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
Standard Load Balancer and Standard Public IP are available in Azure Government
Azure Standard Load Balancer and Standard Public IP are now generally available in Azure Government cloud regions. Standard Load Balancer offers resiliency and ease of use for all your virtual machine resources inside a virtual network. It supports inbound and outbound scenarios, provides low latency and high throughput, and scales up to millions of flows for all TCP and UDP applications. You can use load-balancing rules with TCP/HTTP/HTTPS health probes, HA port load-balancing rules for network virtual appliances, inbound NAT rules for port forwarding, and outbound rules to scale and tune your outbound connectivity.
Global VNet Peering in Azure China cloud
Global VNet Peering is generally available in all Azure China cloud regions. This means you can peer virtual networks across the China cloud regions. You cannot peer across Azure China and Azure public cloud regions.
General availability of the Lsv2-series Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)
The Lsv2-series is well suited for your high throughput and high IOPS workloads including big data applications, SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, and large transactional databases. The Lsv2-series features high throughput, low latency, and directly mapped local NVMe storage. The Lsv2 VMs run on the AMD EPYCTM 7551 processor with an all core boost of 2.55GHz. The Lsv2-series VMs offer various configurations from 8 to 80 vCPUs with simultaneous multi-threading. Each VM features 8 GiB of memory and one 1.92TB NVMe SSD M.2 device per 8 vCPUs, with up to 19.2TB (10 x 1.92TB) available on the 80vCPU L80s v2.
M-series virtual machines (VMs) are available in Australia Central 2 region
Azure M-series VMs are now available in the Australia Central 2 region. M-series VMs offer configurations with memory from 192 GB to 3.8 TiB (4 TB) RAM and are certified for SAP HANA.
Account failover for Azure Storage (public preview)
The preview for account failover for customers with geo-redundant storage (GRS) enabled storage accounts is available. Customers using GRS or RA-GRS accounts can take advantage of this functionality to control when to failover from the primary region to the secondary region for their storage accounts. If the primary region for your geo-redundant storage account becomes unavailable for an extended period of time, you can force an account failover. When you perform a failover, all data in the storage account is failed over to the secondary region, and the secondary region becomes the new primary region. The DNS records for all storage service endpoints – blob, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, file, queue, and table – are updated to point to the new primary region. Once the failover is complete, clients can automatically begin writing data to the storage account using the service endpoints in the new primary region, without any code changes.
Reserved instances applicable to classic VMs, cloud services, and Dev/Test subscriptions
Classic VMs, Cloud Services users, Enterprise Dev/Test and Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test subscriptions can now benefit from the RI discounts.
Resource group control for Azure DevTest Lab
As a lab owner, you now have the option to configure all your lab virtual machines (VMs) to be created in a single resource group. This helps prevent you from reaching resource group limits on your Microsoft Azure subscription. The feature will also help by enabling you to consolidate all your lab resources within a single resource group. In result this will simplify tracking those resources and applying policies to manage them at the resource group level.
Azure Stack
Azure Stack 1901 update
The update includes improvements, fixes, and new features for Azure Stack. This update package is only for Azure Stack integrated systems. Do not apply this update package to the Azure Stack Development Kit. The Azure Stack 1901 update build number is 1.1901.0.95.
