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
Change feed provides a guaranteed, ordered, durable, read-only log of all the creation, modification, and deletion change events that occur to the blobs in your storage account. Change feed is the ideal solution for bulk handling of large volumes of blob changes in your storage account, as opposed to periodically listing and manually comparing for changes. It enables cost-efficient recording and processing by providing programmatic access such that event-driven applications can simply consume the change feed log and process change events from the last checkpoint.
Azure Blob storage lifecycle management now supports append blobs
Azure Blob storage lifecycle management offers a rich, rule-based policy for Azure storage accounts. You can use the policy to transition your data to the appropriate access tiers or expire at the end of the data’s lifecycle. Azure Blob storage lifecycle management now supports expiration of append blobs.
Azure Blob access time tracking and access time-based lifecycle management (preview)
Once access time tracking is enabled, each blob has a new property called last access time which is updated when the blob is read. Azure Blob lifecycle management supports using last access time as a filter to transition data between access tiers and manage data retention. You can minimize your storage cost automatically by setting up a policy based on last access time to:
- Transition your data from a hotter access tier to a cooler access tier (hot to cool, cool to archive, or hot to archive) if there is no access for a period.
- Transition your data from the cool tier to the hot tier immediately if there is an access on the data.
- Delete your data if there is no access for an extended period.
NFS 4.1 support for Azure Files (preview)
NFS file system is very popular choice for Linux applications and end users for their shared storage needs. Having a fully managed NFS file system in Azure will enable customers to easily lift-and-shift their enterprise workloads and leverage the elasticity, scale and cost savings of cloud. Azure Files is built on Azure Storage platform which by nature is highly durable, highly available and highly secure. It is backed by same Azure Storage SLA. NFS on Azure Files is being offered first on the highly performant SSD backed Premium Files tier enabling customers to run their most demanding enterprise applications. The NFS file system can grow and shrink to meet your scale and performance requirement from 100 GiB to 100 TiB per volume. Azure Files NFS can be accessed from a variety of clients like Azure VM Linux distros like Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE etc., Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS), Azure Container Instances (ACI), Azure VMWare Service (AVS), VMSS, etc. NFS has a broad range of use cases.
Azure NetApp Files: cross region replication (preview)
With this new disaster recovery capability, you can replicate your Azure NetApp Files volumes from one Azure region to another in a fast and cost-effective way, protecting your data from unforeseeable regional failures.
