way to share data, but may also present a security risk. It’s important to enable anonymous access judiciously and to understand how to evaluate anonymous access to your data. If your scenario does not require it, you can disable it for the storage account. 

Azure Blob versioning public preview region expansion

Azure Blob Versioning automatically maintains previous versions of an object and identifies them with version IDs. You can list both the current blob and previous versions using version ID timestamps. You can also access and restore previous versions as the most recent version of your data if it was erroneously modified or deleted by an application or other users. Microsoft has expanded the preview regions to include East US 2, Central US, West Europe, and North Europe. You can start previewing this feature on any existing or new General-purpose (GPv2) storage accounts in those regions.

Azure shared disks general availability

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. This unique offering allows a single disk to be simultaneously attached and used from multiple virtual machines (VMs), enabling you to run your most demanding enterprise applications in the cloud, such as clustered databases, parallel file systems, persistent containers, and machine learning applications, without compromising on well-known deployment patterns for fast failover and high availability.

Improved availability guarantees with single VM SLA for Standard SSD and Standard HDD

To strengthen the availability guarantee of VMs, Microsoft is extending the single-instance VM SLA to all disk types including Standard SSD and Standard HDD. Previously, it offered an SLA of 99.9 percent for single-instance VMs using Premium SSD and Ultra Disks. Now it offer an SLA of 99.5 percent for single-instance VMs using Standard SSD and an SLA of 95 percent for single-instance VMs using Standard HDD, improving the availability guarantee to cover all single-instance VMs. 

Azure Disk Storage with Azure Private Link integration is in preview

For enhanced security, you can now restrict access to your data by only allowing import and export from your private Azure virtual network by leveraging the integration with Azure Private Link. 

Networking

Azure Stack

New Azure Stack HCI Preview

Microsoft just announced the new Azure Stack HCI, delivered as an Azure hybrid service, at Microsoft Inspire 2020. Azure Stack HCI Preview is a hyperconverged infrastructure host from Microsoft, now delivered as an Azure hybrid service. Run Windows and Linux virtual machines on-premises on a host platform that’s IT friendly and managed by you with existing tools, processes, and skillsets. Easily extend your infrastructure with up-to-date Azure hybrid services for monitoring at scale.

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

Virtual machine scale sets: Automatic image upgrades for custom images

Automatically deploy new versions of custom images to scale set virtual machines using the new capabilities of virtual machine scale sets. Automatic OS image upgrade monitors your image gallery and automatically begins scale set upgrades when a new image version is deployed, facilitating faster image deployment without additional overhead. Enabling automatic OS image upgrades will safely upgrade the OS disk for all virtual machines in the scale set, helping to ease update management.

Distributed network name for SQL Server on Virtual Machines

Support for distributed network name (DNN) for SQL Server failover cluster instance (SQL FCI) on Azure IaaS with SQL Server 2019 CU2 and higher is now available. Connectivity configuration with DNN increases the availability and robustness of SQL FCI. By using DNN, you don’t need an Azure Load Balancer, and can simply use the same method you’ve been using on-premises for automated failover.

Storage

Azure Data Lake Storage

The following news have been announced for Azure Data Lake Storage:

• Immutable storage for Azure Data Lake Storage is available in preview. Immutable storage provides the capability to store data in a write once, read many (WORM) state. Once data is written, the data becomes non-erasable and non-modifiable, and you can set a retention period so that files can’t be deleted until after that period has elapsed. Additionally, legal holds can be placed on data to make that data non-erasable and non-modifiable until the hold is removed.
• The archive tier for Azure Data Lake Storage is generally available. The archive tier provides an ultra-low cost tier for long term retention of data while keeping your data available for future analytics needs. Tier your data seamlessly among hot, cool, and archive so all your data stays in one storage account. Lifecycle management policies can be set so files are moved automatically to the archive tier when data access becomes rare. When needed, data in the archive tier can be quickly and easily rehydrated so that the data is available for your analytics workloads. 
• File snapshots for Azure Data Lake Storage are available in preview. Use file snapshots to take an unlimited number of point-in-time snapshots of your files. These snapshots can be used to revert a file back to that snapshot in the case of accidental or inadvertent updates. Snapshots can also be retained so you can reference the content of a file at that point in time.
• Static website for Azure Data Lake Storage is in preview. Use static website to directly host static content from Azure Data Lake Storage, and view that site content from a browser by using the public URL of that website.

Azure Storage 200 TB block blob size in preview

Azure Blob storage provides massively scalable object storage for workloads including application data, HPC, backup, and high-scale workloads. Microsoft has increased the maximum size of a single blob from 5 TB to 200 TB, now available in preview.
The increase in blob size better supports use cases from seismic data processing to genomics that require support for multiple TB object sizes.

Azure Shared Disks for SQL Server failover cluster instance on Azure IaaS (preview)

Preview support is now available for Azure Shared Disks for SQL Server failover cluster instance (SQL FCI) on Azure IaaS with SQL Server 2019 on Windows Server 2019 and higher. Azure Shared Disks for SQL FCI enables lift and shift migrations for the most commonly used HA configuration on-premises to Azure IaaS.

Networking

New Azure Firewall features

The following several new Azure Firewall features have been announced by Microsoft that allow your organization to improve security, have more customization, and manage rules more easily. These new capabilities were added based on customer top feedback:

• Custom DNS support now in preview.
• DNS Proxy support now in preview.
• FQDN filtering in network rules now in preview.
• IP Groups now generally available.
• AKS FQDN tag now generally available.
• Azure Firewall is now HIPAA compliant. 

Azure Firewall Manager

Azure Firewall Manager is now generally available and includes Azure Firewall Policy, Azure Firewall in a Virtual WAN Hub (Secure Virtual Hub), and Hub Virtual Network. Microsoft is introducing several new capabilities to Firewall Manager and Firewall Policy to align with the standalone Azure Firewall configuration capabilities:

• Threat intelligence-based filtering allow list in Firewall Policy is now generally available.
• Multiple public IP addresses support for Azure Firewall in Secure Virtual Hub is now generally available.
• Forced tunneling support for Hub Virtual Network is now generally available.
• Configuring secure virtual hubs with Azure Firewall for east-west traffic (private) and a third-party security as a service (SECaaS) partner of your choice for north-south traffic (internet bound).
• Integration of third-party SECaaS partners are now generally available in all Azure public cloud regions.
• Zscaler integration will be generally available on July 3, 2020. Check Point is a supported SECaaS partner and will be in preview on July 3, 2020. iboss integration will be generally available on July 31, 2020.
• Support for domain name system (DNS) proxy, custom DNS, and fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) filtering in network rules using Firewall Policy are now in preview.

Private endpoints for Azure File Sync

Starting with Azure File Sync agent 10.1, Azure File Sync supports private endpoints in all public and Azure US Government cloud regions where Azure File Sync is available. Private endpoints enable you to assign your Storage Sync Service private IP addresses from within the address space of your virtual network. This allows you to:

• Securely connect to your Azure resources from on-premises networks using a VPN or ExpressRoute connection with private-peering.
• Secure your Azure resources by disabling the public endpoints for Azure Files and File Sync.
• Increase security for your Azure virtual networks by blocking exfiltration of data from your network boundaries.

Azure Virtual WAN: new capabilities

Several key Azure Virtual WAN capabilities are now generally available:

• Hub to Hub connectivity providing fully meshed virtual hubs.
• Custom Routing adding advanced routing enhancements: custom route tables and optimization of virtual network routing.
• Virtual Network Transit with 50 Gbps transit speeds between Virtual Networks (Vnets) connected with Virtual WAN.
• VPN and ExpressRoute Transit for seamless interconnectivity between VPN/SD-WAN and ExpressRoute connected sites and users.
• New VPN Capabilities supporting custom BGP IP (also known as APIPA or Automatic Private IP Addressing) for VPN Site connections.
• New Virtual WAN Partners VMware SD-WAN by Velocloud and Cisco Meraki now supporting automation of IPsec connectivity between their branch VPN/SD-WAN devices and Azure Virtual WAN VPN service.

Azure Load Balancer support for IP-based backend pool management (preview)

Azure Load Balancer now supports load balancing across IP addresses in the backend pool. Previously, you could only add network interfaces associated virtual machines in the backend of a Load Balancer. With this release, you can load balance to resources in Azure via your private IPv4 or IPv6 addresses using Standard Load Balancer.

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 general purpose and memory-optimized Azure Virtual Machines with Intel 

New general purpose and memory-optimized Azure Virtual Machines based on the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8272CL (Cascade Lake) are available.

With this announcement, Microsoft is introducing two new Azure Virtual Machines families, one of which represents a brand-new product category in the portfolio:

• The Azure Ddv4 and Ddsv4 and Edv4 and Edsv4 virtual machines, which include a local data temporary disk (now generally available)
• The Azure Dv4 and Dsv4 and Ev4 and Esv4 virtual machines, a new category of virtual machines, which rely on remote disks and do not provide temporary local storage (now in preview).

The new virtual machine (VM) sizes deliver up to roughly 20 percent CPU performance improvement compared to their predecessors, the Dv3 and Ev3 VM families.

Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series is now available in new regions

Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in East US, Canada Central, UK South, and West Europe.

Extended term reservation for the Azure HBv2 Virtual Machine

Announcing the availability of the 5-year reservation for the Azure HBv2 Virtual Machine.  The extended term reservation provides significant cost discount compared to pay-as-you-go rates. The extended term reservation provides continuous access to HBv2 resources for all supported Azure regions.

Storage

Azure Storage account failover

Customer-initiated Storage account failover is now generally available, allowing you to determine when to initiate a failover instead of waiting for Microsoft to do so. When you perform a failover, the secondary replica of the Storage account becomes the new primary, and the DNS records for all Storage service endpoints—blob, file, queue, and table—are updated to point to this new primary. Once the failover is complete, clients will automatically begin reading from the Storage account and writing data to it in the new primary region, with no code changes. Customer initiated failover is available for GRS, RA-GRS, GZRS, and RA-GZRS accounts.

Azure geo-zone-redundant storage is now generally available

Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) and read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS) are now generally available, offering intra-regional and inter-regional high availability and disaster protection for your applications. GZRS writes three copies of your data synchronously across multiple Azure Availability zones, similar to zone-redundant storage (ZRS), providing you continued read and write access even if a datacenter or availability zone is unavailable. In addition, GZRS asynchronously replicates your data to the secondary geo-pair region to protect against regional unavailability. RA-GZRS exposes a read endpoint on this secondary replica allowing you to read data in the event of primary region unavailability.

Ephemeral OS disks for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) now support additional VM sizes (preview)

You now have the ability to store ephemeral OS disks on the VM temp or resource disk in addition to the VM cache (in preview). This enables their use with VMs that don’t have a cache, or have insufficient cache, but do have a temp or resource disk to store the ephemeral OS disk such as Dav3, Dav4, Eav4, and Eav3.

Networking

Web Application Firewall for Azure Front Door service logging enhancements

Azure Web Application Firewall for Azure Front Door Service now has a match details field in the logs to provide insights on why a request triggered a Web Application Firewall rule. In addition, you can facilitate further analysis by embedding the unique reference string in a Web Application Firewall custom response message to link the request to a specific entry in the Azure Front Door Service and Web Application Firewall logs.  

Rules Engine for Azure Front Door and Azure CDN

The Rules Engine feature on both Azure Front Door and Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is now generally available. Rules Engine places the specific routing needs of your customers at the forefront of Azure’s global application delivery services, giving you more control in how you define and enforce what content gets served from where. 

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 Azure Virtual Machines with high-performance local SSD are generally available

The new Dd v4-series and Ed v4-series series Azure Virtual Machines provide up to 64 vCPUs and are based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8272CL processor. This custom processor runs at a base speed of 2.5 Ghz and can achieve up to 3.4 Ghz all core turbo frequency. The Dd v4-series and Dds v4 virtual machine (VM) sizes are well suited for applications that benefit from low latency, high-speed local storage (up to 2,400 GiB.) The Edv4-series and Edsv4-series VM sizes are ideal for various memory-intensive enterprise applications and feature up to 504 GiB of RAM, in addition to high-performance local SSD storage (up to 2,400 GiB.)

Azure Dedicated Hosts now support additional Azure Virtual Machines

Deploy M-series, NV v3-series and NV v4-series Azure Virtual Machines on Azure Dedicated Hosts. This will expand the range of workloads you can run on Dedicated Hosts to include memory-intensive and graphics-intensive applications.

Storage

Networking

Azure App Service regional virtual network integration for Linux apps is available

The regional virtual network integration feature of Azure App Service, which enables access to resources in your virtual network across service endpoints or ExpressRoute connections, is now available in public regions.

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

Azure DevTest Labs updates

New updates are available in Azure DevTest Labs:

• Azure DevTest Labs is now available in the Switzerland North and Switzerland West regions. The support includes full Azure DevTest Labs capabilities. 
•  Azure DevTest Labs environments are now available in Azure Government. 

Storage

Object replication public preview for Azure Blob storage

Object replication is a new capability for block blobs that lets you replicate your data from your blob container in one storage account to another anywhere in Azure. Object replication unblocks a new set of common replication scenarios:

• Minimize latency – have your users consume the data locally rather than issuing cross-region read requests.
• Increase efficiency – have your compute clusters process the same set of objects locally in different regions.
• Optimize data distribution – have your data consolidated in a single location for processing/analytics and then distribute only resulting dashboards to your offices worldwide.
• Minimize cost – tier down your data to Archive upon replication completion using lifecycle management policies to minimize the cost.

Networking

Azure Firewall updates

New key features are now available in Azure Firewall:

• Forced tunneling: configure a default route (0.0.0.0/0) on the AzureFirewallSubnet or publish a default route to the firewall over BGP, to send all traffic to on-premises or nearby NVA.  
• SQL FQDN filtering: filter outbound SQL traffic using application rules. Support is for SQL proxy mode only. Redirect mode support is tentatively planned for later in 2020. 
• The limit for Azure DevTest Labs from 100 to 250 for both DNAT and SNAT.

These features are included in the Azure Firewall standard SKU, so there is no change in the price.

Network service tiers with new Routing Preference option in preview
Using the new “Routing Preference” option in Azure, customers can choose how their traffic is routed between Azure and the internet. Prior to making “routing preferences” customer selectable, Azure exclusively kept and optimized customer traffic over Azure’s global network. The introduction of this new competitive egress tier adds a secondary option for solutions that do not require the premium predictability and performance of Microsoft’s global network. Instead it will allow customers to further architect their traffic to their needs and allow routing to the public internet as quickly as possible. Customers will have the option to select routing preference while creating a public IP address for an IaaS resource such as a Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine Scale Set or internet-facing Load Balancer, and for their Azure storage account.

Azure Peering Service is generally available

Peering Service is a networking capability that enhances customer connectivity to Microsoft cloud services such as Office 365, Dynamics 365, software as a service (SaaS) services, Azure, or any Microsoft services accessible via the public internet. Microsoft has partnered with internet service providers (ISPs), internet exchange partners (IXPs), and software-defined cloud interconnect (SDCI) providers worldwide to provide reliable and high-performing public connectivity with optimal routing from the customer to the Microsoft network.

Enterprises looking for internet-first access to the cloud, or considering SD-WAN architecture, or with high usage of Microsoft SaaS services need robust and high-performing internet connectivity. Customers can work with their Telco/carrier to take advantage of Peering Service, which is now generally available.

Key customer features include:

• Best public routing (optimum route hops/AS hops) over the internet to Microsoft cloud services for optimal performance and reliability.
• Ability to select the preferred service provider to connect to the Microsoft cloud.
• Traffic insights such as latency reporting and prefix monitoring.
• Route analytics and statistics: Events for (BGP) route anomalies (leak or hijack detection) and suboptimal routing.

Azure Stack

Azure Stack expands solutions and partner ecosystem
A host of new Azure Stack portfolio partners are accelerating time to value for hybrid customers today:

• The Aware Group, which builds IoT Edge modules that use AI to detect anomalies and perform noise classification, is now delivering modules and
  solutions tailored to the industry.
• Avanade is offering customers a fully managed Azure Stack Hub leveraging HPE’s Edgeline EL8000, a small form factor that does not require external cooling, making it ideal for locations like retail or manufacturing, where a datacenter may not be available on site.
• CloudAssert is providing an enterprise cloud-based solution streamlining the management and operations of multiple Azure Stack Hub deployments, including resources located on-premises and public clouds, with a single pane of glass.
• Microsoft is also launching the open-source Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) server available now for Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack Edge. Customers can now quickly connect existing data sources such as electronic health record systems or research databases at the edge while addressing compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Finally, now available on GitHub, manufacturing customers can get started with an AI solution at the edge that combines the power of Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack Edge with computer vision to modernize a factory floor.

Azure Stack Hub

Azure Stack Hub updates will simplify fleet and resource management and enable graphic-heavy scenarios
New Azure Stack Hub updates will simplify fleet and resource management, and enable accelerated machine learning scenarios, virtual desktop infrastructure and other graphics-heavy scenarios with GPUs:

• Azure Stack Hub Fleet Management (private preview): Azure Stack Hub fleet management gives customers a single view and management method from Azure for all their Azure Stack Hub deployments.
• ManagedIQ (CloudForms) (public preview): ManagedIQ, formerly known as CloudForms, now allows cloud operators to manage their resources on Azure Stack Hub and use RedHat technical tooling to manage the Azure Stack Hub. ManagedIQ is a supported platform from IBM and RedHat.
• AKS Resource Provider on Azure Stack (private preview): The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Resource Provider (RP) on Azure Stack Hub is a fully managed service for easily managing containerized applications for customers to automatically create and manage Kubernetes clusters on Azure
  Stack Hub.
• GPU Partitioning using AMD GPUs (private preview): Graphics processing
  unit (GPU) partitioning for visualization using AMD GPUs on Azure Stack
  Hub is now available, enabling virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and other
  graphics-heavy scenarios on Azure Stack Hub.

Support for Windows containers Azure Container Networking Interface on Azure Stack Hub coming soon

Windows containers and Azure Container Networking Interface in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) engine deployed Kubernetes clusters will soon be in private preview.
The Azure Container Networking Interface plug-in lets you deploy and manage your own Kubernetes clusters with native Azure networking capability by default. This release, which will come as an update to the Azure Kubernetes Service engine, expands the capabilities of Kubernetes clusters on Azure Stack Hub.

Azure Stack Hub supports cross-platform compatibility on PowerShell

Azure Stack Hub now supports cross-platform compatibility on PowerShell and ensures hybrid consistency with Azure. Azure Stack Hub will utilize Az modules with new resource providers from Azure IoT Hub, Azure Stack Edge, and EventHub. This enables full cross-compatibility with Azure and Azure Stack Hub using PowerShell and PowerShell Core. Install PowerShell and connect to Azure Stack Hub on MacOs. This is available through the Az PowerShell installer.