Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (November 2022 – Weeks: 43 and 44)

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

Attribute-based access control for standard storage accounts

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines access levels based on attributes associated with security principals, resources, and requests. Azure ABAC builds on role-based access control (RBAC) by adding conditions to Azure role assignments in the existing identity and access management (IAM) system. This release makes generally available role assignment conditions using request and resource attributes on Blobs, ADLS Gen2 and storage queues for standard storage accounts.

Premium SSD v2 disks available on Azure Disk CSI driver

Premium SSD v2 is the next-generation Azure Disk Storage optimized for performance-sensitive and general-purpose workloads that need consistent low average read and write latency combined with high IOPS and throughput. Premium SSD v2 is now available with the Azure Disk CSI driver to deploy stateful workloads in Kubernetes on Azure.

Ephemeral OS disk support for confidential virtual machines

The support to create confidential VMs using Ephemeral OS disks is available. This enables customers using stateless workloads to benefit from the trusted execution environments (TEEs). Trusted execution environments protect data being processed from access outside the trusted execution environments.

Encrypt storage account with cross-tenant customer-managed keys

The ability to encrypt storage account with customer-managed keys (CMK) using an Azure Key Vault hosted on a different Azure Active Directory tenant is available. You can use this solution to encrypt your customers’ data using an encryption key managed by your customers.

Availability zone volume placement for Azure NetApp Files (preview)

Azure NetApp Files availability zone volume placement feature lets you deploy new volumes in the logical availability zone of your choice to support enterprise, mission-critical high availability (HA) deployments across multiple availability zones.

Networking

Azure Virtual WAN announcements

Multiple areas of Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN) have key announcements:

  • Remote user connectivity (also known as point-to-site VPN)
    • Multipool user group support preview

  • Routing
    • Secure hub routing intent preview

    • Hub routing preference (HRP) is generally available

    • Bypass next hop IP for workloads within a spoke VNet connected to the virtual WAN hub generally available

    • Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Peering with a virtual hub is generally available

  • Branch connectivity (also known as site-to-site VPN)
    • BGP dashboard is now generally available

    • Virtual Network Gateway VPN over ExpressRoute private peering (AZ and non-AZ regions) is generally available

    • Custom traffic selectors (portal)

    • High availability for Azure VPN client using secondary profile is generally available

  • Private connectivity (also known as ExpressRoute)

    • ExpressRoute circuit with visibility of Virtual WAN connection

  • Third-Party Network Virtual Appliance Integrations
    • Fortinet SDWAN is generally available

    • Aruba EdgeConnect Enterprise SDWAN preview

    • Checkpoint NG Firewall preview

Custom IP Prefixes (BYOIP) available in US Government regions

The ability to bring your own public IP ranges is now available in all US Government regions.

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