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
Azure Storage Blob inventory is now available in all public regions (preview)
Azure blob storage inventory provides you the ability to understand the total number of objects, their size, tier, and other information to gain insight into your object storage estate. Inventory can be used with Azure Synapse to calculate summaries by container. Microsoft has expanded preview to all public regions for blob inventory.
Key Rotation and Expiration Policies
Key rotation is one of the best security practices to reduce the risk of secret leakage for enterprise customers. Customers using Azure Storage account access keys can rotate their keys on demand, in the absence of key expiry dates and policies customers find it difficult to enforce and manage this key rotation automatically. The new feature will allow you to not only set key expiration duration but also add policies that can mandate anyone deploying storage endpoints to specify key rotation duration. Furthermore, you would be able to monitor key expiration and set alerts if a key is about to expire. For accounts that are nearing key expiry, you can rotate the keys using APIs, CLI, Powershell, or Azure Portal.
Networking
ExpressRoute Global Reach Pricing Reduction
Microsoft is annoucing a 50% decrease in the data transfer price for ExpressRoute Global Reach. This pricing change will go into effect as of June 1, 2021. For more information about ExpressRoute Global Reach pricing, visit the ExpressRoute Pricing webpage.
Azure Stack
Azure Stack HCI
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI
Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI simplifies the Kubernetes cluster deployment on Azure Stack HCI. It offers hybrid capabilities and consistency with Azure Kubernetes Service for ease of app portability and management. You can take advantage of familiar tools and capabilities to modernize both Linux and Windows .NET apps on-premises. Furthermore, its built-in security enables you to deploy your modern applications anywhere: cloud, on-premises, and edge.
Free Trial Now Available
The Azure Stack HCI team has extended the built-in free software trial from 30 days to 60 days giving more time for customers and partners to evaluate their virtual workloads on Azure Stack HCI in planning their purchase decision. There’s nothing you need to do to enable the trial duration, it’s been automatically extended.
Available in China
Azure Stack HCI is now available in the China cloud – making it very easy to get all the benefits of Azure Stack HCI.
New feature called Network ATC
The next update available to Azure Stack HCI subscribers will be 21H2 which is in preview right now. With this update comes a new feature called Network ATC, which simplifies the deployment and management of networking on your HCI hosts.
If you’ve deployed Azure Stack HCI previously, you know that network deployment can pose a significant challenge. You might be asking yourself:
- How do I configure or optimize my adapter?
- Did I configure the virtual switch, VMMQ, RDMA, etc. correctly?
- Are all nodes in the cluster the same?
- Are we following the best practice deployment models?
- (And if something goes wrong) What changed!?
So, what does Network ATC actually set out to solve? Network ATC can help:
- Reduce host networking deployment time, complexity, and errors
- Deploy the latest Microsoft validated and supported best practices
- Ensure configuration consistency across the cluster
- Eliminate configuration drift
Network ATC does this through some new concepts, namely “intent-based” deployment. If you tell Network ATC how you want to use an adapter, it will translate, deploy, and manage the needed configuration across all nodes in the cluster.
